In a surprise attack, the Germans invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, and quickly secured the capital of Oslo as well as other major cities along the east and west coasts of the country. The underequipped and unprepared Norwegian military fought the Germans in the interior and in the far north but even with the assistance of British troops and ships was unable to withstand the German onslaught.
After running from the enemy for two months, the Government, King and Crown Prince of Norway fled to Britain, and the Germans took complete control of the country.
The Nazis appointed Josef Terboven as the Reich Commissioner, and all of Norway came under his control. Approximately 1700 Jews lived in Norway at the time of the invasion, and about 200 of them had fled from the Nazis in Central Europe. Although Terboven placed restrictions on the Jews and their property, it wasn’t until one year later, in the spring of 1941, that arrests and imprisonments were stepped up. Most of these arrests took place outside Oslo, in locations where Jews were small in number.
In early 1942, Terboven required all Jews to have a “J” stamped on their identity cards and the word “Jew” stamped on their identity papers. Also in 1942, Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, was named prime minister. He and Terboven executed the main persecution of the Jews.
Vidkun Quisling & Josef Terboven Courtesy of Flikr: The Commons via Wikimedia Commons
In the fall, the Norwegian police arrested the seven hundred and sixty-three Jews they could locate, including women and children, and transported them by ship to Germany. They were immediately sent to Auschwitz where most of them perished in the gas chambers.
The Norwegian Resistance had facilitated the escape of about nine hundred Jews to Sweden, where they survived the war as refugees. Hans Mamen was one of those resistance members. Hans grew up on a farm outside Oslo and was a student at the local Lutheran seminary. He learned of the persecution of Norway’s Jews and felt called as a Christian to help protect them. Hans’s mission began when a seminary professor asked him to help find a hiding place for a Jewish family who had requested the professor’s help.
Hans established a network of seminary students and other friends and contacts to assist. Some hid Jews, some shared food and supplies, and a few of them led Jews safely across the border into Sweden. Hans led many rescue efforts, usually taking only three people at a time to reduce the risk of capture. He led his charges through sparsely-populated areas of dense forests. They crossed these difficult areas on foot, often at night. Hans arranged for a Swedish lumberjack who lived just across the border to keep a lantern lit at night so they would know when they had arrived in Sweden.
On one journey, Hans accompanied a mother and her three-year-old son across the country, and then they hiked to the border. He carried the child on his shoulders into the dense forest, and the sudden, complete darkness frightened the young boy. His cries echoed across the landscape, and nothing Hans or the child’s mother tried would calm him.
With dawn approaching and the threat of their footprints in the snow leading a Nazi patrol to them, Hans feared capture. Finally, he whispered to the boy that he shouldn’t wake up the birds, and the child immediately quieted. Once across the border, they enjoyed the sunrise and the opportunity to speak aloud again.
Celia Century, a Jewish refugee from Norway, sits on the deck of a summer camp in Ronneby Sweden next to a non-Jewish friend. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In December 1942, the Norwegian police, working for the Nazis, arrived at the Mamen’s farm and demanded to see Hans. His mother explained that he was at the seminary in Oslo. After the police left, she telephoned the seminary, and her coded message was passed to Hans during class—“‘Pack your suitcase.’”
Hans rushed to the home of a trusted friend and sent a message to his fiancée, Ruth. Although her parents were afraid and didn’t want her to leave, Ruth packed a small bag to escape with Hans.
Hans and Ruth traveled by train from Oslo but disembarked before reaching the border. He had called ahead and arranged for one of his contacts, a licensed woodcutter, to meet them. The couple rode under a tarp in the back of the man’s old truck. They stopped at a safe house; however, Nazi agents were searching the neighborhood. Hans and Ruth climbed back into the truck, and the woodcutter drove them to a border checkpoint, where he knew the lone Norwegian guard was loathe to leave his hut at night.
Although the woodcutter turned resistance fighter was willing to use his gun if necessary, the truck rolled across the border without incident. The couple’s benefactor didn’t stop until they were far from the border. After he did, Hans and Ruth climbed out of the truck, fell on their knees, and thanked God for bringing them safely through.
Hans and Ruth married in Sweden and had the first of five children. Before the war ended, Hans finished his seminary studies and assisted the Norwegian resistance by helping Allied agents cross from Sweden into Norway to conduct operations. After Norway was liberated, Hans and Ruth returned home, and he served as a Lutheran pastor for many decades.
Villa Grande in Oslo. Site of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities and former home of Vidkun Quisling. Credit: Leifern, Wikimedia Commons
More than sixty years later, Hans was asked to speak at the new Holocaust Center in Oslo. A tall, bearded Norwegian “greeted him with unusual affection for a stranger.” The man identified himself as “the Jewish toddler who decades earlier had quieted down in the dark, snow-covered forest so he would not awaken the birds.”
Sources:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Today’s story is the miraculous account of how the Norwegian’s saved their gold reserves from the Nazis and spirited them out of the country right under the enemy’s noses. If the Germans had obtained these reserves, they would have gained more wealth to supply their war machine.
Although Norway was neutral during WWII, Nicolai Rygg, the director of Norges Bank where the nation’s gold reserves resided, made preparations in case Norway should fall or a crisis develop. Early in 1940, Rygg brought in volunteers to pack bars of gold in white painted boxes and seal them with iron bands. Bags of gold coins were packed in smaller kegs. Of the 421 million Krone stored in the bank, 300 million was shipped to the United States. The rest was left in the vault because Norwegian law did not allow all the gold to be removed from the country at one time.
After Rygg learned that German warships were headed up the Oslo Fjord on April 9th, Rygg contacted General Laake, the Commander-in-Chief of military forces, who ordered Rygg to immediately evacuate the gold to the bank in Lillehammer. Moments later, Rygg learned that the Germans already occupied major cities but hadn’t reached Oslo (the sinking of the Blücher kept the Germans from seizing the capital for an extra eight hours).
Norges Bank at Oslo 1906-1986. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
Twenty-six trucks were chartered from local merchants, and the drivers were directed to the side entrance of the bank but were not informed about what they would be carrying. Bank guards were placed close to the bank to keep inquisitive eyes away, but the military was not used in order to avoid drawing attention to the operation. The bank employees loaded the gold.
Each truck, along with two armed bank guards, drove away immediately after loading so there was no convoy to draw the attention of the Luftwaffe. The first truck left at 8:15 AM and the last truck shortly before 1:30 PM. German soldiers marched down the main street of Oslo at exactly the same time, and the Norwegian commander of the Oslo garrison surrendered the city at 2:00 PM at the Akershus Fort, only a couple hundred yards from Norges Bank.
A Gold Bar from the Norges Bank. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
The gold shipment totaled 818 large crates, 685 smaller crates, and 39 kegs of gold coins. Lillehammer was 115 miles from Oslo, and the trucks traveled over snow-laden roads. Vehicles and pedestrians fleeing the capital slowed down the trucks, and people became angry because the trucks didn’t stop to help them. The last truck arrived at the bank in Lillehammer at 8:00 PM.
The bank employees in Lillehammer tucked the gold away in their vault; however, they could only unload the cargo when the Luftwaffe wasn’t flying over them. The media picked up on the activity and broadcast that trucks of gold were arriving in Lillehammer. A Trondheim newspaper also reported on the shipment, but the Germans did not pick up on the reports. The Royal Family, the Norwegian government, and the Norwegian gold had escaped for the time being!
The gold remained at Lillehammer for ten days while the Norwegians barricaded the roads and kept the Germans from advancing. Rygg checked on the gold twice and on the second trip, he asked the bank manager, Andreas Lund, to memorize the numbers to the vault lock. Frequent bombing raids forced the bank to close and wait to reopen until the planes disappeared.
Norges Bank at Lillehammer. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
On April 14th, 15 German transport planes dropped about 180 lightly armed paratroopers in the Dombås area, northwest of Lillehammer. They were spread over a wide area, and the Norwegian troops successfully killed or captured them over a five-day period. This kept the railway lines to the north and the west coast open.
In the mean time, it became obvious that the Germans could overtake Lillehammer at any time. Oscar Torp, the Norwegian Minister of Finance, tasked Fredrik Haslund, Secretary of the Labour Party, with transporting the gold from Lillehammer to the port of Åndalsnes where the British Royal Navy could take it safely away. On April 17th, the British—determined to assist the Norwegians in ousting the Germans—had landed a large number of troops and equipment at three Norwegian ports—Harstad, Namsos, and Åndalsnes.
United States Military Academy Dept. of History – Courtesy of Wikipedia – Public Domain
At midnight on April 19th, orders came to open the bank vault door. Unfortunately due to fear and anxiety, Lund had a difficult time getting the lock to the brand new vault open—it had only been opened once before and Lund was operating by memory. He finally succeeded with the code a little past 1:00 AM.
Haslund had recruited the Lillehammer chief of police who assembled 30 volunteers who met at a secret location at 10:00 PM. They were armed with spades and shovels so they would appear to be preparing to dig trenches. Instead they were quietly transported to the bank and loaded the trucks which took the gold to the railway station, a short distance away. The gold was loaded onto the wooden railcars. A small group of soldiers was ordered to accompany the train, but the men weren’t told what they were guarding. They soon figured out the contents because of the Norges Bank initials displayed on the outside of each container.
Lillehammer Train Station. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
The train left Lillehammer at 4:00 AM with its lights dimmed in case any Luftwaffe aircraft flew over. When dawn approached, the bullion train stopped at Otta and pulled onto a siding to wait for a safer time to proceed. Later, a train arrived at Otta Station from the north with three carriages full of British soldiers who had their thumbs in the air. The Norwegians were encouraged. Little did they know what dangers lay ahead.
The gold train sat undetected on a railroad siding in Otta. It didn’t run during the day because the German bombers loved to target anything moving. After a twenty-four-hour wait, the gold train left at 10:00 PM and arrived at the port town of Åndalsnes at 4:30 AM on April 20th.
View of the innermost part of the Romsdalsfjord with Åndalsnes up to the left in the picture. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Åndalsnes is located at the head of a fjord – a long narrow inlet which connects to the Norwegian Sea. The British had landed troops and secured Åndalsnes two days before, and at 9:00 AM on the 20th, the Germans commenced bombing the port, the British ships, all transport routes, and the town of approximately 2000 people. In spite of their intelligence, the Germans were not aware of the presence of Norway’s gold, which remained at the station awaiting transportation out by British warship to the United Kingdom.
At 11:00 PM, Fredrik Haslund, the official tasked with conveying the gold out of Norway, sent the gold train to a siding at Romsdalhorn, a few kilometers away. Towering mountains guarded the tiny station, making it a perfect place to hide a train. Due to the constant daytime bombing, a crew of railwaymen worked in twelve-hour shifts to repair the area’s rail lines.
On the night of April 24th, Mr. Haslund ordered the gold train to be brought down to the dock in Andalsnes. Norwegian soldiers loaded 200 boxes of gold onto the HMS Galatea which had just unloaded British troops and equipment. The cruiser carried sixteen tons of the gold along with Norwegian officials to Scotland, and from there, the gold was transported to London and the Bank of England. Thirty-four tons of gold remained in Norway, awaiting transportation to the Allies. If the Nazis took possession, the precious metal would provide a tremendous boost to the enemy’s war chest.
A Modern View of Åndalsnes from the Romsdalsjjord Courtesy of Creative Commons via Wikimedia. Author Ludovic Peron.
The Norwegians expected German soldiers to come up the valley into Åndalsnes at any moment. Only hours remained to move the gold. An army captain obtained twenty-five trucks and drivers, and in two hours’ time, all the gold was removed from the train and loaded on the trucks. The convoy navigated over poorly paved roads that were covered with melting snow and mud. Unfortunately, the Luftwaffe returned to Åndalsnes and attacked the convoy. The soldiers and drivers ran for cover and no one was injured during the forty-five minutes of strafing. The convoy continued its journey, and when the next attack commenced, the drivers sped up. The Germans weren’t successful at hitting their targets. After reaching a ferry crossing, some trucks were hidden and some were camouflaged until dark.
A ferry arrived but could only carry two trucks across the water at a time. It took six hours to convey all the trucks to the other side. Because of deep ruts and potholes caused by the winter weather, the road ahead had to be repaired in places before the convoy could pass through. Trucks broke down and had to be replaced, and the crews became exhausted unloading and reloading the gold. Local farmers utilized their horses and equipment to drag one truck out of a ditch and back onto the road.
Eventually the convey arrived at the port of Molde where the Norwegian Government, King Haakon, and Crown Prince Olav were taking cover. They had arrived on April 23rd, and Molde had essentially become the new capital of Norway. The gold was unloaded into a large vault in the basement of the Confectionsfabriken building (clothing factory) in town.
Confectionsfabriken Building – Molde
The people of Molde were very helpful. They assisted with unloading the gold, providing security, and feeding the exhausted soldiers. But the Germans were intent on capturing or killing the King, Crown Prince, and Government. The Luftwaffe attacked Molde and it’s surroundings with bombs and incendiaries. The townsfolk set off the air-raid alarms as soon as they spotted aircraft, which allowed everyone time to escape to the woods.
On April 28th, the German Government announced that they were at war with Germany and that King Haakon was wanted ‘dead or alive.’ This was no surprise to the king or the Government. The relentless air strikes forced the British to send the cruiser HMS Glasgow to Molde and plans were made to evacuate.
The Germans bombed Molde for the first time at night. With debris littering the roads and fires raging, Norway’s gold was loaded on any available truck and transported to various locations at the harbor. Not all the trucks were immediately able to find a safe path through the destruction.
Before the HMS Glasgow could pull into port, a fire had to be extinguished on the dock. A portion of the gold was carried on board from this dock, and some was ferried by smaller ships from other points and loaded by crane onto the ship. The King, Crown Prince, members of the Norwegian Government, and the French, Danish, and British embassy members and staff joined British soldiers aboard the ship.
The Ruins of Molde – 1940. Courtesy of Flickr. No known copyright restrictions.
After the Germans unsuccessfully attacked the ship, the Glasgow left port and sailed down the fjord in reverse for at least an hour. It was too dangerous to turn around in the fjord at night. Not all of the gold had been loaded and not all of the gold had even made it to the dock before the Glasgow was forced to sail.
Along with the gold, the Glasgow carried King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, members of the Norwegian Government, and diplomatic officials from Britain, France, and Denmark to the Tromso area in the far north of Norway. From here, the Norwegians hoped to form an offensive against the Germans and drive them out of the country.
Summer Night in Tromso (2012). Photo Credit: Mark Ledingham via Wikimedia Commons
After delivering its precious human cargo, the Glasgow turned south and safely landed the second installment of Norway’s gold in Scotland. Norwegian officials accompanied the shipment by train to London where it was stored in the vault of the Bank of England.
