On 18 October, with the help of Dutch guides, Colonel Dobie arrived in Allied-held territory after an adventurous journey dodging the Germans and involving two river crossings. He was taken to General Sir Miles Dempsey, commander of the Second Army, who told him that the priority was to evacuate all stranded troops and to make a plan to ‘get ’em out’. Dobie teamed up with Neave and others and rapid arrangements were made for a mass evacuation.
In the meantime, on the night of 11/12 October, Neave had sent Baker across the River Waal to enemy-held territory to liaise with the local underground and set up a formal escape route. Baker arrived at Tiel, sixteen miles west of Nijmegen, where he teamed up with Fekko Ebbens, who had a fruit farm near the town and who was prominent in the local underground. An American, Private First Class Ted Bachenheimer of the 82nd Airborne, whose German-Jewish family had fled to the US in 1934, had volunteered to join him and arrived a day or two later. Their task was to organise a chain of guides to bring the evaders and escapers down in small parties from their hiding places around Ede. It was made clear that the pair were to wear uniform at all times, to reduce the risk of being shot as spies.
No more was heard of them for six days. Then a Dutch messenger arrived with bad news. Baker and Bachenheimer had been captured and were believed to have been shot. Neave took the courier back to the crossing point with a request to return the following night with further information. When he reappeared the news was better. Baker and Bachenheimer had been arrested but might still be alive. It was not until after the war that the full story became known. On the night of 16 October, a German patrol turned up at the house of Fekko Ebbens, pretending they wanted somewhere to consult their map. It was a ruse. They appear to have been tipped off that the farm was a base for resistance activities by a Dutch collaborator. It was also suspected that the authorities had been alerted by the sight of Baker and Bachenheimer walking around in the neighbourhood in daylight in civilian clothes.
Baker left an account of the episode in which he maintained that he had been told by his hosts to change out of his uniform.7 Whatever the truth, Ebbens’s fate was sealed. He was arrested and, despite efforts by the underground to buy his freedom, was executed along with four other Dutch resisters a month later. Baker and Bachenheimer were able to show the Germans their uniforms and claim they were simply soldiers on the run and therefore entitled to protection as prisoners of war. The pair were sent off by train to Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel. En route, Bachenheimer managed to prise open a window and escape with three other prisoners. The group split up and the American struck out on his own. A body believed to be his was later found with two bullet wounds in the back of the head. How he met his end will never be known, but there is a likelihood that he was murdered after his Jewish origins became known or suspected.8
The disaster caused consternation at MI9 and much resentment among the Dutch resistance. An inquiry cleared Neave and Langley of responsibility. This episode, grim though it was, did not impede Baker’s post-war career. Like Neave, Hugh Fraser and another IS9 (WEA) officer, Maurice Macmillan, he became a Conservative MP. However, his career ended disastrously when, after starting a publishing house which ran up huge debts, he was sent to prison for forging signatures on financial documents and expelled from the House of Commons. He died in 1966, aged forty-five, after strenuous failed attempts to clear his name.
With the arrests, the dangers surrounding the plan for a mass evacuation – now codenamed Pegasus – multiplied. Despite fears that the Germans had been alerted, it was decided to press on with the operation nonetheless. It went ahead on the night of 22/23 October. A crossing point, about 150 to 200 yards wide, had been chosen on a stretch of the Rhine near the town of Wageningen, on the occupied bank of the Rhine, and Randwijk, a village in Allied hands on the southern side. The operation would be launched from a deserted farmhouse which stood on the bank, a quarter of a mile from a dyke road which was out of sight of enemy territory. The men were to be shipped in assault boats supplied by a company of the Royal Canadian Engineers. A few days beforehand, they were moved by lorry and hidden in farmhouse outbuildings. An artillery barrage was laid on, miles from the launching point, to divert any Germans in the area. At the same time, a Bofors gun was to fire ten rounds of tracer every fifteen minutes, thus providing a point on the friendly bank for the escape parties to aim for. A force of thirty American paratroopers were to travel in the boats as armed escort. Once ashore, white tapes directed the escapees through the fields to another farmhouse, which acted as a reception centre and first-aid post.
