Christiaan Lindemans – Wikipédia

Christiaan Lindemans (born the October 24, 1912 in Rotterdam and died the July 18, 1946 In Schéveningue) is a Dutch double spy of the Second World War, officer of the Belgian army and SEE agent who defected for the Abwehr in 1944.

He officiated under the name of Freddi Desmet and had as a nickname “King Kong” or in certain circles, “the killer” because he carried out execution missions. He would have been a member of the Z organization of Colonel Claude Dansey.

He delivered the plans of Operation Market Garden, or more precisely, from Operation Arnhem to the Germans two days before the attack and was thus accused of having caused the defeat of the Allies to the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, a Significant defeat since she extended the six -month war and allowed the Red Army to enter the first in Berlin.

However, it seems that the betrayal of Lindemans did not have this impact, the Germans who feared an intoxication operation and not having taken the elements he provided to them seriously.

Before the start of the Second World War, Lindemans worked alongside his brother Jan as a mechanic in his father’s garage in Rotterdam. During the summer of 1936, he was injured in a motorcycle accident, the cracked skull and the injured left arm and leg, which forced him to walk with a heavy and similar approach, and earned him, With its large and heavy stature (1.90 m and 120 kg), the nickname of King Kong. He spoke French and German well and a little English.

Lindemans began to work as an informant for British secret services in the spring of 1940, relaying the movements of ships to London. In August of the same year, he found a job as a truck driver on the Lille-Paris route, carrying gasoline for the German air forces. While living in Lille, and through his girlfriend (who later became his wife), he joined the Resistance in 1940. Around September 1942, Lindemans established his own escape sector in Abbeville where he was arrested two months later on denunciation. Despite a five -month imprisonment by the Germans, he remains the only member of his organization to be detained.

In 1943, its popularity as a leader in the Dutch resistance was at its peak. He had started collecting jewelry and other valuables with rich women in order to provide combat funds for the “outing” underground through Belgium and the Netherlands occupied to Spain and Portugal .

Lindemans served as a contact between Dutch resistance movements, whether engaged in sabotage of communications, the protection of people on the run or in intelligence, in connection with the British services. Lindemans was a member of one of the twelve recognized units of the Belgian clandestine army called the liberated, founded by Camille Tromme, which allowed him to remain in possession of a machine gun and a revolver.

In February 1944, his younger brother Henk was arrested in Rotterdam by the SIPO and held in captivity in The Hague, while waiting for his execution, for helping English to escape from the Netherlands. On February 24, the arrest in France of his wife, Gilberte Letupp, French cabaret singer who worked for the resistance in France, in France and was then awaiting their second child.

In March 1944, he contacted ABWEHR members stationed in the Netherlands and agreed to become a double agent in exchange for the release of his wife and brother. His brother was indeed released shortly after and sent to Germany as a voluntary worker. Contrary to what Hermann Giskes, chief of the Dutch abwehr, assures him, no action is then carried out in favor of his wife.

Gilberte is hardly questioned but does not speak. She is taken to Fresnes prison, south of Paris, where she remains handcuffed to hands and feet, without water or food, for four days. Againly questioned again, she spends the following six months in isolation because of her silence.

She must be part of the prisoners of the last convoy (August 15, 1944) of Paris deportees to Germany but she escapes it because of her condition, because she is then nine months pregnant. She gives birth on August 25 to a little girl named Christianne. Gilberte’s release may have been ordered by Colonel Oscar Reile, a member of the Abwehr.

His testimony will be recorded in writing and will serve as proof during the Nuremberg trial.