Leonie Brandt

Leonie Brandt , actually Gertrud Franziska Pütz , also Leonie Reiman (born October 28, 1902 in Würselen , † January 27, 1978 in Amsterdam ), was a German - Dutch actress , author and double agent .

biography

Many details from Leonie Brandt's curriculum vitae are only known because of her own statements and are therefore partly doubtful. She was born as Gertrud Pütz, nicknamed Leonie , and was the daughter of a miner . During the First World War , like other children from the region, she smuggled food from the Netherlands to Germany. According to her own statements, she was said to have been asked by the German secret service at the age of 14 to transmit news; In return, she was promised that her illegal border crossings would be tolerated. After the war, she worked as a nurse in Metz , Paris and Aachen, among other things , and there, too, did jobs for the German secret service. In 1921 she was briefly married to a customs officer ten years her senior .

In 1925 Leonie Pütz moved to Amsterdam , where she became known as an actress under the stage name Leonie Reiman . The reviews of their performances were not entirely positive, but their "charm" and their "innate daring" were praised. In 1929 she married Karl Brandt, the wealthy owner of an Amsterdam bakery , and thus received Dutch citizenship. The couple had two children: Marie Louise (1932–2019) and Carl (* 1935). The children were primarily cared for by the father, as his wife focused on her career as an actress and now also as a playwright.

At around the same time, Leonie Brandt, as she now called herself, also became active as a spy for the Dutch secret service GS III , according to her own statements. She is said to have been recruited by her alleged lover at the time, the Amsterdam Attorney General Johan van Thiel . He probably also served as a model for the main character in her play De officier van justitie (1931), in which a prosecutor cheats on his wife. In the 1930s Leonie Brandt traveled regularly to Germany to collect information about developments in Germany, but also about the Dutch National Socialist Nationaal-Socialistische Bewegungsing (NSB). She built up an extensive network with contacts to high-ranking personalities such as the Dutch Justice Minister Carel Goseling and the German General Eduard Wagner as well as to employees of the Dutch criminal police, the German SD and the German Abwehr .

In 1939 Leonie Brandt offered the SD to work for the German intelligence service; she became a double agent. In the same year she opened the panel club on Leidseplein in Amsterdam, where the “good company” of the city soon frequented. During a visit to Germany in March 1940, the Gestapo arrested her for high treason . She was released allegedly against a promise to refrain from further espionage. Two months later, the Netherlands was occupied by the German Wehrmacht and the panel club was closed. In October 1941 Leonie Brandt was arrested again by the Germans and released again, only to be deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in April 1942 with the note “return not wanted”. There she became block elder and worked as a nurse. There are contradicting testimonies about her behavior in Ravensbrück: some survivors reported that she helped fellow prisoners, others said that she had abused and blackmailed other women.

In the course of the rescue operation of the White Buses , Leonie Brandt was brought to Sweden by the Swedish Red Cross at the end of April 1945 with other camp inmates . After it became known what activities she had been doing before and during the Second World War , she was interned in Sweden , but was then allowed to return to the Netherlands. From August 1945 she worked for the Bureau Nationale Veiligheid , where she interrogated war criminals . This activity became the source of a number of rumors: She is said to have sold compromising documents to the war criminal Pieter Menten , including the so-called Stadhoudersbrief , with which Prince Bernhard allegedly offered Adolf Hitler the surrender of the Netherlands in 1942 if he, Bernhard, governor of the Country will. Brandt stated that he had received the letter, the existence of which has not yet been proven, from Minister Goseling.

Leonie Brandt's husband, Karl Brandt, died in 1949. Three years later she moved with her children to Rimburg , where she took over a café with a swimming pool . Her health was getting worse and worse, she apparently suffered from schizophrenia and was also an alcoholic . In October 1955 she was admitted to a psychiatric facility in Venray for a year and a half . After her release, she led an unsteady wandering life until she returned to Amsterdam in 1967. In 1976 it came into the public eye when charges were brought against Pieter Menten. She has been interviewed several times and asked about her life as a double agent.

Leonie Brandt died on January 27, 1978 at the age of 75 in a furnished room in Amsterdam. The newspaper Het Vrije Volk wrote: “Kort daarop hoorden velen in den lande met een zucht van verlichting dat de lippen van Leonie Brandt-Pütz voor eternally were paid.” (“Shortly afterwards, many in the country heard with a sigh of relief that the Leonie Brandt-Pütz's lips were sealed forever. ")

Reminder and reception

In 2003 the Dutch historian Gerard Aalders , employee of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie , published a biography of Leonie Brandt, and in 2005 the book was published in German. The main source for this book were the statements of Brandt himself, and her biographer confessed that it was difficult to distinguish what was fact and what was fantasy about her résumé. Leonie Brandt's son had tried in vain to prevent the publication of the book in court. He remembers his mother as "noble mens". He feared that a book about her would be a sensational story. The judge responsible, however, rejected the complaint, as it could not be assumed that Aalders had not worked scientifically.

Three years later, the biography Een kusje op jeziel by Leonie Brandt's daughter Loek Kessels , a journalist and author, was published. She was known in the Netherlands because she had worked for the advice column Lieve Mona in the tabloid magazine Story for over two decades . In her biography, she reported that her mother had abused and terrorized the two children under the influence of alcohol for years after the father's death.

In 2020 the filmmaker Annette Apon published a documentary about Leonie Brandt with the title Leonie, actrice en spionne .

literature

• Gerard Aalders: Leonie. The life of the double agent . Reclam, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 978-3-379-00837-2 .
• Loek Kessels: Een kusje op je goal: het tragische levensverhaal van Lieve Mona . Ed .: Karin Dienaar. Marmer, 2017, ISBN 978-94-6068-368-8 (Dutch).

Individual evidence

1. ^ A lady van allure, even more exciting than Mata Hari. In: trouw.nl. July 27, 1994, accessed February 15, 2020 (Dutch). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Pütz, Gertrud Franziska (1901-1978). In: resources.huygens.knaw.nl. Retrieved February 15, 2020 . 
3. ↑ 'Geen biography spy Brandt'. In: volkskrant.nl. June 20, 2003, accessed February 15, 2020 (Dutch). 
4. ↑ Book over spionne can be different. In: trouw.nl. July 4, 2003, accessed February 15, 2020 (Dutch). 
5. ^ De vrouw achter Lieve Mona, de raadgever van duizenden briefschrijvers. In: volkskrant.nl. June 19, 2019, accessed February 15, 2020 (Dutch). 
6. ↑ Leonie, actrice en spionne (2020). In: imdb.com. Retrieved February 15, 2020 .