Victor Martin

Victor Martin (19 January 1912 – November 1989) was a Belgian academic sociologist. An alumnus of the Catholic University of Leuven, during World War II he embarked on a spying mission in Nazi Germany on behalf of the Front de l'Indépendance, a Belgian resistance group, bringing back the first reliable information about the fate of Belgian Jews deported to the east, as well as detailed information about the functioning of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Martin, who possessed a doctorate, had travelled in Switzerland, France and Germany before the war, and his title had given him access to a network of good contacts in German universities. As a member of the Belgian Resistance and realizing that his mastery of the German language was a trump card, he proposed himself for a secret mission in enemy territory.

Martin's proposal was accepted, but the mission was different from what he had imagined; at the request of the official of the Comité de Défense des Juifs, he was ordered to observe directly where the trains went which carried the deported Jews of Belgium. He manufactured a project researching the psychology of different social classes as cover. He obtained meetings with the sociologist Leopold von Wiese at Cologne, and with another colleague at the University of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland). The project was accepted by the occupier and he obtained permits to travel between Frankfurt, Berlin and Breslau during the period of 4–20 February 1943.

...
Wikipedia