Janine de Greef, Belgian who helped smuggle downed Allied airmen to safety, dies at 95 [View all]

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Obituaries

Janine de Greef, Belgian who helped smuggle downed Allied airmen to safety, dies at 95



Janine de Greef in Lourdes, France, in 1945. (Family photo)

By Phil Davison
Dec. 15, 2020 at 1:05 p.m. EST

Janine de Greef was a 14-year Belgian schoolgirl when the Nazis invaded her country in May 1940. With her youth proving an effective cover, she became at 16 a member of the Belgian resistance, helping smuggle hundreds of downed Allied airmen, mostly British but including 108 Americans, south through Nazi-occupied France to neutral Spain.

The de Greef family — her father, mother and elder brother — were credited with saving more than 320 of the 800 or so Allied airmen who survived being shot down over Belgium. ... At every step, Ms. de Greef was in danger of capture, even execution by the Gestapo, a fate which befell many of her Belgian comrades, some 250 of whom died in Nazi concentration camps.

During her trips through France toward the Pyrenees mountains and Spain, she was often aided by local guerrillas of the French resistance. She was believed to be among the last surviving members of the “Comet Line,” the clandestine Belgian resistance network founded in 1941 by 24-year-old Belgian nurse Andrée “Dédée” de Jongh, to spirit allied airmen through Nazi lines to safety in Spain and eventually to Britain.

Ms. de Greef, 95, died Nov. 7 at the Brussels care home where she had spent the last decade. The French-based Les Amis du Réseau Comète (Friends of the Comet Network, or Line) announced the death but did not provide a cause.

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