Saturday, June 27, 2026

I read again about the misogynistic and horrible double agent, Harry Evers.

"It took talent to do things properly. Evers would check concrete floors for cracks that suggested hidden passages and would measure the distance between the height of a ceiling and the floor above. Power over women was a particular pleasure. There was a room next to his office that he used for the rape of the Jewish girls who happened to take his fancy. He liked to refer to his wife as his 'cauliflower' and to these women as his 'sprouts.'"

(65-66).

Bart van Es

"The Cut Out Girl..."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36978239-the-cut-out-girl

"The wartime career of Harry Evers matches those of many collaborators recorded in the archives. Once the balance of power is altered, they begin to think about changing sides. In the summer of 1943, just as the transport of Dutch Jews was nearing completion, the Wehrmacht's advance into Russia was stopped...Armed resistance, virtually nil at the start of the year, grew rapidly in the last two months of 1943. Meanwhile, the skies darkened with Allied bombers and Evers, like others, started to worry about what he had done. 

So from the New Year onward, he began actively to help the resistance and took every opportunity to tell them about his bravery. As a double agent working for the Germans under instructions from his own side, as time went on, he became ever more helpful...

In the end he received an eight-year sentence, reduced to three years and six months on appeal. This was not out of proportion. After all, Albert Gemmeker, the famous 'laughing commandant' of Westerbork, who held a great party to celebrate the transport of the forty-thousandth victim to Auschwitz, served no more than six years. And afterwards, Evers returned to society, enjoying a second marriage, although this one too ended quickly in divorce. When he died, aged 73 in the early 1990s, there were still those in Dordrecht who hailed him as a hero and as the victim of an unfair campaign."

(68 - 69).

Bart van Es

"The Cut Out Girl..."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36978239-the-cut-out-girl

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