Back in Molde, Fredrik Haslund, the official in charge of rescuing the gold, searched for a way to remove the 18 tons which the Glasgow had been forced to leave behind due to the bombings. While Molde was burning, Haslund loaded eight tons of the gold on the steamer Driva, and the ship set off at 2:00 AM, only one hour after the Glasgow had pulled away.
The Luftwaffe dropped a stick of bombs in the water near the Driva, but she wasn’t damaged. During her trip north she was attacked by a German seaplane, and to avoid being sunk, the Driva’s first mate beached the craft on a flat shoreline. Bombs fell but landed in the sea. As the tide came in, another steamer pulled the Driva back out into the fjord.
Molde Under Attack in 1940 Painting by Rolf Groven
In the meantime, near Molde, Haslund decided the gold should be moved to fishing vessels because the Driva was too much of a target for the Germans. Word was sent to the Driva to rendezvous at the village of Gjemnes. The remaining ten tons of gold was transported by truck to Gjemnes and loaded onto fishing boats (puffers) there. Five hundred and forty-seven boxes of bullion were loaded in the dark, including the gold from the Driva. By this time, Norway’s fight against the Nazis was over in southern Norway but still continued in the far north of the country.
The puffers sailed through the fjords, laying over at coastguard stations and villages but not staying in any one place for long. Unfortunately, the captains of the puffers weren’t comfortable moving into unfamiliar waters farther north along the dangerous coast, and Haslund was forced to find other sources to move the gold to Tromso where the new capitol had been established.
Bodo at the time Haslund visited before it was bombed by the Germans on May 27, 1940. Courtesy of Hundholmen
The gold was again unloaded and reloaded on two different fishing boats. The boats split up but rendezvoused at a small port north of Bodo on May 7th. Hasland left the boat and traveled by car to Bodo where he located the local military commander and learned where the British had placed the minefields in a fjord they must pass through. After safe passage through the fjord, they obtained the services of the commanding officer of a Norwegian guard ship who boarded and piloted them safely to Tromso where they arrived on May 9th.
The gold was combined on one of the puffers, and that boat went out to sea with the other fishing boats each day. On May 21st, the gold was loaded on the HMSEnterprise, a Royal Navy cruiser. The Luftwaffe had previously attacked the Enterprise with 150 bombs, and she was in poor condition. She left on May 23rd on a zig-zag course for the UK. She was attacked again, but none of the bombs hit their target. The Enterprise traveled down the west coast of England without destroyer protection and docked at Plymouth in the south. The gold was transported by train to London and deposited in the Bank of England.
Expecting a German invasion of Britain at any moment, the Norwegians made plans to move its gold once again. The British had already removed all of its own gold reserves before the war started in September of 1939. The Norwegian precious metal was split into several shipments and sent across the Atlantic to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and to the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. A small portion of the gold remained with the Norwegian Government-in-Exile established in England. This allowed them to function independently throughout the war.
Source: Gold Run by Robert Pearson. Casemate Publishers, 2015.
Norway didn’t expect to be drawn into World War II. Just as in World War I, the Norwegian government had declared its neutrality and worked hard to maintain this status. But early on during WWII, two major factors made this position untenable.
Iron ore dug at Kiruna and Malmberget was railed to Luleå and Narvik. Courtesy of Wikipedia & Creative Commons
To maintain its war machine, Germany needed uninterrupted access to iron ore from Sweden. The only year-round ice-free port was at Narvik, Norway, to which the iron ore was shipped by train across a short distance. It was vital for German ships to travel safely down the Norwegian coast from this northern port, but England was determined to end German access.
Narvik, Norway. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia
The Germans were concerned that the British would not only interfere with iron ore shipments but that the Allies would also gain access to Norwegian airfields and ports from which they could launch attacks on Germany. The Germans didn’t believe the British would allow Norway to maintain its neutral status, so Hitler ordered his military to draw up plans to invade before the Allies could gain a foothold.
In early April 1940, the British navy laid mines in the waters off the Norwegian coast at Narvik in an effort to force German ships into international waters where the Allies could attack. Unfortunately, the British waited too long. The German invasion was on.
Part 1
Part 1 is based on the firsthand accounts of Mrs. Florence Harriman who was U.S. Minister to Norway (now called Ambassador) before and during the early months of World War II.
On the morning of April 8, the U.S. Legation (Embassy) in Copenhagen, Denmark, phoned Mrs. Harriman in Norway and reported that a large body of German ships was passing through the Great Belt. This is a strait north of Germany, between two large islands in Denmark. Most officials, including the Norwegian government, thought the fleet was heading to the North Sea to engage the British Royal Navy in battle. The British even withdrew all their ships from Norwegian waters.
The Blücher Which Led the German Fleet into Norway Courtesy of Wikipedia
At 11:30 PM, the air raid alarm sounded in Oslo, but the street lights remained on for some time, and most assumed it was just another practice air raid alarm. Mrs. Harriman went to bed. However, at 3:00 AM, she was awakened by a phone call and notified that German warships were coming up the Oslo Fjord (a long narrow waterway connecting the capital with the North Sea). Mrs. Harriman was unable to call or cable the United States – Nazi collaborators had already taken control of communications.
Between 5:00 and 6:00 AM, Mrs. Harriman and others who had joined her at the American Legation made several trips to a newly-built bomb-proof room in the building. German bombers circled the city with Norwegian planes in pursuit. Anti-aircraft fire penetrated the early morning air.
The Norwegian Foreign minister notified Mrs. Harriman that the Court and Government were fleeing Oslo on a special train, and they wanted her to join them. Although she began packing, she was only given a twenty-minute notice of the 7:00 AM departure time, so she left in her Ford automobile at 9:45 AM along with other Americans.
German Troops Marching Through Oslo on April 9, 1940 Courtesy of Wikipedia and Creative Commons
On the route north to Hamar, those fleeing Oslo passed Kjeller Airfield, which the Germans had bombed, and the hangars were still burning. Behind them, the Nazis occupied Oslo, but their arrival was delayed by eight hours. Coastal guns from the Oscarsborg Fortress sank the German flagship Blücher, which slowed down the invasion and allowed the King and Government to escape the Nazis.
After six hours, Mrs. Harriman and her party reached the city of Hamar, but no accommodations were available under any roof. When word came that the Nazis were headed to Hamar, the Norwegian Government, and the U.S., British, and French Legations traveled in a long line of automobiles to Elverum. After the King and Royal Family passed by, soldiers erected a barrier south of town. Later two hundred Germans were killed at this roadblock, including the German air attache.
Dept. of History United States Military Academy. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Upon reaching Elverum, the town was blacked out except for the brightly lit schoolhouse where the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, was meeting. The King and Royal Family continued on to Trysil, seventy miles north, and Mrs. Harriman found lodging with a family outside Elverum. By 5:30 the following morning, German planes were attacking Elverum. The Germans flew at low altitudes and terrified the inhabitants with their deafening roar. When the bombing ended, only a church and Red Cross hospital remained. The Government escaped safely and retreated to Nybergsund.
The Norwegian Foreign Minister urged Mrs. Harriman to follow, but a barrier stood in her way and deep snow made the forests impassible. The Norwegians maneuvered her Ford around a barricade, and only the frozen ice kept her vehicle out of the nearby river. Upon reaching Nybergsund, Mrs. Harriman found the town wiped out and no walls standing. She had no idea where to find the King and Government. She later learned that the King and Crown Prince had run for their lives into the forest when the Nazis attacked.
King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav Hiding in the Woods During Bombing Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Mrs. Harriman crossed the border into Sweden to make contact with the U.S. Legation in Stockholm and report that she and other U.S. officials were still alive. Although she remained close to the border and intended to cross back into Norway after learning the location of the Norwegian Government, she was never able to return. In her memoir, Mission to the North, she shared a portion of King Haakon’s speech to his people, which he broadcast while on the run.
“‘In this hour, the most difficult our country has ever known in a hundred years, I send the most pressing appeal to each of you to do all in your power to save the liberty and independence of Norway. We have been the victims of a lightning attack from a nation with which we have always maintained friendly relations. That nation has not hesitated to bomb the civil population, who are suffering intensely….They have employed against us, and against the civil population high explosives and incendiary bombs and also machine-gunned us in the most savage fashion….I thank all those who are today with me and the Government, and who are fighting at their posts of duty for the independence and preservation of Norway. I pray you all to treasure the memory of those who have already given their lives for this country. God protect Norway.'”
Part 2
Part 2 is based on the firsthand accounts of C.J. Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament, as shared in his book I Saw It Happen in Norway.
The Germans attacked Norway on April 9, 1940 and took the country by surprise. Norway had maintained a strict neutral status in World War II and was on excellent terms with both Germany and the Allies.
The German attack on Norway, planned months in advance, was executed with simultaneous invasions by ship and air at every strategically important point in the country. Also, soldiers had been secretly loaded on German commercial ships which were already in Norwegians ports. Unfortunately, the Norwegian army had not been mobilized, and the country was completely unprepared for war.
The first inkling of trouble came when the air raid alarm in Oslo started at 1:00 AM and continued incessantly. At 2:00 AM, Mr. Hambro reached the War Office and the Prime Minister by telephone and then received updates every fifteen minutes. Reports came in from all over the country—the Germans were invading.
Between 4:30 and 5:00 AM, the German Minister met with the Norwegian Minister of Affairs. He presented a list of demands which actually called for the complete surrender of Norway. The Government rejected the proposal and made plans to flee the capital. Mr. Hambro traveled by taxi to Hamar, one hundred miles north of Oslo, to prepare for the arrival of the Royal Family, the Government (Cabinet), the 150 members of the Storting (Parliament), and others supporting them. Most of these traveled on a special train which left Oslo at 7:23 AM that morning.
The sinking of the German flag ship Blucher in the Oslo Fjord postponed the occupation of Oslo, the capital of Norway, by eight hours and prevented the Germans from ever capturing the Royal Family or the Government.
That afternoon while the Storting was in session in Hamar, word arrived that the German motorized troops were advancing toward the city – one group was only ten miles away. A special train left for Elverum with most of the members aboard about ten minutes later. Norwegian soldiers barricaded the roads leading to Elverum and established a line of defense. The Storting met for the last time before the German occupation and unanimously gave the Government the full power to make all necessary decisions under war conditions.
The king sent his daughter-in-law, the Crown-Princess, and her three children to Sweden to stay with her parents, Prince Carl and Princess Ingeborg. The King and Crown Prince traveled with them as far as Nybergsund, which was twenty miles west of the border with Sweden.
The German Minister demanded a meeting with with the King, so he made the 45-mile trip back over frozen roads to Elverum the next day. Dr. Brauer, the German Minister, set forth the ultimatum which was tougher than the one he had presented the day before. The King stated he would abdicate rather than dissolve the Government and appoint a new one headed by Hitler’s man. The Government supported him and refused to accept the German demands.
The Germans replied by bombing Elverum and nearly destroying it. Nybergsund, which was smaller than a village, was also raided by bombers, but the deep snow reduced the impact of the explosions. The King, Crown Prince, and the Government passed through the Gudbrandsdalen Valley to the town of Molde on the west coast. They were constantly on the move, running from German bombers.
King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav hiding in the woods during a German bombing. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
British, French, and Polish troops landed at three points along the west coast to assist the Norwegians in their fight. The first British troops reached Norway on April 19th, but by April 28th, they were forced to evacuate southern Norway. The fight moved to the northern counties. The King and Government sailed above the Arctic Circle to Tromso, which became the provisional capital. The plan was to drive the Germans farther and farther south, and the implementation started to succeed when the Germans slowly lost ground in the north. Nevertheless, the King, Crown Prince, and Government only stayed in Tromso for five weeks.
After the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France, the Allies were forced to evacuate Norway – the troops were needed to defend their homelands. The British offered safe passage to the Royals and the Norwegian Government, and on June 7th, they departed on the British cruiser Devonshire for England.
In August, the Crown Princess, her three children, along with Mrs. Harriman, the U.S. Minister to Norway, and hundreds of others journeyed by train up the length of Sweden to the far north. They crossed into Finland and proceeded to the port of Petsamo on the Arctic coast. There they boarded the American Legion, a troop ship, sent by Roosevelt to take them to America.
The Return of the Royal Family to Norway – June 7, 1945 Courtesy of Oslo Museum via Wikimedia Commons
On June 7, 1940, five years to the day that the King and Crown Prince had fled Norway, the King and Crown Princess and her children returned to Norway by ship to cheering crowds welcoming the Royal Family home. The Crown Prince had returned a few weeks before to prepare the way.
Sources:
Mission to the North by Frances Jaffray Harriman. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1941.
Many books have been written about the atrocities that occurred at the notorious Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the German occupation of Poland in WWII. Survivors of Auschwitz and the death march west in the dead of winter have shared their heartbreaking stories, and each one holds a valuable lesson for readers. But one Auschwitz prisoner who was chosen for execution managed to escape.
Klara Lutkovits was a teenager from Sighet, Hungary (part of Romania before the war). She, her parents, and five of her siblings lived in the Sighet ghetto, which was formed in early 1944. One very hot day in May, Klara and her family were told to pack a few clothes and some food—they would be taken to a work camp and would not return home.
The Hungarian police loaded Klara, her family, and hundreds of others into railroad boxcars, and the Nazis transported them to Auschwitz, just one year before Germany’s surrender. They reached the notorious camp on the third night of travel. Dr. Joseph Mengele, a medical officer at the camp, met them on the selection ramp. He was tall and handsome, only thirty-three-years-old, and resembled the Hollywood actor-type. He had a magnetic personality. Mengele talked and joked with the deportees and then sent them to the gas chambers.
Because Klara’s transport arrived during the night, German soldiers grouped their flashlights around Mengele, and he made his selections. He sent Klara’s sister and brother and her parents to the right and Klara with her two other sisters to the left. He smiled and said they would see their family members the next day. The guards led Klara, Rose, and Hedy to a barracks in B Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The rest of the family went immediately to the gas chambers.
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1944. Selection of Hungarian Jews for work or the gas chamber. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Over the next several months, Klara and her sisters worked eleven-hour shifts in the surrounding fields and factories. They were fed three meager “meals” a day. The girls endured the cold and SS beatings and observed hundreds of new arrivals herded into the gas chambers daily.
Klara’s mind as well as her body began to break down, and she stopped eating. In November, Dr. Mengele announced that he would conduct a selection among the prisoners. After he viewed Klara’s emaciated body, he chose her and others in the same condition to die in the gas chambers.
The Nazis knew they were losing the war and needed to eliminate the evidence of their atrocities, so they pushed their extermination efforts to the maximum. A backlog of prisoners awaited execution, and Mengele could no longer send those housed at Auschwitz directly to the gas chambers whenever he wanted. New arrivals had priority. Klara and the other women selected were taken to the bath house, given black dresses to wear, and told to wait. Klara wanted to die rather than continue suffering in the camp. Her sisters, Rose and Hedy, came to the window of the bath house to comfort her, but they were pulled away and beaten for their efforts.
