Odette Sansom (1912-1995)

DOSSIER:

Odette Marie Celine Brailly, daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Gaston Brailly, was born on 28 Apr 1912 in Amiens, France. At 7 years of age she caught polio and spent a year blind and another without the movement of her limbs. In 1931 she married Roy Sansom with whom she had three children: Francoise, Lily and Marianne. Their marriage was dissolved in 1946 and she remarried to Peter Churchill in 1947. She divorced from Churchill in 1956 and married Geoffrey Hollowes that same year. Odette died on 13 Mar 1995 at Walton-on-Thames, England.

CODE NAMES:

Agent Spindle

Lise (Churchill)

In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the Continent for possible war use. Hearing the broadcast, she wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, on the French coast of the English Channel, but she inadvertently addressed her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. As a result, she was enrolled in Special Forces of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and trained by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive to be sent into Nazi-occupied France to work with the French underground. 

She made a landing near Cannes in 1942, where she made contact with her supervisor, Peter Churchill. Using the code name Lise, she brought him funds and acted as his courier. Churchill's operation in France was infiltrated by Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr counter-intelligence officer, who arrested Odette and Churchill at the Hotel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz on 16 Apr 1943. They were sent to Fresnes Prison.

Although tortured by the Sicherheitsdienst using a red-hot poker at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, she stuck to her cover story that Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that she was his wife. The hope was that in this way their treatment would be mitigated. She was condemned to death in June 1943 (although a time for execution was not specified) and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Odette survived the war partly thanks to her alias of "Churchill". The British had calculated that if the Germans thought she was related to the British Prime Minister, they would want to keep her alive as a possible bargaining tool. And so it turned out, for with the Allies only a few miles from Ravensbrück, Camp commandant Fritz Suhren took Odette with him and drove with her to the U.S. base when surrendering to the Americans. He hoped that her supposed connections to Churchill might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution.

Subsequently Odette testified against the prison guards charged with war crimes at the 1946 Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials.