CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Joseph Raskin arrived in Germany in May 1942, as the country was slowly realizing that the war would not be over as soon as Hitler had promised. In the East, the invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled and was turning into a brutal war of attrition. Allied bombers were beginning to pierce German defences, thanks to the work of R. V. Jones and others. But the German hold on Western Europe remained firm and the Nazi secret police were determined to maintain their grip, by means that included enforcing their version of justice on enemy spies. Raskin and his friends were first taken to Brauweiler prison in Cologne, which had begun life as a Benedictine abbey in the Middle Ages but now belonged to the Gestapo, a place where social and political ‘undesirables’ were kept. It was one of the strange ironies of the priest’s journey through Nazi Germany that so many of the places he visited had been built for Christian worship, a grim reminder of the subversion of faith in that country.
Hector Joye was able to get a letter home from Brauweiler that July – the only one his wife Louise received after his arrest. There was no high drama in it, just hope and domesticity. ‘I am well. I hope to see you all in a few months. Would you send a good shirt and a new warm jacket,’ he wrote, adding, as an afterthought, a request for a large piece of soap. In August, Arseen Debaillie was taken to Brauweiler and reunited with his friends. He sent a letter back to the family saying they should pay money to try to get him released, something the Germans sometimes suggested would work. ‘I’m doing well, thank God. Life is very monotonous, but there is also nothing to be done,’ he added. When the Gestapo delivered the letter to Lichtervelde, they demanded 20,000 francs.
Spying had been expensive for the family. They had already tried paying out once for Arseen and had given money to help Devos escape. The family pulled together the money and handed it over. Nothing happened. Then came a demand for more money. Again a sum was handed over, and again nothing came of it.
There were no letters from Raskin. He had a red note attached to his identity card, unlike the other men, which may have been why. All of them were allowed sometimes to walk on a small patch of grass but never to talk to those they knew.
Brauweiler was where the interrogations began. The Germans wanted confessions. For all the arbitrary exercise of power and violence inherent in the Nazi system, they still wanted to put espionage cases through a formal legal process. Otherwise, the risk was that spies would be seen as martyrs. And if it was going to go to court, then the most effective way of securing a conviction was through confession. The Germans began the kind of patient work that their best interrogators excelled in. They were trying to draw out as much as they could by playing the men off against each other. They would reveal details of what they learnt from one man to the others in order to make it sound as if they knew more than they did, bluffing that others had already told all.
Leopold Vindictive’s interrogation was revealing about what the Germans did and did not know. Bodicker from Abwehr IIIF in Brussels sent on details of what his team had been able to gather. Everything revolved around the first pigeon and the contact with the group around Joseph Dehennin, whom Raskin had first tried to use to ask Britain for more birds. Clément Macq’s account provides the only insight into how the Gestapo tried to break the men. Macq was transferred to Brauweiler on 5 August and interrogated for the first time on 17 August. He was read a declaration which contained details regarding his own role and what he and others had discussed with Joye and Raskin. The Germans also seemed to know the times and places of meetings with René Dufrasne, the man to whom Macq had passed Raskin’s message to Britain. Macq denied everything and said it was all untrue. After a few hours he was back in his cell. He was never tortured apart from receiving one blow with a stick.
Joye was brought into the room with Macq next time and a declaration supposedly from him was read out. The interrogators spoke about a specific document Joye had given Macq. Joye made a tiny signal with his finger to indicate he had admitted only to giving Macq one document. Joye was asked if he maintained his previous statements and he said he did. Macq at this point continued to deny everything.
Next Raskin was brought into the room. The Germans asked Macq if he knew who Raskin was. Macq said they had been in contact regarding a cinema projector for the priest’s lectures. This was true and provided an alibi. Fortunately, Raskin had said the same. Both men then said they had never discussed espionage.
