Roy Natusch RIP

Kyt · May 3, 2009

Double Dutchman's nine lives | smh.com.au

ROY NATUSCH, the last antipodean linked with events that led to the mysterious disappearance behind the iron curtain of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and the RAF warrant officer Reginald Barratt, was a master of disguise and escape who fooled his Italian and German captors in making nine hair-raising escapes from captivity during World War II.

His deeds inspired nine authors to include his clandestine activities in 12 books. During the Cold War years the Sunday Pictorial, a British newspaper, revealed Natusch as the elusive "Double Dutchman", a reference to his guise as a Dutch officer who fooled even the Gestapo.

Natusch was part of a group of escaped prisoners of war and others helping the Allied intelligence network at Szigetvar, southern Hungary. He had been with Barratt until the RAF man was taken into custody by Soviet forces in December, 1944.

Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews by helping with false identity papers and safe houses, was taken in January, becoming an international cause celebre after his disappearance. Intrigue continues to surround what happened to them after they were taken to Moscow. Conflicting reports varied from Wallenberg's dying of a heart attack in 1947, to being shot or poisoned by Stalin's secret police, or being sent to a gulag.

Roy Spencer Natusch, who has died in New Zealand at 90, was born at Havelock North, studied architecture and trialled for the All Blacks in 1939. After World War II began, he sailed as a New Zealand soldier to the Middle East.

In April 1941 he was among members of the Anglo-Anzac force left behind on the beaches of Kalamata in Greece. He teamed up with an Australian sergeant, Johnny Sachs, and they headed north for Athens. For eight months they roamed the Peloponnese peninsula, living off the generosity of patriotic Greeks, before their expanded group was captured by Italian troops.

After several escape attempts and four months of interrogation, Natusch was sent to an Italian prisoner of war camp. When the boat reached Patros, he jumped overboard but was recaptured and sent to camp PG57 at Grupignano. There he joined an Australian airman, Eric Canning, and his enterprising troupe of 17 tunnellers digging their way under the wire. His 14 days of freedom ended abruptly when he walked into the arms of two carabiniere.

The Italians sent him to a German POW camp in Austria, from where he escaped to Hungary. There they met a Resistance group led by a South African lieutenant-colonel, Charles Howie, another escaped POW, and decided "Captain" Natusch would take command of a group of unrestrained POWs living on the estate of Count Mihaly Andrassy at Szigetvar.

Natusch was with Dutch officers at a dinner hosted by a Hungarian banker when they were arrested in an SS raid. He twice fooled Gestapo interrogators into believing he was a Dutchman, inventing a fictitious tale as to why he could not speak Dutch.

His interrogators even told him they were looking for a notorious New Zealand captain, Roy Natusch, before sending him to a Dutch POW camp. In transit, Natusch jumped from a train, was injured, again recaptured and put in hospital in Bratislava. While convalescing, he saw German experimental jet aircraft operating from a nearby airfield.

Natusch's next stopover was a British camp where a plan was hatched to warn him of any impending visit by the Gestapo. He was to take on the persona of his friend Henry Lowenstein, an interned Palestinian.

When the Gestapo arrived, Natusch again escaped, walking south through Hungary and then Yugoslavia. He finally arrived at Semic from where he was flown by one of Tito's supply aircraft to liberated Bari in Italy. His three-year European adventure, with nine escapes, was over.

His debriefing in Cairo became so complicated the disbelieving intelligence team leader, James Klugmann, put Natusch under camp arrest and had him returned to New Zealand, saying he was disturbed.

Recently declassified files show that Klugmann, an associate of the infamous British traitors known as the Cambridge Five, was a Soviet mole. Natusch was another victim of Klugmann's misguided loyalties.

In 1947 Natusch married Molly Triggs (nee Stewart) and took up farming. He is survived by his children David, Anna and Michael.
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