World War II might have ended six months earlier if General Bernard Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden had worked. The plan called for American, British, and Polish paratroopers to drop behind German lines in the Netherlands in September 1944. Its objective was to capture the one remaining intact bridge over the Rhine. The operation’s success would have enabled Allied troops to speed across Germany and seize Berlin before the Russians, who were then approaching Berlin from the east. But it didn’t work. And many military observers have believed the plan’s undisputed complexity explains why. It simply required too many things to happen on a timetable that was impossibly tight. However, as British author Robert Verkaik demonstrates in The Traitor of Arnhem, Market Garden failed simply because someone tipped off the Germans. The warning allowed them to move thousands of troops into position in the paratroopers’ intended path toward the Rhine.
So, who was the “traitor of Arnhem?”
Verkaik examines the intelligence swirling around Operation Market Garden from every possible angle. He divides his book into three sections, reviewing in turn the roles played by the Dutch, the British, and the Russians. His research was exhaustive, and the result can be exhausting for the reader. Although a handful of characters emerge as central to the story, dozens of others crop up in Verkaik’s account. The evidence he turned up 80 years after World War II is filled with uncertainty and contradictions. And he never definitively identifies one of the two men who both betrayed Market Garden to the Nazis.
Yes, there were two traitors of Arnhem, not one. And several other men and women played roles in facilitating the betrayal or covering up the evidence it took place. But it’s clear who were the two men at the heart of the story. One was a gigantic Dutch resistance hero named Christiaan Lindemans but widely known as King Kong, who switched allegiance to the Germans midway through the war. Lindemans was a Communist. The other is better known to us today: Sir Anthony Blunt, one of the five Cambridge spies who went to work for the NKVD while still students at the university. And, yes, he was a Communist, too.
It’s significant that the Germans learned about Market Garden from two independent sources. As Nazi officers’ subsequent testimony makes clear, the two sources reinforced each other, helping convince them to reposition troops to block the Allies’ movement toward the Rhine.
The Traitor of Arnhem: The Untold Story of WWII’s Greatest Betrayal and the Moment that Changed History Forever by Robert Verkaik (2025) 395 pages ★★★★☆
Why did they do it?
So why, you might ask, would two Communists betray the Allies to the Nazis? Although Verkaik never proves that Moscow Central directed them to do so, it’s clear that at least Blunt acted to prevent the Allies from crossing the Rhine and beating the Russians to Berlin. Lindemans’ motives are more difficult to suss out. He served three masters—the Germans, the British, and the Russians—but in the final analysis he may simply have been in the espionage game to enrich himself. Perhaps ideological motives played little if any role in his thinking.
Be advised, though, that you’d need to read Verkaik’s book carefully to glean this central truth from the tangle of detail he reports. And his sometimes sloppy, even ungrammatical writing makes some of the prose a chore to read. However, the detail the author digs out of obscure records helps shape the true history of World War II. Because the Allies’ defeat at Arnhem enabled Stalin to rush his troops into Berlin and claim the greatest prize in Germany. Undoubtedly, the division of Germany that came about as a result helped set the course for the Cold War that followed.
About the author
For more than a decade, Robert Verkaik worked as a senior editor at the Independent and the Mail on Sunday, two of Britain’s leading newspapers. Today he writes about the causes of extremism and social immobility for a number of press outlets in the UK. He is the author of several books. The Traitor of Arnhem is his second book-length work about World War II.
For related reading
You’ll find books on related topics at:
- 10 top WWII books about espionage
- 10 top nonfiction books about World War II
- Good nonfiction books about espionage
- 7 common misconceptions about World War II
- The 10 most consequential events of World War II
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