On September 16, 1943, thirty-seven prisoners escaped from a prison in southern France. Among them was the British spy known as Blonde Charlie. She had been uncovered and arrested in 1942, and most of the agents in her network had been tortured and executed. But Charlie managed to convince her interrogators she was merely a foolish woman who had stumbled into danger without understanding any of it.
In November 1942, she was sentenced to prison, and nearly a year later she and her partner disarmed the guards and organized the mass breakout. Two months after that, she was back in Britain. She lived until the mid-1980s. Her survival had much to do with the fact that her prison was French-run.
The long arm of the Nazi German army could not reach as deeply there. More often, such stories ended in tragedy. German counterintelligence did not hesitate. Its methods were merciless.
One female agent was captured by the Gestapo as a result of a radio game. Under Gestapo control, false cipher notes were sent out under her name, and she was directed toward the German rear as part of a group. Waiting agents arrested her on arrival. She was transferred to Dachau in September 1944.
The next morning, on September 13, she and three other women accused of espionage were shot in the back of the head. This was not the typical Nazi execution method, which usually involved kneeling the victim in front of a dug grave and shooting from behind. According to an eyewitness, one of the victims asked to see a priest before dying. Her request was refused because there was no priest in the camp.
After the execution, the camp commandant ordered that all the jewelry the women had been wearing be brought to his office. At least fifty-five female spies operated in the French underground during the war. Half of them died. Twelve were shot or sent to the gas chamber.
Two died of disease. One of those twelve was Violette Szabo, an Englishwoman of French descent. She volunteered for reconnaissance after her husband died at the front. On her second mission behind enemy lines, she was accidentally captured by a retreating Nazi unit and handed over to the Gestapo in Paris.
For six months she was beaten and abused but gave up no names. She was then sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where in February 1945 she was shot, supposedly in the back, though there is speculation that she was shot in the back of the head. Some, however, survived the Nazi inferno. One such survivor was Odette Sansom.
She was arrested in 1943 along with her leader, Peter Churchill. At first the Abwehr took care of her. Then she was handed over to the Gestapo, where her fingernails were pulled out, a favored Gestapo torture, and her back was burned with a flaming poker. A peculiar twist: she was tortured directly by a Frenchman who, as Odette herself recalled, was handsome but clearly mentally ill.
There is a common misconception that the Germans rarely tortured people personally and delegated this work to locals in occupied countries. This confusion exists because the Nazis were sophisticated and versatile in their methods, and making victims suffer at the hands of their own fellow citizens was one of those refined forms of cruelty. Odette betrayed no one. She was sent to Ravensbrück, where the hell of the concentration camp awaited her.
There she convinced the camp authorities that she and Peter were related to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. This saved both their lives. The Nazis hoped to use their captives to gain some form of immunity in the event of an Allied victory. It did not help the camp leadership.
The camp commandant was executed immediately after the war, when the full scale of the atrocities committed there began to emerge. The revelations were so shocking that the horrors of the war itself seemed to fade in comparison. Torture and mockery were commonplace across the law enforcement agencies of Nazi Germany, whether in the basements of the Berlin Gestapo or in the field headquarters of a regular military unit interrogating partisans. The Nazis made no special adjustments for women.
Often women had a harder time than men, because in addition to physical pain they had to cope with psychological suffering, severe mockery, and degradation. The Nazis treated Soviet women spies who fell into their traps with particular cruelty. Even age did not embarrass them. The young women, often barely more than girls, were shown no mercy.
The heroic deed of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is widely known, but there were thousands of such fearless women on the Soviet side. On January 17, 1942, two girls, Nadezhda Pronina and Maria Sanelnikova, were seized by the Nazis near the village of Kertashkino, in the German rear of the Kaluga region. A local resident present at their interrogation described the scene. She said she would never forget how they beat the girl with braids.
The Nazi used his belt buckle and boot heels. The girl fell down and got up again while he kept saying something to her in German, demanding to know who she was. The other girl sat in the corner crying. The next day, after being beaten and tortured, they were shot.
They were eighteen years old. There is evidence from the execution of another Soviet agent, Vera Voloshina, who was in the same reconnaissance unit as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Because of confusion after the battle, they were forced to carry out their missions in different villages. Only much later, in 1957, was it established that Vera was executed on the same day as Zoya, November 29, 1941.
They brought her by car to the gallows, where the noose was dangling in the wind. Nazi soldiers surrounded the scene. Soviet prisoners of war were forced to watch. At first the witness could not see the girl lying in the car.
When they lowered the sides, the sight frightened her. Vera was lying in just her torn underwear, bleeding all over. Two Nazi soldiers with black crosses on their sleeves climbed into the car and tried to help her up. She pushed them away and, clinging to the cab with one hand, got to her feet.
Her other arm was evidently broken, hanging like a lash. The cold was extreme, below twenty degrees Celsius. It is known that Zoya was forced to stand barefoot in the cold. It is likely that Vera was tortured the same way all night before her death.
One can argue endlessly about the ruthlessness of that era, about atrocities as an attribute of great wars, about how truth is difficult to separate from fiction, or about how history is written by the winners. But there is an indisputable fact. The general doctrine of the Third Reich held no mercy for those it deemed people of another sort. Even individuals who had done nothing against the Nazi regime and did not belong to the Aryan race were clearly destined for extermination or to serve as second-rate servants.
This was the central ideology of Nazism. Those who stood in the way of the Nazi regime were unconditionally doomed to a painful death, regardless of age, gender, or any other factor. The fate of female spies who fell into Nazi hands was grim.
The punitive machine placed no limits on the punishments they could suffer, in the most gruesome and torturous ways Nazism could devise.