The Greatest Traitor (5 page)

2

Resistance

B
y the morning of Tuesday, 14 May 1940, Adolf Hitler was growing frustrated by the stubborn defiance of the forces defending the Netherlands. Five days after the initial German invasion, he had failed to sweep aside the Dutch opposition in order to better concentrate efforts on the more important theatres of war in Belgium and France. So he issued an order to his generals, making it abundantly clear that he expected them to use all means at their disposal to crush the unexpectedly resilient opponent.

When the fifty-seven Heinkel planes from the Luftwaffe’s
Kampfgeschwader
54 squadron joined the assault at 1.20 p.m. that day, by raining down their 60-tonne payload of 110lb and 550lb bombs on the centre of Rotterdam, the terrified population had two unpalatable alternatives. They could either sit out the attack in their homes or underground shelters, and risk being trapped by the avalanche of falling wreckage, drowned when the water mains burst, or burned alive by the fires set off by the bombs. Or they could venture out into a veritable Dante’s Inferno – the firestorm whipped up by a fierce easterly wind that was raging through every street in the heart of the medieval city – and try to dodge the falling
debris and the leaping flames and make it to the beach, or nearby villages.

Tens of thousands chose to make a run for it, mothers pushing prams, husbands wheeling handcarts with the few belongings they had time to snatch on the way out of their collapsing homes, and children laden with backpacks. The sky was alternatively red with fire, and dark and grey from smoke, and all around the city people wandered around caked in dust, looking like ghosts.

Seventeen-year-old machinist Roos Molendijk, who had been hiding in a shelter near her home in Goudsesingel, fled through the streets with her mother and two young sisters when there was a brief lull in the bombardment: ‘Everyone was focussed on leaving the city. We were holding our hands to our heads because of the heat of the fires. There was no conversation with anyone else, it was all about yourself. I remember the sound of people fleeing as a strange, incessant mumbling noise.’ They found refuge in nearby Kralingen. The next day her father tried to return to the family home – only to find it had been completely destroyed. ‘He came back with burned feet – the city was still burning,’ Molendijk recalled.

George Behar was sitting down to lunch with his Aunt Truss and his grandmother when the German aircraft struck. All three crouched down under the dining-room table with kitchen pans over their heads, waiting for the raids to finish. When they finally emerged, less than half an hour later, their house on Burgemeester Meinesz Plein had sustained only minor damage – one of the few that had remained largely intact amid all the wreckage.

‘The streets were full of people fleeing from the burning hell . . . many were injured, dazed or crying,’ he remembers. ‘In a nearby church an emergency hospital was immediately set up to deal with the casualties. I worked there all night, together with many other people from our neighbourhood. We felt both grateful and guilty that we should still have a roof over our heads.’

But on this day, when it felt as if Armageddon had truly arrived,
around 80,000 citizens of a bustling, dynamic city of 600,000 no longer had homes to return to. In just twenty-five minutes, Göring’s bombers had reduced Rotterdam to a smoking mass of rubble. Between 800 and 900 people died that day. For many months – indeed years – afterwards, Allied propaganda put the figure much, much higher, at around 25,000 to 30,000. In London, the bombardment dispelled any qualms the War Office and Bomber Command had over incurring civilian casualties in Britain’s planned attacks on Germany’s industrial centres.

Not only had Rotterdam fallen that afternoon, but by nightfall the nation as a whole – with the exception of the province of Zeeland – had capitulated. General Henri Winkelman, commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces, felt he had no alternative as the Germans were threatening to mete out similar treatment to other major cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. He signed the official articles of surrender the next day in the village of Rijsoord.

Later that week, as some semblance of temporary order was being established in Rotterdam, George decided to travel to Scheveningen to find out how his mother and sisters were faring. He was taken aback when his knock on the door went unanswered and, on entering, he found the villa empty. All that remained were some unwashed teacups on the kitchen table, which was most unlike his tidy, meticulous mother. The story of their disappearance soon unfolded after conversations with neighbours. Catherine, Adele and Elizabeth had left in a hurry before the bombing. They were, in fact, one of the very last groups to board a ship and flee their country for England.