The guards moved Klara’s group to another holding room, a smaller brick-style building next to the gas chamber. Once the others fell asleep, Klara inspected her surroundings. The walls were made of inferior brick, and she noticed someone had dug around the bottom of one of the bricks. She pushed and pulled until she freed it and then used the brick to chip away at the others. After pulling out more bricks, she slipped through the small passage and into the night. The fresh, cold air and Klara’s newfound freedom awakened her. She decided she wanted to live.
Klara moved through the camp, staying close to the buildings. The wet, snowy rain and very cold weather, kept the guards indoors. She noticed lights on in the bath house. Thick steam covered the windows. Klara found an open window and climbed inside, hidden from detection by the steam. After taking a shower, the girls were given dresses and shoes and were told to line up outside—the Nazis has chosen one hundred young women to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia. The guards counted one hundred and one prisoners and started to drag the last girl in line away. She objected, so one of the other girls volunteered to stay behind with her family and returned to the barracks.
After traveling for three days and three nights, Klara’s train arrived in Weisswasser, Czechoslovakia, the home of a Nazi slave labor camp and the privately owned Telefunken Company. Klara lined up with the other girls but collapsed before making it to the camp gates. She awakened later in a hospital bed in the infirmary, where a female Jewish doctor nursed her back to health.
After six weeks, Klara went to work in the town factory, putting wire transmitters and radio relay systems together. She began to eat again, but the process was painful. Those in charge fed the workers three meals a day, including bread and meat with each meal.
A few months later Klara and her co-workers were ushered to their job site as usual but nobody brought work for them to do. The girls discovered the Germans and their soldiers had left. They were free! The next day Russian soldiers arrived, and their captain arranged transportation for the girls to the nearest operating trains—two days away. The girls were all allowed to board without paying, and Klara traveled home to Sighet.
Several weeks later her sisters, Rose and Hedy, arrived home. They thought Klara had died in the gas chambers. What a reunion of crying, laughing, and screaming took place!
Klara met Ezra Wizel in Sighet, and they married in 1947. Having no desire to live under communism, the Wizel’s escaped and emigrated to America. They eventually settled in Los Angeles, California. Source: Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story by Danny Naten and R. Gifford, 2014.
Source:
Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story by Danny Naten and R. Gifford, 2014.
Walter Rosenberg, who later changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler escaped from the infamous Auschwitz Death Camp on April 7, 1944. Their method of escape was rather unique, and the comprehensive report they wrote about the mass executions taking place at Auschwitz helped to save the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Walter was fifteen-years-old when he was forced to leave school and study at home due to the anti-Jewish laws passed by the pro-Nazi German protectorate of Slovakia. Three years later, at age seventeen, he’d had enough. He tore the Star of David off his clothes and left home in a taxi, hoping to make it to Great Britain.
At the Hungarian border, frontier guards captured Walter and sent him to a transition camp. Hoping to improve his situation, he volunteered for a “Work Farm” assignment, which was in reality a one-way trip to Auschwitz. He held various jobs at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), where the gas chambers and crematoriums were located.
By April of 1944, about ninety percent of the new arrivals to Auschwitz (6000 people) were sent straight to the gas chambers each day. One day drunken SS guards spilled the news to the prisoners that Hungarian Jews would soon arrive.
Auschwitz II had a very active underground resistance organization made up of prisoners who worked in various departments in the camp. After the group learned that Rosenberg and Wetzler wanted to escape, the members aided their plans. It was past time to expose the Nazi’s secret crimes to the outside world.
Confiscated clothing in the “Kanada” section of Auschwitz Courtesy of Wikipedia. Public Domain.
The underground organization gathered data from the central registry, a list of the SS officers working around the crematoria, drawings of the layout of the gas chambers and crematoria, records of the transports gassed in two of the crematoriums, and a label from a Zyklon B canister. In one department, the prisoners’ job was to sort through the large quantities of items confiscated from the new arrivals and package the goods to send to Germany. From this supply, the underground gathered suits, socks, underpants, shirts, a razor, a torch, glucose, vitamins, margarine, cigarettes and a lighter for Rosenberg and Wetzler.
A barbed wire perimeter surrounded the barracks where the prisoners slept at night. The Nazi guards erected another external perimeter during the day. A stack of wood for constructing new buildings had been placed in a construction area between these two perimeters.
The men created a hollowed-out space in the wood stack, and on Friday, April 7, 1944, Rosenberg and Wetzler, clad in suits, overcoats, and boots, climbed inside their hiding place. A Russian POW had previously told them to soak strong-smelling Russian tobacco in petrol and dry it out to hide the men’s scent from the guard dogs. Their underground helpers piled wood around the escapees and sprinkled the area with the prepared tobacco.
Rosenberg had observed that after someone went missing at Auschwitz, the SS would hunt for them for three days and three nights before calling off their search. The two men stayed in the wood pile undetected for three nights and throughout the fourth day. After nearly 80 hours, they crawled out of their hiding place at 9:00 PM on Monday, April 10th. The external perimeter had been removed for the night, leaving the men free to escape the camp.
Rosenberg and Wetzler headed south to Slovakia, eighty-one miles away. Polish civilians assisted them with food and shelter, and the men crossed the border after eleven days. A peasant family in Slovakia put the men in contact with a nearby Jewish doctor who sent them by train to the Slovak Jewish Council in Žilina.
Although the Slovakian government had turned over thousands of its Jews to the Nazis who deported them, part of the Jewish community was left alone to operate its schools and synagogues as a show piece for German propaganda.
Vrba and Wetzler’s Escape. Courtesy of Wikipedia and Martin Gilbert.
Rosenberg and Wetzler wrote a full report of the atrocities taking place at Auschwitz, including drawings and detailed facts to back up their testimony. Rosenberg signed the report with his new name – Rudolf Vrba. The report was translated from Slovak into German and completed on April 27th. It was copied and taken to Hungary, Switzerland, the UK, Romania, and the United States.
International newspapers eventually picked up the men’s story, and leaders of several countries pressured Hungary to stop the deportations. The United States and Great Britain bombed Budapest on July 2 and dropped leaflets stating those responsible for the deportations would be held accountable.
Although the Nazi’s had invaded Hungary in March 1944 to prevent the country from withdrawing from the war, the Germans had left Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy in power. After the Allies bombed Budapest, Horthy reasserted his authority and ordered an end to the mass deportations. Prior to that, 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz between May 15 and July 7. The order to stop the deportations spared the lives of 200,000 Jews in Budapest.
Vrba and Wetzler survived the war, wrote books about their experiences, and lived to an advanced age. Vrba argued to the day he died that more lives could have been spared if the report had been disseminated immediately. He maintained that politics had played a part in keeping their account quiet for a time. Over the years many theories have been presented for why this may have happened, but that’s a story for another time.
Over a million Allied airmen flew missions over occupied Europe during WWII, and many of their planes were shot down. The parachute played a pivotal role in saving the lives of tens of thousands of these troops. Fascinating stories of miraculous parachute drops abound. Here are some of the experiences of Royal Air Force (RAF) flyers.
WWII Reenactment of the 82nd Airborne Division – Public Domain
First, a little information about the process of parachuting during WWII is in order. Once a soldier left his aircraft, either by jumping or being blown out, he fell at about 175 feet a second – 120 miles an hour. After his parachute fully opened, his descent slowed to 19 – 21 feet per second – about 11 miles an hour. If the parachute was dry and had been freshly packed, once he pulled his ripcord, the parachute fully opened in one to two seconds. The faster the aircraft traveled, the quicker the chute opened.
The closer the soldier was to the ground, the more dangerous his landing and chance of death. If a man jumped from an aircraft that was diving, he would fall at a faster rate, and a thousand feet above ground might have been too low for his parachute to open.
RAF Flight Lieutenant Dudley Davis defied these odds. On July 21, 1940, he flew his Hampden aircraft over the Wilhelmshaven harbor at fifty feet above the water and dropped a mine under the German battleship Tirpitz. It was timed to explode an hour after release.
Two other Hampdens flew in separately for the same purpose. A high-level diversionary bombing attack was scheduled for a few minutes before their arrival. However, unexpected winds interfered with the operation, and the diversionary attack was over when the Hampdens arrived. The flak guns gave the three enemy aircraft all of their attention. Davis’ plane was the last to arrive, and streams of flak set his plane on fire before he arrived at the docks.
The Hampden continued flying with fuel tanks ablaze, and Davis dropped the mine close beside the Tirpitz. By this time, flames were spurting up through the cockpit floor, and the plane was too low for Davis to order his crew to jump. With the cabin behind him on fire and heavy smoke in the cockpit, Davis open the hood, crouched on the starboard wing, and clung to the cockpit edge. As the aircraft began to roll to starboard, Davis pulled his ripcord. He was no more than fifty feet above the water.
Davis’ canopy filled and snatched him backwards off the wing. His back hit the plane, bounced off, and hit something else. He discovered he was lying on his side on a stone pier. He stood up and was unhurt except for a few bruises and a minor face burn. He was immediately captured and spent the next five years in a German prison camp.
The Germans were outfitting the newly launched Tirpitz at the time, so the explosion from the mine delayed its completion. Crew members from the other two Hampdens also survived by parachuting from their planes which were shot down.
During the Battle of France in the spring of 1940, Flight Lieutenant Crews and wireless operator/air gunner Evans flew out of their base at Rheims, France, to bomb a vital bridge on the German invasion route at the German-Belgian frontier. About thirty miles from their target, they encountered heavy fire from German antiaircraft gunners from the convoys below. The ack-ack smashed the plane’s instrument panel.
When Crews flew within sight of the target, anti-aircraft fire blasted a big hole behind the engine, causing burning gasoline to stream back under his seat in the cockpit. At this point, Crews was flying over rolling wooded country with no place to land. He shouted for his men to bale out. He slid the hood back, and flames gushed up, burning his legs and face. They were no more than 200 or 300 feet above the trees, and the plane would go no higher.
Crews didn’t doubt that he must jump, but he didn’t expect to survive. He stepped out on to the wing root and pulled his ripcord as he dove off. He closed his eyes, hit the trees seconds later, felt burning on his face from pine needles scraping his skin, and then experienced a tremendous jolt.
Crews discovered “he was hanging on his rigging lines held from the top branches of a pine tree by the half-opened canopy” only six feet above the ground. Two yards away, Evans was suspended in another tree in the same way. They stared at each other. “Apart from minor cuts and bruises neither was injured.” Their plane was burning on the ground only thirty feet away. Crews and Evans tried to escape through the German lines but were captured and held prisoner for the next five years.
Deploying Parachutes (Public Domain)
Rear gunner Ken Downing served on an RAF Hampden on April 18, 1941 when he and his fellow crew members bombed a German airfield in Cherbourg, France. Downing’s aircraft was protected by a cloud blanket over the French coast until it broke through the clouds at 900 feet. The plane dropped to 850 feet, bombed the fighters sitting on the airfield, and pulled up to escape into the cloud. A shell of anti-aircraft fire hit the port engine which burst into flames. The pilot announced he would try to land the Hampden, but gave permission for everyone else to bale out.
Downing pulled the jettison wire on the main door of the Hampden, but it would not release. He lost valuable time kicking the door until it finally gave way. Downing pulled the ripcord on his parachute as he slid out of the Hampden. His head just missed the horizontal stabilizer, and his chute, which was streaming, cleared the aircraft. Because he was facing up, Downing didn’t know how close he was to the ground. His body jolted, his harness tightened, and he blacked out for a few seconds.
When Downing opened his eyes, he discovered he was sitting on the ground in deep soft mud, the only patch of mud in the vicinity. “Less than ten yards away on the other side of a hedge was the burning wreck of the Hampden.” Downing’s parachute lay close enough that the top of the canopy caught on fire. There were no other chutes near him – he was the lone survivor. Ammunition from the Hampden exploded, forcing Downing to crawl away on his broken right thigh and leg.
German airmen ran across the field and took Downing to the naval hospital at Cherbourg. The next day the German commander at the airfield visited Downing and congratulated him for his successful jump from 130 feet (almost unheard of). He spent the next four years in captivity.
RAF Seafire (Public Domain)
Lieutenant Commander P.E.I. Bailey and another pilot flew their RAF Seafire planes across the English Channel on the second day of D-Day. Their job was to spot for “the naval ships whose guns were supporting the ground forces in their drive inland” between Boulogne and Dieppe. “No sooner were they within range of the first ships than they were vigorously fired upon. Quickly they turned round and flew out to sea again.” The gunnery officers on the ships had mistaken them for the enemy. Bailey later learned that German fighters had strafed the fleet only minutes before.
Bailey reached one of the headquarter ships by radio and was promised his message about being fired upon would be passed along. The two pilots flew in again, were shot at again, and retreated again. Bailey radioed the headquarters ship once more and was told to wait ten minutes before returning. Ten minutes later, Bailey returned. As he passed directly over a heavily armed anti-aircraft cruiser, the ship opened fire, spraying the two planes with metal. The tail of Bailey’s plane broke off, and the nose went down. At 400 feet above the sea, he couldn’t get his damaged hood to open more than nine inches. The plane continued diving toward the beach. At about 250 feet, although he was still trapped in the cockpit, Bailey pulled the ripcord on his parachute.
Next, the drop tank on Bailey’s plane exploded, and as the aircraft disintegrated, Bailey was blown out. His chute opened and jolted him right before he bumped onto the beach. “The wind filled his canopy, and he was hauled off along the beach, dragged on his back over the sand.” The canopy of Bailey’s parachute detonated small anti-personnel mines attached to stakes near the water’s edge before Bailey reached those areas.
Bailey succeeded in stopping his runaway chute, undid his harness, and discovered he was uninjured. A group of British beach commandos surrounded him, thinking they’d captured a German airman. After all, a British ship had shot him down, and he was wearing black flying overalls. The commandos pointed their guns at Bailey. He didn’t have any proof that he was British, so the soldiers marched him off to a temporary wire cage, housing 150 disgruntled-looking German prisoners. By this time Bailey was quite disgruntled. He protested the whole way, but no one listened to him.
A captured German officer, who spoke perfect English, was also in the cage. He told the British soldiers that Bailey wasn’t a German airman, but no one listened to him either. Finally, after two hours in the cage, Bailey drew the attention of a British officer who took him to a brigadier. The brigadier telephoned and established Bailey’s identity and ordered him released. He returned to England the next day.
Blenheim Aircraft Used by the R.A.F. Courtesy of Canadian Forces via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
In July 1940, Sergeant Roger Peacock’s Blenheim was seriously damaged by flak when returning to Britain after a bombing run near Wilhemshaven, Germany. Peacock was the mid-upper gunner on the flight. (See the gunner turret midway back on the aircraft pictured above.)
