Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell, daughter of Charles George Bushell and Reine Blanche Leroy, was born on 26 Jun 1921 in Paris, France. She was executed on 5 Feb 1945 at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.
CODE NAMES:
Louise
La P'tite Anglaise
In early 1940 Violette joined the Land Army and was sent to carry out strawberry picking in Fareham, Hampshire, but she soon returned to London and went to work in an armaments factory in Acton, west London.
She met Étienne Szabo, a French officer of Hungarian descent, at the Bastille Day parade in London in 1940 where she had been sent by her mother to bring home a homesick French soldier for dinner. They married at Aldershot Registry Office on 21 Aug 1940 after a whirlwind 42-day romance.
After her marriage, Violette went to work as a switchboard operator for the General Post Office in central London, working throughout the Blitz. Bored by the work, she enlisted in the Auxiliary Transport Service on 11 Sep 1941. She was posted to Leicester for initial training, before being sent to the 7 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Training Regiment in Oswestry, Shropshire for specialized training as a predictor and then attached to 481 Heavy (Mixed) Anti-Aircraft Battery. After further training in Anglesey, Gunner Szabo and her unit were posted to Frodsham near Warrington in Cheshire from December 1941 to February 1942. Within weeks Violette learned she was pregnant and returned to London for the birth.
She took a flat at Notting Hill, London, which was her home until she left for her second mission to France in June 1944. On 8 June 1942 she gave birth to her daughter, Tania Damaris Desiree Szabo, at St. Mary's hospital in Paddington while Etienne was stationed at Bir Hakeim in North Africa.
Violette sent her baby to childminders, first in Havant, Hampshire, and then in Mill Hill, north London, while she went to work at the aircraft factory in South Modern where her father was now working. Her time there was brief, as she was soon informed of the death in action of her husband. Étienne had died from chest wounds he received leading his men in a diversionary attack on El Heimimat at the beginning of the Second Battle of El Alamein on 24 Oct 1942. He had never seen his daughter. It was Étienne's death that made an inconsolable Violette decide to accept when offered the chance to train as a field agent by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), as her best way of fighting the enemy that killed her husband.
It is unclear how or why Violette was recruited by F-Section, as her surviving official file is very thin, but her fluency in French and her service in the ATS probably brought her to the attention of SOE. What is known is that she would have been invited to an interview regarding war work with a Mr. E. Potter, the alias of Selwyn Jepson, the detective novelist, who was F-Section's recruiter. Having satisfied Jepson of her suitability, she was given security clearance on 1 July 1943 and selected for training as a field agent on 10 July. She was also commissioned as a Section Leader into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a civilian service often used by SOE as cover for female agents.
After an assessment for fluency in French and a series of interviews, Szabo was sent from August 7-27 for initial training to Winterfold House, the training school designated STS 4, and after a moderately favorable report, from there on to Special Training School 24 of Group A at Aisraig in the Scottish Highlands in September and October for paramilitary training. Here she received intensive instruction in field craft, night and daylight navigation, weapons and demolitions. Once again her reports were mixed, but she completed the course well enough to pass, and move on to Group B.
She was sent to the SOE "finishing school" at Beaulieu in Hampshire where she learned escape and evasion, uniform recognition, communications and cryptography, and had further training in weaponry. The final stage in training was parachute jumping which was taught at Ringway Airport near Manchester. On her first attempt, Violette badly sprained her ankle and was sent home for recuperation, spending some time in Bournemouth (it was this ankle that was to fail her later in France). She was able to take the parachuting course again and passed with a second class in February 1944.
With reference to her time in training, in his book Das Reich, Max Hastings comments that Szabo was "adored by the men and women of SOE both for her courage and endless infectious cockney laughter", while Leo Marks remembered her as "A dark-haired slip of mischief....She had a cockney accent which added to her impishness."
Due to the ankle injury, Violette's first deployment was delayed, but it was during her second course at Ringway that she first met Philippe Liewer. While in London she also socialized with Bob Maloubier, so SOE decided she would work as a courier for Liewer's Salesman circuit. However, the mission was postponed when F Section received a signal from Harry Peuleve's (code name Jean) Author circuit warning that several members of the Rouen-Dieppe group had been arrested, including Claude Malraux (code name Cicero) and radio operator Isidore Newman. This extra time meant she could be sent for a refresher course in wireless operation in London, and it was then that Leo Marks, SOE's cryptographer, seeing her struggle with her original French nursery rhyme, gave her his own composition, The Life That I Have as her code poem.