Now they brought in Dufrasne. He was unrecognizable to Macq. He had lost weight and his eyes were dead. There were no direct signs of torture but he could see this was a man who had been broken. The interrogators read to Macq a statement by Dufrasne which seemed to contain precise details of their relationship and meetings with regard to Leopold Vindictive. They asked Dufrasne to confirm this verbally. He did so. Then emotion seemed to overwhelm him. He said something about how Macq had to think of his children and the consequences. Macq later insisted that he had continued to deny everything. Before being taken away, Dufrasne asked the interrogators to tell Macq that it was not he who had denounced Macq. The interrogators confirmed this.
The interrogators now spoke to Macq alone. They said it was no use denying everything any longer. He had now heard the confessions of Joye and Dufrasne. Macq knew he was in a corner and played for time to try to think up a story which would correlate with their statements without incriminating him too much. It was lunchtime and he asked for something to eat. His interrogators consented. But when they came back they insisted on a confession. He said he needed a few moments to digest his food. He was taken back to his cell and offered a pencil and paper, but refused them saying that what he had to say could be summed up in a few words and that it was not necessary to write them down. The Germans must have realized he was stalling and he was left alone again.
A few weeks later, on 15 September, Macq was brought back to see the Gestapo. By now he had had time to think up a story. He said that Joye had told him about an organization called Leopold Vindictive which Joye and Raskin were involved in. Its aim, he had been told, was to help ordinary people under occupation – a kind of underground charity. Joye had asked if he knew about getting some kind of contact with England for the work – perhaps requesting food and supplies from the United States – and this is what he had passed on to Dufrasne.
In his declaration, Dufrasne had talked about a pigeon. Macq denied ever hearing anything about pigeons and said Dufrasne must have been mistaken and perhaps heard about it from Raskin, if anyone. The interrogator insisted that he only needed enlightenment about the pigeon in order to liberate Macq.
A translation of his ‘confession’ was then given to Macq. There was a sentence that Macq thought was ambiguous and so he refused to sign. The interrogator became indignant and said something about German justice being more correct than Belgian justice and they did not want him to sign anything false. But the declaration was duly altered and Macq agreed to sign.
The Germans had hard evidence. When they had arrested the Dehennin group back in October 1941, at least two hundred documents were found during the search of Dehennin’s father’s house. His interrogator put them in front of him and asked him to clarify the source of every one. There were other details that only someone close to Dehennin and whom he met almost every day could have known. Dehennin could not hide his astonishment at all the details and feared that a friend or a member of his family had betrayed him. He still did not know that it had been his brother-in-law, Pieren.
There was little he could do to deny he had been the leader of a network. Amongst the documents they had also unearthed copies of the telegrams and messages that Leopold Vindictive had given Muylaert to try to get to London.
Faced with the growing stack of evidence accumulated by the Germans, some of the men must have felt they had to confess to certain details. Joye’s defence when he was faced with documentary evidence would be that he was only passing details of factories and installations where ordinary Belgian people worked to England so the RAF could avoid bombing them. Raskin had to confess to some activity, but deliberately hid the role of some of his contacts in Brussels who had passed on information and claimed much of the material that had been collected had been destroyed in April 1942. The advice among the resistance was always to confess only to what you absolutely could not deny, while trying to find some reason for it that did not implicate others. But the Germans were still able to use those details with other prisoners. Slowly, painstakingly, the Gestapo built their case. It feels easy now to ask who talked and who did not. Perhaps Dufrasne did. Perhaps others made partial confessions. But under what duress and what manipulation? And perhaps they sometimes confessed when confronted with incontrovertible evidence, but tried to hide other facts or the role of other people. The recollections of some of the men are full of confusion and fear over who might have talked, often based on a fragmentary picture since they were unaware of the full extent of German penetration and knowledge. Without knowing who the real traitors were or how evidence had been collected, the men went through their own grim, painful internal interrogation and mental torture, wondering which of their friends might have either betrayed them before the arrest or talked afterwards. Macq came to believe that Raskin had offered himself up as a sacrifice, taking all the blame on his shoulders and saying he was the sole person to have been behind Leopold Vindictive.
At the end of October 1942 the initial interrogation was over and the men were moved by car to Bochum. As in Brauweiler, the prisoners in Bochum wore their own clothes. It was winter now and Arseen had to cut a deal with a French cellmate to borrow a green pullover, a khaki shirt, a maroon wool scarf, several blue handkerchiefs and a pair of shoes which did not quite fit.
