British SOE Agents executed at Dachau

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Noor Inayat Khan

Of the four British SOE agents allegedly executed at
Dachau, Noor Inayat Khan has become the most famous. Noor has gone down in
history as a great heroine because she defied her captors to the end,
never cooperating with the Germans in any way.

Noor Inayat Khan was the first woman to be sent to
France to work as a wireless operator, even though there were other women
in the SOE who would have been better suited for this job. Her trainer
thought that Noor was too emotional and when she was given a mock
interrogation to see how she would hold up under an interrogation by the
Gestapo, she failed miserably. Physically tiny and fearful of guns, she
was also "not overly burdened with brains," according to her instructor.
Moreover, her exotic beauty might draw attention to her, causing her to be
more vulnerable to arrest by the Gestapo.

Noor Inayat Khan was sent to France, even before she
had finished her training, on an RAF Lysander plane on the night of June
16, 1943 to become a wireless operator for the Cinema sub circuit of the
Prosper line; her organizer was Emile Garry. Noor was captured around October 1, 1943 after she was
allegedly betrayed by the sister of Emile Garry.

According to the book "A Life in Secrets," by Sarah
Helm, Noor was denounced by Renée Garry who told the Gestapo where to find
her. Renée was in love with another SOE agent named France Antelme, but
when Nora arrived, Antelme gave his affection to her.

Renée Garry allegedly sold Noor to the Gestapo for
money and revenge, but what was the real motive for Noor's betrayal? Did
the British deliberately select their least qualified female agent to send
to France because they wanted her to be caught? Was this a deliberate plan
to allow the Germans to capture a British radio?

In her book "Flames in the Field," Rita Kramer wrote
that Henri Déricourt, who was a double agent in the Prosper line, said
that the British had deliberately sacrificed women SOE agents as part of a
scheme to distract from the invasion of Sicily. These women were "decoys"
who were meant to be captured after the British learned that the Germans
had infiltrated the Prosper Network. The purpose was to plant
disinformation about the invasion of Sicily.

Much of the information about Noor Inayat Khan comes
from her personal file in the Pubic Records Office, part of which was
opened to the public in 1998. The file contains the citation submitted by
SOE Major Maurice Buckmaster for Noor to receive the prestigious George
Medal for gallantry by a civilian.

Although Noor had joined the WAAF before becoming an
SOE agent, she was officially a civilian in FANY during the time that she
was working as a wireless operator in occupied France. FANY was the First
Aid Nursing Yeomanry, an organization of unpaid volunteer nurses and
ambulance drivers, founded in 1907. All of the women SOE agents were
members of FANY, which provided a cover for their participation in illegal
war-time activities.

On April 5, 1949, the London Gazette published the
following account of Noor's death on the occasion of her being awarded the
George Cross posthumously:

Assistant Section Officer INAYAT-KHAN was the
first woman operator to be infiltrated into enemy occupied France, and was
landed by Lysander aircraft on 16th June, 1943. During the weeks
immediately following her arrival, the Gestapo made mass arrests in the
Paris Resistance groups to which she had been detailed. She refused
however to abandon what had become the principal and most dangerous post
in France, although given the opportunity to return to England, because
she did not wish to leave her French comrades without communications and
she hoped also to rebuild her group. She remained at her post therefore
and did the excellent work which earned her a posthumous Mention in
Despatches.

The Gestapo had a full description of her, but
knew only her code name "Madeleine." They deployed considerable forces in
their effort to catch her and so break the last remaining link with
London. After 3 months she was betrayed to the Gestapo and taken to their
H.Q. in the Avenue Foch. The Gestapo had found her codes and messages and
were now in a position to work back to London. They asked her to
co-operate, but she refused and gave them no information of any kind. She
was imprisoned in one of the cells on the 5th floor of the Gestapo H.Q.
and remained there for several weeks during which time she made two
unsuccessful attempts at escape. She was asked to sign a declaration that
she would make no further attempts but she refused and the Chief of the
Gestapo obtained permission from Berlin to send her to Germany for "safe
custody". She was the first agent to be sent to Germany.

Assistant Section Officer INAYAT-KHAN was sent to
Karlsruhe in November 1943, and then to Pforzheim where her cell was apart
from the main prison. She was considered to be a particularly dangerous
and unco-operative prisoner. The Director of the prison has also been
interrogated and has confirmed that Assistant Section Officer INAYAT-KHAN,
when interrogated by the Karlsruhe Gestapo, refused to give any
information whatsoever, either as to her work or her
colleagues

She was taken with three others to Dachau Camp on
the 12th September, 1944. On arrival, she was taken to the crematorium and
shot. Assistant Section Officer INAYAT-KHAN displayed the most conspicuous
courage, both moral and physical over a period of more than 12
months.

