I couldn't agree more Danny. I think
Andrée De Jongh's case would, and should, have attracted much support from service sources.
She was a remarkable woman.. After her wartime achievements, she returned to the Pays Basque to walk again over the same routes she'd walked at night with her airmen evaders (I think she did
32 'out and back' crossings during the war) with Baron Jean-François Nothomb (aka "Franco") who had taken over the leadership of Comet after Dédée's arrest on her 33rd crossing in January 1943. (A
graphic account by a B-17 crewman of a parachute jump and an evasion in company with "Franco")
Many members of the Belgian aristocracy were involved with Comet as they all knew each other and so it made penetration of their ranks by German agents more difficult - but sadly, it didn't stop it. Some 280 members of Comet in Belgium died (shot or deported to the camps) - some as a result of English-speaking Germans posing as evading aircrew, fake networks set up by the Germans to entrap the genuine article and by the use of double agents.
Prosper Dezitter,
Jacques Desoubrie, Maurice Grapin and Englishman
Harold Cole were some of the most
notorious double agents working for the Germans.
In the Pays Basque, far fewer died (only 7) as the guides were all Basque speakers and, being recruited from the ranks of the cross-border smugglers, they had an instinctive disregard for authority (some were Spanish Basque exiles) and 'getting inside' the organisation proved problematic for the Germans.
Following Dédée's arrest, I believe she was interrogated 19 times by the Germans before she was deported first to Ravensbrück and then to the hellhole that was
Mauthausen.
Following this, she went to Africa where she spent 28 years nursing lepers in the Belgian Congo, Cameroon, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Senegal before returning to Belgium in ill-health where she died in 2007. I spoke to a number of evaders in London in December last who had walked the night-time peaks of the Pyrenees with Dédée and, 70-odd years on, they still speak of her in glowing terms.