Berber Peters is the nice, lively and young collaborator of Wallenberg in Budapest’s Swedish Legation offices, often appearing in the novel The Wallenberg Dossier. Although not reciprocated, she is in love with Wallenberg.
“In July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg had arrived in Budapest. Among his new personal acquaintances was a lively young Dutch girl called Berber (Barbara) Smit. Somewhat typically, she scarcely figures in the vast literature on Wallenberg, although her name occurs in several places in Wallenberg’s pocket diary, confiscated by the Soviet authorities and later returned to the family at a meeting in Moscow in the autumn of 1989…
But she retained the highest regard for Wallenberg whom she had personally assisted in his work for the Jews .4 It is possible that she also played a role in activities of MI9, Britain’s secret escape orgaisation…
The father, Lolle Smit, in 1938, after spending twelve years working for General Motors in Berlin 6, Lolle had arrived in Bucharest from Vienna to take up a challenging new post. He had been appointed managing director of Philips Romania in Bucharest, a subsidiary of the well-know Dutch corporation, Philips of Eindhoven , in succession to H. Bruckenstein and soon became a well-known member of the local business community with influential government contacts. In September 1941, it was time for a new promotion as head of the Philips central office in Budapest and as such, in overall charge of the company’s operations in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. Apart from his family home in Budapest where he lived with his wife and three children, he retained a residence in Bucharest…
This professional side of things, however, provided only part of the picture. The archives of SOE, the British Special Operations Executive, now at Kew, tells a very different tale. The account that emerges from the SOE archives is essentially this: Lolle Smit [codename PETERS] had maintained close contacts with the Polish Secret Service, then perhaps the most adept and active Allied Humint service working in the Balkans and had co-operated with them in their work. [ En passant , it was noted that Smit had his own line of communication to the British diplomatic mission in Turkey]. At the same time, he gave important assistance to Allied military personnel who escaped from German POW camps and sought refuge in Hungary. Until the German occupation in March 1944, Hungary, although in the Axis camp, had retained a measure of independence and thus provided a convenient temporary safehaven for those on the run from the German authorities. Among those he assisted were Colonel Howie, a South African officer who was later engaged in secret negotiations with Admiral Horthy, and several Dutch officers who had escaped from the camp at the Stanislasviv in the Ukraine. Many of these Dutch officers were later involved in underground work in Hungary, producing forged papers for other escapers and persecuted Jews. One of them, Lieutenant Gerrit van der Waals, like Wallenberg, later fell foul of the Soviet Security organs when the Red Army entered the Hungarian capital and ended by being taken to Moscow where he died in August 1948 in the hospital of Butirskaya prison as the resullt of prolonged maltreatment in Russian custody…
After the war , Lolle Smit had received two honours in recognition of his wartime work: a British OBE and a Dutch Ridder i de Orde van Oranje Nassau. The real reason for the awards remained secret…
All in all, it is a remarkable picture of secret service during the Second World War which has remained unknown to the wider public for almost seventy years. Lolle Smit was not a professional intelligence agent. The position he held in Philips in the Balkans was not a cover, merely a conventional career position. Like many people during the Second World War, he was a man who had quietly taken a stand and followed it up with practical action.32 His geographical position, his mobility, his contacts, his abilities to sum up men and situations and his nerve under stress allowed him to use those opportunities which arose to make important contributions to Allied clandestine warfare or to alleviate human suffering.”
Source: C.G.McKay/Craig Graham McKay/August 2010. Title: A FRIEND INDEED, The secret service of Lolle Smit. https://intelligencepast.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/lolle-smit.pdf