On 5 April 1944 Violette and Liewer were flown from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire in a U.S. B-24 Liberator bomber and parachuted into German-occupied France, near Cherbourg. Her cover was that she was a commercial secretary named Corinne Reine Leroy (the latter two names being her mother's first and maiden names), who was born on 26 Jun 1921 (her real birth date) in Bailleul, and who was a resident of Le Havre, which gave her reason to travel to the Restricted Zone of German occupation on the coast.
Under the code name "Louise", which happened to be her nickname (she was also nicknamed "La P'tite Anglaise", as she stood only 5'3" tall), she and SOE colleague Philippe Liewer (under the name "Major Charles Staunton"), organiZer of the Salesman circuit, tried to assess the damage made by the German arrests, with Violette traveling to Rouen, where Liewer could not go as a wanted man (both he and Maloubier were on wanted posters with their code names) and Dieppe to gather intelligence and carry out reconnaissance. It soon became clear that the circuit, which originally involved over 120 members (80 in Rouen and 40 on the coast) had been blown beyond repair. Violette returned to Paris to brief Liewer. While the destruction of Salesman was a heavy blow to SOE, her reports on the local factories producing war materials for the Germans were important in establishing Allied bombing targets.
She returned to England by Lysander, piloted by Bob Large, DFC of the RAF, on 30 April 1944, landing after a stressful flight in which the plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire over Chateaudun, and Violette had been thrown heavily about the body of the plane. Large had turned off the intercom when attacked and did not turn it back on for the rest of the flight, so when the plane landed heavily due to a burst tyre, and he went to get her out, she (thinking they had been shot down and not having seen her blond pilot) let Large have a volley of abuse in French, mistaking him for a German. When she realized what had really happened, he was rewarded with a kiss. Philippe Liewer returned at the same time in another Lysander. On 24 May 1944 Szabo was promoted to Ensign in the FANY.
After two aborted attempts, due to stormy weather on the night of 4/5 June and the abandonment of the intended landing ground on 5th/6th by the Resistance reception committee because of German patrols, Violette and three colleagues were dropped by parachute from a USAF Liberator flown from RAF Harrington onto a landing field near Sussac on the outskirts of Limoges, early on 8 June 1944 (immediately following D-Day, and Tania Szabo's second birthday). She was part of a four-person team sent to operate in the department of Haute Vienne with the circuit code-name 'Salesman II', led by her SOE commander Philippe Liewer (now code named Hamlet), whose rolled-up Rouen circuit had been 'Salesman', and including Second Lieutenant Jean-Claude Guiet (code names Claude and Virgile) of the U.S. Army as wireless operator, and Robert Maloubier (alias Robert 'Bob' Mortier; code names Clothaire and Paco), Violette and Liewer's friend and comrade, of SOE who was to act as military instructor to the local Maquis, and who had worked as weapons instructor and explosives officer for Liewer on the original Salesman I circuit. For this mission, Violette's cover was that she was a Mme. Villeret, the young widow of an antiques dealer from Nantes.
Upon arrival, she was sent to coordinate the activities of the local maquis in sabotaging communication lines during German attempts to stem the Normandy landings. When he arrived in the Limousin, Philippe Liewer found the local maquis to be poorly led and less prepared for action than he expected. In order to better coordinate Resistance activity against the Germans, he decided to send his courier, Violette Szabo, as his liaison officer, to the more active maquis of Correze and the Dordogne, led by Jaques Poirier, head of the renamed Digger circuit, who had taken over from Harry Peuleve of the Author circuit, upon the latter's arrest. However, due to poor intelligence gathering by the local Resistance, Liewer was unaware that the 2nd SS Panzer Division was making its slow journey north to the Normandy battlefields through his area.
At 9.30 am on 10 June Violette set off on her mission, not by bicycle as Liewer would have preferred as less conspicuous, but in a Citroen driven by a young maquis section leader, Jacques Dufour ('Anastasie'). He had insisted upon using the car, even though the Germans had forbidden the use of cars by the French after D-Day, and would drive her half the 100 km of her journey. At her request to Liewer, she was armed with a Sten gun. On their way across the sunlit fields of south central France they picked up Jean Bariaud, a twenty-six-year-old Resistance friend of Dufour, who would keep him company on the return journey. Unfortunately, their car raised the suspicions of German troops at an unexpected roadblock that had been set up to find Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, a battalion commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, who had been captured by the local resistance. When Dufour slowed the car, the unarmed Bariaud was able to escape and later warn the Salesman team of the suspected arrest of his two companions.
