Sonia Olschanezky (25 December 1923 – 6 July 1944) was a member of the French Resistance and the Special Operations Executive during World War II. Olschanezky was a member of the SOE's Juggler circuit in occupied France where she operated as a courier until she was arrested by the Gestapo and was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Early life

thumb|left|Old and new city hall in [[Chemnitz]]

Olschanezky was born in Chemnitz, Germany.

Unknown to London, Olschanezky had refused to follow Weill who had fled to Bern (Switzerland) in July 1943 after the arrest of the leader of Robin (Jean Alexandre Worms) following the collapse of Prosper the previous month, leaving her in charge of what was left of Robin and taking immense risks by running messages between different SOE groups that were likely compromised by this collapse.

Arrest and execution

Arrest

thumb|right|[[Fresnes Prison]]

Olschanezky remained free until her capture on 21 January 1944. After being interrogated by the Gestapo, she was imprisoned at Fresnes Prison. On 13 May 1944, Olschanezky together with three other captured SOE agents, Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh and Diana Rowden, were moved from Fresnes to the Gestapo's Paris headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch along with Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Odette Sansom, all of whom were F Section agents. (Only Sansom would survive the war.) Later that day they were taken to the railway station, and each handcuffed to a guard on the train. Sansom, in an interview after the war, said:

<blockquote>We were starting on this journey together in fear, but all of us hoping for something above all that we would remain together. We had all had a taste already of what things could be like, none of us did expect for anything very much, we all knew that they could put us to death. I was the only one officially condemned to death. The others were not. But there is always a fugitive ray of hope that some miracle will take place.</blockquote>

The Germans transported Olschanezky and the seven other female agentsBeekman, Borrel, Damerment, Leigh, Plewman, Sansom, and Rowdento a civilian prison for women in Karlsruhe prison where they were placed in separate cells. The agents were treated no differently from other prisoners and were given manual work. Occasionally, they could hear Allied bombers headed for targets within Germany as the war was apparently coming to its end and the prisoners could hope to be liberated in due course. There was some confusion as to what had happened to Olschanezky as she looked similar to another agent Noor Inayat Khan (Cinema circuit) who had also been arrested, and it was thought that Noor might have used Olschanezky's name as an alias.

Execution at Natzweiler-Struthof

thumb|250px|right|[[Natzweiler-Struthof camp entrance.<br /> Monument to the Departed in background.]]

thumb|right|250px|View of former Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp in 2010. The cellblock is the building on the left and the crematorium is the building on the right.

250px|right|thumb|The crematorium at Natzweiler-Struthof

Some time between five and six in the morning on 6 July 1944, not quite two months after their arrival in Karlsruhe, Borrel, Leigh, Olschanezky and Rowden were taken to the reception room, given their personal possessions, and handed over to two Gestapo men who then escorted them 100 kilometres south-west by closed truck to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, where they arrived around three-thirty in the afternoon. The women's arrival was apparently unexpected as was the order by one of the women's escorts that the four women were to be executed immediately.

As women were a rarity in the camp their presence immediately attracted attention from both German guards and prisoners. The four women were led through the center of the camp down to the cellblock at the bottom of the camp by SS men and held there until later that night. "One could see from their appearance that they hadn't come from a camp," said a French prisoner. "They seemed young, they were fairly well groomed, their clothes were not rubbish, their hair was brushed, and each had a case in their (sic) hand."

The four women were initially together but later put into individual cells. Through the windows, which faced those of the infirmary, they managed to communicate with several prisoners, including a Belgian prisoner, Dr Georges Boogaerts, who passed one of the women (whom he later identified as Borrel from a photograph) cigarettes through the window. Borrel threw him a little tobacco pouch containing some money.

Albert Guérisse, a Belgian army physician who had headed the Pat O'Leary escape line in Marseille, recognized Borrel as one of his former helpers. He exchanged a few words with another one of the women, who said she was English (Leigh or Rowden) before she disappeared into the cellblock building. At the post-war trial of the men charged with the execution of the four women, Guérisse stated that he was in the infirmary and had seen the women, one by one, being escorted by SS guards from the cellblock (Zellenbau) to the crematorium a few yards away. He told the court: "I saw the four women going to the crematorium, one after the other. One went, and two or three minutes later another went."

