Harold Cole

Harold Cole (24 January 1906 – 8 January 1946), also known as Harry Cole, Paul Cole, and many other aliases, was a petty criminal, a confidence man, a British soldier, an operative of the Pat O'Leary escape line, and an agent of Nazi Germany.

He was in jail several times between 1923 and 1939.

In 1927, he deserted from the West Kent Regiment.

He claimed to have served in the British Army in Hong Kong in the 1930s, and in 1938, he was in France masquerading as "Wing Commander Wain" of the Royal Air Force.

In September 1939, shortly after World War II began, Cole, fresh out of prison, enlisted in the Royal Engineers of the British army.

Cole was described as "a six-footer, slim-built, and always well dressed, the type of person who can walk into clubs, attractive to gullible women."

Cole fashioned himself as a suave upper-class Englishman dressed in plus fours, with plastered-down hair and a finely-clipped moustache.

Serving in France and relying on his "appealing personality and sharp wits," Cole advanced rapidly to the rank of sergeant with the Royal Engineers.

In 1940 and 1941, he helped many British soldiers escape France after its surrender to Nazi Germany in World War II.

In March 1940, he was jailed for stealing from the non-commissioned officers' mess fund.

He quickly escaped but was caught and jailed once more until his guards released him in June 1940 as the invading Germans were overrunning British forces in northern France.

He remained in France when British forces were evacuated from Dunkirk.

Several thousand soldiers, mostly from Britain and the Commonwealth, were left behind in France after the evacuation and were hidden by French citizens.

British pilots were also being shot down over France and, if they survived, sought assistance from the French.

In the summer of 1940, Cole quickly built up a circle of contacts in Lille and La Madeleine, a suburb of Lille.

He presented himself as Captain Delobel of British intelligence.

He persuaded a wealthy industrialist, François Duprez, to finance his efforts to assist British soldiers and airmen to escape France and return to England.

In La Madeleine, the upstairs apartment of a hair stylist, Jeannine Voglimacci, served as a meeting place for Cole, his helpers, and British soldiers seeking help.

Voglimacci became a key assistant, although she considered Cole "bizarre."

Cole largely achieved the objective of combining all the disparate individuals and organisations helping British soldiers in the Lille region under his leadership.

Through contacts at City Hall, he obtained false identity documents for himself and his helpers and a document for himself saying that he had speech and hearing impediments.

Cole spoke poor, accented French, and the document enabled him to pretend to be unable to speak and hear if necessary for deception and in the presence of Germans.

Cole's followers at the time included 18-year-old Roland Hector Lepers and Lepers's girlfriend Madeleine Damerment, who would later become an agent of the clandestine British organisation, the Special Operations Executive.

He became a double agent for the Germans in December 1941 (or possibly earlier) and betrayed to the Gestapo 150 escape line workers and members of the French Resistance, of whom about 50 were executed or died in German concentration camps.

Cole has been described as "the worst traitor of the war."

He deceived both the British and the Germans and escaped from prison on several occasions.

In January 1941, Roland Lepers led a group of eight British soldiers and airmen south to Marseilles, where he came into contact with Ian Garrow, the leader of the clandestine Pat O'Leary escape line (Pat Line) which was dedicated to transporting British soldiers stranded in France to neutral Spain from where they could be returned to Britain.

Garrow was impressed.

French citizens helped British soldiers and airmen flee German-occupied northern France for relatively benign southern France, called Vichy France and unoccupied by Germany until November 1942.

Marseilles was the usual destination.

However, the Germans and Vichy French government made it more difficult for the British soldiers and their French helpers to travel southward.

Cole's contacts and wide-spread network had the sophistication and technical capability to provide false identity cards, travel documents, clothing, guides, and travel expenses to British evaders and escapees.

Despite his influence, Cole had detractors.

One of the most active women helping British evaders, Maud Olga Baudot de Rouville, said of him, "he was always borrowing money, or begging petrol, and never repaying it, and he talked ill of people behind their backs...he had women everywhere and was always going on sprees with them."

She eventually broke off contact with Cole.

He survived the war but was killed while resisting arrest by French police in Paris in January 1946.

Cole was born in London and grew up in Hoxton, an East London slum.

His parents were Albert Cole, an unskilled labourer, and Alice Ann Godfrey, formerly a servant.

Albert Cole was killed in World War I and his widow married Thomas Mason, whose last name Harold Cole would sometimes use as an alias.

Cole left school aged 14 and, as a teenager, he became known as a con man, embezzler, and petty criminal.