Note: A reader from New Zealand recently sent me a photo likely taken Between January and March 1944 on the estate of Count Mihály Andrássy in Szigetvár, Hungary where British Commonwealth prisoners of war who’d escaped from German stalags were housed before Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. The photo includes Heinz Loewenstein, my father’s first cousin, along with other POWs whose memoirs and wartime escapades I’ve discussed in multiple posts written about Heinz. In this post I review the historical events that led to the capturing of this astonishing moment. I feel truly privileged to have obtained a copy of it, particularly since I met Heinz as a child and know he was one of my father’s closest relatives.
Related Posts:
POST 137: MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN: DISCOVERING HIS WHEREABOUTS DURING WORLD WAR II
POST 163: THE WARTIME ESCAPADES OF HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN, FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN’S BROTHER
POST 181: JOE POWELL, ESCAPEE FROM A GERMAN STALAG WITH MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN
I derive pleasure from my blog on multiple levels. Beyond learning about historical events and the geopolitical milieu in which the subjects of my posts lived, I often discover connections between events, people, and places, and occasionally facilitate this among followers of my blog. Readers occasionally send me rare photographs of family members or images of well-known or notorious individuals. The current post is about one such photograph sent to me of my father’s first cousin by Paul London, a gentleman from New Zealand.
Paul initially reached out to me through my blog in January 2025. He introduced himself as the biographer of the Kiwi soldier Roy Natusch, which immediately caught my attention as I had written about Roy in Post 163 (more on this below) and because he knew and was detained with my father’s first cousin Heinz Löwenstein in Hungary. When Paul initially contacted me, he wrote:
“While ‘surfing’ the internet the other night, by happenchance I came across your family history website recording details on the lives of Rudolf Loewenstein and his wife Hedwig (née Bruck). My interest in the Loewenstein family lies with the wartime activities of their son Heinz Kurt (aka as Henry) who in 1944 as an escaped PoW was living on the estate of Count Mihály Andrássy at Szigetvár in southern Hungary with a group of allied evaders under the command of a New Zealand soldier, my late mentor Roy Natusch, who, as you have correctly recorded was himself an escaped PoW and over the course of four years made ten escape attempts before finally making that ‘home run’. During his time in Hungary Roy not only passes himself off as Henry Loewenstein but also masquerades as a recently escaped Dutch officer which the post-war UK tabloids identify Roy as “the Double Dutchman”. I see you too have referred to his book that bears that same name and was released in 1977 and records their movements. For the record, over the past 80 years Roy’s activities have inspired 12 authors to record his clandestine activities in 15 books, with the last being published some 3 years ago in ‘The Flight’ by Tyler Bridges, a former American journalist now university lecturer in New Orleans. For over 20 years I was Roy’s biographer and since his death some 16 years ago I am now the custodian of his archive which I’m currently reviewing and adding to as new and indeed exciting evidence emerges through the release of documents via the likes of those two genealogical sites of Ancestry.com and Findmypast, and lately the British National Archives at Kew Gardens, a repository I use to visit whenever in the UK.”
Reminding readers about Heinz.
Heinz Löwenstein and his older brother Fédor Löwenstein (Figure 1) have been the subject of numerous posts. Fédor Löwenstein was an accomplished abstract artist whose works were deemed by the Nazis to be degenerate art resulting in many of his works being destroyed. I’ve detailed in recent posts how I was able to retrieve three of his surviving works in September 2025, from the French Minister of Culture after a 12-year legal tussle.
For his part, Fédor’s younger brother, Heinz Löwenstein, who I met in Nice, France as a child, was captured by the Wehrmacht during the Battle of Greece in 1941 and incarcerated in various German stalags from which he escaped multiple times. His longest stretch of freedom occurred following his escape from Stalag VIIIB in Poland in September or October of 1943 when he successfully made his way to Hungary. Following his flight there, Heinz was eventually scooped up by Hungarian police and briefly taken to Komárom, Hungary, near the then-Czechoslovakian border. He was not turned back over to the Nazis because Hungary had not yet declared war on Britain. Instead, from Komárom, Heinz was moved to Camp Siklós, then relocated to the remarkably comfortable estate of Count Mihály Andrássy at Szigetvár in southern Hungary.
In an article titled “The Messenger of Hope,” written by Roy Natusch and edited by Paul first published in October 1993 in the “New Zealand Returned Servicemen’s Association Review,” Roy described the circumstances of internment at Szigetvár: “By the end of 1943, Reg [EDITOR’S NOTE: REGINALD PHEASE, ANOTHER INTERNEE] was on the estate of Count Michael Andrassy in Szigetvár, Hungary, where I had been put in charge of a group of British soldiers who were put under loose government supervision as ‘free internees’—Hungary had not yet declared war on Britain.”
