Bones belong to traitor

Press, 19 June 1986, Page 10

Bones belong to traitor

NZPA-Reuter Rotterdam The Dutch police have dug up the remains of the country’s most notorious war traitor and ended years of speculation that he had escaped abroad in 1946 after a fake suicide. Examination of the remains confirmed that Christiaan Lindemans, a double agent who betrayed some 250 resistance fighters to the Nazis, died and was buried in Rotterdam 40 years ago despite a suspicious confusion in the official records. His bones were dug up from their grave in a leafy Rotterdam cemetery at dawn behind a shield of tight security, the traitor’s surviving brother and two daughters looking on. A former comrade-in-arms of Lindemans’, Belinda Thone, had formally requested the exhumation after several historians suggested that the man who sent several of her wartime companions to their deaths might have survived unpunished. The family consented, saying they, too, wanted the truth, and the last doubt was removed when the chief pathologist, Dr Martin Voortman, told a news conference: “As far as we are concerned there is no doubt that this is the body of Mr Linde-' mans.” The corpse was identifiable as Lindemans’ by marks on the skull and traces of an ankle fracture. But controversy still surrounded the cause of death. Historians question the colourful official story that Lindemans died of poisoning after making a lovers’ suicide pact with a prison nurse. Dr Voortman said a study, which would be difficult, would follow to see if the poison story could be confirmed. Lindemans, a garage

mechanic whose huge build earned him the nickname “King Kong,” was a resistance hero until he switched sides to save the life of a captured brother. He had access to the highest levels of Dutch command in the final months of the war and was able to betray dozens of French, Belgian, and Dutch resistance cells. In 1944 he made a vain attempt to warn the Germans of the Allied plan for a mass paratroop attack on the Dutch town of Arnhem. Researchers suggested he had been killed to prevent a scandal, which would have revealed that Lindemans was recommended to the British for Intelligence work by Prince Bernhard, then commander of Dutch forces. The decision to open the grave resulted from the discovery that many records of Lindemans’ death in 1946 were missing and others were contradictory. Suspicions deepened when it was found that the nurse who was ; his companion in the suicide pact survived until 1959 and may have had links with the Dutch secret service. One expert said, the body of a Palestinian occupied the Rotterdam grave.