At midnight the boats slid into the water. Neave and the team settled down to wait for the signal that the escape party was in place on the far bank – the letter ‘V’ flashed in Morse code on a red torch. When it came, it was 400 yards to the right of where they expected it. ‘There were whispered orders and the Americans entered the boats which, with a splash of oars, began to move off,’9 he wrote. There was a burst of fire from enemy territory. Had a German patrol stumbled across the operation? It was not difficult to imagine the bloodbath that would follow. But the silence rolled back and after twenty minutes the boats appeared out of the darkness. It was Neave’s job to count the men ashore. There were 138 of them, mostly soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division, along with several Dutchmen fleeing the Gestapo.
Pegasus was a triumph, and Neave was justified in judging it ‘a striking, indeed memorable performance’. His name would be associated with it thereafter, though like any complex operation of war, the plan was a joint effort involving, among others, Fraser, Dobie, Tatham-Warter and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strayer of the US Army’s 101st Airborne. British government propaganda made a feast of the coup, which was lauded in an article in the News Chronicle based on interviews with Brigadier Lathbury and other escapees as ‘one of the greatest stories of the war’.10
Neave was in a hurry to carry out another operation before the winter rains made the rivers too tricky to navigate in small boats. Pegasus II would clearly be a more difficult proposition. The Germans would surely have worked out what had happened. Communications with the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division were conducted through ‘Fabian’, a Belgian officer serving with the SAS who was in direct radio contact with headquarters. Communication with Neave’s own agents had to be relayed via London and was subject to a delay of twenty-four hours. A new crossing site was chosen and the planners managed to commandeer flat-bottomed boats fitted with silenced outboard motors to deal with the rain-swollen river. Neave set the preliminary date for 16 November to move a second group of 140 men, and the arrangements were passed to the fugitives.
The date slipped by a day and Neave began to have doubts about Pegasus II. It ‘involved the possibility of serious casualties among men … who might be killed instead of spending the rest of the war in prison camps’. But everything was in place. The men were alerted and their hopes ‘could not be dashed’. Neave was right to have hesitated. On the first night, no one came and the reception party was shelled by the Germans. The second night, voices were heard calling across the river and a boat was launched. It brought back three men in civilian clothes, two Dutchmen and Sergeant J. M. Mescall of the RAF. They were the only ones to arrive out of a party of 120 men, most of them from 1st Airborne. They had set out from north of Ede, about twenty miles from the river, on the previous evening. While crossing the Ede–Arnhem road they ran into a German patrol, who put up flares and opened fire. Several were killed. Seven escaped. The rest were taken prisoner.
Neave was ‘deeply depressed’ by the news. It was the end of any thoughts of further large-scale escapes. Like others involved in the operation, he would later lay some of the blame for its failure on the appearance of the newspaper article, whose contents could easily have been conveyed to the enemy via neutral capitals. In fact, the piece appeared after Pegasus II had already come to grief and contained nothing that would not have been obvious to the Germans.
He returned to London in December to t
ake charge of Room 900. He still worked with 1S9 (WEA) in Nijmegen, and was able to arrange canoes and other craft for individual waterborne crossings at the mouth of the Waal. Thirty soldiers from 1st Airborne were ferried out of occupied territory before the Allies finally crossed the Rhine the following spring. He was also able to get supplies to one of his agents, Dick Kragt, who had been dropped into Holland in June 1943 and had been a coordinator for both Pegasus operations. Kragt also arranged the exodus in February 1945 of Brigadier John Hackett, the commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, who had been severely wounded at Arnhem.
