After landing in France, Szabo, Guiet, Liewer and Maloubier got into a large car and were driven to a grocer’s shop in the village of Sussac, where they were fed and given rooms to sleep in. They were dismayed to discover that almost half of the supplies that were dropped with them had been destroyed, as the parachutes attached to the packages had failed to deploy. There was nothing they could do about that, however, so they quickly turned their focus to their mission, which was to make contact with local Resistance leaders and assist them in organising sabotage activities. The D-Day commanders were relying heavily on the French Resistance to disrupt German communications in the days following the Allied invasion, and the SALESMAN network members were eager to get started. On the morning of 10 June, Liewer gave Szabo her first assignment. She was to make contact with Jacques Poirier, the leader of another Resistance network (DIGGER), in order to arrange a meeting between him and Liewer, so that they could share information and coordinate their two networks’ activities. Plans had been made for Szabo to travel by car for the first part of her journey and then to complete the trip by bike. She was accompanied by Jacques Dufour and Jean Bariaud, two members of the French Resistance. Before they departed, Szabo requested a Sten gun, which Philippe Liewer loaded for her. Szabo’s request for a gun was a curious one in terms of security measures. Travelling through the French countryside was fraught with peril. German roadblocks were common, and being caught with a weapon would result in her immediate arrest, so she certainly endangered herself with this request. More curious still is the fact that she asked for a Sten gun (a large sub-machine gun) rather than a pistol, which would have been much easier to conceal. However, Robert Maloubier clearly remembers Szabo’s loathing of Germans, and her determination to kill as many as she could. Perhaps, consciously or subconsciously, Szabo was seeking such an opportunity.
With her bike strapped to the back of the car, Szabo, Dufour and Bariaud set off on their mission. As they approached the village of Salon-la-Tour they encountered a German roadblock manned by the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The Panzer Division had actually been on its way to Normandy but, on the evening of 9 June 1944, one of the division’s battalion commanders (Helmut Kämpfe) was kidnapped by some Maquis (armed Resistance fighters). The soldiers from the Second SS Panzer division fanned out throughout the region searching for Kämpfe, and the roadblock they established at Salon-la-Tour was part of this search. The Germans waved for them to stop, and Dufour waved back, slowing down the car. As both Dufour and Szabo were armed, they decided that stopping for the roadblock was not an option, and Dufour murmured to Szabo, who was beside him in the passenger seat, that she needed to be ready to jump out and run. They stopped the car about 35 m from the roadblock, and the trio leapt from the car, seeking cover in an adjacent wheat field. As the Germans gave chase, both Szabo and Dufour laid down withering machine-gun fire. Bariaud, who had been unarmed, disappeared into the depths of the wheat field. Pursued by heavy fire, Szabo and Dufour managed to make their way through the field to the edge of a forest. At first it looked as though they might have made their escape. They travelled quickly through the field, keeping their heads low so that they presented no targets. However, the Germans soon began raking the field with machine-gun fire, and German infantrymen entered the field en masse. At this point, according to Dufour, Szabo fell to the ground, exhausted. Her clothes were torn and she was bleeding from countless scratches she had sustained from the underbrush. Dufour attempted to carry her, but Szabo told him to go on without her, insisting that someone had to reach Philippe Liewer to warn him of the German presence in the area. Szabo covered Dufour’s escape with gunfire until her ammunition ran out. Dufour managed to escape and hid beneath a haystack next to a nearby farmhouse. Szabo was taken into custody by the Germans and was, in fact, brought first to the very farm where Dufour was hiding. According to Dufour (in a statement included in Philippe Liewer’s official report of Szabo’s arrest), ‘Last I know was that, half an hour later, Szabo was brought to that very farm by the Germans; I heard them questioning her as to my whereabouts, and heard her answering, laughing “You can run after him, he is far away by now.”’8