After both engines stopped on the Blenheim, the pilot gave the order to bale out at 6,500 feet, and he and the observer jumped. Unfortunately, Peacock didn’t hear the order. The aircraft went into a slow spiral dive at about 4,000 feet, and Peacock didn’t know if the pilot would recover in time.
Twice Peacock called over the intercom, asking if he should bale out, but no one responded. He figured the guys up front were too busy to reply. After waiting until the plane had descended to 1000 feet above the ground, he asked again if he should bale out. No reply. So he removed his parachute and moved forward to the cockpit. Finding he was the only person left on the aircraft, Peacock returned for his parachute, clipped it on and looked out the escape hatch. The altimeter registered he was at 450 feet.
Peacock jumped. Even though it was dark, he detected the black carpet of the ground below him. His parachute began to stream; however, he knew he’d jumped too late. Then a miracle unfolded. “The Blenheim crashed under him and exploded. A blinding orange flash lit up the ground for hundreds of yards.” This caused “a great upsurge of hot air. A few feet from the ground the blast snapped his canopy fully open and blew him upwards and sideways away from the blazing aircraft. When he landed safely a few moments later he was some distance from the wreckage, in another field.”
Because Peacock stayed with his aircraft for so long, he overtook the pilot and observer who had baled out much earlier, and he reached the ground before them. The pilot came down close to Peacock five minutes later, and the observer landed in a ditch several miles away.
R.A.F. Vickers Wellington
On a training flight in a R.A.F. Wellington, Sergeant F. W. R. Cumpsty baled out right before his aircraft crashed in the Welsh mountains. He was only fifty feet above a mountain top. A gale-force wind carried him away from the top and into a valley, allowing time for Cumpsty’s chute to open. “He landed safely 200 feet below the peak.”
The British Stirling Heavy Bomber (Public Domain)
After his Stirling Bomber was shot down by flak over France in 1944, Flight Engineer Joseph Cashmore baled out from below 300 feet. The flight was halfway across France and traveling at 300 feet to avoid radar detection when searchlights revealed its presence to the enemy. After the ensuing bombardment destroyed the plane, the pilot ordered his men to bale but then rescinded the order while he attempted to bring the Stirling higher. He wasn’t successful.
Each crew member prepared to jump. Cashmore went to the rear floor escape hatch and kicked the locking handles that were preventing the hatch from opening. They broke off. Cashmore and the flight sergeant beside him each insisted that the other jump first. By the time Cashmore exited, the bomber was in its last dive.
After pulling his ripcord, Cashmore “felt a sharp jerk as the harness tightened between his thighs and a thud, after which he knew no more.” He came to but had no injuries. “He had landed in a depression which contained the only patch of deep snow in the whole field.”
The French Underground rescued Cashmore, but the Germans captured him escaping near the Swiss frontier. After the war, he returned to England and was appointed Warrant Officer-in-charge of an enemy prisoner-of-war camp. Unteroffizier Heinz Ulrich was a prisoner there and, after learning that Cashmore had flown in Stirlings, bragged to Cashmore that he had earned an Iron Cross for shooting a Stirling down in 1944.
The date was March 4th, the same night Cashmore had been shot down. Cashmore grabbed a map of France and had Ulrich point out where the kill had taken place and at what time. Both answers, along with other descriptions, matched up with Cashmore’s ill-fated flight. Ulrich was the man who had ended Cashmore’s active participation in the war. The two became friends, and after Ulrich’s release, they corresponded for several years.
WWII British Halifax Bomber (Public Domain)
Flight Sergeant Eric Sanderson served as Rear Gunner on a Halifax named ‘R’ for Robert. On the night of March 22, 1944, Sanderson flew on the last operation of his tour. On their way to bomb Frankfurt, Germany, a strong force of enemy fighters attacked Sanderson’s bomber group. After watching the fighters go after the bombers behind them, Sanderson was ready. Sure enough, he spotted a Ju88 lurking under their tail, and he notified the crew.
Sanderson’s pilot initiated several maneuvers, diving, climbing, turning, performing a corkscrew, but the enemy fighter stayed with them, below and just out of reach of the bomber’s guns. As a desperate measure, the pilot rolled the Halifax on its belly so the mid-upper gunner could shoot down at the fighter. The fighter took advantage and hit them with his cannon fire, igniting the incendiaries on the “R.” With the wing root on fire, the pilot ordered all bombs to be released, but the mechanism didn’t work.
The fire moved to the fuselage, and the pilot called for his crew to jump. The other members left through the main door and the nose hatch, but Sanderson was left to wind his turret 90 degrees by hand and attempt to tumble backwards out of the turret. Unfortunately, when he swung down, his legs caught under the dashboard. He dangled upside down and could not swing back up into the turret to release his legs. Flames from the aircraft poured over him, searing his hands and face.
Diagram of the British Halifax. Note the Rear Gunner Turret. Courtesy of Author Martin Čížek via Creative Commons and Wikimedia
Sanderson expected to die. He didn’t know how close he was to the ground, but by this time, the “R” had descended from 16,000 feet to 1,000 feet, which he later learned. Suddenly, Sanderson decided to pull the ripcord on his parachute, hoping he’d be snatched clear. He was now below 400 feet. His chute rapidly filled and Sanderson felt as if his body had been torn in half. He saw the trees below him and then passed out.
Sanderson, lying on his back, awoke to utter darkness and silence. He thought he had died. But his vision and hearing slowly returned, and joy filled him when he realized he was alive after all. He moved his head and his arms, but he had no feeling in his legs. He sat up, but only saw a tangled twisted mass where his legs should have been. Upon further inspection, his legs and feet were intact but tangled up in his Mae West and harness. After untangling himself, he was able to stand.
Next Sanderson pressed a patch of snow to his face, which was bleeding from severe burns. A flap of loose skin hung from the his burned hand holding the snow. He crawled on his hands and knees to where he could observe the burning Halifax. Sanderson called to four German soldiers nearby. After running over to him and flashing a lamp in his face, they carried him off to a village.
Sanderson’s face and hands and broken collar bone healed in a prison hospital. “The only damage his legs suffered in their violent exit from the turret” were torn ligaments and muscles in his legs. All of his fellow crewman who bailed from the “R” for Robert landed safely, and Sanderson met them in captivity.
A Row of Halifax Bombers Being Assembled in Britain (Public Domain)
Source:
Mackersey, Ian. Into the Silk: The Dramatic True Stories of Airmen Who Baled Out – and Lived. Sapere Books.
Many have heard about the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from Dunkirk in May-June of 1940, but few know the story behind this miracle. In May 1940, the approximately 400,000 strong British Expeditionary Force waited on the continent of Europe in anticipation of German hostilities. On May 10th, the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium, and the bulk of the Allied forces moved into Belgium to meet the attack.
Dunkirk Beach in 2012. Courtesy of User: Eporte in Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons
What the Allies didn’t expect was that the main thrust of the German forces would come through the Ardennes Forest to the south of their position. The Allied military leaders didn’t believe it was possible to move a large amount of soldiers and equipment through this area, but the Germans proved them wrong. By May 13th, the first German troops crossed the River Meuse into France at a place poorly defended by the Allies. A total of nine German Panzer divisions rapidly headed west in what is known as the Blitzkrieg, “Lightning War.”
The enemy trapped a half million French, British, and Belgian soldiers between the German troops to the north and the German troops streaming to the coast in the south. So effective was this maneuver that on May 15th, French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud phoned British prime Minister Winston Churchill and said, “We are beaten. We have lost the battle.”
On May 20th, the first German division reached the coast near Abbeville. On May 23rd, General John Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, defied the orders of the British Imperial General Staff. Instead of conducting an all-out assault on the German army, Gort sent his troops to the coast and instructed them to form a defensive perimeter, allowing thousands of troops scattered over hundreds of miles to funnel through to the little-known town of Dunkirk. Thousands of French troops also took positions along the outer perimeter.
Before it was all over with, Churchill thought he would be forced to announce the grim news that a third of a million British soldiers had been captured or killed. He couldn’t envision evacuating more than 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers before the Germans moved up the coast and cut them off.
Churchill shared the hopeless situation with British King George VI, and the king appealed to the British people in a radio broadcast on May 24th. He asked the nation and all within the empire to pray for deliverance and announced a National Day of Prayer for Sunday, May 26th. He implored, “‘Let us with one heart and soul, humbly but confidently, commit our cause to God and ask his aid, that we may valiantly defend the right as it is given to us to see it.’”
The British people answered the call and met in churches throughout the country to pray for their troops and their nation. Long lines formed outside many cathedrals, including Westminster Abbey where King George and his cabinet went to pray.
The British Lined Up Outside Westminster Abbey on the National Day of Prayer – May 26th. Public Domain
On May 24th, the same day King George appealed to the British to pray, General Guderian and Adolf Hitler ordered the German Army to halt. The Panzers were less than fifteen miles from Dunkirk. Hitler and his generals were concerned their tanks would be needed in case of an Allied counterattack, and they wanted to prevent the loss of equipment they would need for the march to Paris.
In addition, Herman Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, had requested that Hitler allow the airforce to prevent the evacuation of British troops instead of the army. It wasn’t until May 26th that the German army was allowed to move toward Dunkirk. By then, the British and French defenses were well entrenched.
The British Expeditionary Force Evacuating at Dunkirk. Public Domain
On May 26th, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsey commenced Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe had already destroyed the port facilities, so the British destroyers loaded men at the East Mole, a flimsy wooden pier five feet wide, which extended 1400 yards into the sea. The loading process proceeded slowly, so Ramsey also requisitioned small boats from England to shuttle the troops waiting on the beaches to bigger ships anchored in deep water. The Luftwaffe continued to attack, strafing and bombing the beaches, the Mole, the ships, and the men backed up around the port.
On May 27th, General Halder, Chief of the German General Staff proudly boasted about the impending destruction of the British Army, but the Germans didn’t reckon with the prayers of the British. On May 28th, a terrible storm developed over Flanders, grounding the Luftwaffe and allowing more British troops to move to the coast unhindered. The defensive perimeter held the German Army back.
Following the storm, the normally turbulent waters of the English Channel calmed. Ramsey called for hundreds of small boats to head to Dunkirk. Many of these vessels wouldn’t have made it safely across and back if it hadn’t been for the unusual stillness of the waters. These boats carried thousands of troops back to England and saved their lives.
Small Boats Taking Troops Back to England from Dunkirk. Public Domain.
Despite the loss of six destroyers, eight personal ships, and over two hundred small craft, about 330,000 British and French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk between May 26th and June 3rd. The British were so grateful that they held a National Day of Thanksgiving on Sunday, June 9th. Choirs and congregations all across the country sang the words to Psalm 124.
“If the Lord himself had not been on our side, now may Israel say: if the Lord himself had not been on our side, when men rose up against us; They would have swallowed us up quick: when they were so wrathfully displeased at us. Yea, the waters of the proud would have gone over our soul. But praised be the Lord: Who has not given us over for a prey unto their teeth. Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken, and we are delivered. Our help standeth in the name of the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.”
Many of the troops saved at Dunkirk lived to return across the Channel and help the Allies win World War II. God heard and answered the prayers of a people who humbled themselves and sought His face.
Eastern Europe was heavily impacted by WWII. Millions of civilians and soldiers lost their lives when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union initially invaded and then reconquered these lands later in the war. Both countries massacred many civilians and soldiers and deported hundreds of thousands to either Germany or Siberia, where the deportees often died of starvation.
What was the emotional and spiritual state of the general population in these countries prior to WWII? Did the people expect such widespread devastation, and were they prepared for the suffering ahead? Did they think about their spiritual welfare?
It so happens that a great spiritual awakening took place across denominational lines in Eastern Europe in the 1930‘s and continued into the war period. God, in his love and mercy, sent witnesses and opened the windows of heaven prior to the great calamities which followed.
In 1934 a young evangelist from Scotland traveled to Riga, Latvia, a small northern country bordered by the Baltic Sea on the west and the Soviet Union to the east. Even though he didn’t personally know anyone in the country, James Stewart clearly felt God had called him to this land. He arrived almost destitute and penniless, his clothing inadequate for the harsh winter weather. He found refuge in the home of Pastor Robert Fetler and held a revival campaign in Fetler’s church. Twelve hundred people attended the meetings nightly, which often lasted until three o’clock in the morning.
Fetler’s brother, William, pastored the Salvation Temple Revival Church, also in Latvia, and the church was holding a revival convention the week Stewart arrived in the country. The congregation had prayed for revival for many years and hundreds of believers participated in a twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer circle for that purpose.
Stewart preached in the Salvation Temple’s services where over two thousand people gathered every day for weeks and months. The meetings continued sometimes all day and all night, and those attending attested to the “awful sense of the majesty and holiness of God.” The Russian, German, and Polish churches which met in the building were “touched by the power of God.”
ESTONIA
Physically exhausted from ministering daily in Latvia, Stewart went north to the little country of Estonia to rest. It wasn’t long before he made contact with a pastor whose people had also been praying for revival. They began gospel meetings and soon had to move the services to the largest Protestant building in the capital city of Talinn. They ran out of space in that church and asked church members to stay home to make room for the visitors. Then it became necessary to rent the largest public hall in the city, which seated thousands.
Stewart arrived at the new location one night and found a crowd waiting outside. When he asked the people why they hadn’t been allowed inside, they answered that the hall was crowded and there wasn’t any more room.
During the course of the meetings, Stewart lost his voice and went to another town to rest. After his voice returned, he conducted meetings entitled “Lectures on the Bible” and gave each attendee a New Testament. As he both taught and preached from the Scriptures, the listeners gave their hearts to Christ, including his interpreter, a university professor.
POLAND
Creative Commons
In 1935, James Stewart left for Warsaw and met with the Russian Missionary Society to receive instructions on how to assist pastors ministering in the small towns and villages among the Russians of eastern Poland. Stewart visited and encouraged these pastors, arranged for the systematic distribution of Scriptures in the villages, and conducted evangelistic meetings in rented public halls and theaters.
Stewart was especially burdened for the large number of Jews he encountered, so he held special meetings for them. Both orthodox and liberal Jews attended, packing the buildings so tightly that the gas lamps went out for lack of sufficient oxygen.
The films of actor James Stewart played in the same cities and towns where missionary James Stewart led people to Christ. Some folks traveled to town to watch the movies but went to the wrong hall by mistake. After listening to the gospel message, they gave their hearts to Christ. Stewart held ten-day campaigns in the larger towns of Rowne, Baronowicze, Vilna, Pruzana, and Lutsk, and the rented cinema buildings filled to overflowing.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Map of Czechoslovakia and northern Austria, 1928-1938. Created by PANONIAN [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
James Stewart returned to Warsaw, and an associate asked him where he planned to go next. “Czechoslovakia,” he said without a pause. His friend asked if Stewart knew anyone there. No, he didn’t. But that same day, Mr. Zdened Koukol, a chocolate manufacturer from a town near Prague, Czechoslovakia, walked into the associate’s office. He met Stewart and asked him when he planned to come to his country and hold revival meetings.
