Dutch Girl Read online

  Praise for Books by Robert Matzen

  Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe

  “Military and movie buffs alike will revel in this vivid portrayal…”

  Publishers Weekly

  “An illuminating, recommended look at a hidden chapter in Stewart’s life.”

  Library Journal

  “As Jimmy Stewart’s children, we have always known that our father’s service during the war was the most significant event of his life, although he rarely spoke of it. This book gives us the best glimpse we will ever have of what that experience was like for him and the men he flew with. Thank you, Robert Matzen.”

  Kelly Stewart, daughter of Jimmy Stewart

  Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3

  “Matzen provides an intriguing mixture of biography and history as he relates not only the story of Lombard’s life, but those of the other passengers on Flight 3, as well as the curious elements of the plane crash.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “As a piece of investigative reporting, it’s awe-inspiring, and it’s also a damn good dual biography.”

  Scott Eyman, author of John Wayne: The Life and Legend

  GoodKnight Books

  © 2019 by Robert Matzen

  Foreword © 2019 by Luca Dotti

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by an information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by GoodKnight Books, an imprint of Paladin Communications, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  ISBN 978-1-7322735-3-5

  ISBN 978-1-7322735-4-2

  ISBN 978-1-7322735-5-9

  ISBN 978-1-7322735-6-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966886

  Cover photo of Audrey Hepburn and other photos from the Dotti Collection courtesy Personal Collection of Luca Dotti/©copyrighted material.

  Book and cover design by Sharon Berk

  Colorization of cover photo by Tom Maroudas

  Photo of Robert Matzen by Annie Whitehead/Harvesting Light Photography

  For the people of Velp

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Part I: Cauldron

  1. Rapture

  2. The Blood of Frisia

  3. Exile

  4. Edda

  5. The Unthinkable

  6. Dancer

  Part II: Long Live Oranje!

  7. Pencil Scratches

  8. Unacceptable

  9. Born for the Spotlight

  10. Death Candidate

  11. Paranoid

  12. The Secret

  Part III: Resistance

  13. Soul Sister

  14. Just Dutchmen

  15. Warmest Praise

  16. Black Evenings

  17. Het Vaderland

  18. If, If, If

  19. The Hun on the Run

  Part IV: The Liberators

  20. The Netherlands in Five Days

  21. Ultimatum

  22. The Devil’s Picnic

  23. Cakewalk

  24. Aflame

  25. Champagne for One

  Part V: Toys

  26. The Princess

  27. Hunters

  28. The Magic Stamp

  29. Streaking Evil

  30. Peace on Earth. Yeah, Right.

  Part VI: Pursued

  31. A Tree

  32. The Race

  33. Gates of Hell

  34. First Cigarette

  35. Sorting

  36. Crossroads

  37. Completely Nuts

  38. Peace

  Dutch Girl: The Story in Pictures

  Chapter Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Foreword

  When I am asked about my mother, my favorite response has often been, “I don’t know Audrey Hepburn.”

  My words always create a little stir and give me the opportunity to further explain how lucky my brother and I were growing up with a present and loving mother as opposed to a glamorous but absent movie star.

  When my mother talked about herself and what life taught her, Hollywood was indeed the missing guest. Instead of naming famed Beverly Hills locations, she gave us obscure and sometimes unpronounceable Dutch ones. Red carpet recollections were replaced by Second World War episodes that she was able to transform into children’s tales. We considered her lessons as tokens of wisdom, but we knew we were missing the complete story of her life in the war—until “somewhere over the rainbow” Robert Matzen wrote to me introducing himself and his book, Dutch Girl.

  In a pure form of serendipity, Robert’s message arrived just as I was trying to unite the dots between Mum’s stories and my own archive and research efforts. I was understandably excited—who wouldn’t be—as I knew Mum’s deep self, the one that remained unchanged despite her stellar career, the one that made her the Audrey I knew, lay in these dots soon to be united by Robert’s research.

  Dutch Girl led me through a world of war that isn’t as black and white as Hollywood’s movies often suggest. Even I immediately forgot that there would be a happy ending for Audrey. As I read, I realized that bomb, that bullet, that German truck and its load of prisoners could simply be The End.

  I now understand why the words Good and Evil, and Love and Mercy were so fundamental in her own narrative. Why she was open about certain facts and why she kept so many others in a secluded area of her being.

  I really didn’t know Audrey Hepburn, but I know more now, and I miss her more than ever.

  Thank you, Robert, for your book is a true gift.

  Luca Dotti

  August 2018

  Luca Dotti is the son of Audrey Hepburn and the New York Times best-selling author of Audrey at Home. He is a former graphic designer and now chairs the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. Created by Audrey’s family in 1994, the Fund helps children in need around the world.

