The safe house on Rue Jean Van Velve in Ixelles had become a trap, and Marcel Demasy knew it the moment the shooting started. For hours, the Germans pressed their attack against the small cell of Belgian resisters, men and women who had gathered under Demasy’s leadership to plan the assassination of Léon Degrelle, the leader of Belgian fascism. The Germans had been tipped off. The battle raged until the safe house finally fell, and most of its occupants were captured.
They would all be executed, and when Demasy himself was caught a month later, he was executed too. The tip that destroyed them had come from a man named Prosper De Zitter, and by the summer of 1943, De Zitter had become the most hated collaborator in Belgium, a traitor who had already brought down hundreds of resisters and who now stood directly in the path of the most unlikely spy master Britain would ever produce. Hardy Amies was born in 1909 in Maida Vale, London, the son of a civil servant and a mother who worked as a saleswoman for a clothing firm. Before the war, he moved through the fashion houses of Europe and even ran a textile factory in Germany in the 1930s, where he watched Nazism rise but paid it little mind.
Politics did not interest the flamboyant fashionista. His career was soaring. By 1934, he was design director at the fashion firm Lachasse, mingling with Hollywood stars like Ginger Rogers. The one thing that threatened to undo everything was his private life.
Hardy Amies was gay, and at the time, that was illegal. But the war changed everything for everyone. In 1940, as Britain stood alone, Amies was called up for officer training. The most unmilitary of men found himself in uniform, albeit a tailored one, serving as a captain in the Intelligence Corps.
He spoke fluent French and impeccable German, and his business experience made him an efficient organizer. This skill set quickly came to the attention of a shadowy organization operating under the innocuous title of MI1 SP. It was a cover. The real name was the Special Operations Executive, and its mission was to break all the rules of warfare.
Churchill gave it a single order: set Europe ablaze. The SOE would use guerrilla tactics, sabotage, and propaganda to do it. The SOE set up resistance networks throughout occupied Europe and employed spies, saboteurs, and trained killers. Recruits were taught to kill with their bare hands, to parachute into enemy territory, to operate radios, and to place explosives.
It recruited unconventionally. It chose linguists, it chose patriots, it chose people who thought outside the box, and in the early part of the war, very few people were thinking outside the box. Amies was just such a free thinker, and the SOE came calling. His personnel file recorded what an exemplary, if particular, recruit he was: “This officer has done very well on the course.
He is far tougher both physically and mentally than his rather precious appearance would suggest. ”
In November 1941, Amies went into action. He was sent to London to work in T Section, the branch of the SOE responsible for Belgium. Its job was to strike at the enemy in the occupied country, and Amies quickly found himself planning and executing missions into Belgium, as well as supervising the training and recruitment of T Section agents.
His flamboyant side always showed through. One document lists a series of Shakespearean code names, to which Amies added: “What a wonderful cast. May I do the costumes? ”
Despite the levity, Amies was involved in a deadly game.
He planned in detail the parachuting of waves of Belgian agents into their homeland and the clandestine landing of radio operators. Between July 1941 and October 1942, 45 agents, many selected by Amies himself, went into Belgium. Their mission was to make contact with men like Marcel Franckson, a young Belgian determined to strike back at Germany. For Franckson, taking on a ruthless, well-armed opponent was an enormous task.
It was hard to know how to hit back at such an enemy, so he welcomed the help of the SOE. But Amies was running into trouble. T Section found it hard to make contact with men like Franckson, and throughout 1941 and 1942, it was dealt a number of severe blows. Despite sending more than 40 agents into Belgium, the section was failing.
In Belgium, Amies faced a formidable enemy. The Germans were firmly in control, and their counterespionage system was waiting for his agents, excelling at catching SOE spies and breaking up their resistance networks. Two main German services operated against the networks. There was the Abwehr, which fought Allied intelligence, and the Geheime Feldpolizei, which worked directly against the networks to protect the army from spies and saboteurs.
These German units were especially skilled at targeting the SOE’s Achilles heel: the radio. Special detection units from the secret police listened out for SOE radio operators. Every time an operator used his set, he risked detection by the Funkabwehr, the section of the Abwehr specialized in locating clandestine radios. The first radio operators were soon arrested.
The Germans locked up many of these agents and radio operators in the notorious Saint-Gilles prison in central Brussels. The code names of the agents they caught became a roll call of T Section’s early failures. Agent Interjection, caught March 1942. Terrier, caught April 1942.
