Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 by Ashdown Paddy

Author:Ashdown, Paddy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

On 20 December, three weeks after Landes and Corbin’s arduous journey across the Spanish frontier, and thirty kilometres to the northwest, Friedrich Dohse, Louis Joubert and Colonel André Thinières also crossed into Spain, but by a far more congenial route.

At around eleven that day, Joubert and Thinières stepped down from the Bordeaux train at Hendaye, the French seaside resort and rail terminus on the Franco-Spanish border. Outside the station entrance, they found Dohse, Claire Keimer and Kunesch waiting for them in Dohse’s black Cadillac. After the Germans were introduced to Thinières – who they had never met before – the party drove into the Basque hills and up to the picturesque hilltop town of Biriatou, where they lunched at the ancient wooden-beamed, flagstone-floored inn, the Auberge Hiribarren. Looking down from the dining room, they could see the turbulent white water of the Bidasoa river marking the frontier. Beyond, the hills of Spain, covered in oak woods and dotted with little farms and open pastures, rolled away into the distance under a cold December sky.

After lunch the group drove a little way down the hill to a quiet spot. Here Joubert and Thinières were taken out of Dohse’s Cadillac and locked into the boot of a second Gestapo car, which was waiting for them. The convoy then snaked its way down the hill to the outskirts of Hendaye. Here they turned left and crossed a rickety bridge perched on concrete pylons which led over the Bidasoa river, to the checkpoints on the Spanish border.

This was a moment of high danger for Dohse, for though his superiors in Paris were aware of his plans to approach de Gaulle’s government through Joubert, they knew nothing of his decision to send Colonel Thinières with him. The Bordeaux Gestapo chief was, in short, illegally smuggling two men – one of them a senior member of the French Resistance under sentence of death – out of France in the boot of a Gestapo car. ‘At this moment I was taking a very great risk,’ Dohse said later. ‘If the Spanish customs men had arrested me that would have been it. No one in Paris knew what I was doing – not even [Machule in Bordeaux] … If anything had gone wrong it would have been straight to the Russian front for me.’

Normally, at this point, German officials without diplomatic papers, such as Dohse, would have been stopped and questioned – and, on occasion, even searched. But Dohse had previously arranged for a friend and colleague, who was the local German–Spanish liaison officer, to be engaged in deep conversation with the Spanish frontier guards as the illicit convoy approached. Distracted, the guards waved the cars through.

From Irun, Dohse led off along the back roads towards San Sebastián. Once in open countryside the two Frenchmen were released and transferred, in pouring rain, to the comfort of the Cadillac, where they joined Dohse in the back seat, chatting amiably with him for the rest of the journey. At San

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