In June 1940, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe and the British forces were driven back from the continent, Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a stark directive: set Europe ablaze. With no prospect of a conventional assault on the occupied continent, the newly formed Special Operations Executive, known as the SOE, was tasked with waging a different kind of war. Working alongside local resistance groups in occupied lands, SOE agents gathered intelligence on the enemy, coordinated operations between resistance cells, sabotaged German equipment, and carried out assassinations. It was a dirty but necessary kind of warfare.
Captured agents could expect merciless treatment, and the psychological strain of operating behind enemy lines meant that only the strongest and toughest could serve. The SOE could not afford to discriminate based on gender. What mattered was that any prospective agent was intelligent, resourceful, tenacious, courageous, and above all dedicated to the eradication of Nazism. Among the extraordinary individuals who answered that call were three women whose wartime service would become the stuff of legend.
Vera Atkins could stake a claim to being Britain’s top female spymaster of the Second World War. Born Vera Rosenberg in Bucharest, Romania, on June 16, 1908, she was the daughter of a German Jew and his English wife. After her father passed away in 1932, she studied modern languages in Paris before she and her mother permanently moved to Britain as the situation in Europe deteriorated. Even before the war broke out, she was being conscripted as a spy.
Canadian spymaster William Stevenson, working with Winston Churchill before he became prime minister, identified Vera as someone who could be used on missions to gather intelligence on Germany. Using the more Anglicized name of Vera Atkins and posing as an ordinary civilian, she was part of a British operation sent to Poland to meet with code breakers who claimed to have constructed a replica of the German Enigma machine. The device could be examined and used to break vital German codes. Traveling by air via Greece to avoid alerting German agents, Atkins’s party landed in Poland a mere six days before Hitler’s armies charged across the border on September 1, 1939, beginning the Second World War.
Once the German invasion began and Britain and France declared war, Vera helped evacuate the code breakers to her former homeland of Romania, then a neutral country. After being interned briefly, they were allowed to continue on to France and then Britain with their vital piece of equipment. Back in Britain, Atkins soon returned to Europe, although on an unsanctioned operation of her own. She carried a large sum of money intended to bribe a German official into providing documentation for her cousin to cross German-occupied Europe and meet her in Britain.
But upon entering the Netherlands, the Germans invaded the neutral country and her plan was foiled. She was forced to go on the run and was eventually smuggled back to Britain with help from the Belgian resistance in late 1940. In February 1941, she joined the SOE and was assigned as an assistant to Major Maurice Buckmaster, who led F Section, responsible for special operations in France. F Section’s team numbered only eight at first but would ultimately be responsible for some 470 agents working in the field against the Germans.
Compared to other military establishments, the hierarchy of F Section was more relaxed, allowing everyone to have their say in operations. Atkins quickly established herself as one of the most prominent members, with some going so far as to say that while Buckmaster was in command, she was nonetheless the brains of the outfit. She was heavily involved in the recruitment process, often interviewing and vetting new agents personally, then customizing training regimes and planning much of their operations in France herself. As a result, she was often deeply invested in the successful and safe conclusion of their missions.
She later described the strain: “The realization that they were going out on a very dangerous mission and this was probably the last glimpse they would have of the lovely countryside through which you were traveling with them while you remained quite safely at the end… there was a considerable strain. ” She also proved extremely useful in deciphering German codes and making sense of garbled transmissions intercepted by British intelligence. After the war, Atkins assisted in the investigation of German war crimes, interviewing people who had conducted some of the most heinous crimes in history.
A Gestapo officer who had ruthlessly clamped down on resistance to German occupation judged her interrogation to be the most skillful he had endured from his Dutch, French, and British captors. Perhaps her most disturbing interrogation took place in March 1946, when she sat across the table from Rudolf Hess, the German commander of Auschwitz. When she asked whether it was true that he had caused the deaths of one and a half million Jews, he dismissed the figure nonchalantly before adding matter-of-factly that the true number was 2,345,000. Having been so invested in the agents she dispatched into occupied Europe, she never gave up trying to discover the fate of those who never returned.