In Post 163 Postscript, I described the route Heinz might have followed using the same path that South African Lt. Colonel Charles Telfer Howie who had escaped from the same stalag several weeks earlier had taken. Howie would eventually make his way to Budapest and figure prominently in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to sway the Hungarians to support the Allies. The Nazis who had spies everywhere in Hungary got wind of this and invaded the country on the 19th of March 1944 to stymie Allied plans. Heinz and the other internees housed in Szigetvár were immediately recaptured. An interesting footnote about my father’s first cousin. In Stalag VIIIB and at Szigetvár, he was known as Heinz Löwenstein, surname spelled either “Henry Lowenstein” or “Henry Loewenstein,” but following his recapture in Hungary after the Nazis invaded in March 1944, he miraculously transformed into “Henry Goff” with a new prisoner number. Likely this metamorphosis slipped unnoticed through the “fog of war.”
In Post 163, using information from a book entitled “The Double Dutchman: A story of wartime escape and intrigue” by Francis Jones, I described some of Roy Natusch’s escapades because they prominently featured Heinz. I quote at length what I previously wrote:
“The story is primarily about a New Zealand soldier, captured like Heinz Löwenstein during the Battle of Greece in April 1941, by the name of Roy Natusch. (Figure 2) He was interned in Stalag XVIIIA in Wolfsberg, and, like Heinz, escaped from a work camp with two other internees, Lance-Bombardier David ‘Dai’ Tom Davies and Joe Walker. The work camp from which they fled was located not far from the Hungarian border in a place called Gaas, Austria. The author does not specify the exact date of their get away, but I place it in the Fall or Winter of 1943. Following their nighttime escape, the three internees tried to get as far into Hungary as possible; they were trying to avoid being recaptured by the German-influenced Hungarian border squads who would have handed them back to the Germans.
While Roy Natusch was only a Corporal, with the agreement of his two companions, he passed himself off as a Captain knowing that if the three were captured by the Hungarians an officer would be better treated. Eventually, the three escapees were in fact arrested by Hungarian police or military, and temporarily interned in Komárom, Hungary, near the then-Czechoslovakian border. Had they not been captured by the Hungarians, Roy and his traveling companions had always intended to do a dogleg through Hungary into then-Yugoslavia (i.e., head east into Hungary, then turn southwards towards Yugoslavia), linking up with Tito’s Partisans and being repatriated by the Allies in Italy. This was not to be their fate, at least not immediately.
As an officer, or at least claiming to be one, Roy quickly came to the attention of the only other escaped Allied officer in Hungary, a real officer, the South African Lieutenant Colonel Charles Telfer Howie hiding in Budapest (i.e., Komárom and Budapest are only about 60 miles apart). Along with a Private by the name of Tom Sanders, Howie had escaped from Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf [today: Łambinowice, Poland].
While at Komárom, Roy Natusch was visited by a Colonel Utassy from the Hungarian War Office along with a Foreign Service Officer, presumably to be vetted for possible involvement in a plot to change the course of the war. He eventually made his way to Budapest where he met other members of the Hungarian resistance and was introduced to Lt. Colonel Howie. While Howie could have left Hungary and rejoined the Allies, he consciously decided to remain there. Clandestinely, he was working with the various opposition factions in Hungary to switch them from the Axis to the Allied side. This was a particularly precarious undertaking since Budapest and more generally Hungary had Nazi spies everywhere. Moreover, it was an open secret that as soon as the Soviets got anywhere near Hungary, a day which was quickly approaching, the German troops would invade the country and quickly seize Budapest.
At the time Natusch met with Lt. Colonel Howie, Germany had not yet invaded Hungary, however. Howie dispatched Natusch to the detention camp in Szigetvár at Count Andrássy’s castle estate with specific orders that the detained British POWs there not attempt to escape to Yugoslavia, or they would be court-marshalled after the war. Sargeant Major Norman McLean was ostensibly in charge of the soldiers. As noted above, Heinz Löwenstein was among the sixteen or so British Commonwealth soldiers confined there and was considered the ‘intellectual of the camp’; here is where Roy Natusch first encountered Heinz. With Heinz’s nod of approval, the soldiers put off their escape attempt, a fateful decision, as it turned out. By the time Natusch and Howie made their request, Heinz, the point of contact because of his fluency in multiple languages, had already contacted a local Hungarian who would have facilitated their escape by accompanying them to the Partisans in Yugoslavia. The distance from Szigetvár to the Yugoslav border was less than 15 miles, although the march to reach Partisan lines once inside Yugoslavia was long and dangerous because the Wehrmacht troops were active in the northern part of the country.