  Preface

  Since the death of Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of 1993, her story has been told and told again. An Amazon search of books with her name will produce 1,000+ hits. Every aspect of her life has been covered in print but one: the years of World War II when she lived in the Netherlands. There are portions of Audrey’s story of the war that she wouldn’t discuss and portions she felt she couldn’t discuss. As a result, authors invented some situations and interpreted others incorrectly because they had no foundation in the history of the war. I can safely say that most pages about her war years in previous biographies contain errors about her life during that time.

  Hepburn’s definitive biographer, Barry Paris, spent a great deal of time and resources in 1993 with the backing of powerful G.P. Putnam’s Sons to tell the Dutch portion of Audrey’s story, and his meticulously referenced work became the starting point for my project. Paris had some advantages in his proximity to the war years—many people involved with the story were alive then who aren’t now. But he also had a big disadvantage: There wasn’t yet an Internet with fingertip access to prime Dutch archives. And because he based his operations in the United States (employing a Dutch researcher to do legwork in the Netherlands), Paris missed the importance of the village of Velp to Audrey’s story. Velp sits just outside the city of Arnhem. That location came to mean everything to the story for reasons you will soon learn.

  I love uncovering facts about Hollywood personalities in World War II, especially facts that have been lost over time because of the depth of research required to set the record straight. In the case of Audrey Hepburn, most of that research can be conducted only on the ground in the Nether
lands, which is quite a deterrent for American authors. In addition, the adults that fought through and survived the war have passed on; the eyewitnesses are gone. Most vexing of all, some records stateside have vanished, which is a story in itself. These files, which should exist in the archives of the FBI and CIA (known as the OSS during World War II), concern a Dutch national named Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, who was Audrey’s mother. When I began my project and sent my Washington, D.C., researcher after these files, she couldn’t locate them and determined after exhaustive efforts that they no longer exist. Her professional opinion was that they had been destroyed long ago, and this conclusion begged the questions, why would these files have been removed from the record, and who would have removed them? After I spent two years investigating, the answers became evident.

  Audrey Hepburn’s father lived under the radar for most of his life, and her mother covered her tracks for activities from 1935 through ’41, so it’s no wonder that biographers shied away from chronicling those years of Audrey’s life or relied on preexisting works. The trail was either cold or had been rubbed out of existence.

  Was Audrey Hepburn’s family rich? Was this wealth confiscated by the Nazis? Did Audrey grow up in grand Dutch castles? Did she witness her uncle and others being put up against a wall and shot? Did she perform clandestine dances to raise money for the Dutch Resistance and risk her life to perform other anti-Nazi duties at age fourteen or fifteen? My investigation took many twists and turns and provided surprising answers in the end.

  Context is everything in Audrey Hepburn’s war story, so I’ve described the times and the history that surrounded the subject. I was able to locate more than 6,000 words spoken by Audrey about World War II, and in the end I plugged them into the story of the war and the part the Netherlands played in it. And, son of a gun, her quotes made sense, including all those stories she told about the Resistance.

  Combat came to Audrey’s world in September 1944, and I made it my goal to recreate for the reader what she experienced over the course of eight brutal months. I wanted those who already love Audrey to know the sights, the sounds, the pain, and the terror felt by this Dutch girl during the occupation and then the battles that would forge Audrey Hepburn into a global force. I wanted the reader to get some sense of what her world was like. She saw so much blood and death before she turned sixteen, yet lived a life of such grace and never admitted what she had witnessed. The war made Audrey Hepburn, and so what she experienced, especially in those final months of conflict, is a story worth telling, day by day and blow by blow.

  In some ways it’s a miracle she made it out of the war alive; in all ways this is the tale of a remarkable young girl who would go on to become an icon for peace.

  Robert Matzen

  30 June 2018

  Part I:

  Cauldron

  1

  Rapture

  Germany

  1935

  Baroness Ella van Heemstra stood in the office of Adolf Hitler and offered her hand to the most famous man in the world, the man whose name was on simply everyone’s lips. Hitler’s deep blue eyes could have bored through her, such was their power. He was so pale, so composed as he smiled that enigmatic smile, full of humility, the one seen so often in newsreels flickering on screens around the world. He reached out his hand and accepted hers lightly. Then, with a gesture born of generations and centuries of European tradition, he bowed and touched his lips to her skin. Ella had often heard the touch of this man described as an electric shock, yet here she was, standing in the Führer’s office in National Socialist German Workers Party headquarters, better known as the Braunes Haus, in Munich, Germany. She had dropped off her two sons and little daughter in the Dutch resort village of Oosterbeek so that she and her husband could come here for what promised to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  How many women would have signed away their lives for this moment, their very lives, but the baroness had earned this audience thanks to a column she had written in The Blackshirt, the weekly newspaper of the British Union of Fascists, extolling the virtues of Hitler and his British disciple in National Socialism, Sir Oswald Mosley.

  It didn’t hurt that Ella’s dear friends in her English social class also admired the great man. British journalist Micky Burn of the Gloucester Citizen had fallen under the Führer’s spell—the Führer signed a copy of his book Mein Kampf for a breathless Burn. Unity Mitford of the Swinbrook Mitfords was mad for Hitler and had become his latest pet. Unity had introduced her elegant sister Diana, and now both women were smitten. A third Mitford, Pamela, was now running in the pack, but she just seemed bemused by the whole business.

