The Greatest Traitor Read online

  As a result of the events of February 1941, attitudes hardened on both sides. In particular, the Germans intensified their campaign against the Jews, banning them from parks, cafés, swimming pools, stopping them from using public transport and even preventing them from riding their bikes.

  On the other side, the Dutch resistance started to marshal itself more efficiently. It was still, ten months into the war, a very fragmented and ideologically diverse movement. But having witnessed the events of February, and becoming ever more disenchanted with the increasingly ruthless tactics of the country’s puppet leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart, their opposition intensified.

  George Behar had been recruited to work for the Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands) organisation, best known for its underground newspaper whose first copy had been launched on 31 August 1940, the date of Queen Wilhelmina’s first birthday in exile. That issue, of which just 130 copies were printed, called for ‘combat to free our country’. Publishing and distributing illegal newspapers was not the only function of Vrij Nederland, however: the group also set up radio transmitters to supply British intelligence services and the Dutch Government-in-exile with information on German army operations; and arranged for hiding places for Allied airmen who had been shot down, setting up escape routes to enable them to return to England.

  The principal task for 18-year-old ‘Max de Vries’ – George’s nom de guerre – was to ensure that as many as possible of his countrymen and women were able to get hold of a copy of the paper and read it. He was very young in appearance, looking more like a 14-year-old schoolboy than a grown man, which meant the Gestapo rarely gave him a second glance. He was also fit and athletic, vital requirements when his work as a courier required him to cycle long distances – sometimes thirty to forty miles a day. As the organisation’s confidence in him grew, in addition to parcels of illegal newspapers he was entrusted with the delivery of intelligence messages – usually about the German Army – which the underground collected to be sent to England. This was dangerous work. There was always the possibility that Vrij Nederland would be penetrated by the security police, and that one day he would knock on a door to make a delivery, only to walk straight into a trap.

  Already, on the journeys he made across the length and breadth of the country, he was learning some rudimentary ‘tradecraft’ that would stand him in good stead. Baggage was constantly searched, particularly on trains. ‘I had, therefore, to be constantly on my guard for sudden checks and ready to take evasive action. I usually put my parcel or briefcase in a luggage rack some distance from where I was sitting so that if there was a check, I could always pretend that it wasn’t me,’ he recalls.

  On one mission, in the town of Assen, a moment of heedlessness nearly cost him dear. He had just taken delivery of a parcel of newspapers, and – with not enough room in his suitcase – had stuffed half a dozen under his pullover. As he ran to catch a tram, the illegal papers spilled out right in front of an elderly German officer. George gazed at the road in horror: ‘As I knelt down in a frantic attempt to collect the newspapers before he could see what they were, he also stooped down and began to help me pick them up. He handed them to me without even looking at me. I thanked him profusely and boarded the tram. I didn’t tell any of my friends about this adventure.’

  As he travelled around his occupied country, George noted the rapidly deteriorating circumstances of the Jewish population. Jews found themselves harassed and isolated, excluded from very many towns and villages. Yet this did not prompt in him any great feeling about his own Jewish heritage because he considered himself a Christian, not a Jew, and, although dark in appearance, he had no fear of being recognised as Jewish by the Germans. ‘The only way, therefore, that the persecution of the Jews affected me was that it increased my hatred for the Nazis and all they stood for even more.’

  In this thoroughly bleak period, with growing repression at home and continued German expansion in Europe, George found further encouragement in the speeches of Winston Churchill. He was especially heartened when he listened to the Prime Minister’s broadcast on 22 June 1941, after the news came of the advance of Hitler’s armies into the Soviet Union. Churchill put aside ideological differences to welcome a new ally to the Allied cause, in characteristically robust fashion.

  If Hitler imagines that his attack on Soviet Russia will cause the slightest division of aims or slackening of effort in the great democracies, who are resolved upon his doom, he is woefully mistaken . . . the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.

  In the spring of 1942, George’s grandmother, with whom he had been very close, died at home in Rotterdam at the age of 77. Even while mourning her death, he realised that freedom from domestic responsibilities now gave him the licence to plan his journey to England. This yearning to escape to the friendly neighbour across the North Sea was common in many young Dutchmen working in the resistance and they were known in Holland as Engelandvaarders. England was where their Queen and government now resided; where there was freedom, albeit under fire; and from where Churchill was leading the battle against Nazism. For George, there was the prospect of seeing his mother and sisters again. He also felt that there he would be able to receive proper training as a secret agent, and then return to his homeland to act as a link between the resistance movement and the British intelligence services.

  A daring if foolhardy way of reaching English shores would have been to get hold of a boat and cross the North Sea. George considered but quickly discounted that idea because of the surveillance the Germans kept on the coastline. The only real hope was to try and get a place on one of the established escape routes: through Belgium, France, into Spain, and then on to England by boat from Gibraltar.