The evacuation of Holland’s great and good had begun in earnest on Monday, 13 May. Queen Wilhelmina and her entourage left Dutch shores from the Hook of Holland at midday, aboard HMS
Hereward
and accompanied by the destroyer HMS
Vesper
. Not without a scare or two from nearby enemy planes, they docked at Harwich five hours later.

On that same day, Mrs Behar was phoned by a friend and told that she had until 5 p.m. to report to the British Consulate, if she wanted to take up a berth on board a Royal Navy ship with her family. Catherine was assured that this offer – and the time constraint that accompanied it – would also have been relayed to her son in Rotterdam. But there was no way of knowing whether he would join them as Grandmother Beijderwellen had no telephone, and it was too dangerous to make the trip to pick him up, even if there had been time. Catherine could only hope that he would be at the quayside at the Hook of Holland that evening.

In the mid-afternoon, the Behar family gathered up what belongings they could and made the ten-mile journey along the coast. It was an anxious, frightening experience for all those descending on the Dutch port. Of the six Royal Navy destroyers at the pier, HMS
Windsor
was the first to depart, carrying the most important cargo – Prime Minister Dirk Jan de Geer, his Cabinet and the rest of his Government. Then, in the following four to five hours, HMSs
Janus
,
Malcolm
,
Vivien
,
Mohawk
,
Janus
and
Versatile
lined up to take the remaining refugees. Disaster struck the last of these –
Versatile
was hit by a bomb and seven sailors were killed, thirteen injured. With her engine room out of action she could neither steer nor steam, but she was towed successfully out of the harbour and somehow managed to limp across to England by the following evening. Mrs Behar and her daughters docked safely at Southend early in the morning of Tuesday, 14 May.

When George was able to piece together what had happened after his visit to the empty villa, he was relatively unperturbed. ‘In the frame of mind I was in, I would not have left even if I had received a warning,’ he would later reflect. ‘In my eyes that would have meant abandoning the sinking ship. Besides, I would not have left my grandmother alone in those dangerous times.’

While he waited and hoped for news from England, George was able to resume his education. His school had survived the blitz of Rotterdam virtually intact, and studies continued just a week after the invasion.
Summer exams were taken as usual, and he attained excellent marks in all subjects. Factories and offices reopened too, and, on the surface at least, life in the city went back to some semblance of normality.

On 15 May, the first handwritten Resistance paper,
Geuzenactie
(Beggars’ Action), appeared. A month later,
Bulletin
– closer to a real newspaper as regards form and content – followed. In reality, though, in the early summer months of the occupation, there was little by way of serious resistance to the invaders. The people of the Netherlands were still stunned by events, struggling to understand what sort of country they were now living in and what the future might possibly hold.

For their part, the occupiers did not want to alienate the Dutch. Hitler and his associates considered them to be of ‘superior’ Germanic breeding, almost 100 per cent Aryan. Ultimately they had in mind the complete Nazification of Dutch society: the integration of the economy into the German financial system and the elimination of the Jewish population. But at this stage, as long as they were receiving reasonable co-operation from a demoralised and pliant people, they were in no immediate hurry to fulfil these objectives.

The remaining Beijderwellen family convened and decided it would be best if George spent the summer holidays far away from the horrors of the bombing with his Uncle Tom, a grain merchant who lived in the village of Warnsveld, not far from the town of Zutphen in the central province of Gelderland. Young George had always enjoyed his trips to this area, walking the hills and visiting the old castles and grand country houses. He also liked to accompany his uncle in his car when he made work calls on neighbouring millers and farmers.

A fortnight into his holiday, however, this idyllic interlude was brought to an abrupt end. An elderly village constable knocked on the door and informed Uncle Tom that he was taking the boy into custody: young George was a British subject and, following instructions from the German authorities, would have to be interned along with the other Britons trapped in the Netherlands following the invasion.