Another witness, Madame Montinin, who lived in the farmhouse where Dufour hid, recalled that Szabo and Dufour
defended themselves like lions. Jacques shot until his last bullet and they had nothing left. The Germans injured the lady on the ankle with a bullet. She couldn’t walk. That’s when they caught her. A German officer approached and offered her a cigarette. She spat in his face and didn’t accept it. She was very brave to do that.9
Interestingly, Madame Montinin clearly identifies Szabo as having been struck and wounded by a German bullet, whereas Dufour had no recollection of this. It is possible that Madame Montinin was mistaken. Alternatively, Dufour may simply have been unaware that Szabo had been shot, and so attributed her bleeding, which he did remember, to cuts sustained when hitting the ground to fire at the Germans, or to the branches and vegetation they encountered as they attempted to escape through the wheat field. From the farmhouse Szabo was taken first to Gestapo headquarters and then to Limoges prison. Jacques Dufour, with the help of the Montinin family, managed to escape and returned to Liewer, Maloubier and Guiet early the next morning. The group was devastated to learn of the capture of their friend and plans were immediately made to rescue Szabo. Maloubier contacted the local Resistance to see if they had any contacts within Limoges prison. The information that Maloubier received detailed how Szabo was walked down to Gestapo headquarters (approximately half a mile) every couple of days, under the watch of two guards. Maloubier found a local Resistance member who owned a car, and the plan was for Maloubier and the Resistance driver to pull up in front of Szabo and the two guards while they were en route to Gestapo headquarters. The driver was to snatch Szabo into the car while Maloubier killed the two guards. Unfortunately, just before the plan was implemented, Szabo was moved to Fresnes prison, outside of Paris. With this move, all hopes for a rescue were gone. The SALESMAN network needed to focus on their assignment of disrupting German transportation and communications so that the Allied armies in Normandy could advance off the beaches. There was simply no time to rescue a lost comrade.
Szabo was held at Fresnes prison, but on several occasions was brought to the infamous Avenue Foch where she was interrogated relentlessly. The buildings located at 82, 84 and 86 Avenue Foch had been commandeered by the Germans when they occupied France. Located in a beautiful residential neighbourhood not far from the Arc de Triomphe, they housed the German counter-intelligence branch of the Gestapo and were used for the imprisonment and interrogation of captured foreign agents. Szabo revealed nothing during her interrogations, refusing to name her Resistance contacts or to explain the purpose of her mission. Torturing captured agents was quite common at Avenue Foch, and the Szabo biography Carve Her Name with Pride (R. J. Minney) asserts that Szabo was tortured extensively. However, the book contains a great deal of ‘conversation’ material that it is doubtful the author could have been privy to, so there is a sense that some of the material is fictionalised to create a better and more dramatic story. Other authors, including Susan Ottaway and former intelligence officer and history professor M. R. D. Foot, have examined witness statements from Szabo’s cellmates at Fresnes prison, and can find no conclusive evidence that Szabo was tortured during the interrogation process. Whether or not Szabo was physically tortured, the mental torture she would have suffered from her imprisonment, multiple interrogations, and the daily worry that each day might be her last would certainly have been significant. Szabo definitely left her mark on Avenue Foch, as her name was found written on the wall of cell 45 (one of the interrogation cells) when the premises were searched after the war.
