Violette Szabo heard the shot and knew the next moment belonged to her. The SS man standing behind her had already raised his pistol to the back of her head, and the death sentence that had just been read aloud was still hanging in the cold February air of the execution alley at Ravensbrück. She had fought them for thirty minutes in an open field, she had beaten interrogation, she had refused to build the bombs that would kill her own people, and now, at twenty-three years old, she was seconds from the end. The pistol fired.
Her story began far from that wall, in a life that gave no hint of the fate waiting for her. She was born Violette Bushell, the daughter of an English father and a French mother. Her father had served in the British Army in France during the First World War, and it was there that he had met her mother, a dressmaker from the Somme region. The family moved to London in the 1930s, crossing the English Channel when Violette was eleven.
She was a tomboy who excelled at sports and had learned to shoot under her father’s instruction, and she relearned English at a school in Brixton, where her peers liked her well enough. But her father was strict, and the two clashed often, so on one occasion Violette did what many headstrong young women did when they could not stand the tension at home: she ran away, all the way to France. She eventually came back to England and took a number of jobs around London, settling into the working life of a young woman in the thirties. When the Second World War broke out, Violette joined the Women’s Land Army and spent time picking strawberries in Fareham on the south coast.
Then she became a munitionette in an armaments factory in London, making bullets and bombs for aircraft, doing the sort of work that kept the war machine turning while men went off to fight. It was in this period that she met Étienne Szabo, a French non-commissioned officer of Hungarian descent. The two fell in love quickly, very quickly, and married in under two months. He was twelve years older than her.
They went on honeymoon, and then he went off to fight abroad. Violette worked as a switchboard operator in London during the Blitz and was sent for training as an anti-aircraft gunner, becoming a gunner herself before her war effort took an even more demanding turn. She gave birth to a child, a daughter, and continued working in factories that made aircraft. Then came the news that would change everything: her husband was dead, killed in action.
At a young age, Violette Szabo was a widow and a single mother. The loss did not break her; it redirected her. She decided that she would fight the enemy that had killed her husband, and she set out to do it in the most dangerous way available: she joined the Special Operations Executive. The SOE was a secret intelligence service that worked alongside the French Resistance to help liberate France.
Its agents were trained to operate behind enemy lines, and they were among the most highly prepared operatives of the war. Violette was recruited by F Section, and her fluency in French made her a natural fit for work in occupied territory. She attended an interview and was selected for training as a field agent in July 1943. The training was vigorous.
She was trained in navigation, weapons, and demolitions, and she received a good report. She then went on to Beaulieu to learn further skills, including escape techniques and cryptography. The training was thorough, and she took to it, though not without mishaps. During parachute training she sprained her ankle on her first attempt, but she passed the course anyway.
Her SOE colleagues adored her, both for her courage and for her endless infectious Cockney laughter. She was described as a dark-haired slip of mischief, and her Cockney accent only added to her impishness. Her first mission was delayed because of the ankle injury, but on the night of 5 April 1944 she was flown from RAF Tempsford with another agent and dropped into German-occupied France, landing in the heart of the Loire Valley. Her cover was that of a secretary, and she posed as a resident of Le Havre.
Her code name was Louise. Her task was to work out which agents had been arrested by the Germans, and what she found was grim: the circuit she was investigating had been damaged beyond repair. She went back to Paris, stopped off for a bit of shopping, and reported back to SOE. She got back to England on 30 April, about three weeks after she had left.
She was readied for a second mission about six weeks later. The landing in France was delayed further by German patrols, but on 8 June 1944, two days after D-Day, she parachuted back into France, landing in a field. She was part of a four-person squad tasked with investigating a circuit named Salesman II, and her SOE commander would spearhead the operation. She would work with the local Maquis to obtain weapons.
But within a matter of days of landing, her cover was blown, and she would be arrested early in the morning of 10 June, just two days after she had touched down. That morning she traveled by car, driven by a young Maquis squad leader. The Germans had banned the use of cars by the French following D-Day, so the journey itself was a risk. The trip was around a hundred kilometers long, and Violette was armed with a Sten gun and a significant amount of ammunition in case of trouble.
