Denise Bloch

Denise Bloch

Denise Madeleine Bloch (born January 21, 1916 in Paris , † February 5, 1945 in Ravensbrück concentration camp ) was a French Resistance fighter and agent of the British special operations executive (SOE). Arrested by the Gestapo shortly before the liberation of France, she was murdered in the Ravensbrück concentration camp a few weeks before the end of the war.

Life

Bloch was the daughter of the Jewish couple Suzanne Levi-Strauss and Jacques Henri Bloch, she had three brothers. Before the Second World War , she worked as a secretary at Citroën for Jean Maxime Aron, a member of a Jewish resistance group in France. Since the summer of 1942 she belonged to the Resistance in Lyon and kept in contact with the SOE radio operator Brian Stonehouse. After Stonehouse's arrest by the Gestapo on October 24, 1942, she hid with friends for a while, because she was threatened by the German occupiers not only because of her underground work for the Resistance, but also because of her Jewish descent .

In early 1943 Bloch decided to flee to London . After a first failed attempt to cross the snow-covered Pyrenees, at the end of April she managed to reach Spain, still officially neutral, with a seventeen-hour walk . On May 21st, she registered with SOE, Section “F” in London, and was recruited under the cover name “Ambroise”. After extensive training, including as a radio operator, she landed with her parachute at Soucelles near Nantes in the early morning of March 3, 1944 . She had dyed her hair blonde and carried a forged ID in the name of "Danielle Williams". She was accompanied by the SOE agent Robert Benoist , the head of the agent ring "Clergyman", for whom she should work as a radio operator and courier.

On June 19, 1944, a day later as Benoist, she was caught by the Gestapo. First interrogated on Avenue Foch , the headquarters of the Security Service (SD), she was later imprisoned in Fresnes prison in Paris . Together with the two SOE agents Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo , who were also imprisoned in Fresnes , she was transferred to the so-called Gestapo camp Neue Bremm near Saarbrücken on August 8, 1944 . Shortly afterwards, the women were taken to the Torgau camp, a satellite camp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp . In the winter of 1944/45 they had to clear tree stumps in another satellite camp in Königsberg , Brandenburg , in the bitter cold to prepare an airfield, until they were brought back to the main camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945 and imprisoned in the punishment block. One evening, probably on February 5, 1945, they were killed by shots in the neck in the courtyard next to the crematorium on the orders of the camp commandant Fritz Suhren . Their bodies were burned.

Honors

After her death, Bloch received the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct medal in England, and her name is also recorded on the Brookwood Memorial in Surrey. France honored her with acceptance into the Legion of Honor and with the "Médaille combattant de la Résistance" as well as with the Croix de guerre with palm tree. 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 .

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 Munich 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