Obituary

Countess Andrée de Jongh

Belgian resistance heroine whose secret escape line saved 800

Countess Andrée de Jongh, who has died aged 90, created one of the most effective escape lines for allied airmen out of Nazi-occupied Europe during the second world war before she was caught, interrogated by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. Later, she devoted the rest of her working life to the treatment of African lepers.

De Jongh was born in occupied Brussels in 1916, a year after the British Red Cross hospital matron Edith Cavell was shot by the Germans for helping some 200 first world war soldiers to escape from Belgium to the neutral Netherlands. The story deeply impressed the young Andrée. The younger daughter of schoolmaster Frédéric de Jongh, she was 24 and working as a commercial artist in Malmédy at the time of the Belgian surrender to the Nazis. She threw up her job, moved to Brussels and became a nurse. Some of her patients were British servicemen, whom she helped to send letters home via the Red Cross.

Entirely on her own initiative, De Jongh began to make discreet soundings among friends and contacts with a view to copying her heroine, Cavell. Circumstances for such activity were much harder in the second world war than in the first: this time, the Netherlands had been overrun, while the whole of France was under direct or indirect Nazi control, divided between a German-occupied zone and a collaborationist Vichy.

The construction of what was called the Comet escape line was methodical from the outset. De Jongh arranged a series of safe houses in and around Brussels, where evading soldiers and aircrew could await escort out of the country along a complicated route. She found plenty of helpers, even though such activity was subject to the death penalty. Her first escape group comprised 11 men, who were sent via Paris and further Nazi-occupied French territory (which included the whole of the Atlantic coast) to the Pyrenees, which they crossed on foot into neutral but pro-Nazi Spain.

This first sortie ended badly. All members of the party were arrested by the Spanish authorities; only two ultimately managed to reach England. So De Jongh decided to lead the next group, two Belgian soldiers and a Scot, to Spain herself. They eventually stole into the British consulate in Bilbao, a success that proved to be the breakthrough.

Now De Jongh was able to persuade British officials to provide financial and logistical backing, and the Comet line got the support of MI9, the intelligence branch set up to bring home stranded servicemen from occupied territory. The desk officer who oversaw support for Comet was the later Tory politician Airey Neave, who himself had escaped back to England from Colditz.

For a while, Comet flourished alongside another Belgian escape line, known as Pat, which managed to send some 600 men to Britain before it was betrayed and wound up in 1942. Comet carried on until the allied armies freed Belgium in 1944, in spite of disaster in January 1943. De Jongh evaded mounting German suspicions, which had led to a number of betrayals and arrests among network members in Belgium, by moving her headquarters to Paris. On one occasion, Comet rescued a seven-man RAF bomber crew and got them all to Gibraltar in a week. Altogether the organisation was responsible for the safe return of some 800 men.

But on her 33rd run to Spain, while leading three RAF men at the beginning of 1944, de Jongh and her charges were arrested in France. She was interrogated by the Gestapo, to whom she told the unvarnished truth: the whole thing had been her idea from the start. Unwilling to believe her, the Germans spared her life but sent her to the notorious women's concentration camp at Ravens- brück. She sidestepped further interrogation by disappearing into the general prison population. Her father had also worked with Comet, but was betrayed, arrested and shot in June 1943.

After the war, De Jongh went to the [then Belgian] Congo to work as a nurse in a leper colony. Following Congolese independence, she undertook similar work in Ethiopia. For her wartime heroism, she was awarded the George Medal by the British, the Medal of Freedom by the Americans, an honorary commission in the Belgian army and was created a countess by the King of the Belgians.

· Andrée de Jongh, nurse and resistance heroine, born November 30 1916; died October 13 2007

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