She wore a light suit. They drove across France, picking up other resistance allies along the way. But the car drew the suspicion of German soldiers. That very day, Helmuth Kämpfe, a senior SS commander, had been arrested and burned alive inside an ambulance by the resistance, so the SS were on the lookout for cars and suspicious vehicles, and they were in no mood to let anything pass.
The car was stopped by the Germans. Violette got out and opened fire. Armored cars arrived to support the German troops, and Violette jumped over a gate and tried to run across a field. She made it across and got over a stream, but then she twisted her ankle.
Still, she provided covering fire for the others and fought the Germans for thirty minutes. She killed a corporal and wounded several others before her ammunition ran out. She had put up a fierce resistance with her Sten, but she was eventually overwhelmed and taken for interrogation. Violette Szabo became a prisoner of the SD, the SS security service.
For four days she was brutally beaten and tortured for information, and she refused to give them anything. She gave her name as Vicki Taylor, but the SD had for some time known her actual identity and what she was doing as an SOE agent. She was taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Paris for further torture, and her ordeal was truly horrific. As this was happening, the Allies were driving further into France, and the Third U.
S. Army was heading for Paris. The Germans, anticipating the fall of the city, began sending their valuable prisoners to Germany. On 8 August 1944, Violette Szabo was sent to Germany with other SOE agents.
She was shackled to SOE wireless operator Denise Bloch, and they were held with other prisoners on board a train. The conditions were harsh. The only food they were given was bread crusts, and for ten days the women were held in terrible conditions at the transit camp they arrived at in Germany, with no toilet and no running water. The SOE women were then sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, an all-female site where around ninety thousand women would die during the war.
The conditions were brutal. Disease was rife, and the SS guards violently attacked the women. Violette entered the camp on 25 August 1944. For some time she endured the camp’s brutality, forced to do hard labor.
But she protested and appeared not to build munitions inside a Heinkel factory, refusing to make armaments that would be used against her own country. She was then forced to dig potatoes, and she and other women were sent to work other sites. At a punishment camp she was forced to fell trees in the tough winter conditions. Many of the women sent there alongside her froze to death.
She was dressed only in summer clothes and had no blankets in the barracks at night. The women were also assaulted inside solitary confinement blocks. Then, around 5 February 1945, Violette Szabo was sent back to Ravensbrück for her execution. She was considered a thorn in the side of the German Army, and now the time had come to remove her.
She was brought out into the execution alley at the camp. The SS guard, SS Rottenführer Schultze, told her to kneel down while the death sentence was read out. The commandant of Ravensbrück, Fritz Suhren, looked on. Also witnessing the execution were the deputy commandant, Johann Schwarzhuber, and a dentist, Dr.
Martin Hellinger. Schultze pulled out his pistol, and while the death sentence was read, Violette knew she would be dead in seconds. He shot his pistol into the back of her head. She was one of a number of female SOE agents shot at the same time and place, including Denise Bloch, the woman she had been shackled to on the train.
Her body was then carried to the camp crematorium and burned. After the war, Violette Szabo became the second woman to be awarded the George Cross. The citation recorded what she had done: she volunteered to undertake a particularly dangerous mission in France, parachuting in in April 1944 and undertaking her task with enthusiasm in the execution of the delicate researches it entailed. She showed great presence of mind and astuteness.
She was twice arrested by the German security authorities and each time managed to get away. Eventually, however, with other members of her group, she was surrounded by the Gestapo in a house in southwest France. Resistance appeared hopeless, but she seized a Sten gun and as much ammunition as she could carry, barricaded herself inside part of the house, and exchanged shot for shot with the enemy, killing or wounding several of them. By constant movement she avoided being cornered, and she fought until she dropped exhausted.
She was arrested and had to undergo solitary confinement. She was then continuously and atrociously tortured, but never by word or deed gave away any of her acquaintances or told the enemy anything of value. She was ultimately executed. The citation concluded that she gave a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness.
Her life ended in one of the most evil concentration camps of the war, and she is remembered today among the heroes of the Second World War, one of the many who gave everything to rid France of the Nazi regime. Like so many other female spies, Violette Szabo was sentenced to a horrific death, and she met it without giving the enemy the thing they wanted most. The screams of the women thrown into the crematorium ovens at Ravensbrück were heard by the other prisoners, a sound that defined that place, and Violette Szabo was among those who died there, at the age of twenty-three, having fought to her last bullet and her last breath.