Inside the building housing the crematorium, each woman in turn was told to undress for a medical check and a doctor gave her an injection for what he told one of them was a vaccination against typhus, but was in fact a 10cc dose of phenol which the doctor believed was lethal. When the woman became unconscious after the injection, she was inserted into the crematorium oven. Guérrise said, "The next morning the German prisoner in charge of the crematorium explained to me that each time the door of the oven was opened, the flames came out of the chimney and that meant a body had been put in the oven. I saw the flames four times." The door was locked from the outside during the executions, but it was possible to see the corridor from a small window above the door, so the prisoner in the highest bunk was able to keep up a running commentary on what he saw.

The prisoner Guérisse referred to was Franz Berg, who assisted in the crematorium and had stoked the fire that night before being sent back to the room he shared with two other prisoners before the executions. Berg said:

More than one witness talked of a struggle when the fourth woman was shoved into the furnace. According to a Polish prisoner named Walter Schultz, the SS medical orderly (Emil Brüttel) told him the following: "When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled. As there were sufficient men there, they were able to push her into the oven, but not before she had resisted and scratched [Peter] Straub's face." The next day Schultz noticed that the face of the camp executioner (Straub) had been severely scratched.

The camp doctor (Werner Rohde) was executed after the war. Franz Berg was sentenced to five years in prison but received the death penalty in another trial for a different crime and was hanged on the same day as Rohde. The camp commandant (Fritz Hartjenstein) received a life sentence, while Straub was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Awards and honours

thumb|right|SOE Agents Memorial

In spite of the efforts of Vera Atkins (F Section's intelligence officer during the war), Olschanezky is not commemorated on the Valençay SOE Memorial in the Loire Valley, unveiled in 1991, which is dedicated to the 91 men and 13 women of F Section who were killed in action. Atkins was told by the memorial committee that Olschanezky was not eligible to be noted on the memorial as she was a locally recruited agent, not commissioned in the British armed forces. Nor was this German-born Jew honoured by the British or French governments with any medals or citations, despite her actions on behalf of these two nations.

A later memorial, the SOE Agents Memorial in Lambeth Palace Road, London, is dedicated to all SOE agents but does not list individual names, so is considered to include people like Olschanezky. Olschanezky is specifically commemorated with a plaque, along with the names of Noor Inayat Khan and Lilian Rolfe, on the Vera Atkins Memorial Seat in the Allied Special Forces Memorial Grove at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Her name is also on a stone plaque, along with the names of Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel, and Vera Leigh, in the furnace room of the Natzweiler-Struthof crematorium.

In 1985, SOE agent and painter Brian Stonehouse, who saw Olschanezky and the three other female SOE agents at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp just before their deaths, painted a poignant watercolour of the four women which now hangs in the Special Forces Club in London.

:Documentary about the SOE "finishing school" on the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire.

  • Les Femmes de l'Ombre (aka Female Agents) (2008)

:French film about five SOE female agents and their contribution towards the D-Day invasions

  • Now It Can Be Told (aka School for Danger) (1946)

:Filming began in 1944 and starred real-life SOE agents Captain Harry Rée and Jacqueline Nearne codenamed "Felix" and "Cat", respectively. The film tells the story of the training of agents for SOE and their operations in France. The training sequences were filmed using the SOE equipment at the training schools at Traigh and Garramor (South Morar) and at Ringway.

  • Odette (1950)

:Movie based on the book by Jerrard Tickell about Odette Sansom, starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard. The film includes an interview with Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE's F-Section.

  • Robert and the Shadows (2004)

:French documentary on France Télévisions. Jean Marie Barrere, the French director, uses the story of his own grandfather (Robert) to tell the French what SOE did at that time. Robert was a French teacher based in the southwest of France, who worked with SOE agent George Reginald Starr (codenamed "Hilaire", in charge of the "Wheelwright" circuit).

  • Wish Me Luck (1987)

:Television series that was broadcast between 1987 and 1990 featuring the exploits of the women and, less frequently, the men of SOE, which was renamed the 'Outfit'.

See also

  • British military history of World War II
  • Military history of France during World War II
  • Resistance during World War II

References

Citations

Bibliography

Further reading

  • le site EdC - Sonia Olschanezky