‘TRAITORS MUST DIE’
“He was a traitor, this man, Pierre Martin, whom I was going to kill.”
Born in Manchester, England, in 1914, Harry Rée was the son of an industrial chemist from a Jewish family and an American-born heiress to the du Pont chemical fortune. As a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s, he signed the Peace Pledge, but after visiting his Jewish cousins in Germany he became preoccupied with Adolf Hitler and the menace of Nazism. In June 1940, following the fall of France, he gave up a promising teaching career to enlist in the British Army. A year later he was recruited into the F (for France) Section of the Special Operations Executive, and in April 1943, after intensive training, he parachuted into France. There, using the code name César, he guided various resistance groups in a series of dramatic sabotage operations against railways, canals, warehouses, power stations, and factories. At one point he got into a hand-to-hand fight with an armed officer of the German military police, but he somehow managed to escape despite having been shot four times. After returning to England in 1944, Rée received the Distinguished Service Order, among other British and French honors, as well as the French Médaille de Résistance Française and Croix de Guerre. Three years later he starred in Now It Can Be Told, a government-produced film based on his activities as an SOE agent in France.
After the war Rée resumed his career as an educator. He occasionally appeared on Brains Trust, a BBC program in
