BRITON DEFIES GESTAPO

Evening Star, Issue 23723, 2 November 1940, Page 9

BRITON DEFIES GESTAPO

RICH CZECH’S DEATH How Sir Paul Dukes, formerly of th« Intelligence Service, a few days before the outbreak of war forced Nazi officials to exhume the body of a man who had died under mysterious circumstances is told by him in a real-life thriller, . ‘ An Epic of the Gestapo (says the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ’)• In March last year'Sir Paul was consulted about the disappearance of p wealthy Czech named, for the purpose of the'book, Alfred Obry. Friends in England were interested, and large/ sums of mojoey^ 1 several times six’ figures ’’—-were involved. ft wds known that he had been put under “ house arrest,” that he had succeeded in buying a false passport, and that, disguised as an artisan, ha had escaped for England. A week elapsed and nothing was heard of him. Then came a mysterious message from an unknown woman in Paris to say Obrv had been arrested by the Gestapo at Mies, a small Sudeten town. That was all that was known. Sir Paid Dukes decided to investigate the case himself. He went to Germany and came upon a short paragraph in a back number of an obscure local paper reporting the death of a man called Friedrich Schweigler on a railway line near the Bohemian frontier. BODY EXHUMED. This chance clue put Sir Paul on the track of the mystery, and at Prague he interviewed some of Obry’s friends and relations and discovered that the false passport was supplied to’ him for a large sum of money by the Gestapo “back door,” Nazi traitors. His first theory that Obry had been murdered by them to save their own skins was proved wrong, but not before Sir Paul, with superb assurance, had made his way into the Gestapo headquarters in various places and finally forced, the authorities to dig up the body. He was then able to prove that Schweigler was really Obry. He had been- accidentally killed itf trying to escape a second time from the Nazis. Besides being a pitiful and thrillingstory, 1 An Epic of the Gestapo ’ gives a realistic picture of the life in Germany and Czecho-Slovakia immediately before the outbreak of war. Sir Paul Dukes arrived back in England by plane a day before war was declared.