In August of 1944, the decision was made to send Szabo to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, along with fellow SOE agents Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. Bloch, aged twenty-nine, was a French Jewess who had been trained by SOE as a wireless op
erator and had been working with the CLERGYMAN network near Nantes since early March 1944. She was arrested on 19 June 1944 after a Gestapo raid on the home where she was staying. Rolfe, aged thirty, had been working as a wireless operator for the HISTORIAN network since April 1944. On 31 July 1944, the home she was staying in was raided by the Germans, and Rolfe was arrested. Szabo, Bloch and Rolfe, along with hundreds of other prisoners of war, were loaded aboard a train bound for Germany. As the prisoners lined up, in the crowd Szabo caught a glimpse of her old friend Harry Peulevé, who had been arrested in March. The Germans’ decision to move these prisoners was no doubt influenced by the fact that the Allied armies had long since broken through the German defences on the Normandy beaches and were, by August, closing in on Paris. At some point during the trip the train was bombed by the Royal Air Force (RAF). The train stopped and, leaving the prisoners on board, the German guards exited the train to machine-gun the planes. Many of the prisoners were in a panic, fearing the bombs might hit the train, and dozens were suffering from dehydration, as they had been packed into the cars with no food or water in the scorching August heat. Amid the exploding bombs and machine-gun fire, Szabo, Bloch and Rolfe crawled along the floor of the train to bring water to the suffering prisoners. Harry Peulevé witnessed this act, and declared, ‘I shall never forget that moment … I felt very proud that I knew her. She looked so pretty, despite her shabby clothes and her lack of make-up – she was full of good cheer.’10 Another agent, Forest Yeo-Thomas, was also impressed by the bravery of Szabo, Bloch and Rolfe, stating, ‘Through the din, they shouted words of encouragement to us, and seemed quite unperturbed. I can only express my unbounded admiration for them and words are so inadequate that I cannot hope to say what I felt then and still feel now.’11
Taken from the train, as the track had been heavily damaged by the bombing, both the male and female prisoners were loaded into heavily armed trucks and driven to Gestapo headquarters at Châlons-sur-Marne. The prisoners were allowed to wash in a local fountain, and conversed with each other as their captors received further instructions regarding the transport of the prisoners. They spent the night sleeping in stables, with the male prisoners separated from the females. The German guards had orders to shoot anyone who tried to cross over. Still, Peulevé managed to exchange some whispered words with Szabo. He recalled,
We spoke of old times and we told each other our experiences in France. Bit by bit everything was unfolded – her life in Fresnes, her interviews at the Avenue Foch … She was in a cheerful mood. Her spirits were high. She was confident of victory and was resolved on escaping no matter where they took her.12
The next morning the prisoners were transported to Metz and then on to a camp at Saarbrücken. Szabo was kept there for several days, and was briefly reunited with fellow agent Yvonne Baseden. The two women had a brief opportunity to chat, but Szabo was soon loaded aboard a cattle car to be transferred to Ravensbrück. Baseden would eventually follow Szabo to Ravensbrück, but she never saw her colleague again.
Szabo, Rolfe and Bloch arrived at the camp on 22 August 1944. Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi camp designed specifically for women. Opened in 1939 and located approximately 90 km north of Berlin, the camp had a terrifying reputation. Prisoners in the camp existed under horrific conditions, and murders occurred daily, as a result of starvation, beating, torture, hanging and shooting. Medical experimentation on the prisoners was also commonplace. After arriving at Ravensbrück, Szabo, Rolfe and Bloch were sent to several different work camps. In September, they were shipped to Torgau (193 km south of Ravensbrück) where they performed factory work. Conditions there were bearable, and witnesses recall that Szabo was very cheerful and was planning to escape. She actually managed to get hold of a key to one of the camp gates, but had to throw it away when someone informed on her. In late October 1944, Szabo, Bloch and Rolfe were relocated to a camp in Königsberg. Conditions here were dreadful, and the women worked long hours in the cold, assisting in the construction of an airfield. One of Szabo’s fellow prisoners wrote frequently to Violette’s parents after the war, and, after seeing the movie Carve Her Name with Pride, wrote a letter to them stating,
You will understand why I feel shocked when I see pictures of the film on Violette with the women in the camp wearing so much clothes – my poor darling had only one blue silk frock, a fringe from hem to her knees and short sleeved, this is the way we were clothed to face a Prussian winter.13
The inadequate food, squalid living conditions and hard labour, clearing brush and trees, made life miserable for Szabo, but she still managed to make quite a few friends while she was imprisoned. Survivors remembered her fondly. In early 1945 the three British SOE agents were recalled from the work camp at Königsberg and returned to Ravensbrück. They were housed in the punishment block where they had no contact with other prisoners, but rumours spread quickly that the women had returned to the camp. Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch were both very ill by this time, and only Szabo was able to walk. One evening, sometime during late January or early February, the three women were summoned from their cells. They were led to a courtyard known as execution alley. Holding hands, the three condemned women knelt down as the order of their execution was read out. One by one they were executed by a single gunshot through the back of the neck, and their bodies were immediately stripped and cremated. Violette Szabo was twenty-three years old.