There were 118 in total, and she frequently interrogated German guards at POW and concentration camps. In the end, there was only one instance in which she was unable to trace a missing agent. The agent in question had been sent to Marseille with three million francs, and many speculated he either lost it all at Monte Carlo and committed suicide or won and created a new persona, living out his days as a very wealthy man but a traitor to the cause of freedom. Vera Atkins settled in the English county of Sussex and passed away shortly after her 92nd birthday on June 24, 2000.
It was only after her biographer interviewed some of those at her funeral that the unsanctioned mission to help her cousin escape was uncovered, meaning that like all great spies, she took at least one secret with her to the grave. Born in Warsaw, Poland, on May 1, 1908, Christina Skarbek grew up in a well-connected Polish family linked to the aristocracy on her father’s side and a wealthy Jewish family on her mother’s. Growing into an attractive young woman, she enjoyed horse riding and skiing, and with her good looks she became a runner-up in the 1930 Miss World competition. On a personal level, happiness seemed out of grasp: a brief marriage ended when both parties realized it was a mistake, and with the stain of being a divorcee on her character, she struggled to find suitors.
Then one day while skiing the slopes of Zakopane, she lost control and would have suffered untold injuries but for the intervention of another skier nearby. She had just met her future husband, Jerzy Gizycki, who was very similar to Christina: both were headstrong and determined individuals. When they married on November 2, 1938, they looked set for success, with Gizycki accepting a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia. Then, less than a year later, their homeland was invaded by Hitler, and with no Polish government, Gizycki’s posting was voided.
The couple decided to sail for England, by which time Christina had decided she wanted to play an active role in combating the enemy that had overrun her country. British authorities initially rejected her request to join the intelligence services, but she persisted, and with the help of an acquaintance, journalist Frederick Voight, she was finally accepted by the Special Intelligence Service. Documents described her as “a flaming Polish patriot, expert skier, and great adventuress,” as well as “absolutely fearless. ” Sent to Hungary, which was not yet in the war, and posing as a British journalist named Christine Granville, she helped establish a network of couriers in and across Poland to allow British intelligence to communicate with its agents in occupied land.
During one of her early trips into Poland, she made contact with her mother and pleaded with her to follow her to Hungary, but her mother refused and was later arrested and killed by the Nazis for her Jewish heritage. In January 1941, it looked as though Christina’s luck had run out when she was arrested by Hungarian police and handed over to the German Gestapo. During her incarceration, she bit her tongue until it bled and feigned symptoms of tuberculosis, an illness she was familiar with from her father’s death. The ruse worked; even a German doctor diagnosed her condition, and coupled with her unwillingness to break under questioning, convinced the Germans she was merely a journalist.
She was released. Sensing she was being followed, she and another agent decided to leave Hungary for Yugoslavia, aided by the British ambassador Owen O’Malley and taking with them two rolls of microfilm handed over by the Polish resistance. They drove the ambassador’s car over the border and into Yugoslavia, where they met a Royal Auxiliary Air Force intelligence officer, handed over the microfilm, and continued driving through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and into Turkey, where her husband met them. The microfilm showed the buildup to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and was viewed by Winston Churchill personally.
But there was trouble for Christina and her companion: their car journey across pro-German lands cast suspicion on them from their British superiors, who began to suspect they could be double agents. In June 1941, they were dismissed from frontline duties and forced to live on a meager wage, at which point Christina admitted to her husband that she and her fellow agent Kowerski were now lovers. Over the following years, she was gradually worked back into British intelligence and recruited by the SOE. Plans to parachute her into Hungary were curtailed by the Polish government in exile, still suspicious of her, so the SOE put her to work aiding the French resistance following D-Day.
Parachuted into German-held territory, she worked as a courier, gathered information on German positions, and committed acts of sabotage and assassination. Her most celebrated action came on August 13, 1944, when she attempted to free two captured SOE agents from a prison. When a plan to storm the prison with French resistance fighters failed, she came up with a cunning ruse. She made contact with the Gestapo officer in charge and broke her cover, informing him she was a British agent and a niece of General Bernard Montgomery.
