Mathilde Carre (1909-1970)

DOSSIER:
Mathilde Carre was born in Le Creusot, Saone-et-Loire on 30 Jun 1908. After her marriage to Maurice Carre, she moved to Algeria. Maurice was later killed during the campaign of Italy. She returned to France, worked as a nurse and witnessed the country fall to the Germans. 

CODE NAMES:
Victoire
La Chatte (the She-Cat)

In 1940, she met a Polish Air Force Captain named Roman Czerniawski (code name Walenty to the Poles and Armand or Victor to the French). Mathilde, who had contacts with the Vichy Second Bureau, joined the headquarters section of his Franco-Polish Interallié espionage network based in Paris under the code name "Victoire". (All the headquarters section staff had "V" initial names, in a network that named its agents and their sectors or areas of coverage for Christian names grouped by the letters of the alphabet). She was nicknamed La Chatte, ("The She-cat") for her feline predatory and stealthy propensities.

On 17 Nov 1941, the Abwehr's Hugo Bleicher arrested Czerniawski, Mathilde and many other members of Interallié. They had been uncovered when an informant in Normandy exposed them to the Gestapo. She was interrogated by Bleicher, threatened with death and offered financial reward. Mathilde agreed to become a double agent herself and revealed all of the members of the network known to her. She began working for the Germans, continuing to use the code name Victoire and may also have become Bleicher's mistress.

According to Pierre de Vomécourt, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he and a Resistance contact began to suspect her. When he confronted Mathilde, who had become his mistress, she confessed and together they planned to outwit the Abwehr.

She claimed she convinced Bleicher, and through him his superiors, to send her to London to infiltrate the SOE. In February 1942, she was exfiltrated to London with de Vomécourt. MI5 interrogated her about Abwehr techniques and played back her radio link for a period until her usefulness was exhausted, whereupon she was arrested. She was first taken to HM Prison Holloway and then to HM Prison Aylesbury for the rest of the war. There she acted as an informant against other detainees.

After the war Mathilde was deported to France where she faced charges for treason. At the trial, which started on 3 Jan 1949, the prosecution read from her diary: "What I wanted most was a good meal, a man, and, once more, Mozart's Requiem." Despite being defended by her wartime commander, Paul Archard, she was sentenced to death on 7 Jan 1949. Three months later, the sentence was commuted to 20 years in jail.

Mathilde Carré was released in September 1954. She published an account of her life in J'ai été La Chatte (1959); revised in 1975 as On m'appelait la Chatte (I Was Called The Cat), in which she denied many claims that had been made about her and her activities during the war. She soon fell out of public view. Mathilde Carré died in 1970 in Paris.