Next they were transferred to Wuppertal. The days began at a quarter past five in the morning, when they were woken in their cell – this was a good fifteen minutes of lie-in for Raskin compared to his days as a missionary. But now he was on his knees scrubbing floors rather than praying. Breakfast was either a slice of bread and half a litre of watery porridge or two slices with jam. Days would be spent sewing leather clothes for the German soldiers who occupied their country. Lunch was cabbage soup, dinner three slices of bread, perhaps with cottage cheese. Raskin wrote some notes but never managed to get them out. One letter survives:
Arseen, Hector and I are now in the prison of Wuppertal. We are all very healthy: please do not be concerned. Our crime is not dangerous. Only after the war will they allow us to go back home. We are monitored very strictly and receive no letters or parcels. We cannot go to Mass, nor receive Holy Communion, or see a priest. There is not the slightest difference between our guards and real pagans … We rarely see each other and there is no way to talk to each other … The Lord is among us and the Blessed Mother blesses us, how could we be afraid? The Belgians are about 300 in number … we will undoubtedly return to our country so our families can rest assured.
Hope was still there.
The prisoners may not have been allowed to go to mass, but on Sundays Raskin held his own service from within his cell. He would break the dark prison bread, bless it and pray. As this happened, a knock would go from cell to cell allowing those who so wanted to kneel in their cells as if they were back in church at home and not in a German jail. Some would hear the prayers, while those who could not would at least know they were being said. For a few moments in their cells they were not alone. Macq and Dufrasne had cells next to each other and could talk through the walls. Raskin communicated with Macq and others by hiding messages in a hollow stick which he would drop to the ground during walks, signalling to the person the message was meant for. He tried to send notes to Joye, worried over the man’s health and the careworn expression he could see on him when they passed.
A week later, on his fifty-first birthday, Raskin scribbled a prayer card with the addresses of four families back in Belgium whose relatives were in jail with him. He wanted them to be informed that there was no danger and they would return after the war. ‘There is absolutely no risk,’ he assured them. He even asked his family to make sure that moths were kept out of his clothes. It was another indication that he was sure he would be home eventually. Raskin felt optimistic that the war would be over soon. ‘The Germans have long lost all hope,’ he said. He could see that shortages were beginning to take their toll, even on food. The German war machine was starting to judder under the strain. ‘The victory is near: Long live our homeland.’ The message never made it out.
On 24 June 1943, the Allies bombed the city of Wuppertal. Two weeks later, the planes were back again and this time the prison caught fire. One hundred and sixty-nine men, including the members of Leopold Vindictive, were taken from Wuppertal to Esterwegen on 7 July. Now it was prison clothes – black trousers and jacket, hardly brightened by the yellow lines that marked out a political prisoner. Their heads were shaved, although Raskin presented a strange sight since he was still allowed to keep his full beard on top of the bald scalp. Those who knew him there say he also retained his optimism. He was held in a barracks occupied by fellow Belgians and, exempted from certain tasks because he was a priest, continued to hold to some extent to the life of religious ritual that had governed his years before captivity.
In barracks number six, Macq worked some of his old engineering magic and somehow managed to construct a radio, from which prisoners could occasionally grab a muffled BBC broadcast which spoke of progress against the Nazis in the war. They might hear the coded messages personnels and wonder what men and women had now taken their place. Raskin was held in a different block but during a walk, the priest told Macq he had written to the German Ministry of Justice about their case, and had mentioned that in the campaign of May 1940 he had saved the lives of two German officers who lay wounded in a burning building. He hoped that might help them. He was already planning for his return.
The priest also found time to go back to his old First World War pastime and sketched out scenes from camp life. In small print he recorded in a notebook a few lines of a diary during his days there. Three days after his arrival he noted that there was nearly one death every night, usually from dysentery. Arseen Debaillie was among those who were ill but just about made it through. Muylaert and Joye were also hospitalized for long periods with fever. A month after arriving, he recorded a bitter warning of the other way death haunted the cells. ‘Saturday 7th August. This night suddenly twelve of the sixteen sentenced to death taken away.’
