Until now, it has been thought that
All Nazi spies in Britain during the War were apprehended and turned, saving lives and shortening the War.
This was an astonishing tour de force, not only of counter-espionage but also of applied psychology, which is in our opinion far too little known and studied. Why is the same thing not being done to all the murderous bastards who are captured nowadays?
Anyway, now it turns out that they missed one:
Two amateur historians have uncovered the story of an audacious spy, who infiltrated the RAF in the middle of World War II and escaped back to Germany in a stolen RAF Hurricane.Augustin Preucil came to Britain along with scores of other Czech pilots when mainland Europe fell under Nazi domination.
[...]
Preucil had taken off with another pilot, a young Pole, to practice dogfights over the sea.
The Pole returned to base reporting he had seen Preucil in a steep dive and assumed he had crashed. In fact Preucil had flown his machine across the North Sea to Belgium.
There he landed on a farm and was offered food and shelter by the farmer and his family .
But Preucil immediately betrayed them to the Gestapo and the family were imprisoned.
Preucil went on to work for the Gestapo mainly by infiltrating Czech political prisoner groups in concentration camps; it is known that some of those he betrayed were shot.
When Germany was finally defeated Preucil was captured by the Czechs and put on trial for treason.
He was executed in 1947.
We are, as a rule, opposed to the death penalty but ... hurray!
