World at War: Unforgettable Tales from the First and Second World Wars by Journals War History

Author:Journals, War History [Journals, War History]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storyteller Books, LLC
Published: 2020-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Dutch Spy Incident

I t was October 1939, and the Second World War had just begun. I was in a town in neutral Holland. I sat waiting. Suddenly another car drove up and the passenger side door opened. The driver looked like a typical English gentleman. He was tall and had an aristocratic manner. He wore a tweed suit. His hair was carefully oiled, and he wore a monocle.

He was a spy. He lived in Holland with his Dutch wife and ran a small business importing bicycles. He was a member of the Z branch. It was an independent group of agents which formed Britain's Special Intelligence Service, SIS. His credentials were impressive. He spoke four languages and during the First World War, he’d run a successful network of spies behind enemy lines. Now, he was trying to make contact with dissatisfied Germans willing to fight against Hitler and the Nazis. As far as he could tell, things were going very well for him. His name was Evans and he’d been contacted weeks earlier by a refugee who had fled from persecution in Germany.

The refugee said he knew many high-ranking officers within the German army. He’d assured Evans that there'd be a great deal of resentment against Hitler. The bitterness had built up to a strong resistance movement. Evans probed deeper and he was given my name and that I was an officer involved with the resistance movement.

Evans was the man I now sat in the car with. He spoke German well, and we drove through the Dutch countryside chatting about classical music and our dissatisfaction with Hitler. We stopped in a small Dutch town and picked up two more of Evans’s colleagues. One was an English officer named Major Stevens, and the other a Dutch officer named Captain Janssen. Although Holland was neutral at the time, Captain Janssen was assisting the British. He wanted to keep his nationality a secret, so he pretended to be Canadian and use the name, Coppin. This was a convincing alias because Captain Coppin lived in Canada for several years, and the country was an ally of Britain.

As Evans drove on, I reeled off a list of officers who were eager to see Hitler's downfall and named a distinguished general who was prepared to lead the resistance. I promised to bring the general to the next meeting, which we set for October 30. What Evans didn't know was that we were one step ahead of him. The refugee who’d introduced him to me was, in fact, a German spy. The resistance movement I was telling Evans about didn't exist. I didn't exist as he knew me either. I was really Walter Schmidt, A 31-year-old ex-lawyer, now head of German Foreign Intelligence. Instead of being a spy for Evans and the British, I wanted to annihilate them.

My plan was simple. Over the upcoming weeks, I intended to lure the British and the Dutch agents into a false sense of security by pretending to be a willing collaborator.

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