Stewart traveled to Czechoslovakia and, under Koukol’s sponsorship, held meetings starting in October of 1936. After two weeks of speaking to a cold and unresponsive congregation in Kutna Hora, the young preacher packed his bags, planning to move on. Koukol urged him to stay longer. James prayed and the Lord convicted Him for his impatience.
Koukol encouraged the believers in the towns of Kutna Hora and Kolin to pray and believe that revival was possible, starting in their own hearts. Koukol rented a large public hall in Kolin, and young people flocked to the meeting. No one responded the first night. However, very late that same night, a Christian woman who held an important position in the Kolin church appeared at Koukol’s home.
The woman feared that sin in her life had prevented God’s blessing upon the revival meeting. Stewart counseled with her, and she left determined to make things right. A very different atmosphere was evident at the meetings in the following days. Many heard the gospel for the first time and accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.
Source:
Stewart, Ruth. James Stewart Missionary, A Biography. Revival Literature, 1977.
Last month, we learned about the message of faith and hope which spread through Latvia, Estonia, Eastern Poland, and Czechoslovakia from 1934 to 1936. If you missed that post and would like to read it, here’s the link: A Pre-WWII Great Awakening in Eastern Europe.
Today we continue the story in Czechoslovakia in late 1937.
Prior to WWII, Czechoslovakia consisted of four regions – Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Young Scottish evangelist James Stewart, invited and backed by the Czech Brethren, held revival meetings in Bohemia and Moravia in western Czechoslovakia.
Map of Czechoslovakia and northern Austria, 1928-1938. Created by PANONIAN [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.
Following the great revivals seen in the cities of Kutna Hora and Kolin (see the story “A Pre-WWII Great Awakening in Europe”), people from all walks of life filled large rented halls in the nearby capital city of Prague, Bohemia, to hear the gospel preached. Many surrendered their hearts to Christ as a result of these meetings.
Next, Stewart was invited to hold meetings in a large rented hall in the city of Brno, Moravia. Members of a Brno church were greatly concerned for the state of their congregation. The church was dying as a result of differences of opinion, hard feelings among the members, and a generation gap. Stewart challenged the believers to trust God for revival, for the salvation of their own children, and for the salvation of hundreds more.
Before the meetings began . . .
Round the clock prayer meetings were organized – each volunteer prayed for an hour.
Believers made sure their hearts were right with each other. They righted wrongs.
And the results . . .
God worked and the church experienced:
Love among the believers
A warm atmosphere
Life among the young people
Many souls won to Jesus Christ
A prodigal son in the church gave his heart to Christ, his behavior completely changed, and he became the leader of the young people, who willingly followed him.
From 1936 to 1939, Stewart held nine campaigns in large halls in Brno for two to three weeks at a time. He was only 26-years-old, preached simple messages, was of plain appearance and dress, but was joyful, earnest, enthusiastic, and spent hours in prayer each day.
In March of 1938, Hitler annexed Bohemia and Moravia and sent thousands of German soldiers and government workers to set up and maintain the new order. Despite the fact that every fifth person in and around Brno was German, the young people who were reached through the revival campaigns . . .
Held gospel services in hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons
Held gospel meetings and Bible studies in the nearby villages where many accepted Christ
Forty years later, Ruth Stewart, the widowed wife of James Stewart, traveled to Czechoslovakia and visited with some of these former young people, who were then in their 50‘s and 60’s. They had survived the war and their faith was strong in spite of having lived under communism for many years. Over and over again the former young people told her, “‘God knew what was coming to us of sorrow and suffering, and He brought revival into our midst to prepare us for standing strong in the faith in those difficult times.’”
Source:
Stewart, Ruth. James Stewart Missionary, A Biography. Revival Literature, 1977.
In the last two months, we learned about the spiritual awakening which spread across Eastern Europe prior to WWII. If you missed those posts and would like to read them, here are the links:
Courtesy of Professor John L. Heineman, Boston College
Today the story moves to . . . Hungary.
Dr. Alexander de Csia, the chief physician for the Hungarian Railway, witnessed the changes taking place in the churches of Czechoslovakia (See the story “A Message of Hope in the Time of Need – Eastern Europe, 1936–1939”), so he invited Evangelist James Stewart to Hungary to hold evangelistic meetings on behalf of the Evangelical Alliance of Hungary. Dr. Csia was burdened to see God work in his country and refused to accept the attitude of many that revival in Hungary was impossible.
Hungary, Spring of 1939
Stewart enlisted Christians to pray “around the clock,” and they each dedicated one hour a day for prayer. The first meetings were held in a small Methodist hall in Budapest, but after two days the services moved to the larger building of the German Baptist Church. After two or three more days, the crowds overflowed this location, and the meetings moved to the big Reformed Church, which boasted seating for 2000 people. Soon the overflow crowd had to stand in the center aisle during the entire service.
Just like he had done in other Eastern European countries, Stewart had scripture choruses and gospel songs translated and printed in booklets so everyone attending the meetings would have a copy. He introduced “Into My Heart,” “Jesus Never Fails,” “Yes, I know,” “Wounded for Me” and other songs. It wasn’t unusual to hear these tunes hummed in shops and whistled by delivery boys riding their bicycles down the street.
Stewart shared the message of John 3:16 and invited those who wanted to give their hearts to Christ to leave their seats immediately and go to the front. Hundreds of people surged forward, making their way through the overflow crowd in the aisles.
More prayer meetings formed in other parts of Budapest, and many Christians attended morning meetings on the topic of God’s plan for living a holy life. They left these meetings “determined to make things right in their own lives.” The revival campaign ended before Christmas but began again in 1938. The organizers rented the biggest concert and dance hall in Budapest, the “Redoubt.” In a few days, the crowds outgrew this location.
And the results . . .
Many Hungarians turned to Christ.
Many Christians confessed the sin in their lives and renewed their relationships with God and with each other.
New converts attended discipleship meetings.
School officials, including those from Roman Catholic schools, invited Stewart to speak to their students.
Students from the Baptist Seminary and Training School in Budapest went home to their villages and spread word about the revival.
Interested folks from all over Hungary extended invitations to hold meetings in their towns and cities.
Campaigns were set up in many locations throughout Hungary.
Andi Ungar, a Christian Jew, interpreted for Stewart at many of the meetings, and the two men spoke as if one person. Anti-Semites criticized Mr. Ungar’s role in the meetings, but Stewart and the other leaders ignored the criticism.
A great outpouring of the Holy Spirit took place in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Debrecen had long been called “The Geneva of Hungary” and “The Calvinist Rome.” Services were held at the Reformed Seminary, which had been established 300 years earlier. In addition to the evening gospel services, meetings carried on day after day for women and girls, for children, for prayer, for youth, and for Bible study. Many people shared about the work God was doing in their hearts.
In the spring of 1938, Stewart held his last campaign in Budapest in “The Tattersall,” a horse riding academy. At the end of each day, “hired laborers quickly cleaned the huge arena, put down fresh shavings, and arranged four thousand chairs which had been rented for the purpose.” The chairs were gathered and stored after the meeting each night.
Members of the Salvation Army and various Baptist groups formed a brass orchestra, which accompanied the revival songs. Several thousand people attended the meetings each night during the two-week campaign. On the final Sunday, over five thousand young people from Budapest and the surrounding towns and villages gathered for a youth rally.
James Stewart left Hungary in 1938, but the revival led by the Hungarian people continued to spread across the country. More souls turned to Christ. More hearts and lives changed. Stewart returned to Hungary for short visits in 1939, 1940, and in 1946 after WWII. He was overjoyed to witness the revival fires still burning, despite the ravages of war.
Buda Castle and Danube River – Budapest. By Costel Slincu.
Source:
Stewart, Ruth. James Stewart Missionary, A Biography. Revival Literature, 1977.
During my summer 2022 trip to Europe, I toured the Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris, which will play a part in one the WWII books I’m currently writing. During the German Occupation, the show went on.
Palais Garnier Opera House (Deposit Photos)
The Palais Garnier was commissioned by Napoleon III but opened in 1875 after his death. It’s located in the 9th Arrondissement and sits at the intersection of several wide boulevards. The architect, Charles Garnier, utilized several different styles to create the exterior of the opera house. When Empress Eugenie asked Garnier what architectural style he was using, he replied that “he’d created a new Napoleon III style.”
Garnier experienced a few setbacks during the building of the opera house. A lake was discovered under the site, and it had to be drained. A cistern was built to collect water, which is still in use today. French firefighters train to swim in the dark in this huge cistern or underground lake below the opera house. Although the ornate exterior was completed in 1869, the Franco-Prussian War brought construction to a halt.
The Grand Staircase (Deposit Photos)
The interior of the opera house is so opulent that it earned the moniker “Palais” from the beginning. The steps of the Grand Staircase are made of white marble, and the railing and its supports (balustrade) are made of red and green marble. The stairway leads to various floors and foyers of the theater.
The Grand Foyer (Deposit Photos)
Garnier designed the Grand Foyer to rival Marie Antoinette’s Palace at Versailles. The foyer is absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking.
A Closer View of the Ceiling of the Grand Foyer. Courtesy of Author isogood via Wikimedia Commons
The auditorium, which seats just under 2000, was designed in the classic Italian opera house style. The horseshoe shape allows patrons to view each other as well as those on stage. An enormous eight-ton bronze and crystal chandelier hangs below a colorful painting, and the stage curtain is painted, providing the illusion of many curtains.
The Auditorium (Deposit Photos)
Several legends about the Palais Garnier inspired The Phantom of the Opera book and later the musical. Some of these legends are based on real events which took place long ago. In 1896 during a performance of the opera Helle, one of several counterweights holding up the chandelier in the auditorium broke off and fell through the ceiling. It killed one person in the audience and injured several others. A fire on the stage of the Paris Opera’s former location killed a ballerina and disfigured her fiance, a pianist. He supposedly went to live underground at the new opera house for the rest of his life. There’s also the rumor that a faceless man lived in the lake.
In the summer of 2022, I was blessed to take a research trip to Europe with fellow author Rebecca Davie. We visited many cities and areas where my works in progress (books) are set.
Deposit Photos
One of the places we visited was the Hôtel des Invalides (English: “house of invalids”) or Les Invalides in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris. French monarch Louis IV built the extensive complex to provide a hospital and retirement home for French veterans. Although these services are still provided on a small scale today, the buildings are primarily utilized for several museums and memorials dedicated to the military history of France. Two WWII museums are housed at the Invalides, so we spent the better part of a day viewing the exhibits but also couldn’t resist visiting Napoleon’s tomb.
Dôme des Invalides
Napoleon’s ashes reside in an elaborate tomb made of red quartzite, resting on a green granite base.
Napoleon’s TombThe Dome above Napoleon’s Tomb
The Museum of the Order of the Liberation
The Musee de l’Ordre de la Liberation contains three sections – the Internal Resistance, Free France, and Deportation. Dozens of artifacts, including uniforms, stories of Resistance members, British transceivers, and many other items used in the fight for liberation are on display.
After Nazi Germany crushed France, the French government of Marshal Petain signed the armistice, allowing part of the country to be occupied. General Charles de Gaulle, who had led a command during the Battle of France, fled to Britain and, over the BBC radio in London, called for France to continue the fight. Some Frenchmen who hadn’t been evacuated by the British or captured by the Germans took up the call and found a way to escape to England to join de Gaulle. Others stayed in France and participated in the Resistance. French women volunteered as well.
In July 1940, de Gaulle established Free France, a military and political organization supported by Winston Churchill. “Between 1940 and 1945, the Free French forces fighting on the land, on the sea, and in the air distinguished themselves on several continents by maintaining France’s presence in the world war.” (“Discover the Permanent Collections of the Museum of the Order of the Liberation” pamphlet distributed by the museum)
The Legion of Merit Medal
President Harry S. Truman awarded the Legion of Merit, one of the highest distinctions of the American armed forces, to General de Gaulle on August 30, 1945 for leading Free France in the fight alongside the Allies.
The Deportation section of the museum details the Nazi regime’s concentration camp system across Occupied Europe. “Victims were mainly resistance fighters, politicians, people who refused to work, and people rounded up in reprisals.” Seventy-four thousand Jews were transported from France to extermination camps with most assassinated upon arrival. The Nazis also deported 70,000 people from France for slave labor, many of whom died of hunger and exhaustion.
The Army Museum
The Musée de l’Armée contains many artifacts from France’s wars. The section on WWII contains many interesting items.
WWII BombsAmerican Light Artillery PieceGerman Underwater MineA U.S. Army Soldier’s KitDies and Stamps for Producing Forged Papers and LeafletsA Fake Identity CardInternment Camps in France (Expand bottom left key for descriptions)The German Cryptographic Machine – The “Enigma” – used to transmit military information by code, which was cracked by the Allies
Sources:
Information on display and in print at Les Invalides
Christmas 1944 found the United States Army fighting its largest and costliest battle in U.S. history – the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler’s last major offensive in WWII was motivated by the hope that his troops could drive toward the coast and seize the port of Antwerp, Belgium, effectively cutting off British supply lines to their army in the north and from the Americans to the south. The Germans would then crush the isolated British troops. When this was accomplished, Hitler thought the Allies would sue for peace and leave the Nazis in power in Germany. This would leave the Germans to concentrate on defeating the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front.
Under cover of night and radio silence, the Germans amassed an attack force of thirty divisions (more than 200,000 troops) and over 2000 tanks. On December 16th before dawn, they launched their surprise attack through the Ardennes Forest, the least expected place and the lightest defended area (85 miles of dense woods). This move both surprised and created alarm and confusion among the Allies. For the first three days, the Allied air forces were grounded due to mist and rain.
American soldiers captured by German troops in the Ardennes between December 16 and 22, 1944. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.
The Germans initially bypassed the city of Bastogne, which was defended by the 101st Airborne but later besieged the city. The German commander demanded the Americans surrender, but the American commander responded “Nuts!” On December 26th, Patton’s 3rd Army relieved Bastogne.
A dugout built under snow in the Bastogne area. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.
On Christmas day, the 2nd U.S. Armored division stopped the German tanks before they reached the Meuse River. British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had brought reserve troops south quickly and shored up the defense at the Meuse River crossings, which the Germans never reached. The “Allied lines bulged but did not break.”
On January 3rd, the U.S. 1st Army began their counteroffensive. Realizing the Allies were attempting to surround and pinch them off, the Germans retreated. The battle lasted for six weeks (12/16/44 – 1/25/45), until the Allies pushed the Germans back across the border.