Neave did not return to Europe until April 1945. After the Germans withdrew from Arnhem, he, Hackett and Hugh Fraser walked across the famous bridge over the Rhine for which so many lives had been sacrificed and through the rubble of the town. He moved forward on the heels of the retreating Germans, and in Barneveld he was reunited with Kragt. The German forces in Holland surrendered on 5 May and Neave crossed their lines, to arrive in Amsterdam three days later: VE Day. He was there to check on the welfare of his agents, but ‘the Dutch thronged the streets in a frenzy of welcome and rejoicing and it was hours before I could reach the addresses of our helpers.’ On Crockatt’s orders, he spent the rest of the summer in The Hague, overseeing the congenial work of recommending honours for the hundreds of men and women whose bravery had kept the escape lines open. Then, in August, he was given the opportunity of coming face to face with the perpetrators of the horror, destruction and bloodshed of the preceding years.
Neave’s appointment to the British War Crimes Executive was merited on the grounds of his ability to read and speak German reasonably well, his Oxford degree which had given him a grounding in international law, and his pre-war experience as a barrister. It was a plum post that carried considerable kudos, as well as giving him a participatory role in one of the great dramas of the century. It also brought a further promotion, from major to lieutenant colonel, and from October he could add the ribbon of the DSO to that of the MC on his tunic, awarded for ‘gallant and distinguished service in the field’ – presumably his part in Pegasus I. His initial job was to help gather evidence against the twenty-four senior political and military leaders of the Third Reich who, after much debate, had been chosen to stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg. The tribunal was controversial from the outset. There was no consensus on how to punish the Nazis. Churchill, Eden and others had initially been in favour of selecting fifty to a hundred senior figures and executing them without trial. This course was soon discredited by the argument that to do so would only ensure they died as martyrs. Some process was essential in order to publicly expose the horrors of Hitler’s reign. The legal procedures at Nuremberg were rough at the edges. It could hardly be otherwise. Unprecedented crimes called for novel justice.
Neave was twenty-nine when he returned to Germany. In his short life, his association with the place had been complex and intense. It had started with his exposure as an adolescent in September 1933 to a Nazi rally in Berlin. In his writings, he often referred to the Germans he encountered in caricature terms. They were brutal and bullying or stupid and preposterous. Nonetheless, he professed to feel no animosity towards the German armed forces, declaring that having been ‘fairly treated as a prisoner at Colditz … I understood the difference between the Nazi leaders who were to be tried at Nuremberg and the ordinary German soldier.’11 Nor did he accept the new job ‘in any spirit of personal revenge’. He had received enough satisfaction nearly four years before, when he crossed the Swiss frontier from Colditz. His detached outlook did not make him sympathetic to the attitude of some Allied jurists who were pained at the crudeness of the tribunal’s legal machinery. Nor for a moment did he swallow the tu quoque claims of the defendants who bleated that what they were accused of was no worse than what the Allies had done to them. Putting the guilty to death did not trouble him, as long as their culpability was properly established. Throughout the proceedings he maintained an impressive detachment and sense of proportion, evidence of a rationality and coolness that marked his subsequent career in politics.
Before he arrived in Nuremberg, Neave was given a preliminary mission. At the end of August 1945 he went to Essen, home of the Krupp works which had forged the tools for much of Germany’s war industry. He was charged with collecting evidence that linked the firm to the Nazi party, to the production of any weapon that was forbidden under international law or to the use of foreign slave labourers in Krupp enterprises. Essen had been on Bomber Command’s target list from the beginning of the strategic air campaign and the town and surroundings had been flattened. As Neave remarked grimly, ‘the RAF had done their job.’
