Edward Yeo-Thomas

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Bust of Yeo-Thomas in the town hall of the 16th arrondissement of Paris

Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas (born June 17, 1902 in London , † February 26, 1964 in Paris ) was a British spy during World War II . He worked particularly in Vichy France . He is said to have inspired Ian Fleming to the figure of James Bond .

Life

Yeo-Thomas grew up as the son of a London coal merchant and his wife. His parents moved with him to Dieppe in Normandy . He attended the Collège de Dieppe and the Paris Lycée Condorcet and therefore spoke fluent French. He was expelled from school twice for discipline issues. Yeo-Thomas served in the US Army in the First World War , posing as an 18-year-old and then on the side of the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War . He was captured and should be shot. Here he escaped for the first time by strangling a guard. He did an apprenticeship as a mechanic at Rolls-Royce and later worked in Paris for the fashion designer Edward Molyneux . With the beginning of the Second World War, he escaped from the advancing German Wehrmacht in Operation Dynamo and initially worked as an interpreter for the Free French under Charles de Gaulle . He then served in the Royal Air Force , most recently with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was employed as a contact for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at the French secret service Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA). He was code-named Seahorse and Shelley at the SOE and the White Rabbit at the Gestapo . It was flown out of RAF Tempsford for the first time on February 25, 1943 and dropped off over occupied France. Together with Pierre Brossolette and André Dewavrin , he was able to ensure that the Resistance became more united. When he parachuted again in February 1944, he was betrayed and detained in the Passy metro station in Paris , taken to the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch , where he was tortured and taken to the Fresnes prison in Paris. He was able to escape, was arrested again and was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar . There he tried to flee again, was taken prisoner, pretended to be a French soldier and was taken to Stalag XX-B near Marienburg (now Polish: Malbork ). He escaped from there in April 1945.

After the Second World War he witnessed the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials and the Dachau trials in 1947. In the US trial against Otto Skorzeny , he witnessed the defense and testified that he too had worn the enemy's uniform as camouflage.

In 1967 the BBC aired a miniseries about his life in which his role was cast with Kenneth More .

Honors

In 1972 a street in Paris's 13th arrondissement was named after him. On March 31, 2010, he was honored with a plaque on the London house he had lived in with his wife Barbara.

literature

  • Sophie Jackson: Churchill's White Rabbit: The True Story of a Real-Life James Bond. The History Press, Stroud 2012, ISBN 978-0-7524-6748-1 .
  • Mark Seaman: The Bravest of the Brave. The true story of Wing Commander Tommy Yeo-Thomas, SOE secret agent, codename 'the White Rabbit.' Michael O'Mara, London 1997, ISBN 1-85479-650-X .
  • Bruce Marshall: The White Rabbit. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 1952.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marshall, Rabbit, p. 3
  2. ^ Richard Norton-Taylor: Forgotten spy and escape artist extraordinaire comes in from the cold. guardian.co.uk, March 31, 2010 , accessed September 22, 2010
  3. ↑ Press release with a detailed biography at english-heritage.org.uk , accessed on September 22, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Yeo-Thomas, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Yeo-Thomas, Forest Frederick Edward; Seahorse; Shelley; White rabbit
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British spy
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1964
Place of death Paris , France