  George confided in Max, the agent who had introduced him into Vrij Nederland. While regretting his protégé’s desire to leave the country, he set out to put him in touch with resistance workers in the south of the country who might be able to help. In a couple of weeks, he had established contact with a family who lived not far from Breda, close to the frontier with Belgium, whose sons and daughters were doing sterling service in the cause of the resistance, including running a successful ‘escape line’ across into Belgium. Max and George set out to meet them.

  The remarkable de Bie family lived in a large town house on the main street – Markt – in the pleasant village of Zundert, just three miles from the Belgian border. Their home sat across the road from the town hall, and next door to the house where the post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh was born and brought up. Viktor de Bie – together with his brother Walter – ran a tree nursery, one of the largest and most highly regarded in the whole of the country, and he and his wife Marie had raised a large Catholic family of eight girls and five boys.

  The eldest son, Pieter – or Piet – was the man Max and George went to meet in the station restaurant in Breda one July afternoon. It was a dangerous assignment for Piet as the Germans had put a price on his head as a result of his work smuggling Allied pilots to safety, and if they were to find and arrest him, torture and almost certain death would follow. He told Max and George that an escape party was shortly due to leave for Switzerland, and that he would do his best to have George included.

  George went back up north to wrap up his affairs with Vrij Nederland before returning south to Zundert. The de Bie family offered him a bed in their crowded house, so he stayed and enjoyed their warm hospitality, watching and waiting for his chance to get away.

  Initially, there was disappointment. The group that was heading for Switzerland were not prepared to include him in their number because they would only take RAF pilots, Dutch army officials and others with particular skills who were of immediate and vital use to the war effort.

  Now it was the turn of two of the de Bie sisters to come to his aid. Margaretha Francisca Maria – everybody called her Greetje – and Wietske intimately knew the terrain around the borde
r; where the footpaths were, where the soldiers patrolled, and any other dangers that might lie in store. Greetje de Bie was then aged 23, and photographs of her from that time show a pretty woman with a serious, defiant expression on her face. She worked as a secretary in her brother Piet’s office at the nursery, but was also fully involved in the work of the escape group. She and Wietske offered to take George to the frontier, and beyond to Antwerp, where their aunt could accommodate him for a few days before he started on his long trek South.

  It was a beautiful morning on Sunday, 19 July when the sisters led George carefully and cautiously through the woods near their home. Greetje selected a trail she particularly liked where she went blueberry picking with her father. They had come through a clearing and were on farmland, just a few hundred yards from the border, when a German soldier appeared from behind a haystack and barred their way with a rifle. It was a tense situation for the party of three, but suddenly the soldier’s frown turned to a smile as he recognised the two girls. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, some Dutch mixed up with his German. ‘This is a forbidden zone.’

  Fortunately, he was not a complete stranger. A few days earlier, Greetje had helped him buy potatoes in the grocery, saving him from embarrassment, and then, a day or so later, they had a friendly encounter in the Church of Saint Trudo in the village where he, an Austrian Catholic, attended mass. Greetje explained hurriedly that George was a cousin of theirs, and they were merely on their way to visit an aunt who lived in a nunnery close to the border in Belgium. The soldier not only let them through without a word of admonishment, but said that, if they returned the same way in the evening, he would be at his post in the same place and would guide them back across.

  Greetje, Wietske and George duly crossed the border and made their way to their destination without any further alarms. But Greetje had been angry with George, as the man she married after the war, Leopold van Ewijk, recalls: ‘My wife afterwards was absolutely furious with this George Behar because he told her he had all his papers hidden in his shoe. That was a stupid thing to do, because if the Germans had found out they could have shot him there and then.’

  George later acknowledged the enormous debt of gratitude he owed his companions: ‘Once more I had to say goodbye that day and for the first time I experienced a feeling which was often to recur in later life – a feeling of the inadequacy of words to express gratitude and admiration to people who, by assuming very considerable risks, had ensured my safety and freedom.’

  3

  Flight to England

  On that July weekend in 1942, as George Behar headed for Antwerp on the first leg of his dangerous thousand-mile journey across Europe, the Jews of Holland were desperately trying to find sanctuary as transportation to the concentration camps began in earnest.

  Four days earlier, the first train had left the Westerbork transit camp for Auschwitz, with two thousand men, women and children on board – the majority of them German Jews who had found sanctuary in Holland between 1933 and 1939. Many Dutch Jews were now going deep underground, being given shelter by non-Jews in towns such as Winterswijk and Aaalten.

  Then, that very Sunday, 19 July, the Nazi hierarchy gave another indication of its ultimate intent. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, sent a directive to Lieutenant-General Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, head of the police force in German-occupied Poland, ordering ‘the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General-gouvernement to be carried out and completed by 31 December . . . in the name of the New Order, security and cleanliness of the German Reich’. At the same time, in France, the round up had also started.

  The following day, Monday, 20 July, George left Antwerp and made for the University of Louvain in Brussels. Greetje de Bie’s aunt had given him an introductory letter to take to a friend of hers, a Dominican monk. At their meeting, the priest told George he had a contact in Paris – another Dominican – whom he felt sure could put the young fugitive in touch with resistance workers, who would help him along the way.

