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A Ballerina Who Stabbed an SS Guard With a Stiletto and Other Historic Rebels

Khalid Elhassan August 10, 2020 34 min

20. Doing Some Good Before Doing a Whole Lot of Bad

For some time, Harold Cole actually did some positive work for the Allied cause and for the resistance. He escorted escaped personnel across Nazi-occupied territory to the relative safety of Vichy France. From there, they slipped into neutral Spain, and took a ship back home. However, Cole also embezzled from the funds intended to finance those operations to pay for a high society lifestyle of nightclubs, pricey restaurants, expensive champagne, fast cars, and faster girls.

When his thefts came to light in 1941, the resistance arrested Cole and locked him up. While they deliberated what to do about him, Cole escaped. On the run from the resistance, he turned himself in to the Germans, and gave them 30 pages of resistance members’ names and addresses. He also became an agent of the SS’ Sicherheitdienst, or SD. As a result, over 150 Resistance members were arrested, of whom at least 50 were executed. Cole was present during the interrogation and torture of many of his former colleagues.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.