Noor Inayat Khan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Noor Inayat Khan, code name: Madeleine, 1943

Noor Inayat Khan GC (born January 1, 1914 in Moscow , † probably September 13, 1944 in Dachau concentration camp ; actually Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

Khan was born in 1914 as the eldest of four children of the Indian Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American wife Ora Meena Ray Baker. One of their ancestors was Tipu Sultan , the head of the kingdom of Mysore . Shortly after Noor Inayat Khan was born, at the beginning of the First World War , the family moved to London , and six years later to Paris . There Khan received music training from Nadia Boulanger and published the book Twenty Jataka Tales .

At the beginning of the Second World War she trained as a nurse, in 1940 she and her family left Paris and fled to London from the German occupiers ( Western campaign from May 10 to June 25, 1940). In November 1940, Khan joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) to help support the family, even though military service contradicted her pacifist religious beliefs. She was trained as a radio operator and served on a military airfield. In October 1942 she was recruited by SOE because of her perfect knowledge of French for section "F" to support the Resistance in occupied France , and received extensive training.

In the early morning of June 17, 1943, she landed with two other SOE agents, Cecily Lefort and Diana Rowden , with parachutes near Angers . Under the cover name "Madeleine" and with a forged ID in the name of "Jeanne Marie Regnier", she was supposed to work from Paris as the first female SOE radio operator for a British agent ring, which under its head Francis Suttill (cover name "Prosper") was already with the Resistance worked together. In the following weeks, numerous agents from the “Prosper” area were arrested by the Germans, but Khan was able to maintain their radio communications with London until mid-October. She was probably arrested by the Gestapo around October 13, 1943, and she was probably betrayed by a double agent .

Khan was interrogated for about a month but did not reveal anything of significance. However, the Gestapo found with her copies of her sent and received messages - in plain text and also encrypted - which Khan had kept against the London security guidelines. The German military intelligence service ( Foreign Office / Abwehr ) was given the opportunity to continue radio communications with London instead of Khan with a so-called "radio game" and to find out in advance the arrival of other SOE agents. After two failed attempts to escape, Khan was finally transferred to Germany on November 27, 1943 and placed in solitary confinement in Pforzheim under the Night and Fog Decree , which lasted over ten months.

Probably on September 10, 1944, Khan was transported from Pforzheim to the Karlsruhe prison , from where she and the SOE agents Yolande Beekman , Madeleine Damerment and Eliane Plewman, who had been imprisoned there for a long time, to the Dachau concentration camp on the night of September 12 was deported. On the morning of September 13 - according to official reports - the four women had to kneel down on the sandy floor near the crematorium and were killed one by one with shots in the neck . Their bodies were burned.

Awards

Memorial plaque from 1975 in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp for the British SOE fighters Y. Beekman, M. Damerment, N. Inayat Khan and E. Plewman (there the date of death is given as September 12, 1944)

Khan was awarded the St. George's Cross posthumously in Great Britain , the highest civilian honor. In France she was honored with the Croix de guerre . 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 . A memorial plaque in the crematorium in the Dachau concentration camp also commemorates her. In London's Gordon Square Garden there is a statue of Noor Inayat Kahn, which was unveiled in her honor by Princess Anne .

See also

Air Forces Memorial England - Commemoration of the SOE officers without a grave

Publications

  • Twenty Jātaka Tales. GG Harrap, London 1939. (Stories selected from the Gâtakamâlâ by Âyre Sûra, translated from the Sanskrit, and Jātaka, translated from the Pali. Retold by Noor Inayat and pictured by H. Willebeek Le Mair. 137 pp .: 25 plates (some col.))
    • Twenty Jātaka fairy tales. (Ex .: Eva Linck; drawings: Henriette Willebeek Le Mair.) East-West Publications Fonds, Den Haag 1978, ISBN 978-90-70104-30-6 .
    • Twenty Jātaka stories. (Ex .: Puran Füchslin; 20 color illustrations: Stefania Mattinzioli. Ed .: Petama Project.) Petama Project, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-907643-11-2 .
  • King Akbar and his daughter. (Ex .: Karla Reimert; 12 color illustrations: Koizumi, Natsuyo.) Verlag Heilbronn, Heilbronn 2016, ISBN 978-3-936246-19-3 .

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.
  • Jean Overton Fuller Madeleine. 1952.
  • Comite Internationale de Dachau; Barbara Distel, Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (Ed.): Dachau Concentration Camp 1933 to 1945. Text and image documents for the exhibition. Munich 2005.
  • Shrabani Basu: Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan. Sutton Publishing, Stroud [et al. a.] 2006, ISBN 978-0-7509-3965-2 .
  • 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 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Remembering a Heroine of the Second World War. Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust, accessed October 26, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Inayat Khan, Noor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British resistance fighter and spy
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: September 13, 1944
Place of death Dachau