Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. It was at Fresne Prison that they tortured Sansom. Please make him your prisoner." Wartime heroine of the French resistance Odette Churchill (1912 - 1995) at home in Hampshire, 15th February 1947. to London where she gave birth to three children. With Sansom stranded in Cannes, Churchill obtained Buckmaster's permission to scrap her original mission and for her to act as his courier. Her code name was "Lise". Held by the Gestapo. Fifteen of them were captured by the Nazis. The interrogator told her to unbutton it. Roy and Odette's marriage was dissolved in 1946 and she married Peter Churchill in 1947.[25]. IWM collections. Over the next few months These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. help establish a new circuit in Burgundy. She was captured six months later and imprisoned in Fresne, the Gestapo prison in Paris. After he landed by parachute in a remote mountainous area, Churchill and Sansom hid in an inn in St. Jorioz. Odette Sansom was born in France but later moved to England. Messages were printed on ties, scarves, handkerchiefs, and underwear. She spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrck Concentration Camp. By July 1940, these activities were brought under the control of a central organization, called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), also known as "the Firm" and "the Racket." This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. A manifesto signed by about 20 former associates accused Churchill of being in France only to collect material for a book about his experiences and asked what acts of sabotage he and Odette had carried out. Four female SOE agents had been put to death in a concentration camp by lethal injection that month. Sansom was torn, as she wanted to help but didn't want to leave her children. Sansom's initial objective was to contact the French Resistance on the French Riviera, and then move to Auxerre in Burgundy to establish a safe house for other agents. A glamorous spy, capture, imprisonment, horrific torture, dramatic escape, breathless romance. A year later, they were married, and their first daughter Franoise was born in 1932. This was hard enough for most prisoners and even worse for those suffering from diarrhea which was epidemic in the camps. As Odette got out of the car, Shren stood in the street with her. Her hair began falling out, her teeth became loose and she lapsed into a semi-coma. [19], Sansom succeeded in diverting attention from Churchill, who was subject to only two interrogations, and protected the identities of the two officers whose locations were known only to her. She was brutally interrogated in prison before being deported to Germany and eventually executed at Ravensbrck concentration camp in 1945. Later, she married Geoffrey Hallowes. Odette: The Story of a British Agent. It was this belief that saw her through her harrowing ordeal. Her George Cross, she always maintained, was not to be regarded as an award to her personally, but as an acknowledgment of all those known and unknown, alive or dead, who had served the cause of the liberation of France. Odette Hallowes died at Walton-on-Thames on 13th March, Great access to I-80. Back in her cell, Sansom ripped her prison cloth into strips to bind her feet. "You will realize I am not what you want.". Again, he asked, "Where is Arnaud?" They were joined there by several other members of the Carte network and SOE, a gathering which attracted the attention of the Italian fascist police and the Gestapo. 1936). They scraped out human fat 18 inches thick from crematoria chimneys. She endured months of solitary confinement and death threats, but revealed nothing. In commemoration of those women of the SOE who were executed by the Nazis, there is a plaque at St. Paul's Knightsbridge, dedicated on May 7, 1948. . Peter Churchillm. She was brutally tortured by the Gestapo for information on her fellow agents. Around February 5th 1945 Violette Szabo was executed by a shot in the back of her head aged just twenty three. Her wartime experiences and endurance of a brutal interrogation and imprisonment, which were chronicled in books and a motion picture, made her one of the most celebrated members of the SOE and one of the few to survive Nazi imprisonment. Sansom was aided in her endurance in prison by her early blindness and paralysis, and by the example of her grandfather, who "did not accept weakness very easily." Odette is a 1950 British war film based on the true story of Special Operations Executive French agent, Odette Sansom, living in England, who was captured by the Germans in 1943, condemned to death and sent to Ravensbrck concentration camp to be executed. Odette Sansom was born in France but later moved to England. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Erwin Rommel is know, Reinhard Heydrich Her conditions only improved in December 1944, when she was moved to a ground floor cell. [3][4], In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the French coastline for possible war use. He then departed Saint-Jorioz with a plan to return and for them to leave France together clandestinely by aircraft on April 18. After the war and his separation from Odette he married Carla Schmidt (19212004). Still Odette refused to speak. The following month, after American and British troops landed in French North Africa, the Germans were prompted to enter the unoccupied zone, at which point the Mediterranean coast took on new significance for the SOE. drive her to the Allied lines in the west. Honored for his tenacity and courage at the battle of Verdun, he was later killed as he attempted to save two men missing from his platoon. Great True Spy Adventures. tortured by the Gestapo she had all her toenails pulled out. They claimed they were husband and wife and related to Winston Churchill. The journalist summed up the experience: Everyone remembers that Odette had her toe-nails torn out by the Gestapo. Though the camp was designed to contain a maximum of 6,000 prisoners, after 1943, there were never fewer than 12,000. 19561995 "Every Sunday morning, after church, we were taken to the grave of my father, who was killed at Verdun 30 days before Armistice. He was warned to avoid contact with Sansom and 'Colonel Henri" on his return to France, but when he was parachuted back into the Annecy area on April 14/15, he was met by Sansom and Rabinovich. Meanwhile, Sansom was feeling powerless. //

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