Laura D'Oriano
Laura D'Oriano (* 1911 in Istanbul , † January 16, 1943 in Rome ) was a British spy during the Second World War .
Life
D'Oriano was born in Istanbul in 1911 and was the eldest of five children of Polycarpo d'Oriano (musician) and Aida Caruana. When her father opened a musical instrument shop in Marseille in the late 1920s , Laura tried unsuccessfully as a singer in Paris . Back in Marseille, she met the Swiss Emil Fraunholz, who lived in France so that he would not have to do military service in Switzerland. The two married on August 18, 1931 in Marseille, with which Laura automatically obtained Swiss citizenship . Their first daughter, Renee, was born in 1932 and Anna in 1933.
She very likely became a spy in 1940 when she worked as a secretary for Daniel Petard in Nice , who recruited her. In January 1941 she was first sent to Paris to try to obtain information from officers of the Wehrmacht . A little later she was sent to Bordeaux for two months , where she was supposed to record the movements of the submarines of the fascist Marina Militare in the port of Betasom and send them encrypted on postcards .
In December 1941 she was sent to Genoa to record movements in the port and to report the damage caused by the Allied bombing raids. It is very likely that the Carabinieri were warned; in any case, their messages were intercepted, decrypted and changed. The Carabinieri put an agent on them. When Laura visited her mother, her identity was revealed. On December 26, 1941, she was arrested on the train to Naples .
On January 15, 1943, the trial of Laura D'Oriano took place in camera. She was sentenced to death, shot the following day , and buried in a mass grave. During the fascist dictatorship she was the only woman sentenced to death who was actually carried out. Her father transferred the remains to the Campo Verano cemetery in 1958 , where he was buried next to his daughter in 1962.
Laura d'Oriano is one of the three main characters in the novel " The Forger, The Spy and the Bomb Maker " by Alex Capus .
Movie
Individual evidence
- Information on Laura d'Oriano, the Levantine spy during World War 2 , accessed July 16, 2015
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | D'Oriano, Laura |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British female spy during World War II |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Istanbul |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 16, 1943 |
| Place of death | Rome |