  Of course, Hitler had his reasons for courting the English and sought to embrace Britain’s subjects at every opportunity. Unity told of a time when the British national anthem came up, and the Führer “whistled it all the way through.” So yes, he admired all things English, including women, and embracing the charming Mitfords, the so-called “scandal sisters,” was no chore for the great man. What did he see in Ella van Heemstra now? A way inside the upper strata of Dutch society? Perhaps, but it didn’t matter, because Ella was here and determined to enjoy this moment to the fullest. She hoped His Excellency didn’t mind her lip rouge and powder—he was notorious for loathing women who wore them—but he paid no notice of the paints and powders on his foreign guests at this moment. He aimed a pleasantry at Ella, and she responded in flawless German.

  Ella’s husband, Joseph Ruston, and Unity Mitford were standing at her side; Ella’s hand was in Hitler’s. The Führer was so gallant and so pleasant, with those arresting blue eyes and such a nice face. Dear God, how heady these times were, Germany reborn and lighting the way for all of Europe after the devastation of the worldwide Great Depression. Fascism held the answer for mankind. Fascism shone the light for those wise enough to see. Fascism had brought Germany back to full employment in a matter of a few years, proving its ideals more powerful and unstoppable than economic cataclysm. Blood-red flags with the fascist crest flew everywhere in Munich; banners of fire hung from every building and crosspiece. The narrow streets of the ancient city pulsed with energy as if arteries in a stirring beast.

  The enchantment of all she saw and everyone she met beckoned Ella back to Germany from her home in Belgium later that year in September; once more she parked her children in Oosterbeek so she could attend the annual Nazi Party Congress, the Reichsparteitag, in Nuremberg. She had seen images from the 1934 event shining in glorious silver thanks to Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph des Willen, and now Ella vowed to witness it in person. Imagine a city already at a half million bulging with as many guests. Hotels filled too quickly, and all those that could not find indoor rooms or accommodations in the nine open-air tent camps were placed in commandeered factories, churches, and schools. Here the infatuated Ella became immersed in a full week of Fascist activities, from the pealing of the city’s church bells to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger to meeting after meeting and speech after speech. She witnessed the Führer’s review of his Hitler Youth at sprawling Zeppelin Field, the Nuremberg stadium, as he addressed 60,000 perfectly uniformed, precisely aligned young men. He told them, his voice booming from speakers: “You must learn to suffer privation without crumbling once. Whatever we create today, whatever we do, we will die, but Germany will live on in you. When there is nothing left of us, then you must hold in your fists the flags that we hoisted out of nothing. I know this cannot be otherwise because you are the flesh of our flesh, and the blood of our blood. In your young heads burns the same spirit that rules us.”

  This 1935 gathering was the Party Congress of Freedom, as in freedom from the restrictions of the horrendous Treaty of Versailles that had ended the Great War sixteen years earlier—and stripped Germany of its wealth, military might, and much of its territory. The Führer paraded his Wehrmacht, his magnificent army, before the quarter million assembled at the stadium. Overhead, German war planes flew so thick
that they seemed to blot out the sun, and demonstrations of anti-aircraft fire from cannon manned by calm and able crews boomed in response.

  The Reichstag had passed the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which forbade marriages and intercourse between Germans and Jews and the employment of German females under the age of forty-five in Jewish households. The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder—including Jews, especially Jews—were classed as state subjects without citizenship rights. Ella had many Jewish friends in Belgium and elsewhere, but Diana Mitford summed it up beautifully quoting her dear friend Putzi Hanfstaengl: “If the Jews don’t like it, they can get out. They have relations and money all over the world. Let them leave Germany to us Germans.” It was the only instance Ella had for pause in an otherwise positive story, and it was easily reasoned out.

  Back in the stadium, Hitler heard the affirmations of his labor force and consecrated those of the party killed in the 1923 armed Nazi uprising known as the Beer Hall Putsch, when sixteen party members were gunned down on a Munich street. It was a moving display of love, remembrance, and most of all, power. Ella felt deep in her bones that in the not-too-distant future, she would be part of a Europe united under Adolf Hitler, the man who had generated all this out of the force of his will and ended the hopelessness of Germany in the decade and a half after the Great War.

  On the final day of the Reichsparteitag, Zeppelin Field bulged with more than 300,000 people, with hundreds of flags rippling in the breeze, planes flying over, tanks rolling through, drums pounding, and bands playing; the seats seemed to vibrate from the high black boots of the Führer’s massed troops as they goose-stepped past. The banners, black and white swastikas inset in red, streamed past as if a river of blood. So red it hurt the eyes. The tinkling of Schellenbaum, the belltree staff carried in front of some army units, sent pure silver tones soaring high above the dull thuds of the drums and boots.