The British representatives who were supposed to negotiate with the Hungarian opposition were to be dropped by parachute on the plains near Szigetvár, and the British soldiers were expected to gather the inexperienced parachutists and bring them to Budapest. Howie had assured the British soldiers that in the event of a sudden German invasion, he would notify them by phone and/or send one of his men to warn them so they could quickly flee to Yugoslavia to join the Partisans.
As it turned out, Germany’s invasion of Hungary took place on the 19th of March 1944, and came from three directions, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Germany. As expected, the Wehrmacht immediately headed for Budapest and the internment camp at Szigetvár where they recaptured all the British soldiers, including Natusch and Löwenstein. The warning the soldiers had been awaiting from Lt. Colonel Howie never arrived because the phone lines were immediately cut throughout the country upon Germany’s invasion, and the man Howie sent to warn the soldiers instead fled to Romania.
Because of Natusch’s knowledge of ‘The Mission’ (i.e., the Allies plan to try and peel off Hungary from the Axis alliance) and the players involved, he was a wanted man. Under torture, Natusch could have divulged the names of no fewer than eleven co-conspirators. For this reason, it was imperative he avoid being captured by the Gestapo. Fortunately, he managed to escape at Szigetvár despite being guarded by seven Wehrmacht soldiers. Following his getaway and subsequent travails, he eventually made his way back to Budapest in the company of another British escapee, and reestablished contact with Lt. Colonel Howie who was in hiding. In Budapest, through contacts he had there, he connected with some Dutch soldiers, including a Lieutenant Eddie van Hootegem. The latter would wind up giving him his identity card, so for a period this was his alias. However, when he and two other Dutch officers (Lieutenant Frank Brackel & Lieutenant Joob Sengor) were arrested in Budapest and taken to Buda prison, together they crafted an elaborate explanation for why the purported Dutch soldier “Eddie” was unable to speak Dutch.
Suspicious of his explanation, the Germans transferred Roy Natusch, now Eddie van Hootegem, along with a contingent of almost a hundred Hungarians, Poles, French, and Jews, and non-descripts, by train from Buda prison. The Wehrmacht intended to take Roy/Eddie to an Oflag, a prisoner of war camp for officers established by the Germans during WWII, in Neubrandenburg, about 120 miles north of Berlin. This presented a major problem for Roy since they would ultimately have discovered he was Natusch, not van Hootegem.
On their way to Neubrandenburg, however, the prisoners were unloaded in Stalag XVIIA [Kaisersteinbruch, Austria]. Roy once again had the good fortune to run into Heinz Löwenstein there, who had by now assumed his own alias, the previously mentioned “Henry Goff.” As a side note, Francis Jones, author of “The Double Dutchman,” incorrectly claims Heinz’s alias was ‘Henry Lewis.’ Regardless, Roy had learned from his time in Szigetvár that Heinz was a master forger, so he asked him to prepare a set of papers so that he could pass as an Italian.
Below is how Francis Jones describes the episode and the results:
‘Henry Lowenstein appeared a few hours later and got past the guards without difficulty. “Here you are, sir,” he said. “It’s finished.” He glanced around nervously. “Best hide it. I’m not sure about these guards” Natusch put the slim package he’d been given into his breast pocket. The Palestinian was as jumpy as a cat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything for your friends [EDITOR’S NOTE: THE AFOREMENTIONED BRACKEL & SENGOR]” he went on, “but there was only enough material for you.” Pride of craftsmanship calmed some of Henry’s agitation. “You’ll find a passport there, properly stamped,” he announced, “a travel warrant, also stamped, and a couple of letters. You’re Mario Brioni, sir. That’s if you want to be Italian. I’d better go now, sir. Good luck.” He shook hands with Natusch, gave Frank and Joob a half-bow, and left.
The New Zealander passed the little folder to his two friends without a word and stayed on the alert whilst they examined him it. The verdict came quickly. “It’s perfect,” Frank said slowly. His eyes were wide with admiration. “This is first-class work.” Joob Sengor, taking longer over his examination, agreed, and with that, Natusch was really satisfied. Joob was a protégé of the great Bentinck [EDITOR’S NOTE: A DUTCH FORGER], and a connoisseur of forgery. He put the documents back into his pocket and breathed thanks once again to the ever-helpful Henry Lowenstein.’
