Lilian Rolfe
Lilian Vera Rolfe (born April 26, 1914 in Paris ; † February 5, 1945 in the Ravensbrück concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).
Life
Lilian Vera Rolfe and her twin sister Helen Fedora Rolfe were the daughters of George Samuel Blackburn Rolfe, a British public accountant who lived and worked in Paris for many years. Although the girls grew up in Paris, they often visited their grandparents in London . In 1930 the family moved to Brazil for professional reasons , where the father had found a new job. The daughters finished school in Brazil.
When the Second World War broke out , Lilian Rolfe was working at the British Consulate in Rio de Janeiro , but soon went to London, where she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1943 . Because of her good French language skills, she was recruited by SOE on November 26, 1943 for section "F" to support the French Resistance . Rolfe was trained as a radio operator under the cover name "Nadine". Presumably she landed on the night of April 6, 1944 with a parachute and forged French papers in the name of "Claude Irène Rodier" near Chartres or Tours . For the British agent ring "Historian" under the direction of George Alfred "Teddy" Wilkinson, she was in almost daily radio contact with London from the beginning of June to the end of July. Often she had to change her transmission slot in order not to be found by the German radio detection vehicles . She is also said to have been involved in a firefight on the side of the Resistance in the village of Olivet , south of Orléans .
On July 31, she was discovered in Nargis (Loiret) , arrested, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo . Eventually she was imprisoned in Fresnes prison in Paris . Together with SOE agents Denise Bloch and Violette Szabo , also prisoners in Fresnes, she was deported on August 8, 1944 to the so-called "Gestapo camp" in Neue Bremm near Saarbrücken . 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 a further subcamp, in Königsberg in Brandenburg , in the bitter cold, in order to prepare an airfield. Already seriously ill, Rolfe and her two companions were imprisoned again in the Ravensbrück main camp in January 1945 in the punishment block. One evening, presumably on February 5, 1945, they were killed with shots in the neck in the courtyard next to the crematorium on the orders of camp commandant Fritz Suhren . Their bodies were burned.
In Great Britain, Lilian Rolfe is honored as an officer of the Royal Air Force on a plaque at the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, England . The “Lilian Rolfe House” in Lambeth was set up in her memory. The French government posthumously awarded her the Croix de guerre , and a street was named after her in Montargis, in the Loiret department , where she had worked during the war. 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
- Michael Foot : SOE. An outline history of the Special Operations Executive 1940-1946 . BBC, London 1984, ISBN 0-563-20193-2 .
- David Stafford: Secret Agent. The True Story of the Special Operations Executive . Overlook Press, Woodstock, 2000, ISBN 0-563-53734-5 (in collaboration with BBC Worldwide ).
- 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 Women Agents of the SOE in the Second World War . Coronet Books, London 2003, ISBN 0-340-81840-9 .
- Sarah Helm: A Life in Secrets. Vera Atkins and the lost Agents of SOE . Little Brown, London 2006, ISBN 0-316-72497-1 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rolfe, Lilian |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Rolfe, Lilian Vera (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British resistance fighter in occupied France |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 26, 1914 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 5, 1945 |
| Place of death | Ravensbrück concentration camp |