Peter Tazelaar

Peter Tazelaar (1945)

Peter Tazelaar , occasionally also written Pieter (* May 5, 1920 in Fort de Kock , Dutch East Indies ; † June 6, 1993 in Hindeloopen ), was a Dutch resistance fighter and spy during the Second World War . Although many of his missions failed, he is considered one of the role models for Ian Fleming's fictional secret agent, James Bond .

biography

Training and trip to England

Peter Tazelaar was born in 1920 in what was then the Dutch East Indies colony, the son of a civil servant, and came to the European Netherlands in 1938, where he initially enrolled at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Marine (KIM) in Den Helder as an officer candidate. However, he ended his training early because he could not cope with the theoretical courses. In the following year he moved to relatives in Groningen , where he took courses at the seafaring school there. At the beginning of the German Wehrmacht's invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, he served in the merchant navy . Tazelaar first tried to leave the country via an escape route along the coast towards England , but was stopped by the heavy air raids on Rotterdam . At the end of the month he was back in Groningen, where he soon came into contact with the medical student Johan Birnie, who, like him, had studied at the now closed KIM. At that time, Birnie was the contact person in Groningen for the Ordedienst resistance group , which Tazelaar then joined. Since it was clear to the members of the Ordedienst that they would need outside help to fight the occupiers, Tazelaar was commissioned to try again as one of the so-called " Engelandvaarder " (in German: "Englandfahrer" or "Englandsegler") Reach Great Britain and contact the British Secret Service there. To this end, he procured a place on the Swiss freighter SS St. Cergue , which set sail for New York in July 1941 on behalf of the Germans under the Panamanian flag . During the crossing, the ship was stopped by the British cruiser HMS Devonshire and forced to a stop in Tórshavn on the Faroe Islands . From here, finally together further from Tazelaar arrived with two on board Dutch resistance fighters - Erik Hazel Roelfzema and Bram van der Stok - after London .

Contact Holland

After a stay in the so-called Patriotic School , where it was to be determined whether the newcomers were German spies, Tazelaar and Hazelhoff Roelfzema became members of the resistance group The Mews, which consisted of refugee Dutch people . They found that neither the British secret services nor the Dutch government in exile had a clear idea of ​​the situation in their occupied homeland. To change this, together with Hazelhoff Roelfzema's school friend Christoffel Krediet , they planned to contact the Dutch resistance as part of the so-called Operation Contact Holland . This operation included the extraction of important members of the resistance and the supply of radio equipment to the resistance. For this purpose, after a few unsuccessful attempts, Tazelaar and his comrades crossed the English Channel to Scheveningen in a small boat on the night of November 22nd to 23rd, 1941 . The first line after the successful landing was the smuggling of Tazelaar, disguised as a drunken guest at a party, into the Palace Hotel , which was used by the Germans as their headquarters. Although the infiltration was initially successful, the subsequent planned contact with England failed due to defective radio equipment. The second part of the operation - rescuing the resistance members - also failed because the conditions at sea had meanwhile deteriorated too much. Despite its lack of success, this action is said to have served years later as a model for the opening scene of the James Bond film Goldfinger , in which the title character carries out a very similar but much more successful operation.

Since the Germans had meanwhile tracked down the agents and were pursuing them, Tazelaar had no choice but to stay behind for the time being. He was finally able to leave the Netherlands in January 1942 and did not reach England again until April, after a trip across Europe. Despite the manageable success of the mission, Tazelaar was awarded the Military Wilhelms Order in September 1944 for his role at Contact Holland , after he was not immediately honored in contrast to Hazelhoff Roelfzema .

Remaining war years

After his return to London, Tazelaar turned away initially disaffected by the work of an agent and worked as a firefighter with the London Fire Brigade in the Soho district . In September 1944, however, he was recruited by the Dutch secret service Bureau Bijzondere Opdrachten for a new mission in the north of his home country: Together with the radio operator and former Jedburgh team member Lykele Faber, he jumped off with a parachute near Heerenveen . Her job was designed for six months and consisted of maintaining radio contact with England and setting up safe dropping points for supplies to Frisian resistance groups. In March 1945, the two were tracked down by the Germans, but were able to escape and hide for the remaining weeks until the end of the war. Tazelaar was awarded the Bronze Lion for his role in the liberation of the northern Netherlands .

After the end of the war

Peter Tazelaar (right in the light coat) on Queen Wilhelmina's return to the Netherlands

Following the liberation of the Netherlands, Tazelaar and Hazelhoff Roelfzema worked for a few months as an adjutant to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands . In this role he was present, among other things, when the monarch returned to Dutch soil. Furthermore, it was he who brought Wilhelmina the news of the capitulation of the German Reich. In August 1945 he left the service of the royal family and went to Ceylon to fight against the Japanese occupiers in the Dutch East Indies. After the beginning of the Cold War , Tazelaar was recruited by the American foreign intelligence service CIA , for which he carried out several operations against the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. He finally died of esophageal cancer in June 1993 at the age of 73 , leaving behind a son.

The soldier of Orange

The 1977 feature film The Soldier of Orange by director Paul Verhoeven , a film adaptation of Hazelhoff Roelfzema's bestselling novel Soldaat van Oranje , shows a detailed but historically imprecise version of Operation Contact Holland . The significantly involved Peter Tazelaar does not appear in the film, instead he and several other resistance fighters are represented by the fictional "Guus LeJeune", who is played by the actor Jeroen Krabbé .

literature

• Victor Laurentius: De Grote Tazelaar - Ridder & Rebel . St. de Grote, The Hague 2010, ISBN 978-90-813972-1-6 .

Web links

Commons : Peter Tazelaar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography of Tazelaar at boekje-pienter.nl ( archive link, PDF) (Dutch)
• Tazelaars and Hazelhoff Roelfzemas resistance activities at Anotheretijden.nl (Dutch)
• Tazelaar's mission to Scheveningen at warhistoryonline.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ JWM Schulten: De geschiedenis van de Ordedienst - mythe en werkelijkheid van een verzetsorganisatie . 1st edition. Sdu, Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 978-90-12-08633-2 .
2. ↑ ST. CERGUE History ( Memento from September 2, 2018 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on October 22, 2019 (English)
3. ^ David Harrison: The secret war mission that inspired Goldfinger scene. In: telegraph.co.uk. The Telegraph, April 17, 2010, accessed October 22, 2019 . 
4. ↑ Tim Shipman: Revealed: How James Bond was based on a real life MI6 special agent ... white tuxedo and all (except he was Dutch). In: dailymail.co.uk. The Daily Mail, September 22, 2010, accessed October 22, 2019 . 
5. ↑ Karlijn Bruggeman: Soldaat van Oranje als geschiedschrijving . Ed .: Universiteit Utrecht. Utrecht 2015, p. 18 .