The Greatest Traitor by Roger Hermiston Read Free Book Online

far away from the horrors of the bombing with his Uncle Tom, a grain merchant who lived in the village of Warnsveld, not far from the town of Zutphen in the central province of Gelderland. Young George had always enjoyed his trips to this area, walking the hills and visiting the old castles and grand country houses. He also liked to accompany his uncle in his car when he made work calls on neighbouring millers and farmers.
    A fortnight into his holiday, however, this idyllic interlude was brought to an abrupt end. An elderly village constable knocked on the door and informed Uncle Tom that he was taking the boy into custody: young George was a British subject and, following instructions from the German authorities, would have to be interned along with the other Britons trapped in the Netherlands following the invasion.
    The shock was profound. George and his family had grown so accustomed to thinking of him as an ordinary Dutch schoolboy that they had long banished from their minds the inheritance of his father’s nationality.
    He was duly escorted on the train to the Rotterdam Police headquarters, where he spent a night in a cell. Aunt Truss arrived the next day to protest on his behalf, furiously berating the Dutch officials for locking up a teenage boy on the say-so of the hated invaders. Her indignation was to no avail. The following day, George was taken by two detectives to a camp on the sand dunes at Schoorl, a small village on the coast just north of Amsterdam.
    It was surely an alarming experience for a 17-year-old boy to be whisked away from his family and incarcerated in a detention centre overseen by the dreaded Waffen SS. At this time, however, life in Kamp Schoorl was a relatively benign experience. The commander, SS-Untersturmführer Arnold Schmidt, was well aware that thousands of his own countrymen had been interned by British authorities throughout the world and, at this early stage of the war, seemed content to observe the rules of international law. The food was prepared by a local cook who lived in the nearby village, and prisoners enjoyed the same menu as their prison guards from the German Ordnungspolizei. The inmates’ days were spent exercising vigorously, scrubbing the huts and keeping the rest of the compound clean.
    The camp consisted of French and British subjects, many of them young. On 22 June the morale of the former took a turn for the worse when the fall of France was announced. The German guards then lost no time in taunting George and his fellow Britons that they would be next, that the German army would be landing in England any time soon.
    George’s heightened sense of adventure and the self-reliance developed on his travels to Egypt ensured that his time at Kamp Schoorl was not entirely miserable though, and he had mixed feelings when, two weeks after the French capitulation, he was informed he was free to go. He and four others were allowed to leave. All were told it was becausethey were not yet of age to undertake military service. The Germans clearly felt the war was almost over and there was little prospect of these teenagers ever donning uniform. ‘I was by now accustomed to camp life and had begun to make good friends with my fellow prisoners. Though thrilled at the unexpected prospect of freedom and of seeing my family again, I felt sad to leave my new friends to an uncertain fate,’ George recalled.
    All the French were released a week later, but the remaining British prisoners were transferred to a German camp, Gleiwitz, in September, where they remained until liberated by the Russians in 1945.
    Throughout the summer, the speeches of Winston Churchill on the BBC provided a source of comfort and inspiration to the beleaguered Dutch. George was as enthralled as any listener, and his resolve to resist the invaders was only strengthened by these words from the Prime Minister on 14 July:
    All depends now upon the whole life-strength of the British race in every part of the world