English jailbird Harold Cole (1906 – 1946) served in the British Army during WWII, then in the French Resistance, before he betrayed both by working as a double agent for the Germans. During his extraordinary wartime career, he lied and conned his way across France, joined the Nazis, and spied and snitched on the Resistance, resulting in the arrest and execution of many.
Cole was a dirt bag from early on. By his teens, he was already a burglar and check forger. He was no criminal mastermind, however, and kept getting caught: by 1939, Cole had served multiple stints in prison. When WWII began, he lied about his criminal history to enlist in the British Army, and was sent to France. Promoted to sergeant, he was arrested for stealing money from the Sergeants’ Mess to splurge on prostitutes. He became a POW in May, 1940 when the Germans captured the guardhouse where he was jailed.
Resistance fighters arrested by Germans and collaborationist French police. Getty Images
2. Joining and Betraying the French Resistance
Harold Cole escaped German captivity and made his way to Lille, where he got in touch with the French Resistance. He convinced them that he was a British intelligence agent sent to organize escape lines to get stranded and fleeing British military personnel back home. At first, Cole actually helped the Allied cause, escorting escaped personnel across Nazi-occupied territory to the relative safety of Vichy France, from which they slipped into Spain and a ship back home.
He 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 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, gave them 30 pages of Resistance member names and addresses, and became an agent of the SS’ Sicherheitdienst, or SD.
Over 150 Resistance members were arrested because of the information that Harold Cole gave the Nazis. At least 50 were executed, and Cole was present during the interrogation and torture of many of his former colleagues. When the Allies liberated France in 1944, Cole fled in a Gestapo uniform. He turned up in southern Germany in June 1945, claiming to be a British undercover agent, and offered his services to the American occupation forces. Triple crossing, he turned against the Nazis, hunting and flushing them out of hiding, and murdering at least one of them.
The British eventually arrested Cole, but he escaped while awaiting court martial and fled to France. There, French police received a tip-off revealing his whereabouts in a central Paris apartment. On January 8th, 1946, they crept up a staircase to seize him, but their heavy tread gave them away. Cole met them at the doorway, pistol in hand, and was killed in the ensuing shootout.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
