Yvonne Rudellat

Yvonne Claire Rudellat , née Cerneau (born January 1897 in Maisons-Laffitte ; † April 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp ) was an agent of the British special operations executive (SOE).

Life

The daughter of a wine merchant married in 1920 an antique dealer of Italian or French origin, with whom she lived in London and had two daughters. The marriage failed after nine years, Rudellat separated from her husband and ran a small hotel in London. She came into contact with the SOE through a British major, one of her hotel guests. In 1942 she was recruited because of their knowledge of French and their organizational skills as a hotel owner from section "F" under the code name "Jacqueline" to in France , the Resistance support.

Agent activity

On July 17, 1943, Rudelatt was flown to Gibraltar in a bomber , from where she was dropped off on the southern French coast on July 30 in a felucca , a sailing boat. She was the first woman SOE smuggled into France as an agent. With forged papers in the name of “Jacqueline Gauthier” she was supposed to set up the agent ring “Monkeypuzzle” with other SOE agents at Tours , an offshoot of the agent ring “Physician” headed by Francis Suttill (code name “Prosper”), and work as a courier . She worked successfully for almost a year and also took part in acts of sabotage, including against the Chaingy power station near Orléans .

On June 21, 1944, she and Pierre Culioli , a French colleague, and two other Canadian SOE agents at Dhuizon in Sologne ran into a German roadblock. Armed Gestapo men forced them to drive to the town hall square in Dhuizon, where they initially managed to escape. But after just a few kilometers, the Gestapo's fast vehicle caught up with their old Citroën, and the Germans immediately opened fire. Rudellat was hit in the head and admitted to Blois hospital seriously injured . When she was ready for transport after a few weeks, she was taken to the headquarters of the Security Service (SD) on Paris Avenue Foch . Her three companions, also injured, were meanwhile imprisoned in Fresnes Prison. The two Canadians were later deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and murdered there; Culioli survived the war.

Rudellat was interrogated several times by the SD, but as a result of her head injury she suffered from memory loss and could only remember her assumed name "Jacqueline Gauthier". After several weeks in the Fresnes prison in Paris, “Jacqueline Gauthier” was deported with other French Resistance fighters to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . In February or March 1945 she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which in the meantime also served as a reception camp for prisoners from the concentration camps further east. Rudellat is said to have contracted typhus and dysentery there and died a few days after the camp was liberated on April 15 by British troops. She was buried in a mass grave under her adopted name "Jacqueline Gauthier".

Honors

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

• 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