Madeleine Damerment

Madeleine Zoe Damerment (born November 11, 1917 in Lille ; † September 13, 1944 in Dachau concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

Madeleine Damerment was born as the daughter of the Chief Postmaster of Lille. After the occupation of France by German troops in World War II, her family became active in the French resistance movement ( Résistance ). The twenty-two-year-old Damerment worked as Michael Trotobas's assistant for the Pat-Line escape organization , which had been set up by Albert Guérisse. She helped shot down or landed pilots of the British Royal Air Force secretly leave France. In 1942 the group was betrayed and Madeleine had to flee to England.

Agent activity

In England she was recruited in 1943 by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and trained as a courier for the Bricklayer agent ring under the cover name “Solange” . On the night of February 28, 1944, she jumped together with SOE agents France Antelme and Lionel Lee by parachute near the city of Chartres in France and landed on a field.

Their arrival had been betrayed and they were arrested by the Gestapo immediately upon landing . She was taken to the headquarters of the Security Service (SD) at 84 avenue Foch in Paris and was interrogated for a long time under torture. She was then transferred to the Fresnes prison in Paris . On May 12, 1944, a truck brought Damerment and seven other SOE agents ( Yolande Beekman , Andrée Borrel , Eliane Plewman , Vera Leigh , Sonia Olschanezky , Diana Rowden and Odette Sansom ) to the prison in Karlsruhe , where they were called " Protective prisoners " were held in solitary confinement.

On the night of September 12, she and Eliane Plewman, Yolande Beekman and Noor Inayat Khan, who had been brought in the day before, were deported to the Dachau concentration camp. On the morning of September 13, 1944 - according to official reports - the four women had to kneel down on the sandy ground near the crematorium and were killed one by one with shots in the neck . Their bodies were burned.

Honors

Memorial plaque for the British SOE fighters Y. Beekman, M. Damerment, N. Inayat Khan and E. Plewman in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp

Madeleine Damerment was posthumously honored in England with the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct medal, as well as on a plaque at the Brookwood Memorial in Surrey . France awarded her the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance and honored her with admission to the Legion d'Honneur . Furthermore, she is honored as one of 91 men and 13 women who died in the service of SOE for the freedom of France, on the SOE memorial in Valençay in the Indre department and on a plaque in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp.

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.
• Arne Molfenter, Rüdiger Strempel: Towards the Darkness: The true story of Vera Atkins and her courageous agents in World War II. Dumont, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8321-8887-0 .