Peter Stevens (born Georg Franz Hein) was the only German Jew known to have flown bombers in the RAF in World War 2. He was sent to safety in London by his widowed mother in early 1934 (aged 14), Hein learned English and graduated from Regent Street Polytechnic in 1936. After a year at the LSE, he began working, but immaturity and bad feelings towards his mother got in the way. Gambling away the remainder of his family fortune (which had been sent to England for his care, and that of his two siblings), Hein got into trouble with the law, and in July '39 was sentenced to 3 months for petty theft. Released from prison 6 weeks early on Sept 1 (the day the Nazis invaded Poland), Hein committed identity theft, taking the name of a dead Polytechnic classmate, Peter Stevens.
Rather than reporting to a police station as an enemy alien (which would have meant internment for the duration), the reincarnated Peter Stevens reported to an enlistment station and joined the Royal Air Force for training as a fighter pilot. Selected instead for bombers, he was the object of a Metropolitan Police manhunt during the 18 months he trained, and the 5 months he was flying combat operations as a Hampden pilot.
Joining 144 Squadron in April '41, Stevens flew 22 combat ops before his aircraft was damaged by flak over Berlin on Sept 7 '41. He order his crew to bail out, and one rear gunner, Sgt Ivor Roderick Fraser was killed when his parachute failed to open. The other air gunner, Sgt Thompson, was captured and spent the rest of the war as a POW. Stevens realized that the aircraft was marginally flyable, and made it back as far as Amsterdam before he ran out of fuel and force-landed in a farmer's field. He destroyed the secret bits and set fire to the wreckage before setting out cross-country with his Navigator, Sgt Alan Payne. They were captured by German troops within a day.
Stevens, as a POW in his own country, was without protection under the Geneva Convention (as he was still a German citizen). For 3 years and 8 months, he lived with the knowledge that the Nazis could take him out of the prison camp at any time and execute him legally. Nonetheless, he went on to become one of the most ardent escapers of the war. Stevens made 8 escape attempts, and got outside the wire 3 times, but was recaptured each time.
In October '41, just a month after being captured, he and a Canadian pilot (W/C W. J. "Mike" Lewis) jumped off a Nazi prison train in a hail of bullets, and went to the home of Stevens' mother in Hannover. Looking for civilian clothing, food and money, they discovered instead that Stevens' mother had committed suicide 6 weeks before the outbreak of hostilities.
On May 17, 1946, Stevens was awarded the Military Cross for his escape activities, one of only 69 members of the RAF to receive the medal for bravery on the ground. Another of his attempts was characterized in a London newspaper on May 18, 1946 as "The Boldest Escape Attempt of the War".
Stevens was naturalized as a British citizen in 1946, and was then recruited to MI6 in 1947. He served 5 years in MI6 as an operative against the Soviets in Germany. He emigrated to Canada in 1952, married in 1953 and had two sons. Stevens died of a heart attack brought on by chemotherapy in 1979 in Toronto. Sgt Fraser has no known grave, but is remembered on the Runnymede Memorial.
The biography of Peter Stevens, 'Escape, Evasion and Revenge', was published by Pen and Sword Aviation in 2009.