Balaclava, caught May 1942. Sometimes the Germans did something even more sinister. They turned some of the captured agents and used their radio sets to contact London and send disinformation. One turned agent in particular became notorious within T Section.
Armor Compion was used by the Germans from early 1942 and duped T Section for months. Requests were radioed to London for more weapons, money, and agents to be sent by parachute, only for the supplies and men to be dispatched straight into a trap. What was worse, Belgium was crawling with fascist sympathizers, volunteers ready to hunt down resisters or spies, and often they had an added incentive: money. These paid informers caused havoc, and one Nazi sympathizer on the German payroll became infamous.
Prosper De Zitter was the Abwehr’s number one Belgian agent. He had served in the Canadian Air Force in 1918, been charged with rape and embezzlement, and had done time in Belgium. He was a nasty piece of work. After the invasion of Belgium, he worked for the Germans while masquerading as an Allied soldier or airman, infiltrating resistance networks and escape lines set up to smuggle downed aircrew and agents out of the country.
And he was good at his job. This man had an extraordinary capacity to inspire trust and to present himself as an authentic resister. Some say that because of De Zitter and his collaborators, about a thousand resisters were arrested. Marcel Franckson’s small group of resisters encountered De Zitter to their cost.
He infiltrated an escape line that Franckson’s group often used, and then, in June 1943, De Zitter struck again, tipping off the Germans about the safe house in Ixelles and destroying the cell planning Degrelle’s assassination. Back in London, Amies and his colleagues were in despair. The Germans were winning. Thirty-two SOE agents had been captured.
Worse still, over and over, De Zitter had hindered Amies’s plans. First, an elaborate propaganda mission: an SOE agent set up a news service with London using carrier pigeons to send out copies of Belgian newspapers, and De Zitter busted the network. Then he hindered a Boys’ Own SOE plan for two agents who were pilots to steal an ME110 night fighter from a Nazi airfield. Now it was getting personal.
Amies wanted De Zitter’s head. The SOE was desperate for a solution, something that could turn the tide, so they decided to do something about it. They planned to stage a wave of assassinations across mainland Europe, including Belgium. In June 1943, a top-level SOE planning committee met.
The men present plotted the operation and set a start date: October 1st. The minutes of the meeting stated: “Execution campaign. The council considered a paper recommending a concerted campaign against SS and Gestapo officials. The proposal was accepted, but should for the most part be confined to civilian officials rather than soldiers.
”
News of the assassination operation soon filtered through to all departments of the SOE. This was Amies’s chance to get to De Zitter. His targets would be the collaborators and sympathizers who helped the Nazis rule. The operation was renamed Rat Week, and it was ready to be put into action.
A call went out to all country sections to identify targets for assassination. All Amies had to do first was get it approved by the Belgian government in exile, led by Hubert Pierlot. Pierlot’s government was made up of politicians who had fled their homeland in the chaos of 1940. It was bedeviled by infighting, and everyone had their own agenda.
When it came to intelligence, the Belgians had two agencies based in London: the CI, the civilian intelligence service, and its military rival, the DM6. All this made for confusion. Nothing could be done in Belgium without the say-so of these different groups. Amies turned on the charm and threw himself into the mission.
Letters flew back and forth between his department and the Belgian government via its representative, Pierlot. And Amies began to show just how far he had come from flamboyant fashion designer to ruthless spy master. In August 1943, he wrote: “Copy to M. Pierlot.
It is proposed to hold a so-called Rat Week in all the occupied countries when a certain number of Quislings are to disappear. Could you please create a list of possible candidates? Yours, Major H. Amies.
” When the Belgians stalled, an increasingly impatient Amies pressed for a response. “Am I to understand that your authorities do not want our boys to participate? The matter is really getting very urgent. ”
Across Europe, all the other governments in exile had granted their approval for the assassinations.
Amies was under pressure. And it was about to get worse. In August, he was promoted to acting head of T Section. With the new post, the personal burden on him to get the Belgians to play ball mounted.
Rat Week in Belgium depended on him. At the same time, a familiar name cropped up in SOE correspondence in a letter from MI5, ratcheting up the tension still further. The letter showed that MI5 also needed Amies to take out De Zitter: “Would you please refer to my letter of the 19th of August 1943 referring to the notorious Belgian Prosper De Zitter? I would be very interested if you would let me know how the matter now stands, in particular with regard to De Zitter and whether or not your proposed rat has taken place.
”
Then came a bombshell from the Belgian government in exile. Amies received a letter from his Belgian contact refusing to allow the rat hits on collaborators or Quislings, including De Zitter. “My authorities do not for the time being think it advisable to take special measures against Belgians collaborating with the enemy. This would involve too many difficulties.