By May 1943, the Germans had written up their indictment and the men were told they would stand trial. On Wednesday, 25 August Raskin noted in his diary that the trial had now been scheduled for 31 August at 9 a.m.
In Belgium, no one knew what was happening. The friends had simply disappeared. Hector Joye’s wife Louise heard nothing of her husband: ‘What can I answer my sons when they ask for their father again and again?’ she wrote to the Red Cross. Rumours swirled around. One was that Raskin had been condemned to death but was pardoned after the intervention of the Queen Mother of Belgium.
When the morning of the trial came, the men’s prison clothes were taken away and replaced with their well-ironed civilian clothes. Raskin unfurled his priestly garments. But the Germans objected, saying the robes were akin to a uniform, which was banned. Instead he was given a blue suit. His friends’ sense of humour had not been dimmed by their confinement as they joked that it made him look like a car mechanic. Those left in the barracks also promised they would pray. Then came a thirty-kilometre drive through a beautiful sunny landscape.
Normally the court – grandly named a ‘Tribunal of the People’ – would sit in Berlin, but it was temporarily sitting in the Ursuline convent of Papenburg. The People’s Court had special jurisdiction over political crimes – it was a component of the system of terror within Germany and occupied lands. The President of the Court was to sit in judgement on Leopold Vindictive. He was dressed in a blood-red robe, giving him, in the eyes of the accused, a satanic appearance. The eyes themselves above an angular nose were also demonic, the Belgians thought. He had the look of a man who seemed to relish his work.
That impression was accurate. Roland Freisler was not a lawyer who had reluctantly collaborated with the Nazi system, he was an intrinsic part of its evil who had been instrumental in taking National Socialist ideology and expressing it in the form of law and decrees. He had authored a legal decree against ‘national parasites’ and had attended the Wannsee conference in 1942 to provide legal advice on the plans for the ‘Final Solution’ which would eliminate the Jews. His trials always began with a Nazi salute and he brooked no disobedience in his courtroom. Theatrics were important to him – he had learnt as much from attending Soviet show trials as an observer before the war. The outward façade was of a normal legal process – a judge, lawyers, dossiers of evidence – translated to the dining room of a convent for girls with a large cross hanging on the wall.
After the salute, the accusations against the group were read out. The accused sat on two benches, a line of bald heads except for one woman – the nurse, Hélène Dufour, who had passed messages in sealed envelopes for Dehennin. Two linked groups were on trial. One, around Dehennin, included the others who had worked with him; the other, around Raskin, included Joye, Macq, Dufrasne and Arseen Debaillie. All were accused of secretly collecting information about the German army and passing it on to the enemy or others. Additionally, some were charged with smuggling people out of the country, listening to non-German radio transmissions and being in possession of anti-German material.
It was explained to the court that they were two independent circles of espionage: one, under Dehennin, under the influence of the French Deuxième Bureau and occasionally the English intelligence service; the other, under Raskin, working only with the English. Muylaert was the only common point which brought them together.
The evidence the Germans had accumulated and now presented to the court was weighty. The meetings between Dehennin and his French contact were described in detail, as was the specific intelligence that had been handed over. There were names, codenames, dates, and details of the money that had passed between him and the French, as well as their work helping people escape the country. There were the lines of contact between Muylaert and MI6 and the attempt to pass telegrams, including those from Raskin.
Next they came to Leopold Vindictive. It had begun, the Germans said correctly, when the ‘racing’ pigeon descended by parachute with its questionnaire – although they had the timing wrong, saying it had been in May 1941. The German allegations described the way the three accused friends – Raskin, Joye and Arseen Debaillie – had met in Lichtervelde and then divided up the intelligence gathering between them to collect material to send back to Britain attached to the pigeon. They knew Raskin had been the one to write the final report. There were precise details of what the pigeon had carried back and of what each man had contributed – for instance that Arseen had reported about copper wires on the Bruges–Ghent railway line whilst Joye had reported on what he had seen around Bruges. The pigeon had not been intercepted, so had someone talked under duress – or had the notes and drafts the men used for their first dispatch been found somewhere? It was noted that Raskin had taken a photograph of the pigeon and that Arseen had developed the picture. The codename Leopold Vindictive 200 and its origins were explained, including the meeting with Keys. Here was their story, of which they were so proud, now turned into an accusation.