The shock was profound. George and his family had grown so accustomed to thinking of him as an ordinary Dutch schoolboy that they had long banished from their minds the inheritance of his father’s nationality.

He was duly escorted on the train to the Rotterdam Police headquarters, where he spent a night in a cell. Aunt Truss arrived the next day to protest on his behalf, furiously berating the Dutch officials for locking up a teenage boy on the say-so of the hated invaders. Her indignation was to no avail. The following day, George was taken by two detectives to a camp on the sand dunes at Schoorl, a small village on the coast just north of Amsterdam.

It was surely an alarming experience for a 17-year-old boy to be whisked away from his family and incarcerated in a detention centre overseen by the dreaded Waffen SS. At this time, however, life in
Kamp Schoorl
was a relatively benign experience. The commander, SS-Untersturmführer Arnold Schmidt, was well aware that thousands of his own countrymen had been interned by British authorities throughout the world and, at this early stage of the war, seemed content to observe the rules of international law. The food was prepared by a local cook who lived in the nearby village, and prisoners enjoyed the same menu as their prison guards from the German Ordnungspolizei. The inmates’ days were spent exercising vigorously, scrubbing the huts and keeping the rest of the compound clean.

The camp consisted of French and British subjects, many of them young. On 22 June the morale of the former took a turn for the worse when the fall of France was announced. The German guards then lost no time in taunting George and his fellow Britons that they would be next, that the German army would be landing in England any time soon.

George’s heightened sense of adventure and the self-reliance developed on his travels to Egypt ensured that his time at
Kamp Schoorl
was not entirely miserable though, and he had mixed feelings when, two weeks after the French capitulation, he was informed he was free to go. He and four others were allowed to leave. All were told it was because
they were not yet of age to undertake military service. The Germans clearly felt the war was almost over and there was little prospect of these teenagers ever donning uniform. ‘I was by now accustomed to camp life and had begun to make good friends with my fellow prisoners. Though thrilled at the unexpected prospect of freedom and of seeing my family again, I felt sad to leave my new friends to an uncertain fate,’ George recalled.

All the French were released a week later, but the remaining British prisoners were transferred to a German camp, Gleiwitz, in September, where they remained until liberated by the Russians in 1945.

Throughout the summer, the speeches of Winston Churchill on the BBC provided a source of comfort and inspiration to the beleaguered Dutch. George was as enthralled as any listener, and his resolve to resist the invaders was only strengthened by these words from the Prime Minister on 14 July:

All depends now upon the whole life-strength of the British race in every part of the world and of all our associated peoples and of all our well-wishers in every land, doing their utmost night and day, giving all, daring all, enduring all, to the utmost, to the end.

Back in Rotterdam, young George was welcomed as a conquering hero. To be imprisoned by the hated Germans was something of a rarity in those early days of the war, and his schoolmates and neighbours wanted to hear every last detail.

But the prospect of re-internment in November, when he turned eighteen, was now very real. At the same time, he had no news of the whereabouts of his mother and sisters and, in fact, had learned that a British destroyer had been attacked at the Hook of Holland. In his bleaker moments, he feared the worst. He certainly felt there was little to lose in fleeing from Rotterdam and so headed back to Zutphen, arriving on 16 October, and stayed for a while with Uncle Tom.
Knowing that it was the first place the Germans would come looking for him, however, his uncle arranged for him to hide out with a farmer named Boer Weenink, who lived in a small hamlet called Hummelo, twenty miles from Zutphen, in the depths of the countryside. Another friend of Tom’s provided George with a fake identity card in case he was being sought by the authorities.

In the meantime the boy helped out in the dairy and the cowsheds. He continued to go to church and, if he pondered his future after the war at all, it was to envisage himself as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A religious calling had always attracted him from his early days in the thrall of the
Children’s Bible.
But his mind was really on the horror of here and now – the humiliation his country had suffered and the certainty of darker days to come. He wanted to play his part in the fight-back and ironically, given his religious instincts at that time, it was a priest who would set George Behar on the path of resistance and, ultimately, to espionage.