“Who you know is everything” or “Who you claim to know is everything” should be the lesson that you take away from the adventures of Odette Hallowes.
After accidentally enrolling into the SOE by sending a postcard offering to help with the war effort to the wrong government office, Odette was dropped into France in 1942.
Meeting up with her supervisor Peter Churchill (no relation to Winston), Odette acted as an assistant and courier.
After their operation was infiltrated, the two were arrested and tortured in Paris.
What they did then most likely spared them their lives. They claimed that Peter was the nephew of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and that Odette was his wife. The two were still sent to a concentration camp in June 1943, but no death date was officially listed.
In fact, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, even brought Odette with him when he surrendered. He had hoped that her connections would spare him from being labeled a war criminal. Odette later testified against him, and he was hanged in 1950.
Wiki:
Service in France She made a landing on a beach near Cassis on the night of 2 November 1942, and made contact with Captain Peter Churchill, who headed SPINDLE, an SOE network in the South of France and based in Cannes. Her code name was "Lise." Sansom's initial objective was to contact the French Resistance on the French Riviera, and then move to Auxerre in Burgundy to establish a safe house for other agents.
Adolphe Rabinovitch
At the time of her arrival in France, the SPINDLE network was beset by internal strife. Churchill's principal agent, André Girard, quarrelled with his assistant and with the network's radio operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch. A list of 200 potential supporters, lost by a Girard courier, was obtained by the Germans. He refused to help Odette reach Auxerre. With Sansom stranded in Cannes, Churchill obtained Buckmaster's permission to scrap her original mission and act as his courier.
Sansom, posing as "Madame Odette Metayer," was required to find food and lodging for Rabinovitch, who was in France illegally and had no ration card, and to tend to air drops that were sometimes carelessly placed in dangerous areas. Her work brought her initially to Marseilles, then considered a dangerous town because of its infiltration by German agents. Sansom was shocked by the lax attitude toward security by her French supporters. Sansom grew close to Churchill and to Rabinovitch, whom she liked and trusted.[4] She later recalled that she had suspicions concerning members of the SPINDLE network, but declined to identify who she suspected and did not share them at the time.
In 1943, Churchill's operation in France was infiltrated by Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr counterintelligence officer, using the list of names lost by Girard's courier. Bleicher posed as "Colonel Henri," a German officer who opposed Hitler. Bleicher arrested Sansom and Churchill at the Hôtel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz on 16 April 1943; they were then sent to Fresnes Prison.
Imprisonment Fresnes Prison Fresnes Prison In the course of her imprisonment at Fresnes, she was interrogated by the Gestapo fourteen times. She was subjected to torture. Her back was scorched with a red-hot poker and all of her toenails were pulled out. But she refused to disclose the whereabouts of Rabinovitch and another British agent, stuck to her fabricated cover story that Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that she was his wife, and that he knew nothing of her activities. The hope was that in this way their treatment would be mitigated.[8][9] 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.
Sansom succeeded in diverting attention from Churchill, who was subject to only two interrogations, and protected the identities of the two officers, whose locations were known only to her.
While imprisoned, Bleicher occasionally appeared and sought to invite her to travel with him to Paris to attend concerts and dine in restaurants, to persuade her to talk. Sansom rejected the overtures.
She was condemned to death on two counts in June 1943, to which she responded, "Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once." Infuriated, Bleicher sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbruck inmates in 1939
In Ravensbruck she was thrown into a completely dark cell on a starvation diet. She was in the punishment block and every night could hear other prisoners being beaten.
After the Allied landings in the south of France in August 1944, on orders from Berlin, all food was withdrawn for a week, all light was removed from the cell, and the heat was turned up. Despite a report by the camp doctor that she would not survive such conditions for more than a few weeks, after she was found unconscious in her cell, she was returned to solitary confinement. Her conditions only improved in December 1944, when she was moved to a ground floor cell. The cell was located near the crematorium and her cell would be covered with burned hair from the cremations. At one point toward the end of the war, she witnessed an instance of cannibalism of a dead inmate by starving prisoners.
When the Allies were only a few miles from Ravensbrück, camp commandant Fritz Suhren took Sansom with him and drove with her to the US base to surrender to the Americans. He hoped that her supposed connections to Churchill might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution.
Churchill survived the war but Rabinovitch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944.