Amazingly, the Krupp residence, the 200-room Villa Huegel which sat above the town, was still intact. It was a ‘tasteless mausoleum’ and ‘looked like an early railway station’. Gustav Krupp, who had enthusiastically collaborated with Hitler and the German inter-war rearmament programme, had been partially paralysed since 1941 and was deemed to be too ill to stand trial. The prosecutors tried to substitute in the indictment his son Alfried, who ran the company in his place, but the move was rejected by the judges. At the villa, Neave discovered nearly a ton of documents, which would form a large part of the prosecution case when Alfried was finally put on trial by an American tribunal two years later. Chilly, unrepentant and a convinced Nazi, he was convicted of crimes against humanity relating to Krupp’s wholesale use of slave labour, including workers from Auschwitz. In July 1948, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison and the forfeiture of his property. Three years later, he was free and his inheritance restored to him.
As Neave interrogated the firm’s directors and staff, he heard no word of regret over the fate of the tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and Jews who had been beaten, starved and worked to exhaustion and death in Krupp enterprises. The astonishing speed of Alfried’s return to grace and Krupp’s revival were a source of wry wonderment in later years, but he told himself that he ‘should have known that the burning passions of 1945 would soon subside’. Although it was not something he brooded about, he believed that history, if allowed, could repeat itself, and only a fool would not be always on the look-out for warning signs.
At the end of September, he was summoned to Nuremberg. The trials were due to start in November and he arrived with other members of the investigating team early one evening in the first week of October. The city had been chosen because it housed a large Palace of Justice which had somehow escaped bombardment, and for its symbolic value as the site of the great Hitler-worshipping rallies of the 1930s. The narrow streets and half-timbered houses, home of the Meistersingers and birthplace of Dürer, were in ruins. Corpses still lay under the mounds of rubble. The people he passed were pale and gaunt and wore clothes ‘the same drab colour as if they had risen from the tomb’.12 They looked at him with expressions of misery and hate. He was unmoved. ‘It was Hitler who did this to you!’ he shouted in German once in response to an accusing look.
At Nuremberg he would be working with the judges of the tribunal, whose president was a Briton, Geoffrey Lawrence. Neave’s name had been proposed by the head of the British War Crimes Executive, Colonel Harry Phillimore. On 18 October, he was standing in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, where the senior staff had their headquarters, when a phalanx of men in dark suits approached. At the centre was an intimidating figure, a bronzed man with a neat moustache and smart clothes: the principal American judge, the former Attorney General of the United States, Francis Biddle. Surprisingly, Biddle seemed to know who he was and asked him if he was ‘ready to serve the indictment’. This was news to Neave. He had yet to meet the British judges and no one had told him what his precise duties were. Biddle expressed surprise at Neave’s youth, then proceeded to explain in a theatrical voice that under the tribunal’s charter ‘the defendants have a right to a fair trial and to counsel of their own choice. We have appointed you to advise them of their rights and select them German law
yers.’
This was a huge responsibility for someone whose legal experience to date had been confined to the lowest rungs of the British bar. Neave ‘nodded as calmly as possible’. However, he felt as if he had suddenly been invited to sing at Covent Garden or deliver a lecture on higher mathematics. It was ‘the most dangerous situation I had faced since Colditz’. He spent a restless night at his billet in the neighbouring village of Zirndorf. Then, on the afternoon of 19 October 1945, in his best uniform, Sam Browne gleaming, he set off with the American governor of the prison, Colonel Burton C. Andrus, to face the men who had plunged the world into war.
The defendants were held in Nuremberg prison, next to the courthouse. Its three storeys of cell wings were grouped around an atrium covered with wire netting to prevent prisoners jumping to their death. In Neave’s writings, he is always alert to the connectivity of events. A sight, a landmark or an experience triggers off a recollection of a related incident. Often there is irony in the observation, or a sense of the wheel of fate coming full circle. So it was when he observed the wire netting. It brought to mind the fate of one of the agents he had trained, Captain Dominique-Edgard Potier, who was parachuted into Belgium in July 1943 to start up a new escape line for Allied aviators. After returning to England he was dropped into France for a second mission. He was captured at Reims and tortured by the Gestapo for several days. On 11 January 1944 he broke free from his guards and jumped from a third-floor window, dying hours later.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 16