Lilian Vera Rolfe, daughter of Mr. & Mrs. George Rolfe, was born in Paris on 26 Apr 1914. She was executed at Ravensbruck concentration camp on 5 Feb 1945.
CODE NAME:
Nadine
At the onset of World War II, Lilian worked at the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro before going to London, England in 1943 to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Because of her fluency in the French language, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where she was trained as a wireless operator.
On 5 Apr 1944, she was dropped near the city of Orléans in occupied France, where she was deployed to work with the Historian network run by George Wilkinson. Her job was to transmit maquis and other important radio messages to London. Beyond her wireless duties, that included reporting on German troop movements and organizing arms and supply drops, she actively participated in missions with members of the French Resistance against the German occupiers and was involved in a gun battle in the small town of Olivet just south of Orléans.
Following the D-Day landings, an increasingly aggressive manhunt by the Gestapo led to the arrest of her superior officer. Nonetheless, Lilian continued to work until her arrest at a transmitting house in Nargis on 31 Jul 1944. Transported to Fresnes Prison in Paris, she was interrogated repeatedly and brutally tortured until August 1944, when she was shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
According to an admission made by a German officer after the war’s end, she was so ill that she could not walk. On 5 Feb 1945, 30-year-old Lilian Rolfe was executed by the Germans and her body disposed of in the crematorium. Three other female members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort and Violette Szabo.
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