'Freedom Fighting Heros' sometimes are anything but. You can only pin them down by asking questions.

 

What is more important in a war? Unity, say some. No, false compromise can lead to disaster, others say. As it did in the Battle of Arnhem. Questions need asking, even if it hurts. A lesson for today.

Colonel Oreste Pinto earned himself praise from very high up as a “Spy-Catcher” during WWII. But he had to be prepared to make himself enemies. The job he was tasked to do was more important than having many friends. Colonel Pinto worked in Counter-Intelligence against the Nazis.

One of his biggest successes proved to be one of his greatest failures by the same token. Pinto was the man who in the fall of 1944 detected a Double-Agent in the Dutch Resistance that secretly worked for the German Abwehr. But Pinto failed to arrest this man, a most famous leader of the Dutch resistance, nick-named “King Kong”, before he could inform the Nazis about “Operation Market-Garden”. What could have ended the war before Christmas 1944 turned into a “bloody disaster” for 7,000 allied casualties in the Battle of Arnhem alone.

Today we know that in all probability, “King Kong”, or Christian Lindemans, received protection from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Bernhard, German born son-in-law of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, was a member of the SS, lied about his Nazi past (“I can declare with the hand on the Bible: I was never a Nazi”), but he retained the image of a “Freedom Fighter” until well after the end of WWII.

In all likelihood Bernhard is the high ranking Dutch official whom Pinto doesn’t name in his book, who betrayed “Operation Market-Garden” to the Germans by sending “King Kong” over to his Nazi Colleagues to stop the allied advance at the Bridge at Arnhem. Bernhard was put in charge of the Dutch HQ in Brussels on September 13, 1944. One day later, Pinto was informed by Dutch officers that his request to interrogate Lindemans had been rejected. Instead, Pinto found out, Lindemans had been embedded in a Canadian Unit to “alert the Dutch resistance”. Another spy later revealed that Lindemans went straight to the Abwehr, who made sure that German tanks rolled into position the night before the biggest Airborne Invasion ever conducted was to begin.  (more...)

'Freedom Fighting Heros' sometimes are anything but. You can only pin them down by asking questions.