Vera Leigh

Vera Leigh

Vera Eugénie Leigh , née Glass (born March 17, 1903 in Leeds , † July 6, 1944 in Natzweiler concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

Vera Leigh, given up for adoption by her mother after birth , was adopted as a baby by the American Eugene Leigh and his English wife. She grew up near the Maisons-Laffitte racecourse near Paris , her adoptive father was a trainer of racehorses. After finishing school, she completed an apprenticeship in a Parisian fashion house and started her own fashion studio "Rose Valois" with two friends in 1927.

After the German occupation of France in the summer of 1940, she left Paris and moved to Lyon to live with her fiancé Charles Sussaix, director of a Portuguese film company. There she joined a resistance group and supported an organization helping people to escape . In 1942 Leigh fled to Spain herself, where she was held for several months in the Miranda de Ebro internment camp . With the help of the British Embassy in Madrid, she was finally able to get to England via Gibraltar .

Because of her fluent French, SOE recruited her under the cover name "Simone" for the "F" section of the SOE to support the Resistance in France. After extensive training, during which she proved to be an excellent marksman, on the night of May 15, 1943, she landed with another SOE agent, the French Julienne Aisner , with parachutes near Tours . With a forged identity card in the name of Suzanne Chavanne, which identified her as a Parisian hatter, she was supposed to be used as a courier for the new agent ring "Inventor" to be set up. Sidney Jones, radio operator of the Frenchman Marcel Clech, who had landed on the same night as Leigh, was supposed to be head of "Inventor".

In Paris, the three SOE agents were shadowed by the German security service for months because their arrival had been announced by a traitor. Finally, on October 30th, Leigh was arrested and interrogated at Gestapo headquarters at 11 rue de Saussaies without disclosing any information. She was then imprisoned in Fresnes prison in Paris until she was in a truck with seven other SOE agents ( Yolande Beekman , Andrée Borrel , Madeleine Damerment , Sonia Olschanezky , Eliane Plewman , Diana Rowden and Odette Sansom ) on the morning of May 12, 1944 the prison of Karlsruhe , where they were held as so-called “ protective prisoners ” in solitary confinement. On July 6th, Leigh, Andrée Borrel, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden were deported to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace . Each received a fatal phenol injection that same evening . Their bodies were burned.

Awards

Vera Leigh was posthumously honored in Great Britain with the "King's Commendation for Brave Conduct" medal. In France, she is honored as one of 91 men and 13 women who died in the service of SOE for the freedom of France at the SOE memorial in Valençay in the Indre department . In the memorial of the Netzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace, a plaque commemorates the murder of Vera Leigh and her three companions.

literature

• Michael R. Foot: SOE. The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946. Mandarin Paperbacks, London 1990, ISBN 3-7493-0378-6 . (Reprint of the London 1984 edition).
• David Stafford: Secret Agent. The true story of the Special Operations Executive. Overlook Press, Woodstock 2001, ISBN 0-563-53734-5 .
• 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 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 .
• Anthony M. Webb (Ed.): War Crime Trials, Vol. 5: Trial of Wolfgang Zeuss Marcus Wochner, Emil Meier, Peter Straub, Fritz Hartjenstein, Franz Berg, Werner Rohde, Emil Bruttel, Kurt aus dem Bruch and Harber (The Natzweiler Trial). Hodge Press, London 1949.
• 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 .