Diana Rowden

Diana Rowden

Diana Hope Rowden MBE (born January 31, 1915 in London , † July 6, 1944 in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp ) was an agent of the British intelligence service Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Life

Diana Rowden lived in southern France with her mother and her two younger brothers after the divorce of her parents, Scottish major Aldred Rowden and his wife Muriel Christian. She spent her childhood on the French and Italian Riviera until her mother decided to return to England so that the children could attend English schools. After graduating from high school, Rowden began studying languages ​​at the Sorbonne in Paris with the aim of becoming a journalist.

At the beginning of the war, she reported to the French Red Cross and was assigned to the Anglo-American ambulance of the British Expeditionary Corps. When the Allied front collapsed in northern France at the end of May 1940, she was unable to get on one of the escape boats in Dunkirk , so she had to go into hiding with friends. Until the summer of 1941, she was able to Spain and Portugal to flee to England, where she is the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), the women's section of the Royal Air Force joined, and earned a ranking officer in the intelligence area.

Agent activity

In March 1943, Rowden was recruited because of her knowledge of French from SOE, Section "F", to support the Resistance in France under the cover name "Paulette" . After extensive training, she was parachuted near Angers on the night of June 16-17, 1943 . SOE agents Noor Inayat Khan and Cecily Lefort landed with her . Rowden traveled on to Saint-Amour in the Jura , a small town between Lons-le-Saunier and Bourg-en-Bresse , where she should work as a courier for the agent ring "Acrobat" under the head of John Renshaw Starr . Her forged papers were in the name of "Juliette Thérèse Rondeau".

A month after Rowden's arrival, Starr was arrested, and Rowden had to hide with the "Acrobat" radio operator John Young with the French Janier-Dubry family , who were members of the Resistance , in Clairvaux-les-Lacs . On November 18, 1943, Rowden and Young were also arrested after the Security Service (SD) got on their trail. The following day both were transported to Paris, where they were interrogated for two weeks at the security headquarters on Avenue Foch . Rowden was then transferred to the Fresnes prison in Paris , Young was deported to Germany and there killed in a concentration camp.

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

Honors

Great Britain posthumously honored Diana Rowden with her acceptance into the Order of the British Empire . She is honored on the plaques of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh and the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey . France made her an honorary member of the Legion of Honor , awarded her the Croix de guerre 1939-1945 and as one of 91 men and 13 women who died in the service of SOE for the freedom of France, she is on the SOE memorial in Valençay in the département Indre appreciated. In the memorial of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, a plaque commemorates the murder of rowdies and their 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 Volume V., London 1949.