After the war, survivors from Ravensbrück talked admiringly of Szabo’s bravery, as did her colleagues in the SOE. The three men who accompanied Szabo on her last mission (Robert Maloubier, Philippe Liewer and Jean Claude Guiet) all survived the war. On 28 January 1947, seven-year-old Tania Szabo accepted the George Cross on behalf of her late mother. The medal was presented by King George VI at Buckingham Palace. Three years later, Tania, wearing the George Cross, was presented with the Croix de Guerre (a French military decoration awarded to those who had performed a heroic act in combat with the enemy) by the French ambassador. A plaque mounted outside the Violette Szabo Museum in Herefordshire, England, reads as follows:
This plaque is placed
as an evergreen tribute to
VIOLETTE SZABO, G.C.
British Secret Agent
Born 26th June 1921
Executed by the Gestapo
at Ravensbrück during 1945
In deep appreciation of her outstanding
courage in England’s hour of need.
Violette spent many happy holidays here
at ‘Cartref’ with her Aunt and Uncle
Mr. & Mrs. H. Lucas and family.
R.I.P. Violette
‘Carve her name with pride’
Rosemary E. Rigby, 1988
The story of Violette Szabo has continued to capture the imagination of thousands of people. In 1958, a British film, Carve Her Name with Pride, based on R. J. Minney’s Szabo biography of the same name, was released. It starred Virginia McKenna as Violette, and former SOE Chief Instructor Major Oliver Brown stated in a 1992 interview that ‘McKenna portrayed her absolutely exactly’.14 Tania Szabo was raised by her grandparents and moved to Australia in 1951. She returned to England in 1963 and now lives in Wales. She has written her own account of her mother’s life, Young Brave and Beautiful, which proved to be so popular that it is currently sold out. Tania maintains the Violette Szabo, George Cross website. In 2009, a sculpture of Szabo was unveiled opposite London’s Houses of Parliament on the Albert Embankment, and Szabo’s story is on permanent display in the Szabo Room at the Jersey War Tunnels.
2
Nancy Wake (1912–2011)
Code Name:
Hélène/Witch/The White Mouse
Bawdy, irreverent, brazen and adventurous, Nancy Wake was the Allies’ most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War. Like a steam engine, Nancy roared through life with a personality so big that a meeting with her was impossible to forget. Not exactly a desirable trait for undercover work, where the idea is to maintain a low profile! Yet ev
erything about Nancy was magnified: her personality, her sense of humour, her thirst for adventure and, most importantly, her courage. Nancy Wake was one of those few individuals who were truly larger than life and, although she was nicknamed ‘The White Mouse’, it would have been more apt to compare her to a lion.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake entered the world on 30 August 1912. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand, to Charles Augustus and Ella Rosieur Wake, and was the youngest of six children. Her father, a journalist, moved his family to Sydney, Australia, when Nancy was two, and subsequently abandoned them, leaving Nancy’s mother to raise six children on her own. Nancy was a handful, even as a child, and she chafed against her mother’s strict religious parenting, the rules and restrictions of school, and the lack of glamour and adventure that she associated with being the youngest child in a large family that struggled to make ends meet. Her confidence and adventurous personality were evident early on, and she ran away from home twice as a young girl. By the age of sixteen she had landed herself a position as a trainee nurse at a small healthcare facility in a remote gold-mining town. Amused by her job, Nancy still longed to spread her wings and discover what the rest of world had to offer. After working for two years as a nurse, she returned to Sydney and took a job with a Dutch shipping company. Wake arrived home from work one night and discovered a letter from her mother’s sister. Wake’s aunt had been a bit of a rebel, too, and had also run away in her teens. Perhaps feeling a sense of affinity for Nancy, the aunt wrote that she was sending Wake £200 to help her make a start in life. This windfall was all the encouragement Wake needed. As she was only eighteen, she lied about her age to get a passport (you needed to be twenty-one), booked herself a first-class ticket, and in December 1932 boarded a ship in Sydney Harbour that was destined for Vancouver, Canada. From there, it was on to New York.
Women who Spied for Britain Page 3