The battle was costly on both sides. Germany lost 120,000 men. Out of the 600,000 U.S. troops who participated, more than 23,000 were taken prisoner and 19,246 died. There were well over 80,000 casualties. This battle accounted for approximately 10% of all combat casualties for the U.S. in World War II.
Germans captured during the allied counterattack. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill stated, “This is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.”
During WWII, thousands of citizens in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Basque region of Spain hid Allied soldiers and delivered them along various escape routes to British consulate officials stationed in Spain. From there, the men flew back to England so they could continue their fight to free Europe from the grip of the Nazis.
The Comet Line was established by Belgians in August of 1941 and continued to operate until the end of 1944. The line ran from Brussels, through France, and across the Pyrenees to northern Spain (red line on map below). How did this line start, and who was behind its formation?
After Belgium surrendered to the Germans in 1940, Mademoiselle Andrée De Jongh, known as Dédée, cared for wounded British soldiers in Brussels. By 1941, she decided to find a way to help the many soldiers and airmen hidden in Brussels to escape back to England. Many were survivors from Dunkirk who hadn’t been caught by the Germans.
Dédée and her father, known as “Paul,” formed an escape line from Brussels to St. Jean de Luz in southwest France. In August of 1941, Dédée escorted a Scottish soldier and two Belgians who wanted to fight for the Allies to the British Consulate in Bilbao, Spain. At first the Consul didn’t believe that the twenty-five-year-old young woman had crossed the Pyrenees on foot, but she convinced him otherwise. She offered to bring more soldiers but asked for financial support to feed and house them on the long trip from Brussels to Bilbao and to pay the Basque guides who would lead them over the mountains. The Consul petitioned the British Foreign Office to support Dédée’s plan, and the Comet Line was born.
Courtesy of Sherri Greene Otis
Meanwhile, back in Brussels, Dédée’s father Paul began plans for collecting the Allied servicemen and young Belgians scattered across the country. He sought aid from likeminded friends – some gave money and others offered to house soldiers.
Early on, one of Dédée’s guides and the servicemen he was escorting were arrested at the train station in Lille, France, and the Germans learned of Dédée’s participation in the escape line. The Gestapo visited the De Jongh home and questioned Dédée’s family at length on her whereabouts. After the Gestapo left without answers, Paul sent word through a trusted messenger that Dédée must not return to Belgium but run the line from France. He took over the Brussels operation.
The De Jongh Home in Schaerbeek, Brussels Courtesy of Lumixbx via Wikipedia
Paul escorted the servicemen to the Brussels train station and handed them off to Charlie and Elvire Morelle, a brother-sister team, who guided them into France. Dédée met up with them just across the border and traveled with the men on a series of trains to Paris and then immediately on the overnight express to Bayonne in the far south of France.
The southern end of the Comet Line was run by the De Greef family. They had fled Belgium when the Germans invaded and then settled in an empty villa in the village of Anglet above the bay of St Jean de Luz, close to the Spanish border. Once recruited, the whole family worked tirelessly for the line. Elvire De Greef, known as “Tante Go,” established a black-market enterprise, which provided good food for the escaping soldiers and their guides before making the arduous crossing of the Pyrenees. Tante Go bribed the Germans with her goods, and her black-market activities provided a good cover for her resistance efforts with the Comet Line.
Tante Go’s husband, L’Oncle, obtained a job as interpreter at the German headquarters in Anglet. This gave him “access to special passes and certificats de domicil required for visitors to the forbidden zone established by the Germans along the Atlantic coast.” L’Oncle was also responsible for billeting German troops in the area, which gave him access to other headquarters of German units. He stole official stamps and blank identity documents and forms in small enough quantities that the theft went unnoticed. These items were then sent to the branches of the escape line in Brussels and Paris.
Tante Go recruited helpers in Bayonne, Anglet, Biarritz, and St Jean de Luz and located those who were willing to provide safe houses for the parties before their crossing into Spain. She and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Janine, regularly bicycled to these locations. Tante Go also hired Basque guides to take the groups over the Pyrenees.
In the fall of 1941, Dédée escorted a group of Allied airmen (two Polish and one Canadian) on the express train from Paris to Bayonne, near the Spanish border. At the train station, they met up with Tant Go’s daughter, Janine, in the refreshment room. When it was time to leave, the airmen went one at a time to the lavatory where there was a door to the outside, allowing them to avoid passing the ticket barrier. Someone in the escape network had made a duplicate key – this door was always locked. Dédée left the station through the main exit.
Janine de Greef
Janine and the airmen bicycled to St. Jean de Luz, left their bicycles at the station, and walked up the stony road to a farm at Urrugne. During their walk, “a young Basque peasant on a bicycle came down the hill towards them. As he passed, he shook his head significantly and pointed up the road.” Janine led the airmen to a hiding place, and then she climbed a wooded slope and observed the road to Urrugne. There she spotted German troops on bicycles at a barricade. Janine led the Allied airmen on a long detour, and they safely arrived at the farm in Urrugne, where their Basque guide, Florentino, awaited them. Florentino and Dédée led the party across the mountains and into the hands of British diplomats in Spain. This was Dédée’s third group of servicemen who made the eight-hour hike to freedom.
Florentino, Basque Guide for Comet
The Basque guide, Florentino, was a tall man, with a broad back and strong muscles. He wore espadrilles, rope-soled shoes necessary for navigating the Pyrenees safely. He provided these shoes for the airmen. Florentino was most at home in the mountains and knew the paths well. Darkness and fog didn’t slow him down. He hated fascism, as did many of the Basques, and he was happy to work for Dédée and Tante Go. He managed to evade the police on both sides of the frontier (France and Spain) who suspected him of smuggling and working for the Allies. In reality, Florentino delivered documents and photos to the British, making constant trips across the mountains from 1941 until France was liberated in the fall of 1944.
Dédée and her father, Paul
Meanwhile, back in Brussels, the Secret Police of the Luftwaffe paid a visit to the De Jongh home, seeking Dédée’s whereabouts. They questioned her mother for an hour. Her father, Paul, was in Valenciennes and escaped the interrogation. Upon learning from a neighbor that she had been questioned about Paul, he moved his headquarters to another location. Six weeks later his wife and daughter, Suzanne, were arrested in their home but were released the same day. With a price on his head of a million Belgian francs, Paul’s friends convinced him to flee to Paris, and he left Belgium forever on April 30. Just six days later, the two men who had taken charge of the Brussels operation were arrested.
In early May of 1942 after Paul De Jongh had fled to France, and the two men who had taken charge of the Brussels end of the Comet Line were arrested and imprisoned, Paul’s daughter and Dédée De Jongh’s sister, Suzanne, worked with Baron Jean Greindl Laan, codenamed “Nemo,” to continue operations. Paul stayed in Paris, and Dédée continued her dangerous trips escorting airmen to the south of France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and into the hands of British consular officials.
Dédée De Jongh, Founder of the Comet Line Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum
A few months earlier, Nemo had become director of a canteen run by the Swedish Red Cross in Brussels. He ran the Comet Line from this location. Madame Scherlinck, a Swedish lady, was the canteen’s patron, and through this agency food and clothes were provided for the poor and ailing children of the city. Nemo supplied bags of rice and flour from the Swedish Red Cross to the families sheltering the airmen.
Peggy van Lier helped with feeding the children at the canteen and became Nemo’s assistant in the Comet Line. The canteen became a cover for several young people who helped in the secret work. They were adventurous and eager to participate in facilitating the escape of Allied airmen.
In an attempt to penetrate the rescue network, the Germans planted young English-speaking men into the countryside who posed as downed Allied airmen. This led to arrests and imprisonment. To counter the problem, eighteen-year-old Elsie Maréchal, who spoke perfect English, started testing the stories of the supposed airmen before taking them to homes in Brussels. The Belgian guides brought the men to St. Joseph’s Church where Elsie asked them about their units, the planes they flew, and where they were stationed. While they waited inside the church, Elsie would report to Nemo at the canteen for further instructions.
St. Joseph’s Church in Brussels Public Domain
One wintry day in November of 1942, two German imposters were brought to St. Joseph’s Church. Normal protocols weren’t followed, and Elsie didn’t know to meet the airmen. The Belgian guide from Namur took them to a house of a friend where he was given the Maréchal’s address by people unaware of their underground activities. The two Germans who claimed to be Americans didn’t act like Americans. Elsie noticed several red flags but thought she was overreacting. After fixing a meal for the men, Elsie went to the canteen. Nemo sent her back home with instructions not to allow the men to leave the house. In the meantime, the young men asked Elsie’s mother if they could go for a walk. They left the house and returned shortly after with guns pointed at Mrs. Maréchal.
One by one the members of the Maréchal family returned home and were arrested along with others who showed up at their house, including Elvire Morelle who arrived from Paris early the next morning. The enemy agents reported on all the guides, shelterers, and helpers they had encountered in the Belgian line “from the Ardennes and Namur to the very center of the organization in Brussels.”
In two days, nearly 100 people were arrested, including innocent relatives thrown into prison as hostages. Many of these never survived to return home. In the previous six months, the Comet Line had rescued sixty airmen, but their operation wasn’t over. New leaders reorganized the line and recruited more Belgians to carry on the work.
After Peggy van Lier successfully convinced the Nazis that she was not a participant in the operation, she was released and fled to England with a group of Allied servicemen on the Comet Line. Mr. Maréchal was executed by the Germans. Mrs. Maréchal, her daughter Elsie, and Elvire Morelle were sent to concentration camps in Germany, but they each survived and returned home after the war ended.
Dédée De Jongh and her father, Paul, continued to work out of their apartment in Paris. She escorted the Allied airmen south across the border to Spain, and Paul stamped forged identity cards. Fearing that her father would be captured by the Nazis, Dédée convinced him to leave France. On January 13, 1943, the two of them along with Franco and three pilots left Paris on the night train and traveled to Bayonne.
Franco returned to Paris to prepare another group to escape. Tante Go, who organized the southern section of the Comet Line, led Dédée and the airmen on bicycles to St. Jean de Luz through the pelting rain. Then they navigated the steep slopes to Urrugne on a road that had become a river of mud. Upon arrival at Francia’s farmhouse, they were treated to hot milk and soup.
Francia’s House in Urrugne
Florentino, the Basque guide who would lead them over the mountains, decided it was too dangerous to make the treck in the tempestuous weather, and the group would have to wait until the next evening to leave. He returned to the town of Ciboure. The storm passed through and was gone by the next morning. The airmen enjoyed Francia’s hospitality and played with her children while they waited.
Soon the sound of an engine stopping in front of the house caught everyone’s attention. The shadow of a gendarme in uniform passed across the window of the farmhouse, and the door burst open. Ten gendarmes invaded the house and searched everywhere, lifting floorboards and casting furniture and pictures aside. After an hour, the gendarmes marched the group to police headquarters in St. Jean de Luz. It is believed that a disgruntled former guide for the Comet Line had betrayed the group.
Dédée was transferred to the Villa Chagrin prison in Bayonne the next day. The Gestapo interrogated her, and later moved her to the Maison Blance prison in Biarritz and then to Paris by train under armed guard. Her father Paul returned to Paris under a fictitious name. The safe houses in Paris were overflowing, and he worked to move some of them out through another organization.
After Dédée De Jongh’s arrest in January of 1943, her assistant, Franco, took over her responsibilities. Dédée’s father, Paul, with a price on his head, refused to leave France as long as Dédée remained imprisoned. He resumed escorting airmen from train station to train station in Paris. In May, Paul hired Jean Masson, a Belgian who worked with the resistance in northern France, to be a guide for the Brussels to Paris route. Masson was described as a short man with untidy blond hair and fierce eyes. He was in his early twenties.
Masson brought his first group of seven airmen down from Brussels to the Gare Montparnesse (train station) in Paris to the delight of Paul and others working with him in Paris. Masson was eager to please, polite, and treated Paul with deference. In early June, Masson warned Paul to be prepared for a large party arriving from Brussels on June 7th. He stated that all Paul’s helpers would be needed.
Gare Montparnesse – Station for Trains to and from Belgium
On June 7th, two women workers were sent north to Lille to meet Masson and the pilots and help escort them to Paris. When they arrived, Masson met them and handed over an airman to each of the women. One couple went to a little café across the street while they waited for the train back to Paris. They were promptly surrounded by the Gestapo and arrested. The other couple was arrested after the train left the station.
Late that same day, Paul and two other team members arrived at the Gare du Nord and were waiting on the platform as Masson had requested. Masson arrived with a number of Allied airmen and greeted Paul’s group, shaking hands and smiling. Soon the group was surrounded by at least twelve gendarmes (police). They were all handcuffed and led to the headquarters of the railway police, including Jean Masson.
Gare du Nord Train Station at the End of the Street
The three people in Paul’s group were taken to the Gestapo office on the Rue des Saussaies. Jean Masson was not with them, but he soon showed up, smiling and free of handcuffs. He spat on the floor in front of them, and called them fools. Paul and his helpers were shocked to discover Masson was a traitor.
Franco returned to Paris from Spain eight days later and went to Paul’s apartment on the Rue Vaneau. He discovered rotting fruit and moldy vegetables. He gathered up all the false papers and money he could find and loaded them into a suitcase and hurried away. Franco and another operative checked the apartments of other helpers and discovered their doors had been sealed by the Gestapo. Realizing Paul and his helpers had been arrested, Franco and his helper grieved the loss of their friends. This didn’t stop Franco, however. He was more determined than ever to keep the Comet Line running.
After Franco returned to Paris and discovered that Paul De Jongh and other Comet agents had been arrested by the Gestapo, Franco worked even harder to facilitate the transfer of airmen out of France. He travelled back and forth from Paris to Bilbao, Spain, with a different group of airmen every two weeks during the summer of 1943. Allied bombings in Europe were increasing and more airmen than ever needed assistance.
It was no longer safe for the airmen to ride the train straight from Paris to Bayonne in the far south of France. Gendarmes and plain-clothes Gestapo agents were watching for escapees taking the routes to the coast from the Gare d’Austerlitz train station in Paris. The airmen now rode a fourteen-hour night train to Bordeaux, then a local train to Dax, near Bayonne.
Franco, Tante Go, and Janine took turns escorting the airmen on bicycles from Dax to Anglet. On one trip, an American airmen didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, so Franco had to teach him before they could make the twenty-six-kilometer trip to Bayonne. After falling on the pavement in town a few times, on the outskirts of town, the poor soldier collided with two German officers riding their bicycles toward him. Franco pretended the American was drunk and hollered at him in front of the Germans, saying he deserved to be shot. This satisfied the officers, and they all went on their way.
Comet Line Route from Southern France to Spain
Franco was so exhausted by the fall of 1943 that the British Consul at Bilbao sent him by car to Gibraltar to meet with British intelligence. There in the shadow of the Rock, Franco found new courage. Observing the great fortress and its orderly calm gave him confidence that for the first time that Hitler’s forces could not win this war. Franco was informed the British were sending someone to replace Paul in Paris. His code name was Jerome.
