The Greatest Traitor (6 page)

Fifty-four-year-old Dominee Nicolaas Padt was a tall, slim, inspiring preacher with strong left-wing views, who belonged to an organisation called
Kerk en Verde
(Church and Peace), one of several active Christian pacifist organisations to emerge after the First World War. In 1938, he had felt America, France and Britain should take at least an equal share of the blame for the looming crisis in Europe and, though he still held that view eighteen months later, having observed the evils of Nazism, he was now preaching against it from his pulpit, week after week. On 28 June 1940, he was the first Reformed minister to be arrested, accused of criticism of the occupation on the basis of reports of his sermons. Reverend Padt spent six weeks in a cell in the German city of Emmerich before being released.

George attended his confirmation classes and, as their friendship grew, was invited to the minister’s house for tea and to meet the family. It was widely known in the district that Dominee Padt had links to the underground movement, so in the spring of 1941 George asked his advice on joining a resistance group. The minister listened to his
request, saying only at this stage that he would reflect on it and make contact later. A week passed by, then he asked George to join him on a visit to Deventer, a sizeable provincial town some thirty miles north of Zutphen.

It was there, at a café in the central square, that George was introduced to a friend of Dominee Padt’s, a bearded, middle-aged man who gave his name as ‘Max’. After listening carefully to the teenager’s story, examining his British passport and analysing his motivations, Max said he needed an assistant to carry messages and parcels the length and breadth of the country. Would the youngster be interested? George needed little persuading, so there and then he was given his first assignment; he was to travel the following Monday to Heerde, a village some twenty miles north of Deventer, where he was to liaise with the local grocer. He was to say he had come from ‘Piet’ to collect the groceries and then wait for further instructions. The boy with a taste for adventure was about to take his first steps in a clandestine world that would become his life. He did so with some trepidation, but also with a sense of mission.

Geographically, topographically and demographically the Netherlands was utterly ill-suited to a war of resistance. The country is small (little more than 30,000 square kilometres), flat (no mountains and very little forest to provide cover for partisans) and densely populated (nine million people at that time, the highest recorded population density in the world). Even the excellent transport links militated against any effective underground movement: Holland had an extensive and efficient railway system and roads of excellent quality, which enabled the German garrison of three infantry divisions and several regiments of the
Ordnungspolizei
(Order Police) to move around the country swiftly and maintain maximum control.

Then, of course, there was the sheer isolation of the country in 1940. To all intents and purposes, Holland did not share a border with a neutral country. It was blocked off on its eastern border by Germany,
faced occupied Belgium to the south, and had no links to the north, either, where Hitler’s troops stood vigilant in his Scandinavian satellites. On its western border, Holland faced England across the North Sea, but this coastal area – mainly dunes and beaches – was closely guarded by the Germans, both on land and by patrol boats in the waters.

As a result, the organisation of any lasting resistance group along the lines of the French
Maquis
was a practical impossibility, even if the Dutch Resistance had possessed a stock of working weapons, which they did not until well into 1942.

Instead little acts of defiance marked the opening months of the occupation, mainly centred around the Queen, with the Dutch showing renewed nationalist spirit. This symbolic opposition was demonstrated through growing flowers in the national colours, naming newborn babies after living members of the Royal Family, and wearing pins made of coins bearing the picture of Queen Wilhelmina. On 29 June 1940, the birthday of Prince Bernhard, people all across the country flew the national flag in defiance of a German ban. They also stopped work and took to the streets wearing carnations, the Prince’s favourite flower, in their buttonholes. The occasion would be remembered as
Anjerdag
(Carnation Day).

All this was merely irksome for the invaders. What was more serious, and brought the ‘honeymoon’ period well and truly to an end, was the nationwide strike in February 1941. The Communist Party of Holland (by now illegal) printed leaflets and put the word out for the capital’s citizens and the rest of the nation to down tools in protest. Not only did Amsterdam workers join the strike, but also whole factories in Zaandam, Haarlem, Ijmuiden, Weesp, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht, with some 250,000 people taking part. It lasted a couple of days, during which occupying troops fired on unarmed crowds, killing nine people and wounding many more. Around 200 of the leading activists were arrested and locked up in Scheveningen prison, which came to be known popularly as the ‘Orange Hotel’. They were the first of several thousand resistance fighters who would find themselves
incarcerated there in the next five years. Most were tortured and twenty-two were sentenced to death.

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 border; 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.