When the car stopped, Violette and Dufour opened fire, and a brief gun battle ensued. Both tried to escape, each providing the other with covering fire, and Dufour was able to get away and hide in a friend's farm. However, Violette sprained her ankle and was captured when she ran out of ammunition, around midday on 10 June 1944, near Salon-la-Tour. Her captors were most likely from the 1st Battalion of 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment Deutschland (Das Reich Division) whose commanding officer was the missing Sturmbannfuehrer Kampfe. [In R.J. Minney's biography she is described as putting up fierce resistance with her Sten gun, although German documents of the incident record no German injuries or casualties. A recent biography of Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer for the French section of SOE, notes that there was a great deal of confusion about what happened to Szabo—the story was revised four times—and states that the Sten gun incident "was probably a fabrication. But Szabo's most recent biographer, Susan Ottaway, includes the battle in her book, as does Tania Szabo in hers.]
Violette was transferred to the custody of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) (SS Security Service) in Limoges, where she was interrogated for four days. She gave her name as "Vicky Taylor", the name she had intended to use if she needed to return to England via Spain. (Her reason for choosing this name is unknown, but it may have been a play on szabo being the Hungarian word for "tailor".) From there, she was moved to Fresnes Prison in Paris and brought to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation and torture by the Sicherheitsdienst, who by now knew of her true identity and activities as an SOE agent.
With the Allies driving deep into France and George Patton's 3rd U.S. Army heading towards Paris, the decision was taken by the Germans to send their most valuable French prisoners to Germany. On 8 Aug 1944, Violette, shackled to SOE wireless operator Denise Bloch, was entrained with other male and female prisoners, including several SOE agents she knew, for transfer. At some point in the journey, probably outside Chalons-sur-Marne, an Allied air raid caused the guards to temporarily abandon the train allowing Violette and Bloch to get water from a lavatory to the caged male prisoners in the next carriage, the two women both providing inspiration and a morale boost to the suffering men. When the train reached Rheims, the prisoners were taken by lorries to a large barn for two nights, where Violette, still tied at the ankle to Bloch, who was in good spirits, was able to wash some of her clothes in rudimentary fashion, and to speak about her experiences to her SOE colleague Henry Peuleve.
From Rheims, via Strasbourg, the prisoners went by train to Saarbruecken and a transit camp in the suburb of Neue Bremm, where hygiene facilities were nonexistent, and food only indigestible bread crusts. After about ten days, Violette and most of the other women were sent on to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where over 92,000 women were to die during the war. The exhausted women arrived at this notorious camp, a place of disease, starvation and violence, on 25 Aug 1944 after a terrible 18-day journey.
Although she endured hard labor and malnutrition, she helped to save the life of Belgian resistance courier Hortense Clews, and kept up the spirits of her fellow detainees. While in Ravensbrueck, Violette, Denise Bloch and Lillian Rolfe were sent to work in the ammunition factory of the sub-camp of Torgau. After a mutiny led by communist women, they were among around 250 prisoners transferred in late October 1944 to Koenigsburg, where they were forced into harsh physical labor felling trees and clearing rock-hard icy ground for the construction of an airfield. This was during the brutal East Prussian winter, with Violette dressed only in the summer dress she had been wearing when sent to Germany, and with the women receiving barely any food and sleeping in frozen barracks without blankets. Around 19 or 20 January 1945 the three British agents were recalled to Ravensbrueck and sent to the punishment block where they were kept in solitary confinement and brutally assaulted. They were already in poor physical condition—Rolfe could barely walk—and the abuse finally weakened even Violette's morale.
Violette Szabo was executed in the execution alley at Ravensbrueck, aged twenty-three, on or before 5 Feb 1945, by shooting in the back of the head by SS-Rottenfuehrer Schult, in the presence of camp commandant Fritz Suhren (who pronounced the death penalty), camp overseer and deputy commandant Johann Schwarzhueber, SS-ScharfuehrerZappe, SS-Rottenfuehrer Schenk (responsible for the crematorium), chief camp doctor Dr Trommer, and dentist Dr Hellinger, along with Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe—neither of whom could walk to their deaths—by order of the highest Nazi authorities. Death was pronounced by Trommer, and the bodies were cremated in the camp's crematorium.
Along with Violette, three other women members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Cecily Lefort, who was murdered in the gas chamber sometime in February 1945. Of SOEs 55 female agents, 13 were killed in action, 12 by execution, one from typhus in a Nazi concentration camp, and one in hospital of meningitis.
While there is some confusion about the precise circumstances of her execution, Violette Szabo, along with her male and female colleagues who died in the concentration camps, is recorded by the War Office as having been killed in action. It must be noted that as an agent dressed in civilian clothes operating behind enemy lines, Violette Szabo was regarded by the Germans as a francs-tireur, and therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention, and was liable to summary execution.
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