Georg (Peter) Franz Stevens

Georg Franz Hein, born in Hannover in 1919, was alone in the world from the age of 6. After enduring the beginnings of Nazi persecution in Germany in the late 1920's/early 1930's, his widowed mother sent him to safety in London in early 1934, at the age of 14.

He got into minor trouble with the law in 1939, but was released from jail at the beginning of the war. Instead of submitting to internment as an enemy alien, Hein committed identity theft, and enlisted in the Royal Air Force as Peter Stevens. He trained to be a bomber pilot from 1939-1941, during which time he was the object of a police manhunt as a potential German spy. Two tips brought the Metropolitan Police ever closer to catching him, but they only discovered the whole story in October 1941.

Peter Stevens flew 22 combat missions over occupied Europe and his home country (including bombing his hometown), and his aircraft was badly damaged by flak over Berlin on Sept 7/8, 1941. With two leaking fuel tanks, he ordered his crew to bail out, and one of his rear gunners was killed, presumably because his parachute failed to open. Stevens was able to get back as far as Amsterdam before running out of fuel, and he crash-landed in a farmer's field. He immediately destroyed all of the secret bits of his plane's equipment and set fire to the wreckage, before trying to contact the Dutch Underground.

Unfortunately, Stevens was captured by the Nazis before the Dutch could get him to safety, and so began a period of 3 years and 8 months as a Prisoner of War, without any protection whatsoever under the Geneva Convention. He was, after all, still a German citizen, while fighting for Britain against the Nazis.
As a POW, Stevens went on to become one of the most ardent escapers of the war. He made 9 separate attempts, actually getting outside the wire on three occasions.

On one of those escapes, he jumped from a moving prison train in a hail of Nazi bullets. Making his way to his mother's home for help, he discovered that she had committed suicide in July 1939, rather than submit herself to the horrors of a concentration camp.

As a native German, Stevens played a major role in helping many other escapes succeed, by briefing the escapers on German customs and proper behaviour, as well as by providing linguistic and forgery services for false identity documents. He played a behind-the-scenes role in The Great Escape and the Wooden Horse escape, and is today considered one of the most ardent POW escapers of the war.

Stevens never succeeded in getting back to Britain until after the war, but when his exploits came to light, he was one of only 69 members of the RAF to be honoured with one of Britain's highest medals for bravery, the Military Cross.

He went on to serve 5 years as an MI6 operative against the Soviets at the beginning of the Cold War, and later emigrated to Canada to resume a normal life. He died in 1979, never having told even his own wife and children that he was born Jewish.

Very proud to say that he was my father, and that he is today mentioned in more than 20 books, including the

biography I wrote after 18 years of research.

https://www.calcalist.co.il/calcalistech/article/r1is8kwsq