What the Germans had failed to do in Budapest, namely check his photo and fingerprint files in Berlin, they would certainly have done in the Oflag in Neubrandenburg; obviously, they would quickly have learned his real identity and turned him over to the Gestapo for interrogation. This meant that Natusch couldn’t risk facing new interrogators and had planned to jump off the train en route to the Oflag and change his identity from Eddie van Hootegem to Mario Brioni, who happened to be a fictitious Italian traveling legitimately. Incidentally, Roy had opted for an Italian surname because he spoke passable Italian and thought he could fool most Germans.
Roy’s intention after he jumped from the train was to travel in the opposite direction along the same line from Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland] towards Hegyeshalom, near the Austrian-Hungarian border. Stettin lay 30 miles east of Neubrandenburg, which made the revised journey feasible. Roy was concerned that if his luck failed some attentive German might check and discover there was no such person as Mario Brioni. If this happened, he knew that he could no longer be Eddie van Hootegem, a Dutchman who didn’t speak Dutch, and certainly not be himself. Heinz Löwenstein again came to his rescue and offered him his own identity since he now went by Henry Goff. Roy jumped at the offer, so Löwenstein gave him his identity tag. This was the last interaction between Heinz and Roy documented by Francis Jones.
As fate would have it, when Roy jumped off the train at the stop before Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], he was seriously hurt. Knowing he would be recaptured because of his injuries he ditched the identifications for both Mario Brioni and Heinz Löwenstein. He was arrested at the train station near Breslau by one of the three guards escorting him to the Dutch Oflag in Neubrandenburg. On the 2nd of August 1944 two guards from there came to collect Roy. Because his Hungarian civil papers were in order, upon his arrival in the Oflag he continued to pass himself off as Eddie van Hootegem. However, eventually he gave up the ghost and admitted to his interrogators that he was Roy Natusch, an escapee from Stalag XVIIIA in Wolfsberg. Fortunately, the Germans didn’t immediately make the connection that he was wanted by the Gestapo; consequently, they sent him back to Stalag XVIIIA where he’d originally escaped from years before. Knowing he was still in danger, he quickly had himself assigned to a work party in a place called Radkersburg near the Yugoslavian border. With help from the Hungarian resistance, he escaped across the border and after a dangerous journey through German lines reached the Partisans. From there he was eventually repatriated in Italy.”
According to Paul, Roy spoke admiringly of Heinz:
“Roy talked very highly of him and was amazed at his skills to forge documents most accurately and prior to his death Roy often wondered what became of Henry and thought he may have settled in Palestine after the war. We did go ‘looking’, but sadly with little success and now reading your various blogs confirms the reason why.”
As previously noted, I’ve reviewed what I previously wrote not only because Heinz Löwenstein escaped several times on his own, but he also figured prominently in the escape of other prisoners-of-war.
As it specifically relates to Heinz’s “loose government supervision” in Hungary on the estate of Count Andrássy, Paul recently came into possession of what I can only characterize as an exceptionally rare photograph of some of the internees detained there, including Heinz. (Figure 3a-b)
Paul recently completed a world cruise where he had several opportunities to meet up with several fellow Second World War researchers he’s been associated with over the past 35 years. One Kiwi expat now living in Atlanta, Georgia flew down to Miami to meet Paul when his cruise ship berthed there and subsequently put him in touch with the son (Buster Beckett) of another internee whose father was also housed on Count Andrassy’s estate in Szigetvár at the same time as Heinz. Buster’s father was Private Doug “Joe” Beckett. Dai Davies, mentioned above as one of POWs who escaped from Stalag XVIIIA (Wolfsberg) with Roy Natusch and Joe Walker, gave Joe Beckett the attached group photo taken on Count Andrássy’s estate of the “guests” detained there. Dai Davies identified as many of the detainees as he could. (Figure 4)
Let me review what I discussed in Post 137. The evidence that Heinz Löwenstein escaped from Stalag VIIIB in Poland and successfully reached Hungary comes from War Office Record WO 224/95. This document was sent to me by my English friend, Brian Cooper, who specializes in the study of British Commonwealth Second World War POWs. It places Heinz at Szigetvár on the estate of Count Andrássy no later than November 8, 1943. Quoting what I previously wrote:
“Record WO 224/95 is a Visit Report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) written on the 16th of November detailing prison conditions at the Camp Siklós Hungarian detention center inspected on the 8th of November 1943. While referred to as Camp Siklós the holding facility had in fact been moved from Siklós to Szigetvár on the 12th of August 1943 due to the poor conditions prevailing at Siklós. Attached to this report is a list of 16 army personnel (Figure 5), presumably, all POW escapees, including ‘Henry Lowenstein.’ It’s unclear at what point Heinz was arrested in Hungary but no later than the 8th of November he was in Hungarian hands. Szigetvár, incidentally, was the castle estate of Count Mihály Andrássy, and incarceration conditions there were excellent.
