(Jewish Group) How an elite group of Jewish refugees helped to defeat the Third Reich
Lieutenant George Lane is in big trouble. His waterlogged Sten gun has jammed, and bullets from German rifles and MP40s are flying all around him. He is hiding in the surf next to beach obstacles made of thin iron girders. The Nazis are shooting blindly into the darkness while Lane and Captain Roy Wooldridge, an expert in mines, desperately seek cover. It’s May 17, 1944, Ault, northern France, two hours after midnight, three weeks before D-Day.
Something has spooked the Germans, and Lane doesn’t know whether they have been discovered and the mission compromised, or the bored guards are now simply letting off steam. He does know that if they are taken prisoner, it will mean almost certain death. Adolf Hitler’s 1942 Kommandobefehl edict states that all captured Allied commandos are to be summarily executed. The two men lie as still as possible on the beach, and after 10 minutes the shooting stops. The British officers find their concealed rubber dinghy, which is miraculously unpunctured. They jump in, push into the waves and start paddling out to sea, hoping to make it back to the motor torpedo boat from which they deployed.
They begin to think that they might just make it back from this mission, but after rowing frantically for 20 minutes, they are spotted by a German E-boat. A blinding spotlight turns on them, and a 37 mm flak cannon and machine guns are pointed at their torsos. “Hände hoch, Tommy!” a Kriegsmarine lieutenant shouts.
Lane and Wooldridge have no choice but to surrender. Lane is thinking more about torture than the Kommandobefehl and summary execution. “The Gestapo make everyone talk,” he has been told.
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