Who “Betrayed” Market Garden? 

The Traitor of Arnhem seeks to finally explain the failure of the airborne Operation Market Garden in September 1944, as resulting from the betrayal of the plans to the operation by spies within the Allied forces. Robert Verkaik points to two sources for the leaked plans. The first spy was Christiaan Lindemans, a member of the Dutch resistance who walked into German lines on the morning of September 15, two days before Market Garden was scheduled to begin, with specific knowledge that airborne drops would take place at Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and Arnhem. The intelligence chief of General Kurt Student’s 1^st Falslschirmjager Army debriefed Lindemans, though it is unclear exactly what steps were taken to prepare German defenses as a result.

At the very least, once Market Garden began on September 17/18, it became quite clear that Lindemans’ warnings had been accurate, so the Germans essentially then knew the goals for the airborne operation. The story of Lindemans is not a positive one for SOE and the British handling of the Dutch resistance that Lindemans was a part of. Though members of the Resistance had warned SOE that Lindemans was working for the Germans before, and despite a number of Dutch operatives close to Lindemans having been snapped up by the German Abwehr in the months before Market Garden, Lindemans was allowed to compromise a good part of the Dutch Resistance.

Lindemans had been passing information on to Hermann Giskes, head of the Abwehr in Holland, including the plans for Operation Comet, an early version of Market Garden. As for his motives, Lindemans later claimed that he turned because his wife Gilou Letuppe had been imprisoned by the SD in Paris, and she was used as leverage to get him to betray 267 of his Dutch comrades. When Letuppe was freed from prison by the Allied Liberation of Paris, Lindemans continued to work for Giskes, which calls into question his stated motive to betray his friends.

The second leak came from a source with the British government that was known as Agent Josephine (the agent was known by a series of code names) who was passing on intelligence to Karl Heinz Kraemer, the primary Abwehr officer in Stockholm. Josephine’s warning by microdot was sent to Kraemer in Stockholm on September 16, and served along with Lindemans’ intelligence to confirm the objectives of Market Garden. Josephine has allegedly never been identified by either MI5 or 6 in the years since, a claim that Verkaik does not accept.

Verkaik points to circumstantial evidence he believes exposes Josephine as being the infamous Anthony Blunt, Soviet agent, and at the time working for MI5. Blunt was given the task at one point of investigating who Josephine might have been, and Verkaik believes Blunt killed the investigation into Josephine and did not properly pursue routes that might have been fruitful so as to not expose himself. Verkaik admits that all of the evidence is circumstantial, and hangs his hat on the fact that Josephine had passed on information that had confirmed the deception Operation Fortitude which confused the Germans in regards to the Normandy Landings, but the same agent gave a correct warning regarding Market Garden. In the opinion of Verkaik, only the Soviets had the motive to allow a successful landing in Normandy and then for Market Garden to fail, preventing the Western Allies from beating the Russians to Berlin. This of course is possible, but certainly not proof that Josephine was somehow working for the Soviets, and certainly does not prove that Blunt was Josephine. Verkaik also cites Walter Schellenberg, who claimed after the war that Kraemer’s source for intelligence was the Russians.

Verkaik dismisses Kraemer’s claims that Josephine passed on messages through a Hungarian diplomat in Madrid, Josef Fuellop, to the Hungarian embassy in Stockholm and on to Kraemer. Kraemer received the microdot on September 13/14 but the German Foreign Office did not pass it to Berlin until the 17th. Verkaik further asserts that there must be proof that Blunt was Josephine in the British intelligence archives which is being concealed to protect the royal family (Blunt became Surveyor of the King’s Pictures after the war) and the greatest betrayal of World War II would reflect poorly on MI5 and the British government if it were to be proven that Blunt was responsible. It is also possible that Josephine is being protected because s/he was a high ranking official in the British government, or simply because there is not the evidence in the archives to prove Josephine’s exact identity. Furthermore, Verkaik does not attempt to explain if Josephine was a real source, turned by Blunt, or how Blunt would have passed on the Arnhem warning to Kraemer.

Verkaik also makes much of the fact that Lindemans was a Communist to assert that his motive to betray the Market Garden plans was in order to help Stalin. Verkaik’s opinion appears to be that because the German Reich was obviously collapsing, the only possible reason to pass on such intelligence to the Germans was to help the Communists take over Europe, when there are many other plausible motives. Even with the betrayal of the plans of the airborne operation, it came close to succeeding, though whether that would have led to the scenario envisioned of the Western Allies reaching Berlin before the Red Army is open to debate. Verkaik could be right, but the evidence he presents does not prove his main thesis that Communists working for the Kremlin were behind Lindemans and Josephine. The Traitor of Arnhem is a book therefore to be read with caution for an example of the gray world of intelligence and espionage in military operations.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre, The Farthest Valley, and The Soldier's Reward .

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Note: The Traitor of Arnhem is also available in e-editions.

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