My late father’s story was a little different than most. He was not an American, but he was Jewish, and he did fight against the Nazis. In a slightly less conventional way, I guess you might say.
Dad was born Georg Franz Hein in Hanover, Germany in 1919. In 1934, just after Hitler came to power, his widowed mother sent him to safety in London (along with his older brother in 1933, and his younger sister in 1938). There, he learned English and completed his education.
On September 3, 1939, Dad stole the identity of a dead London schoolmate (Peter Stevens) and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He trained as a bomber pilot, and was posted to a combat squadron on April 1, 1941. He flew 22 combat missions before his plane was hit by flak over Berlin, and he had to force-land (out of fuel) near Amsterdam on September 8, 1941. He destroyed the secret bits of the plane and set fire to the wreckage, but he was captured by the Nazis less than 24 hours later. He spent the next 3 years and 8 months as a POW in his own country, without any protection whatsoever under the Geneva Convention.
As a prisoner of war, my father made 9 escape attempts, getting outside the wire on 3 occasions. On his very first escape, he and a Canadian pilot jumped off a moving prison transport train in a hail of Nazi bullets. They hid by day and travelled by night, eventually getting to my grandmother’s home in Hanover, hoping to find food, money and civilian clothing. But they discovered instead that my grandmother had committed suicide some 6 weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. They received help from an aunt and uncle (who were later murdered in a concentration camp), but they were eventually arrested again at Frankfurt on their way to Switzerland. Dad was a named member of the executive of the “X” escape organization, responsible for all scrounging efforts in the East Compound of the infamous Stalag Luft 3.
After liberation on April 28, 1945, Dad was one of only 69 members of the Royal Air Force to be awarded Britain’s Military Cross for bravery in World War 2. He went on to become a British citizen before serving 5 years as an MI6 agent, spying against the Soviets in East Germany.
He emigrated to Canada in 1952, and died there in 1979, without telling anyone in his own family his true ethnic heritage.
It took me 18 years of research to piece together his story as the only known German-Jewish bomber pilot in the RAF.
Today, he is mentioned in over 20 books about POW escapers, including the biography I wrote, ‘Escape, Evasion and Revenge’.
