The Greatest Traitor by Roger Hermiston Read Free Book Online Page A

and of all our associated peoples and of all our well-wishers in every land, doing their utmost night and day, giving all, daring all, enduring all, to the utmost, to the end.
    Back in Rotterdam, young George was welcomed as a conquering hero. To be imprisoned by the hated Germans was something of a rarity in those early days of the war, and his schoolmates and neighbours wanted to hear every last detail.
    But the prospect of re-internment in November, when he turned eighteen, was now very real. At the same time, he had no news of the whereabouts of his mother and sisters and, in fact, had learned that a British destroyer had been attacked at the Hook of Holland. In his bleaker moments, he feared the worst. He certainly felt there was little to lose in fleeing from Rotterdam and so headed back to Zutphen, arriving on 16 October, and stayed for a while with Uncle Tom.Knowing that it was the first place the Germans would come looking for him, however, his uncle arranged for him to hide out with a farmer named Boer Weenink, who lived in a small hamlet called Hummelo, twenty miles from Zutphen, in the depths of the countryside. Another friend of Tom’s provided George with a fake identity card in case he was being sought by the authorities.
    In the meantime the boy helped out in the dairy and the cowsheds. He continued to go to church and, if he pondered his future after the war at all, it was to envisage himself as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A religious calling had always attracted him from his early days in the thrall of the Children’s Bible. But his mind was really on the horror of here and now – the humiliation his country had suffered and the certainty of darker days to come. He wanted to play his part in the fight-back and ironically, given his religious instincts at that time, it was a priest who would set George Behar on the path of resistance and, ultimately, to espionage.
    Fifty-four-year-old Dominee Nicolaas Padt was a tall, slim, inspiring preacher with strong left-wing views, who belonged to an organisation called Kerk en Verde (Church and Peace), one of several active Christian pacifist organisations to emerge after the First World War. In 1938, he had felt America, France and Britain should take at least an equal share of the blame for the looming crisis in Europe and, though he still held that view eighteen months later, having observed the evils of Nazism, he was now preaching against it from his pulpit, week after week. On 28 June 1940, he was the first Reformed minister to be arrested, accused of criticism of the occupation on the basis of reports of his sermons. Reverend Padt spent six weeks in a cell in the German city of Emmerich before being released.
    George attended his confirmation classes and, as their friendship grew, was invited to the minister’s house for tea and to meet the family. It was widely known in the district that Dominee Padt had links to the underground movement, so in the spring of 1941 George asked his advice on joining a resistance group. The minister listened to hisrequest, saying only at this stage that he would reflect on it and make contact later. A week passed by, then he asked George to join him on a visit to Deventer, a sizeable provincial town some thirty miles north of Zutphen.
    It was there, at a café in the central square, that George was introduced to a friend of Dominee Padt’s, a bearded, middle-aged man who gave his name as ‘Max’. After listening carefully to the teenager’s story, examining his British passport and analysing his motivations, Max said he needed an assistant to carry messages and parcels the length and breadth of the country. Would the youngster be interested? George needed little persuading, so there and then he was given his first assignment; he was to travel the following Monday to Heerde, a village some twenty miles north of Deventer, where he was to liaise with the local grocer. He was to say he had come from ‘Piet’ to