No one else was alleged to have collected any of the material – so at least the names of some of the others who provided details to Raskin in Brussels had been protected. Raskin himself was singled out as the central figure, having given orders to spy on military buildings in Ostend after the first pigeon was sent home. Their desperate desire for a further pigeon was noted. The friends’ travels in August and September after the sending of the first pigeon were also listed, including Michel and Arseen’s drive along the coast with Joye to make observations which could be transferred to drawings. Painful as it must have been, the group realized that some of them had talked. The Germans also produced the text of telegrams that had been passed to Muylaert to try to get to England, found during the October raids, as well as details of further intelligence that Muylaert had given Raskin.
The telegrams bore the general name Leopold Vindictive, not the names of the men, so they would not have provided enough information to catch the individuals involved straight away. The mystery of the gap between the October 1941 arrests and those of May 1942 remained. A few details were revealed about the meeting with Thonus in April 1942, and the telegram he had been given asking for a further pigeon was produced – the Germans had found that. But there was far less about the second Brussels group, with which Raskin had actually become far more entangled; they did not, for instance, know the real name of Devos. None of those arrested in May 1942 at Michelli’s house – including Thonus and Van Hooff – were put on trial with Leopold Vindictive. There were limits to the Germans’ knowledge. The telegrams – the ones given to both groups to send to London – were the most damning written evidence. They were the bitter legacy of the group’s failure to establish a reliable channel to London.
The Germans had also managed to intercept a message Raskin had tried to send Joye soon after their arrest. ‘The very strong anti-German feeling by the accused Raskin is very prominent in a secret message to Joye. He tried to influence Joye to give false information to the officers of the German departments who were interrogating them,’ the German indictment reads.
The defence lawyer for Raskin and Arseen Debaillie was a 64-year-old who received the indictment only a few days before the trial and was able to speak to his clients for just half an hour before it began, but Raskin still felt he was doing his best. After the accusation had been read out, the defendants had to leave and then return one by one. The judge asked them how they pleaded. If they did not plead guilty, he said he would give them a minute more to speak the truth.
Macq denied everything. Dufrasne said he had acted as a Belgian officer and done what such an officer had to do – his duty. Arseen said his brother, now deceased, had been the one responsible. At this the judge laughed. Joye suggested that some material had been passed to Raskin but it had all been destroyed and not sent anywhere. At 4 p.m. on the first day, the court broke up. Raskin’s mood was dark. Only now, it seems, was the promise of release disappearing from view. The next day, the defence lawyers made their case – some saying the evidence was hearsay or lacking, or that the men were former soldiers who were doing their duty. Only two offered up neither denials nor excuses, apologies or mitigating circumstances for their actions. They were Hélène Dufour and Raskin.
Dufour spoke in French of her pride in her country and her actions. Raskin spoke in German, the language of those who sought to judge him. His tone was confident and dignified. No official record remains of what he said; a German began noting it down but when he heard what was being said he stopped taking notes. Raskin was then silenced. ‘I will never forget his attitude in front of his judges,’ Macq later recalled. ‘He said he had done what he had to do as a Belgian. He took all responsibility for the group as its leader.’ Raskin said he felt no regret in the service he had given his country: ‘In conscience and before my God, I have done my duty.’ The judge responded harshly, describing him as an enemy of Germany.
There was plenty of evidence, but no full confession from the central players. The chances that they would all be found innocent were slim. But they hoped one or two might be. And the penalty for those found guilty still lay in the balance. A prison sentence would only hold them until the day that was surely coming soon, when the Allies would fight their way to Germany. Under the cross in a convent dining room, they awaited their fate.