Note that this version of her execution says that
Noor arrived at Dachau on the 12th of September, not the 11th, and was
taken immediately to the crematorium and shot, not kept in a prison cell
or barrack overnight, as two Gestapo men later testified. Other versions
of the story give September 11th or September 13th as the day the women
were executed.

At the time that Maurice Buckmaster submitted the
citation on February 24, 1944, Noor Inayat Khan had been in German hands
for at least three months and the Gestapo was using her radio to
communicate with the SOE in London, requesting arms and money to be
dropped. In the citation, Buckmaster wrote that as a result of Noor's
bravery, the Prosper Network had been reinforced and reconstructed and was
now in perfect order, which was a blatant lie.

The following is a quote from the citation submitted
by Buckmaster on February 24, 1944:

It is unique in the annals of the organization
for a circuit to be so completely disintegrated and yet to be rebuilt
because, regardless of personal danger, this young woman remained on her
post, at times alone, and always under threat of arrest.

An often-repeated story is that Noor Inayat Khan was
instructed by the SOE to return to England in July 1943 after the collapse
of the Prosper Network. According to a book written by Sarah Helm,
entitled "A Life in Secrets," there is no evidence that Noor was ever
instructed to return, and if she had been so instructed, she would have
been obliged to obey. Yet Buckmaster wrote in his citation for the George
Medal that Noor was given the opportunity to return, but had pleaded to
remain and had been allowed to do so even though she was in grave
danger.

Did the leaders in the SOE deliberately select Noor
Inayat Khan to send to France because they believed that she would be
easily intimidated by the Gestapo? Was her betrayal a deliberate plan on
the part of the SOE? Did the SOE know that she had been captured? Did they
deliberately communicate with the Germans who were using her radio, in
order to send disinformation about the Allied plans for the invasion of
Europe?

According to Rita Kramer, the captured agents in the
Prosper line, both men and women, knew that they had been betrayed by
their own countrymen and they gave information to the Germans because of
this. Except for Noor Inayat Khan. After the war, when the Gestapo men
were interrogated, they confirmed that Noor had told them
nothing.

Although Noor never revealed anything to the
Gestapo, she didn't have to because she had kept a notebook with a list of
all the messages that she had sent, which allowed her captors to work out
all her codes and security checks. Was Noor instructed to keep this
notebook, so that after her betrayal, when she was eventually captured,
the Gestapo would be able to use her radio? Was she also instructed to
tell the Gestapo nothing, except personal details about her
family?

When SOE officer Vera Atkins eventually became
suspicious that Noor might have been captured and the Germans were
transmitting from her radio, she decided to test whoever was using the
radio by asking personal questions about Noor's family. According to Rita
Kramer's book "Flames in the Field," Noor had told the Gestapo agents that
her name was Nora Baker and she had discussed her family with them. The
Gestapo was able to guess the right answers and Atkins was satisfied that
it was really Noor with whom they were communicating.

According to the book "A Life in Secrets," by Sarah
Helm, for reasons never explained, the family of Noor Inayat Khan was
never told the full facts of her death at Dachau. It was only when the
family read the citation for her George Cross in 1948 that they learned
the "final official version" of what had happened to their
daughter.

In Noor Inayat Khan's personal file at the Public
Records Office is a message sent from Berne, Switzerland by an SOE agent
named Jacques Weil, a radio operator with a Jewish SOE circuit called the
Juggler Network. He had escaped to Switzerland after the Prosper Network
collapsed. In his message, dated October 1, 1943, Jacques said that he had
news from an SOE agent named Sonia that Madeleine had been captured. The
SOE office in London completely ignored this message since they didn't
know who Sonia was.

The Sonia that was named in the message was Sonia
Olschanezky, who had been recruited into the SOE by Weil, her fiancé.
Olschanezky had remained in France and continued to send messages until
she was captured in February 1944. She was one of the four SOE agents
allegedly executed at Natzweiler.

In a book published in 1958, entitled "Death Be Not
Proud," by Elizabeth Nichols, it was revealed that the fiancé and family
of Sonia Olschanezky had never been told that she died at Natzweiler,
although they made many attempts to find out what had happened to her. The
problem was that, at the time of the trial of her murderer, Dr. Werner
Röhde, it was not yet known that she was one of his victims. She had no
death certificate because Dr. Röhde had been asked by Vera Atkins to sign
a death certificate for Noor Inayat Khan instead.

Altogether, there were 39 female SOE agents who were
sent to France and 13 of them never returned. Of the 13 female SOE agents
who never returned, there were allegedly 4 that were executed at
Natzweiler, 4 at Dachau and 4 at Ravensbrück, the women's camp. The 13th
was Muriel Byck, a Jewish agent, who died of meningitis on 23 May 1944,
six weeks after she arrived in France.