After three days, Franco left Gibraltar refreshed and within the week had crossed the Pyrenees and returned to Paris. Jerome arrived and set up his headquarters in a flat on the Rue de Longchamps, near the Trocadéro, in Paris.
In December, Franco led a group of American pilots and a Belgian Comet leader to Spain. Their Basque guide, Florentino, was down with the flu and unable to accompany them. Unfortunately, the Bidassoa River on the border between France and Spain was high because of heavy rain the day before. An American pilot and the Belgian leader were carried away in the torrent and drowned.
By January 1944, the Gestapo was closing in on the Comet Line in Brussels and in Paris. The traitor Jean Masson who had led the Gestapo to arrest so many Comet operatives the previous year had resurfaced. Jerome returned to Paris from a visit to Brussels on the evening of January 17th. His intention was to prepare to return to England. The Gestapo was waiting for him at his flat. He was taken to headquarters and tortured. Franco returned to the same apartment the next day and was also arrested. Franco would survive the war.
Jacques Desoubrie Alias Jean Masson. Public Domain
Michou Dumont, codename “Lily,” was away from home in nursing school when her sister Andree was arrested in Brussels for her work in the Comet Line. Like her sister, Lily was also a friend of Dedee, the founder of the escape network. Lily admired Dedee and was determined to carry on the work in Brussels after so many others had been arrested and it was no longer safe for Dedee to remain in Belgium. Lily began working on the Comet Line in 1942.
Micheline Dumont “Lily” Courtesy of Wikipedia. Fair Use.
Lily was only five feet tall and appeared no older than fifteen, although she was in her early twenties. She often dressed as a school girl to hide her activities as she ran around Brussels. She worked with the Comet Line and continued with her nursing duties. One day the Gestapo came to the clinic where she worked, looking for her. The receptionist called her floor and warned her to escape before the agents found her.
Lily fled by way of the outer fire escape and a crossover leading to the building next door. She called to an acquaintance with an office near the outside door to let her in. He complied, and she was able to run down the stairs and out the building without being detected. From then on, Lily stayed on the move. She didn’t remain in one place for long and spent the night in various homes of Belgians she knew.
Lily’s work with the Comet Line kept her very busy. She coordinated transportation for the Allied airmen brought from the country to Brussels and found temporary homes for them. She distributed ration coupons, supplies, and food to the many safe houses in Brussels. She checked on the welfare of the airmen hiding in the city and worked with photographers to produce identity cards. Lily also recruited new individuals and families who were willing to provide safe houses for the airmen, especially after other were arrested for housing the soldiers.
Lily’s shrewdness kept her one step ahead of the Nazis, but in the winter of 1944, one year after Dedee’s arrest, Lily fled Brussels because the Gestapo was getting too close to her. Two of her close associates had been arrested, and instinct told her that the time to leave her native land had arrived. Before she left, Lily recruited trained agents to take her place escorting fliers and securing safe houses.
Lily traveled to Paris and then to Bayonne in the far south of France. She rendezvoused with Jean-Francois (Franco) who’d just crossed back into France after delivering airmen to the British diplomats in Spain. Lily explained the deteriorating situation in Brussels, and Jean-Francois immediately took the express train to Brussels to check out the situation. He planned to return south and coordinate a new operation for Lily. Eight days later, Jean-Francois was arrested and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in France, Belgium, and Germany.
Meanwhile, Lily waited in Anglet at Auntie Go’s house. Auntie Go, who was from Belgium and knew Lily previously, had been running the southern end of the Comet Line from the beginning.
Views along the Comet Escape Line in the Pyrenees. Courtesy of Pyrenean Experience.
After fleeing Belgium when the Gestapo was closing in on her, Lily went to Bayonne in the far south of France and met with Jean-Francois, the leader of the Comet Line. She warned him of serious problems with the network in Brussels. Jean-Francois, codename “Franco,” travelled to Brussels to check out the situation and upon his return to Paris walked into a trap set by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, Lily awaited word from Franco at Auntie Go’s house in Anglet, near Bayonne.
Several weeks later, Michael Creswell, the British attaché in Spain who took charge of the rescued airmen after they crossed the border, called Auntie Go, Lily, and Max, another operative, down to Madrid for a planning session. Lily was assigned to work with Max in Paris and also to work the line from Dax (north of Bayonne) to the Spanish border. Max would continue bringing airmen by train from Paris to Dax.
After crossing the Pyrenees for additional meetings with Creswell in February, Lily returned to Paris. She was to coordinate escapes in Paris along with Martine Noel, a dentist. Lily stored her belongings in Martine’s apartment. Lily wanted to speed up the escape procedures, so Martine set up a strategy session at a local restaurant for the new team of helpers.
The fellow who sat directly in front of Lily seemed vaguely familiar. “He was short and sandy-haired, with close-set eyes, strange and intense. He wore a garish purple coat along with a polka-dot tie. Abbé Beauvais, a priest who gave sanctuary to pilots when they came to Paris,” introduced the young Belgian as Pierre Boulain. Lily didn’t recognize the name, but she didn’t like the man. His polka-dot tie bothered her – it could be a signal.
The next day Lily left Paris with two British agents in danger of capture. They crossed the Pyrenees safely, and Lily returned to Auntie Go’s in Anglet. Because of the increased Allied bombings, main rail lines were damaged, and Lily arrived in Paris many days later than expected. When she called Martine’s apartment, a strange woman answered the phone and called Lily by her real name, Micheline, which Lily had not used in almost a year. No one in Paris knew her real name, or so she thought. The woman encouraged her to come by Martine’s apartment, but Lily knew better.
Lily headed to Martine’s dental office in the suburbs, but the concierge stopped her at the door. After informing her that Martine had been arrested, the concierge sent Lily to one of Martine’s friends. She learned that everyone at the restaurant had been arrested and sent to Fresnes Prison just outside the city of Paris. Fearing her own capture, Lily caught a train for Bayonne. She considered her options and decided to find out who was betraying the Comet Line to the enemy.
Lily returned to Paris and went straight to Fresnes Prison. At the prison gate, she asked to visit Martine and was promptly arrested. Although she was confined to a room by herself, Lily figured out the communication system used by the prisoners. They communicated at the sides of the walls and around corners using taps, echoes, and shouts. The jail was built in a classic hub-and-spoke design,” so the inmates tracked down Martine and brought her close to Lily’s room. Martine revealed that the traitor was Pierre Boulain. Lily finally remembered where she had seen the man before – in Brussels when he went by the name of Jean Masson.
Masson had obtained false identification papers for airmen traveling from Brussels to Paris and specialized in border crossings. He had attended a meeting at a safe house in Brussels two days before the Comet leader Monsieur de Jongh was arrested in Paris. “Up to now, Masson had protected his identity because all those who knew him were always arrested. Lily was the only one capable of breaking his cover.”
After spending two nights at the Fresnes prison, Lily was led to the prison warden. The birthdate on her French identification card indicated she was only seventeen, and he couldn’t accept the imprisonment of someone so young. The warden ordered Lily out of the prison immediately and told her the Gestapo was on the way. Lily left through the front gate. Shortly after, a German staff car passed her on the road, but the Gestapo officers inside didn’t even notice her.
After Lily’s release from her two-day stay in Fresnes Prison, she met with two MI-9 operatives in Paris who had recently returned from England. They had been assigned the task of setting up camps for downed Allied Airmen in Belgium and France. The airmen would gather and wait in these camps until they were liberated.
Lily informed Thomas and Daniel, the MI-9 operatives, that Pierre Boulain was Jean Masson, the traitor causing the arrest of Comet Line agents and helpers. Lily had learned this from Martine, her friend who was imprisoned at Fresnes. Thomas and Daniel were incredulous. Not only had Masson come to them highly recommended, but he had provided expert assistance to the Comet Line, and they’d hired him to help establish the escape camp in Belgium.
Thomas and Daniel wanted more proof of Masson’s treachery than just the word of Martine. Daniel had already arranged to meet with Masson at an outdoor cafe near the Place de la Concorde the next day, so Lily arrived early and sat a ways off, reading a magazine. Daniel reached the cafe, and then Masson showed up with a woman. Lily knew without a doubt that Pierre Boulain was Jean Masson. After he and the woman left, Daniel found Lily, and she confirmed her previous accusation regarding the traitor. Daniel still wasn’t convinced and told Lily to follow Masson and see what happened. She agreed.
Lily crossed the Seine River and walked in the direction she had seen Masson and the woman go. Lily spotted them by the Chamber of Deputies, a place where Masson shouldn’t be. He looked up and their eyes made contact, and it was obvious in his expression that he’d been caught. Lily turned back the way she had come, and Masson followed. They both increased their pace, but when Lily reached an entrance to the Metro station, she raced down the circular stairway. A train came into the station, and she was able to gain entrance without being spotted.
Part of the Comet Line Path across the Pyrenees
The next day Lily returned to Auntie Go in Bayonne and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain on May 11th. Personnel at the British consulate drove her to Madrid to meet with Creswell, and he convinced her to leave for England. “MI9 gave her a commission as an officer in the British Army. They told her she was needed in London to help organize for intelligence operations once the invasion started.” Creswell did not want her to return to France and be arrested by the Nazis.
Lily stayed in England, working for MI9, until after the Germans left France. She met a young Belgian who also worked for British intelligence, and they married while they were both still in uniform. She returned to Paris to help locate MI9 agents and missing airmen in the fall of 1944.
Masson met with Daniel one more time after his confrontation with Lily. Gestapo agents and French Resistance members surrounded them, although they remained in the background. Masson was hoping to get the money promised him to set up the Belgian camp for Allied Airmen, which he would have pocketed and then turned the airmen in. Daniel reported Masson to the French Resistance who sent an agent to kill him. A man was killed, but it wasn’t Masson.
Dedee, Lily, and Auntie Go in England Several Years After the War
Nadine, Lily’s sister who was imprisoned in 1942, survived her time in Ravensbruck and returned home to Belgium after the war.
Jean-Francois was convicted by a German military tribunal and sent to concentration camps in Germany in 1944. He survived the war.
Dedee was held in prisons in France and Belgium and then sent to Ravensbruck. She survived the war and later became a missionary to Africa.
Jean Masson continued to capture Allied Airmen and turn them over to the Gestapo even after D-Day and the Germans were retreating from France. The Germans sent many airmen to POW camps, but some were sent to concentration camps and died there. Masson made a fatal mistake when he resurfaced and volunteered to work as an agent for the Allies. His photo was obtained, and Lily identified him. He was captured, convicted, and sentenced to death. His last words before he was executed were, “Heil Hitler.”
The Comet Line was responsible for leading over one thousand Allied Airmen safely out of Belgium and France and into the hands of the British in Spain. Hundreds of members of the organization were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis, but those who survived the war testified that they had aided the Allies because . . . it was the right thing to do.
Resources:
The Freedom Line by Peter Eisner. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.
Little Cyclone by Airey Neave. Biteback Publishing Ltd, 2013, 2016.
During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Did anyone help free prisoners on their way to the death camps during WWII? If so, did any of them successfully escape and survive the war? The answer is “Yes!”
In April 1944, Nazi soldiers herded eleven-year-old Simon Gronowski and his mother onto a waiting train, along with more than sixteen hundred other Jewish prisoners living in Belgium. The Gronowskis crowded into a wooden boxcar with one single, small, wired-over window and no food, water, or seats. The train’s destination was the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland, more than seven hundred miles away.
Around 9:30 PM and less than ten minutes after the train left the station, the transport slowed and then stopped. Three members of the Belgian Resistance—Robert Maistriau, Jean Franklemon, and Youra Livchitz—had placed a lantern covered with red paper on the railroad tracks in an effort to stop the train. They wanted to help as many prisoners escape as possible, and their ploy worked. The engineer halted the train for the “danger” signal.
Armed with only a small-caliber handgun, Livchitz attempted to bluff the Nazi guards into thinking a large force was attacking the train. He fired his revolver repeatedly at the rear of the train where the guards were stationed.
Maistriau and Franklemon used wire cutters to open the boxcar doors and yelled at the prisoners to get out. Many jumped off and tried to run away, but the guards on top of the train fired at them. After a few minutes, the train moved forward, but the engineer deliberately accelerated at a slow pace so more prisoners could escape.
After opening as many boxcars as possible, Maistriau, Franklemon, and Livchitz retrieved their bicycles from the bushes and quickly rode away. They had not reached the Gronowskis’s boxcar, but men inside pried open the door. The train had started forward, but some inside jumped out anyway.
Items used during the attack, now in the collection of the Kazerne Dossin Museum in Belgium. Courtesy of Author Jessica Dommicent and Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Simon’s mother gave him money to hide in his sock then led him to the door. She held him by the shoulders outside the car but was reluctant to let go when the train’s speed increased. After the engineer slowed down, the boy’s mother finally released him, and Simon landed on the ground safely. He was the last person to escape his car.
The German guards shot other jumpers, but when Simon spotted the guards heading his way, he rolled down a small slope and ran for the trees. He didn’t stop until he was deep in the woods. Because Simon was a scout and had camped in the Belgian forests, he was quite comfortable in his new surroundings.
The eleven-year-old walked through the night and reached the edge of the woods at daybreak. He stopped at a small house and told the woman who answered that he had lost his way in the woods while playing with friends and needed help getting home to Brussels. The woman took him to the home of a policeman who was also a secret member of the Belgian Resistance.
The policeman was aware of the train ambush and assumed Simon had escaped. The officer’s wife washed and mended Simon’s clothing, fed him breakfast, and gave him a bath. The officer took the boy to a remote train depot and paid for his return to the city. Simon made it safely to Brussels, and, miraculously, no one requested his identification papers along the way.
Simon returned to his former neighborhood where a close family friend, Madame Rouffart, housed and cared for him. She arranged a reunion for Simon with his father, who was in hiding. Fearing they would be captured if they stayed together, Madame Rouffart sent Simon to another safe house where he survived until the Allies liberated Belgium. Sadly, Simon’s mother was sent to the gas chambers as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz, and Simon’s older sister later met the same fate. Simon’s father died of a heart attack shortly after the liberation.
Prisoners Arriving at Auschwitz. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.
Simon’s train achieved notoriety as the “Twentieth Convoy.” It was the only Nazi train carrying deportees to a death camp that was ambushed by a Resistance group during the Holocaust. Two of the three Resistance members who freed the escapees survived the war. More than two hundred and thirty Jewish prisoners escaped, and more than a hundred were not recaptured. Simon grew up in the home of his aunt and uncle and became an accomplished Belgian attorney, father, and grandfather.
Source: My Brother’s Keeper by Rod Gragg. Center Street, 2016.
