Violette Szabo

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Violet Szabó

Violette Reine Elizabeth Szabó , née Bushell GC , MBE (born June 26, 1921 in Levallois-Perret near Paris , † February 5, 1945 in Ravensbrück concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

Violette Szabó was born near Paris in 1921 as the daughter of the Englishman Charles Bushell and the French Reine Leroy. After moving several times, the family moved to London in the early 1930s . From a young age, Szabó was very athletic and outperformed her three brothers in smaller competitions. She left school at the age of 14 and worked as a hairdresser and saleswoman for a few years . In the summer of 1940 she met the French officer of Hungarian descent Étienne Szabó , who had joined De Gaulle's troops of " Free France ", and married him a few weeks later. When he was commanded to serve in the war in North Africa in September 1941, she joined theAuxiliary Territorial Service , which used women for home defense.

Szabó's daughter Tania was born in June 1942, and four months later her husband was killed in the battle of El Alamein . To avenge his death, Szabó decided to take an active part in the war. When SOE offered her in the summer of 1943 to use her in Section “F” because of her knowledge of French to support the Resistance in occupied France, she immediately accepted and was given the cover name “Louise”. After completing her training, she was flown out by RAF Tempsford and landed on the morning of April 6, 1944 with her parachute near Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley. She was accompanied by another SOE agent, a French journalist who was head of the British agent ring “Salesman” under the cover name “Clément”. “Salesman” had been operating in the area around Rouen and Le Havre for over a year , but had lost numerous members of the ring to arrests by the Gestapo in the previous weeks . Szabó's main task in France was to get in touch with the rest of the “Salesman” members under her fictitious identity as secretary “Corinne Reine Leroy”. When it turned out that the "Salesman" ring was as good as broken, Szabó returned to London on April 30th.

On the night of June 8, 1944, two days after the start of the Allied invasion , Szabó and "Clément" landed again with their parachutes in France, near Limoges . A new agent ring, "Salesman 2", was to be set up in the Haute-Vienne department and to work closely with the Maquis , the local Resistance . Disguised with her new identity, "Madame Villeret", widow of an antique dealer, Szabó was supposed to try to get to her area of ​​work unobtrusively. She was supposed to cover part of the route in the car of a French Resistance member, the rest on the bike that was tied to the side of the car. In the vicinity of Salon-la-Tour the car ran into a roadblock of the SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" and its occupants were to be checked. The background to this was the kidnapping of SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kuchten by the Maquis. When the death of Kämpfes later became known, the SS destroyed the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and murdered 642 of the inhabitants in the Oradour massacre .

Szabó and the Frenchman dropped out of the car, started a firefight, and eventually tried to escape. Szabó was caught when she ran out of ammunition. Detained first at Gestapo headquarters and then in Limoges prison, Szabó was taken to Fresnes prison in Paris on June 12th . Together with the two SOE agents Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe , who were also imprisoned in Fresnes , she was deported to the so-called "Gestapo camp" in Neue Bremm near Saarbrücken on August 8, 1944 . 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 another satellite camp, in Königsberg , Brandenburg , in the bitter cold to prepare an airfield, until they were brought back to the main camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945 and imprisoned 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 cremated.

aftermath

An aunt set up a small museum for Szabó in Herefordshire .

Posthumous honors

literature

  • MRD Foot : SOE: 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. BBC Worldwide, London, 2000, ISBN 0-563-53734-5 .
  • Monika Siedentopf: Jump over enemy territory: agents in World War II (= dtv, 24582). DTV, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-423-24582-4 .
  • Marcus Binney: The Women who lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2002, ISBN 0-06-054087-7 .
  • Sarah Helm: A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the lost Agents of SOE. Abacus, London, 2006, ISBN 0-349-11936-8 .

Web links

Commons : Violette Szabo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rosemary Rigby, Mike Colton: Violette Szabó. In: violetteszabomuseum.org.uk. Accessed August 27, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Szabo, Violette
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Szabo, Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French agent and resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 5, 1945
PLACE OF DEATH Ravensbrück concentration camp