” The difficulties they feared were reprisals. The Germans were notorious for murdering civilians across Europe in any area where sabotage or espionage occurred, and their reaction was even more aggressive if one of their own, a soldier or an agent, was killed. The Belgian government in exile feared such a bloodbath and would not budge. They stuck to a belief in judicial process: “Lists of traitors are being made up with a view to meting out to them their just sentence after the war.
” By late October, the official deadline had passed, and Amies seemed defeated. “I am sorry,” he wrote. “The Belgian authorities will not allow us to carry out Rat Week as originally intended. ” It looked as if De Zitter and others like him were safe.
There the story of Rat Week appeared to end. On the surface, it seemed a failure. But Amies would not let the Belgians stop him. He turned to his top agent, André Wendelen.
Wendelen was a T Section star who had volunteered to return to Belgium, and he was there on a mission with another agent, P. Leclercq, to establish links with Belgian resistance groups. Amies’s plan was to send Wendelen a top secret weapon from the SOE’s inventory, one that had been designed specifically for assassination and that had been earmarked for Rat Week. It was called the Welrod.
It had been designed specifically to kill enemies of the state or anyone who was a nuisance to the SOE. The pistol was affectionately known as the bicycle pump, or the assassin’s pistol. Critically, if it fell into enemy hands, it could not be traced. The Welrod was what is described as a sterile weapon.
It had no numbers, no maker’s marks. Nothing indicated who had made it or made it traceable. The Royal Belgian Military Museum was bequeathed one of these rare weapons twenty years ago by former members of the Belgian resistance. The keeper of firearms at the museum, Paul Dubruno, showed just what a useful killing machine it was.
The way to load a Welrod pistol is the same as for a normal automatic pistol: put from one to seven cartridges in the magazine, then put the magazine in two places. The magazine is also the handle of the pistol. To make it ready to fire, push the bolt forwards and turn the back of the bolt to close it completely. Then handle the pistol, being sure the safety behind the handle is pushed forward, and just pull the trigger.
The design made it the perfect weapon for a discreet execution because it was silent. The main purpose, of course, was to kill in silence. Inside the tube there was a significant quantity of washers, and between the washers were rubber washers. The bullet, passing through the holes, left the barrel quicker than the sound, which was kept inside the tube.
The purpose of the silencer was to delay the sounds coming out of the tube. The choice of caliber was also deliberate. The 7. 65 Browning had a muzzle speed of about 900 feet per second, and in a device like the Welrod, it could be subsonic.
That was very important for a silenced pistol used to kill people without making too much noise. The only thing you would hear was the firing pin, and the bullet stopping into somebody or something. In November 1943, Amies was ready to send in the Welrods. The mission was called Tibble II.
His plan was backed up by the head of operations for the SOE: “It is far better to send the five Welrods and let them do what they can. ” A handwritten message on the back of the note made no illusions as to what the mission was. “Tibble. The pistols are intended for the elimination of your enemies.
Let us know as soon as you have any results. ”
Even though Welrods did make it into Belgium, no one can be certain that these or later batches were used to kill collaborators. Most police records were destroyed in the last months of the war. But what is clear is that a great deal of killing did occur in 1943 and 1944, and Marcel Franckson was involved.
His small group of saboteurs ended up working as an action squad with the Front de l’Indépendance, a group of communist-inspired partisans. Marcel’s job was specific: to kill anyone working against the group. Back in London, Amies was eager to impress his superiors. He explained that groups like the Front de l’Indépendance had been extremely busy.
A Rat Week memo of the time talks of a collaborator being arrested, interrogated, and shot through the nape of the neck. Then, as Rat Week continued, even better news filtered out of Belgium. More violence and retribution had been meted out. Nazi sympathizers, pro-Nazi activists, and racist politicians were killed.
Amies was able to show more results and placed them under the heading “Rat. ” It was a success for the dressmaker spy. And even when it was officially over, the killing continued. As 1943 turned to 1944, Marcel Franckson’s group continued to execute any collaborators they could find.
Even now, decades later, Franckson feels no remorse. But one person had so far managed to elude the killers: the number one target, De Zitter. However, a new SOE agent, François Mathot, had him in his sights. Mathot was sent to Belgium in early 1944 to make contact with Marcel Franckson’s group and coordinate their activities.
He took with him two weapons. The agents had to choose which weapons they would bring; they were free to choose. Mathot chose a small . 380 automatic pistol because it was small and concealable, and a Welrod.
