By Kevin Seabrooke

As the Allies approached Brussels, Belgium, in early September 1944, the occupying Nazi SS decided, as a parting act of vengeance, to load up more than 1,400 members of the Resistance, Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, and Allied airmen onto a train bound for the Neuengamme concentration camp. What followed was a two-day master class in passive resistance using exaggerated bureaucracy, false mechanical issues and other methods to stall the train. The Belgian railway workers and Resistance fighters successfully kept the train, now known as Le Train Fantôme (“The Ghost Train”) from leaving before the British tanks rolled in.

The Nazi Ghost Train: Evasion, Betrayal, and Escape during World War II (Greg Lewis, Pegasus Books/Dist. by Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 336 pp., July 7, 2026 $29.95 HC)