With Allied troops less than 40 miles away, she told him that if he released the prisoners unharmed, she would do everything she could to protect him from the retribution of the French locals he had been terrorizing. If he refused, she warned, she could do nothing to protect him. The Gestapo officer agreed and released them safely. By the end of 1944, France was largely back under the rule of its people, and SOE operations ceased.
Christina’s relationship with Kowerski fizzled out after the war, and her post-war life was marred by hardship. She eventually found employment as a stewardess on an ocean liner, where she was expected to wear her many medals with her uniform, making her a firm favorite among rich passengers. Feeling isolated from her shipmates, she found comfort with a man named Dennis Muldowney, but the comfort turned to caution as he became possessive and intimidating. On June 15, 1952, Muldowney flew into a rage and stabbed her to death at the Shelbourne Hotel in Earls Court after she refused his advances.
He pled guilty to murder and was hanged three months later. Christina Skarbek, living under her British name Christine Granville, was just 37 years old. On New Year’s Day 1914, Noor Inayat Khan was born to an Indian father and American mother in Moscow. Her father earned a living as a musician and a teacher of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, and his roots made him all the more intriguing, for he was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, killed when he and his people resisted British colonialism.
This made Noor Inayat Khan a princess, despite not retaining their ancestral lands. As Russia fell into political turmoil during the First World War, her father moved the family to England before settling in Paris, where she undertook much of her education before finding work writing children’s stories. As war once again plunged Europe into darkness, she escaped to Britain, deciding she wished to fight the Nazis. Khan enlisted in the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force on November 19, 1940, but unsatisfied with its mundane duties, she applied within a year for a role in the intelligence services.
She began training as a wireless operator at Compton Bassett in Wiltshire, becoming the first member of the WAAF to receive such advanced training. Given her intimate knowledge of France, and particularly Paris, she was recruited by the SOE in November 1942, though the covert organization hesitated to use her in the field because of her heritage, fearing she would attract too much attention. Eventually such doubts were put aside, and after extensive training in covert and paramilitary warfare, on the night of June 16, 1943, she boarded an RAF aircraft and was flown into German-occupied France. Given the code name Madeleine, she was instructed to head into Paris and make contact with an agent of the Prosper resistance network, for whom she would serve as wireless operator, keeping communication with exiled French commanders in Britain and coordinating operations between Allied forces and resistance groups.
Her arrival coincided with a Gestapo operation to bring down the group. Dozens of arrests were made, but Khan managed to escape. Having recovered her radio set, she took it back to her Paris safe house, becoming the only transmitting agent left in the city in the third quarter of 1943. Constantly on the move and disguising herself as best she could, she evaded the Germans for three and a half months while continuing to transmit messages and organizing clandestine flights for agents and supplies using aircraft like the British Lysander.
By October 1943, it was felt she had done enough, and she made preparations to return to Britain. But on October 14, acting on details from an informant, she was captured by the Gestapo and taken to their Paris headquarters. She escaped their custody not once but twice, though she was recaptured both times. Realizing they had a particularly tenacious agent on their hands, the Germans sent her to Pforzheim prison in Germany, where she was kept chained in isolation, considered highly dangerous.
Despite appalling conditions, frequent beatings, and torture, she refused to answer any questions. This went on for almost a year, until September 1944, when the Germans decided there was no point in keeping her any longer. On September 11, 1944, she and three other captured female agents were transported 250 miles to Dachau concentration camp. It was the last journey any of them would ever take.
Witness testimony tells of her last night alive being one of unnecessary torture and humiliation. In the morning, she and the three other women were shot in the back of the head. Her last word, reported by witnesses, was “Liberté. ” After the war, she was posthumously bestowed with the French Croix de Guerre with Gold Star and the British George Cross.
In 2012, a statue of her was unveiled in Gordon Square Garden, one of her favorite places in Britain, standing as a reminder of her sacrifice for generations to come.