The ICRC visit to Camp Siklós (Szigetvár) was conducted in its capacity as a Protecting Power which was formalized in the Geneva Convention of 1929. Protecting powers were allowed to inspect prisoners of war camps, interview prisoners in private, communicate freely with prisoners, and supply books for the prison library. The term ‘Protecting Power’ is simply defined. It is a state which has accepted the responsibility of protecting the interests of another state in the territory of a third, with which, for some reason, such as war, the second state does not maintain diplomatic relations.”
The photograph given by Dai Davies to Joe Beckett, both pictured, includes eighteen people, eleven of whom are identified. (see Figure 4) I suspect, though have no way to confirm this, the unidentified gentleman in the center of the photo nattily dressed in a suit was Count Mihály Andrássy. Only five of the people whose names appear on the ICRC list are identified in the picture, namely, Corporal Joe Crolla, Private John Bisset, Private Henry Loewenstein, Private Reginald Mathews, and Private John McAteer. It’s probable that some of the unnamed individuals correspond to other people on the ICRC list. It’s not clear why there isn’t greater overlap between the ICRC list and the photograph.
Interestingly, Heinz Löwenstein is identified as a “document forger.” He is kneeling in the lower right of the photo. Having multiple photos of him and having met him earlier in life, I can confirm this is Heinz. As I discussed and illustrated in Post 163, by happenstance, Brian found a group picture on Facebook of so-called Palestinian POWs taken at Stalag VIIIB that also includes an extremely haggard and gaunt looking Heinz Löwenstein. (Figure 6) It is remarkable how much healthier Heinz appears in the photo taken at Szigetvár. (Figure 7) In Roy’s article “The Messenger of Hope,” when he again encountered Heinz in Stalag XVIIA [Kaisersteinbruch, Austria] and Heinz gave Roy Natusch his identity papers (since he was now going by “Henry Goff”), he “. . .noticed how thin and exhausted Henry Loewenstein was from the privations of the Belgrade prison.”
Returning to the picture Paul London shared with me, it is fascinating to see images of some of the prisoners Heinz was interned with as well as individuals who wrote their own memoirs or were the subject of books that mentioned Heinz. The internees appear even more realistic in the AI-enhanced photo Paul was able to get a family friend to reproduce. (Figure 8)
Paul recently shared some dialogue from an unfinished documentary two brothers were producing on Roy Natusch during which they interviewed Dai Davies talking about Heinz Löwenstein:
“Tell us about Henry Lowenstein.
01:57:59:16 Henry Lowenstein was a totally different fellow. Very quiet chap, very, I think was well educated. Very intelligent chap, knew his stuff. And he was a master forger. He could forge every kind of thing. And he must have been able to speak German fluently, I assumed because some of the passes he made with the Nazi emblem on them, the eagle and the swastika. And with instructions that so-and-so should be doing this or that or should be going here. They were fantastic.
01:58:47:13 And I don’t know how he did it, but he did it and he was a wonderfully educated fellow and a nice fellow. He had a way of speaking which irritated some people. I think it was because he was either French or some other nationality but I know he spoke German perfectly. But because of the way he spoke, he irritated some of our boys. But he was very, very intelligent.
What were the tools of his trade as a forger?
01:59:36:09 Well I don’t know where he got them from. He used to make ink on his own. I never found out how he made the ink. He used to make ink. And then he’d have a pen made out of timber or something like that, or a piece of a bone. He was a proper genius in that field. I think he would have made a fortune in the Bank of England.
So he used calligraphy?
02:00:06:09 Oh beautiful. And you see the way that the Germans write, they’ve got a hand-writing which is totally different to ours and he wrote in that style.
02:00:42:03 Lowenstein was a master artist trade. He had the gothic style of writing and everything, marvelous. Lowenstein was a gentleman in my opinion and I don’t know what happened to him.”
Ending this post quoting from someone who knew Heinz Löwenstein seems appropriate.
REFERENCES
Davies, D.T.A. & Ioan Wyn Evans. All for Freedom: A True Story of Escape from the Nazis. Gomer Press, 2016.
Jones, Francis S. The Double Dutchman: A story of wartime escape and intrigue. The Dunmore Press Limited, Palmerston North, New Zealand, 1977.
Natusch, R. (1993). The Messenger of Hope. New Zealand Returned Servicemen’s Association Review.