  George next boarded a train to the French capital, knowing that his first major test on his journey across the continent could well come at the frontier, although as Belgium and occupied France formed one German military district, he was hoping the customs officers there would only take a cursory glance at his luggage.

  In fact, he faced trouble even before the border. Just as the train was approaching Mons station, George saw two German Feldgendarmes (military police) moving purposefully down the corridor, inspecting identity papers. He had concealed his British passport in a loaf of bread and instead presented the officers with his fake Belgian identity card. They did not appear satisfied and told him they would return to speak to him after they had been through the rest of the train. It seemed as if the game might be up even as it had just started. After a moment’s thought, he waited until the train started to slow down as it entered Mons station – the last stop before the frontier – jumped out, ran down the platform and raced through the exit before it had stopped.

  Disappearing into the narrow streets of a strange city, he walked into a church in a secluded square, and was steadying himself, assessing his options, when he was approached by the priest. George, sensing a sympathetic ear, claimed he was an English pilot and that he urgently needed to reach the unoccupied zone. The priest advised him that he could go most of the way to the border if he boarded a certain tram outside Mons, and promptly gave him directions out of the city.

  When he eventually reached the frontier, he saw a German airman on a bicycle, leaning against the barrier, nonchalantly smoking and chatting to two Belgian customs officers. After a while, the airman put out his cigarette and left, and had no sooner turned the corner than George heard the Belgians talking about him with disdain. In what was to prove the first of many fortunate encounters, he decided to gamble on the customs men helping him rather than handing him over to the German authorities. He had calculated correctly because, upon hearing his story, they offered nothing but encouragement, one of them promising he would find George a bed for the night and then see him on his way in the morning.

  As he settled down to eat in a nearby farmhouse he could hardly believe his luck. ‘To this day I remember the homely scene round the table with the customs officer’s two little girls and his plump, friendly wife,’ he recalled. ‘At the end of the meal my host produced a bottle of brandy which he kept for a special occasion. We drank to Allied victory.’

  The co-operation from the Belgians did not end there. In the morning, the other officer arrived to fetch him and escort him to the border post at the town of Maubeuge, about an hour’s walk away. From there he took a bus to Lille, and then the train to Paris; by the evening he was excited to be in La Ville-Lumière, the city where he believed his father had lived and studied some thirty years before.

  That feeling of exhilaration turned to one of anxiety when it became clear that his contact – the Dominican monk recommended to him by the priest in Brussels – was unwilling to harbour him. The monk explained that, although sympathetic to his plight, he was under strict instructions from the Abbot of his order in Paris not to hide anyone from the Germans, as discovery could seriously hinder the work of the Dominicans in the country. Nonetheless, he told George to give him a few hours and he would find a solution. Later that night, he returned from a lecture in the company of a middle-aged couple who offered to shelter George in their nearby apartment. They were devout Catholics and also fervent patriots, supporters of General de Gaulle, with many contacts in the resistance movement. For the moment, George was safe.

  The branch of the intelligence service charged with assisting the escapes of British prisoners of war, and securing the return to the United Kingdom of those who had succeeded in evading capture on enemy territory, was Military Intelligence Section 9, known as MI9. Working hand in glove with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), MI9 set out to establish ‘escape lines’ acros
s Europe to help thousands of captured soldiers, downed airmen and important members of the resistance to flee across Holland, Belgium and France and into supposedly neutral territory of Spain before finding a passage home, usually via British-controlled Gibraltar.

  The ‘O’Leary line’ (aka ‘Pat’) and the ‘Comet line’ were perhaps the two best-established routes. The former was created by a Belgian, Albert-Marie Guérisse, whose nom de guerre was Pat O’Leary, and tended to run from Paris to Dijon, through Lyons and Avignon to Marseille; then via Nîmes and Perpignan, on to Barcelona. The latter was the brainchild of a courageous young Belgian woman, Andrée de Jongh, known as ‘Dedee’, and started in Brussels or Lille before taking in Tours, Bordeaux and Bayonne, terminating over the Pyrenees at San Sebastian, Spain.

  Both routes were ‘staffed’ by a network of helpers, some connected, formally or informally, to intelligence organisations, though many were not. They provided food, clothing and sanctuary for the escapers, as well as false identity documents. George’s path would more closely follow the ‘Pat’ line, although as his journey unfolded, it took him on several detours.

  At first, he had to contend with disappointment. Two weeks into his stay, a resistance leader who went under the pseudonym ‘The Belgian’ arrived at the home of George’s new Paris hosts to assess his worth for a place on one of the lines. Having heard his story, ‘The Belgian’ told George that, being neither an airman or a key member of the resistance, he was of insufficient importance to the war effort to warrant special assistance. He did, however, furnish him with a false French identity card and an address in Salies-de-Béarn in south-western France, where there were people who could help him over the border into unoccupied French territory. He also gave him the name and address of a contact in Lyons.