Andrée Borrel

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Andrée Borrel

Andrée Raymonde Borrel (born November 18, 1919 in Louveciennes , † July 6, 1944 in Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

Andrée Borrel came from a working-class family, her parents Louis Jean Borrel and Eugénie Marie Francoise, née Fayollas, were committed socialists . Borrel left school at the age of 14, completed an apprenticeship in a women's fashion store and then worked in a bakery and in a department store. In 1939 she moved with her mother to Toulon , where she trained as a nurse after the war began. In 1940 she met Maurice Dufour in Nîmes , a French officer in the Resistance , with whom she supported the so-called "Pat-Line" for a year , a British escape aid organization that helped escaped British prisoners of war, but also deserted French soldiers, to leave France .

Agent activity

When the "Pat-Line" was exposed in autumn 1941, Dufour and Borrel fled to England via Portugal. On May 20, 1942 Borrel was recruited as the first female agent of SOE for Section "F" under the cover name "Denise" to support the Resistance in France. After extensive training, she and SOE agent Lise de Baissac set off from RAF Tempsford on the night of September 25, 1942 and were parachuted to the east of Blois . Borrel carried a forged French ID in the name of "Denise Urbain" and was supposed to work as a courier for the British agent ring "Physician" under its director Francis Suttill , alias "Prosper". The ring around "Prosper" comprised around 30 British agents and thousands of helpers from the Resistance in the spring of 1943, but was completely smashed a few months later. Hundreds were arrested by the Germans, Borrel was caught on June 24th and taken to Paris at the headquarters of the Security Service (SD) on Avenue Foch . After numerous interrogations and abuse, she was taken to Fresnes prison in Paris .

On May 12, 1944, a truck brought Borrel and seven other SOE agents ( Yolande Beekman , Madeleine Damerment , Vera Leigh , Sonia Olschanezky , Eliane Plewman , Diana Rowden and Odette Sansom ) to the prison in Karlsruhe , where they were called "Protective prisoners" were held in solitary confinement. On July 6, Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden were transported to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace. That same evening, each received a fatal phenol injection. Their bodies were burned.

Honors

France posthumously awarded Andrée Borrel the Croix de guerre , and as one of 91 men and 13 women who died in the service of SOE for the freedom of France, she is honored at the SOE memorial in Valençay in the Indre department . In the memorial of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace , a plaque commemorates the murder of Andrée Borrel and her three companions.

literature

  • MRD Foot: SOE. The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946. London 1984.
  • David Stafford: Secret Agent. The True Story of the Special Operations Executive. BBC Worldwide, 2000, ISBN 0-563-53734-5 .
  • Monika Siedentopf: Jump over enemy territory. Agents in World War II. Dtv, 2006, ISBN 3-423-24582-4 .
  • Marcus Binney: The Women who lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive. 2003.
  • Sarah Helm: A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the lost Agents of SOE. 2006.
  • Antony M. Webb (Ed.): Trial of Wolfgang Zeuss et al. (The Natzweiler Trial). War Crime Trials , Vol. V. London 1949.
  • Arne Molfenter, Rüdiger Strempel: Towards the Darkness: The true story of Vera Atkins and her courageous agents in World War II. Dumont, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8321-8887-0 .