Poland became a killing ground for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens during WWII, but the Germans specifically targeted Poland’s three million Jews. Those who weren’t immediately shot during the German invasion in 1939 were relocated from the countryside and placed in dozens of ghettos in cities all over Poland. Gradually the SS death squads emptied the ghettos by deporting the residents to death camps or by shooting them on the spot.
On July 26, 1942, an unusual confrontation took place between German Wehrmacht officers and SS troops in the city of Przemysl in southern Poland.
General Curt L. Freiherr von Gienanth, district commander of the Wehrmacht (regular German troops) had just appointed Major Max Liedtke to command the German garrison in Przemysl. Liedtke, a WWI veteran and son of a Lutheran pastor, was opposed to the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews.
In civilian life, Liedtke had lost his post as editor-in-chief of a daily German newspaper and was blacklisted because of his stand against the Nazis. In spite of this, in 1939, Liedtke was recalled to serve as a major in the Wehrmacht. He’d most recently served in Greece.
At Przemysl, Major Liedtke promoted the humane treatment of Jews. General von Gienanth supported Liedtke’s position and put four thousand Jews from Przemysl to work in local armament factories, protecting them and their families from the SS.
Liedtke’s adjutant, Oberleutnant Albert Battel, also despised the Nazi persecution of Jews. Battel was a middle-aged attorney and veteran of WWI who’d been reprimanded by the Nazis for befriending Jews and for treating the Jewish leaders of the Przemysl ghetto with respect. On July 26, 1942, Battel informed Liedtke that a large death squad of SS troops was approaching the bridge over the San River for the purpose of rounding up Jews.
Liedtke and Battel devised a plan to delay the SS long enough to rescue the Jewish workers and their families and to notify General von Gienanth of the situation. Liedtke hoped the general would agree with their plans not to cooperate with the SS death squads. Under Liedtke’s orders, Battel sent Wehrmacht troops to the bridge, erected barricades, mounted heavy machine guns, and put a tough army sergeant major in command.
Truckloads of SS troops arrived at the bridge and halted. Their commanding officer was told that no traffic would be admitted because the city was under a military emergency. The commander protested and ordered that the barricade be removed, but the sergeant major stood firm. He informed the SS officer that he would order his troops to fire on anyone attempting to break through the roadblock, so the SS left.
Major Liedtke ordered Battel to lead Wehrmacht troops into the Jewish ghetto, load the Jewish workers and their families onto trucks, and bring them to the Wehrmacht garrison for protection. Battel succeeded in moving more than one hundred families before new orders arrived from headquarters. General von Gienanth had argued with the high command that the Jews were needed for war labor, but Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler overruled him.
Himmler’s response was ominous. “‘I have ordered that ruthless steps be taken against all those who think that they can use the interest of war industry to cloak their real intentions to protect the Jews.’”
SS troops arrived at the Przemysl Ghetto the next day and deported more than fourteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children to death camps. Eventually the Jews at the Wehrmacht garrison were shipped to death camps as well.
The Nazis forced General von Gienanth to retire. They discharged Oberleutnant Albert Battel from the Wehrmacht and drafted him into the German homeguard, the Volkssturm. They sent Major Liedtke to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. He was captured by the Soviets in 1944, declared a war criminal, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in a Soviet labor camp. The stand taken by these officers is the only known time that German regular army troops stood up to SS troops to protect the Jews.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Early on the morning of April 9, 1940, Germany attacked Denmark. The invasion was executed so swiftly that the Danish military surrendered after only four hours. Many Danish citizens were furious that their government gave up without a fight. Because Hitler wanted to make a good impression on the many foreign correspondents in Denmark at the time, and he wanted the country to be “a model of Nazi occupation rule,” he allowed the people more freedom than in other occupied countries. The elected government continued functioning, but under Nazi supervision, and the Nazis didn’t persecute the Jews.
The boat of Gilbert Lassen, a fisherman from Gilleleje, Denmark, used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Courtesy of Yadvashem.
The Danish Resistance slowly strengthened over the next three years, and in 1943, after the Allies had put the Germans on the defensive on several fronts, the Danish Resistance stepped up their activities and sabotaged the German war industry in Denmark. The German occupation troops were already concerned about an Allied invasion through Denmark, so Hitler placed the country under a dictatorship. He also ordered occupation commanders to arrest the 7,800 Danish Jews and send them to concentration camps.
Georg F. Duckwitz, a German diplomat serving in Denmark, privately warned the Danish government of Hitler’s orders. Duckwitz went to Germany and tried to get the orders reversed. When he didn’t succeed, he traveled to Sweden and asked the Swedish government if they would grant asylum to the 7,800 Danish Jews. Sweden agreed and Duckwitz returned to Denmark. Hitler was shocked when the Danish government leaders and citizens rose up together and refused to hand over their Jews.
The Danish government encouraged its citizens to hide the Jews from the Nazis. The Danish Resistance led the efforts and recruited captains and crews to take the Jews on boats across the waterways to nearby Sweden. Thousands of refugees made their way to the departure points. They rode on trains, in hospital ambulances, by automobile in a fake funeral procession, and in caravans with Danish police officers “looking the other way.” Even the universities shut down so students would be available to help in the rescue operations.
The leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark sent a letter to all the Lutheran Churches in the country and urged its church members to fight for the freedom of their Jewish brothers and sisters. The bishop challenged them with the New Testament scripture that states they should “obey God more than man.” On October 3, 1943, in the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, about thirty-five miles north of Copenhagen (Denmark’s capital), Reverend Kjeldgaard Jensen read the letter to his congregation. He then led them in assisting the Jewish refugees arriving by the hundreds in their seaside village.
Jensen’s church members helped purchase fuel for the local fishermen to carry the refugees ten miles across the Oresund Strait to Sweden. They fed the Jews and hid those awaiting transportation. The fishing boats traveled late at night and at times were hindered by bad weather or German patrol boats. Some ships were swamped and sank, drowning their refugees. The church members worked with the Resistance, some of whom were arrested, imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, and shot to death for assisting the Jews.
Jewish refugees from Denmark upon arrival in Sweden. Courtesy of USHMM
Two days after Pastor Jensen read the aforementioned letter to his congregation, a train arrived from Copenhagen with hundreds of additional Jewish refugees. This brought the total number of Jews awaiting escape in their village to five hundred, and they were in imminent danger if the Gestapo arrived. Because of a storm that same night, a large schooner sheltered in the Gilleleje harbor, and the villagers raised fifty thousand Danish kroner to lease the schooner. Eager to leave, the refugees rushed to the dock, but during the slow boarding process, a fisherman yelled at those out of line, and the people up front thought the Gestapo had arrived. The schooner captain panicked and cast off with only half his passengers aboard.
The villagers immediately loaded all the refugees they could on local fishing boats and took them to Sweden, but they were forced to leave more than one hundred behind. These refugees sheltered in the church, but an informer alerted the Nazis, resulting in a late-night raid. The Gestapo and German soldiers surrounded the church and threatened to burn it down unless the Jews surrendered. The doors were opened, and the Nazis sent all of the men, women, and children to a concentration camp except for one young boy who hid in the belfry.
The Gestapo threatened Jensen and his church members but didn’t arrest them that night. Pastor Jensen collapsed after the raid. However, the villagers leased another large schooner available nearby and safely ferried the remaining Jews sheltering outside Gilleleje to Sweden. Over a three-week period, rescues took place up and down the coast of Denmark, and about 95% of Denmark’s Jews escaped safely. No other Nazi-occupied nation matched this percentage of Jewish survivors.
Danish-Jewish children living in a Swedish children’s home after their escape from Denmark. Courtesy of USHMM.
Resource: Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
At the start of WWII, the Germans began housing prisoners of war at Colditz Castle in the province of Saxony. The castle and town, located between Dresden and Leipzig in the heart of Germany, was about four hundred miles from the closest territory not controlled by the Nazis. The castle had survived for 1000 years and stood as a symbol of German strength. The fortress, with seven-foot thick outer walls, resides on a sheer cliff which drops two hundred and fifty feet to a river below.
Modern-Day Colditz Castle (Deposit Photos)
Allied prisoners-of-war who made multiple escape attempts at other camps were sent to Colditz, because, of course, it was considered escape proof. Putting so many escapees together in one place made for interesting entertainment. The POW’s constantly concocted new escape plans and worked together to ensure their success. It’s believed that thirty-two prisoners escaped and fifteen made it to Allied territory without being captured. Today we’ll look at the first British soldier to escape Colditz and return to Britain successfully (made a homerun).
Airey Neave – between May 1940 and May 1941 (Courtesy of National Archives – Britain)
Airy Neave studied law and completed his education at Oxford University in 1938. He was mobilized when the war broke out and then sent to France in February 1940. He didn’t make it to Dunkirk but was part of the group which kept the Germans occupied in Calais to the south. On May 23rd, Neave was wounded and captured. He landed at the Oflag IX-A/H POW camp near Spangenberg in central Germany and was later sent to Stalag XX-A, near Thorn in western Poland.
Neave and a fellow POW escaped but were caught trying to enter Soviet-controlled eastern Poland. After a brief experience with the Gestapo, they were both sent to Colditz. In August that same year (1941), Neave made his first escape attempt from that POW camp. He dressed up in a German uniform and attempted to leave the castle just as any German officer would. The problem was that the scenery paint used to paint the former Polish army tunic and cap green changed to bright green under the searchlights.
Airey Neave’s German POW Card Obtained by the Allies at the Colditz Surrender (Courtesy of National Archives – Britain)
Here’s a translation of part of Airey Neave’s German record card shown above, describing his escape attempts thus far:
“Stalag XXA: on 16 April 1941, N disappeared on route to the dentist from Fort 15 and on 26 April 1941, he was recaptured by the Gestapo at Plock.”
His punishment – ten days confined arrest
“Oflag IVC on 29 August 1941, N tried to escape from the camp after evening roll call, using a fake German uniform, but was stopped at the gate post and seized.”
His punishment – three weeks close confinement
Colditz. Photo taken in 1945 by U.S. troops (Courtesy of Department of Defense)
Neave was better prepared for his next escape attempt. He and Dutch officer Anthony Luteyn left together, dressed in better German uniforms and with a better plan. A total of four officers, two British and two Dutch, escaping in pairs, dropped through a specially cut hole in the British theater floor into an unoccupied room. They took a corridor “that led over the main gate of the prisoners’ yard and into an attic over the German guardroom.” From there they walked under the archway into the German courtyard and through the main gate. Instead of continuing to the final gate beyond the moat where they could be caught, they turned east and climbed “over the unguarded wall along the park road” under the cover of darkness.
The two pair of escapees parted ways. The other pair was caught eventually. Dressed as civilians and claiming to be Dutchmen working for the Arbeitseinsatz Luteyn and Neave travelled by train and on foot to the Swiss border. They chose to cross at Singen and were successful. Another Dutch POW at Colditz had attempted to cross in the same area in 1940 and had been caught. A Gestapo, who thought Germany had almost won the war, told the Dutch soldier what he’d done wrong and what he should have done instead to make a successful crossing. This information helped many other escapees get across as well.
After arriving in Switzerland, Airey Neave’s ordeal wasn’t over. To get back to England, he had to make it across southern France and cross the Pyrenees into Spain. From there he went to Gibraltar, which was a British colony and arrived home in April of 1942. In May he was awarded the Military Cross. He was recruited to serve as an intelligence officer in MI9, the top secret British agency delegated with the task of supporting the escape networks for Allied military personnel in Europe.
He wrote several books about his experiences:
After the war, Neave served at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and met individually with some of the top German war criminals. He went on to serve in the British House of Commons and later as Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager. He was instrumental in her rise to lead the Conservative Party in Britain. He was also appointed Shadow Secretary of State for northern Ireland. On March 30, 1979, the Irish National Liberation Army assassinated Neave with a car bomb.
This is Margaret Thatcher’s tribute to Airey Neave when she spoke to the press right after his murder: “He was one of freedom’s warriors. No one knew of the great man he was, except those nearest to him. He was staunch, brave, true, strong; but he was very gentle and kind and loyal. It’s a rare combination of qualities. There’s no one else who can quite fill them. I, and so many other people, owe so much to him and now we must carry on for the things he fought for and not let the people who got him triumph.”
Přemysl Pitter served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI. After returning home to Prague, he became a Christian and helped establish a children’s home in the city’s poorest neighborhood. The local children, many of them Jewish, stopped by Milíč House after school “where they would be fed and could safely play, read, listen to music, learn crafts, or participate in gymnastics.”
After German troops occupied the western half of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Nazi laws prevented Jewish children from attending public school, and Milič House became a place for them to study. Later it became a place to hide. Parents took their children to Milíč House to protect them from deportation. After other parents were arrested, Pitter rescued their children.
As conditions worsened for the Jews of Czechoslovakia, Pitter took food to Jewish families in Prague, the capital. He sent children to safe houses in the country about fifty miles away. One day Gestapo agents picked up Pitter and took him to their headquarters. The Gestapo chief questioned why he would risk his life to help Jews. Pitter’s response was simple. “‘From a human point of view, I’m sure you can understand why I’m helping these children.’”
The Gestapo released Pitter, and he and the staff who’d prayed together for his safe return, rejoiced at their answer to prayer. He continued to assist Jews by raising money and warning those who were about to be deported to hide.
Pitter hid Jewish children for over six years. The exact number of children he saved from the Holocaust is unknown, but his job didn’t end with the fall of the Third Reich. After the war, the newly formed Czech government requested that Pitter find and take care of Jewish orphans from Czechoslovakia. He located hundreds of orphaned children from several European countries and housed them in sprawling, abandoned chateaus around Prague.
Many of Pitter’s orphans were concentration camp survivors, including hundreds rescued from Theresienstadt in May of 1945. These children were traumatized and physically weak and ill. Under the care of Pitter and his assistants, the orphans healed in spirit, mind, and body and began to trust people again.
Pitter’s goodwill extended to the children of incarcerated Germans living in deplorable conditions in Czechoslovakia after the war. Pitter petitioned the government not to behave as badly as the Nazis had but to treat the Germans better. In the end, Pitter rescued German children too. He brought them to live with the Jewish children who put aside their fear and hatred and showed compassion toward their former tormentors.
Eventually, Pitter placed many of the Jewish children in adoptive and foster homes and organized the departure of others for Israel. Seven hundred children were sent to Great Britain at the request of Jews there.
After the Soviets imposed a communist government on Czechoslovakia, Pitter was forced to flee his native country and continued his refugee work in West Germany. He later settled in Switzerland where he wrote several books and worked for Radio Free Europe.
Pitter expressed great concern over Western culture’s postwar shift from a God-centered worldview to a man-centered worldview. He had witnessed the tragic results when the German people turned from God and relied on the government to save and provide for them. He spread the biblical message that “without Jesus Christ, man’s inherent sinful nature would inevitably draw him toward a darkened heart.” He believed that this darkness had opened the hearts of many to the swastika.
Sources:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