It was to be used to kill people, because it was not a weapon for war; it was a weapon to eliminate something. One night Mathot decided to make his move on De Zitter, because De Zitter was known to frequent a dancing place in the center of Brussels. They staked out the location for hours, but De Zitter never showed. It seemed he had got away with his crimes once again.
Despite this, Amies and his men managed to transform the overall picture in Belgium throughout 1943 and 1944. They had turned the page on their early failures. In November 1943, Brussels newspaper vans delivered the daily editions of Le Soir. But the resistance had been at work and replaced the Nazi-sponsored edition with a resistance-printed version bearing articles ridiculing the Nazis.
It was a magnificent propaganda success. Sabotage operations and armed attacks were also on the increase, and Marcel Franckson was in the thick of it. Resisters blew up supplies of oil and fuel, locomotives and barges. They blew up factories and cut communication lines.
Group Z, another prominent resistance organization, was especially active. Its great achievement was sabotaging the entire Belgian high-tension electricity network. The resistance, with the SOE’s guidance, was managing to harass the Germans on a daily basis and turn the tables. Soon Amies would be at the heart of one of the most successful stories of SOE wartime activity, a masterful T Section operation.
Operation Overlord was the planned Allied invasion of mainland Europe. By the summer of 1944, it was clear to everyone, even the Germans, that it was coming. The Allied Supreme Command needed the resistance in mainland Europe to ramp up its sabotage and harassment operations behind enemy lines. In the days before D-Day, they swung into action.
The US Army Air Force joined the RAF in dropping more and more weapons to SOE agents as sabotage operations escalated still further. Amies’s T Section was deeply involved. Hundreds of canisters of arms were dropped into Belgium, and soon his involvement would go far deeper. On June 6th, 1944, the Allies finally attacked the beaches of Normandy.
It was the greatest amphibious operation ever undertaken. In the weeks after D-Day, the Allies pushed further into France, but eventually the advance slowed. Supplies could not keep up with demand. What the Allies badly needed was deep-water ports.
At the close of the war, the Germans instituted a program of demolitions. Their aim, as they withdrew toward the Reich, was to destroy anything that might be of use to the Allies, including ports and railways. In France, after the Normandy landings, the retreating Germans had rendered virtually all port equipment unusable. The Allies were now vulnerable.
Everything hinged on the capture of the last major port left: Antwerp. Antwerp was the key port. If the Allies captured it intact, if the cranes and the infrastructure were in one piece, it would allow them to reinforce their troops in Northwest Europe. Amies and his agents were given the mission of protecting Antwerp.
T Section was at the heart of an SOE plan called Counter Scorch. It involved using resistance groups under SOE control to prevent the destruction of this vital strategic target. Amies sent in two wireless operators. They helped resistance teams, notably from Group X, to defend the port.
The two agents kept the men at the port informed and supplied with regular drops of weapons and ammunition, as well as detailed instructions. As Allied ground troops approached in early September 1944, any German attempt to destroy the cranes or docks was robustly seen off. Antwerp’s port was held. It was a massive success.
The whole port system of canals and docks fell undestroyed into Allied hands. The saving of the port enabled supplies to continue to flow to the advancing Allied armies, and Belgium was liberated in nearly a week. Now came the chance for retribution. In concert with Amies, resistance forces came out of hiding to police the handover when the Allies arrived, and the word went out to catch the wanted man.
Prosper De Zitter, Amies’s former foe, was tracked down, imprisoned, and then executed in Brussels four years later. It was a triumph for Amies and the Belgian resistance. Eisenhower praised their work in an open letter: “They can be justly proud of having by their devoted heroism contributed so largely to the liberation of their beloved homeland. ”
Hardy Amies was then sent to Brussels.
He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and, for six months, headed an SOE mission designed to wind down the resistance networks he had helped create. It was a personal moment of glory for the dressmaker from Maida Vale. After the war, Amies went back to the glamorous world of fashion. With a wealthy co-investor, he set up the label that bears his name.
He then penned countless designs for Queen Elizabeth II and became her couturier. But all memory of his role in Rat Week and the wider successes and failures of T Section seemed to be conveniently forgotten. Amies rarely acknowledged his part in the SOE or the details of its Belgian missions. If approached about Rat Week, he simply told people: “Sorry, old boy.
I don’t know anything about it. ”
Hardy Amies was knighted in 1989, and it was only after his death that some of the truth about this dressmaker spy’s surprising past began to emerge.