The 12 women who were allegedly executed had first
been held in the Gestapo prison on Avenue Foch in Paris. Then all except
Sonia Olschanezky and Noor Inayat Khan were sent to Fresnes, another
Gestapo prison. Noor was sent to Pforzheim prison on November 27, 1943
after she attempted to escape for the second time.

Eight of the women agents were gathered together at
Avenue Foch and sent on May 13, 1944 to the civilian prison at Karlsruhe,
including Odette Sansom who was later transferred on July 18, 1944 to
Ravensbrück, where she survived. Sansom was a radio operator for the
Spindle network of the British SOE; she was one of the eight SOE agents
who were sent to Ravensbrück.

Sansom had been captured on April 16, 1943, along
with another SOE agent named Peter Churchill; she had told the Gestapo
that she was married to Churchill, whom she claimed was a relative of
Winston Churchill. Perhaps this was why she was first sent to the civilian
prison at Karlsruhe, instead of being sent directly to the women's
concentration camp at Ravensbrück. At Ravensbrück, she was given a private
cell and was put under the protection of the Commandant, Fritz Suhren.
There were three SOE agents who survived Ravensbrück; the other two were
Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne.

Another SOE agent that was sent to Ravensbrück was
Yvonne Rudellat, a Prosper line agent who parachuted into France around
the same time as Andrée Borrel. Rudellat was shot twice by the Gestapo
when she resisted arrest; she was taken to a hospital and after her
recovery, she was sent to Ravensbrück, then transferred to Bergen-Belsen
where she survived for a few days after the camp was liberated.

Four of the 8 female SOE agents, who were sent to
Ravensbrück, were executed there, according to eye-witness testimony.
Their names are Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, Violette Szabo and Cecily
Lefort.

The SS man who was the second in command at
Ravensbrück, Johann Schwarzhuber, gave detailed testimony in the British
Military Court at Hamburg, where 16 staff members of Ravensbrück were on
trial from December 5, 1946 to February 3, 1947. Schwarzhuber testified
that SOE agents Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch were
executed by a shot in the neck shortly after Schwarzhuber was transferred
to the camp on January 12, 1945.

Until Vera Atkins interrogated Schwarzhuber on March
13, 1946 and got him to confess to witnessing the murder of the SOE
agents, nothing was known about the fate of these three women who had been
at Ravensbrück since August 22, 1944. Schwarzhuber filled in all the
details that Atkins wanted to hear, about how the women had died bravely
and how the SS men had been impressed with their bearing.

Schwarzhuber, who was on trial himself, said in the
deposition taken from him by Vera Atkins and repeated in the courtroom,
that Commandant Fritz Suhren had been annoyed that the Gestapo had not
carried out these executions themselves. Suhren was not on trial since he
had escaped from custody. Schwarzhuber also testified that Suhren had
ordered him to organize a mass gassing of the women prisoners at the end
of February 1945 at a time when sixty to seventy prisoners were dying each
day during a typhus epidemic. Cecily Lefort was one of the women who died
in the gas chamber on May 1, 1945, according to the testimony of Sylvia
Salvensen, a former prisoner in the camp.

Prior to being sent to Ravensbrück, Schwarzhuber had
worked at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz II, better known as
Birkenau. Schwarzhuber was convicted and executed on May 3,
1947.

Schwarzhuber was the most important witness at the
Ravensbrück proceedings; he had first told his story when he gave a
deposition after being interrogated by Vera Atkins. How was Vera Atkins
able to get Schwarzhuber to confess to crimes for which he knew that he
would surely be executed? Did she threaten to turn his family over to the
Russians, a threat that was usually effective?

Denise Bloch, who was Jewish, had formerly worked as
a radio operator in the same circuit as SOE agent Brian Stonehouse, who
survived four concentration camps. Stonehouse was captured by the Gestapo
in October 1941; he survived Neuengamme, Mauthausen and Natzweiler and was
among the prisoners liberated by American troops at Dachau. In an
interview with writer Rita Kramer, Stonehouse told her that he and his
"friends," who were the other British SOE agents in the camps with him,
were "never tortured," much less killed.

Vera Atkins

Brian
Stonehouse

However, it was learned years later that Odette
Sansom had been tortured by Gestapo agents, who had pulled out all her
toenails to try to make her talk. In 1953, a British doctor, who began
treating her, noticed her lack of toenails. In an e-mail to me, Rowan
MacAusland, the son of her doctor, wrote regarding her torture by the
Gestapo: "My father was her doctor on her return to Britain and looked
after her feet - he saw it was true."

The Ravensbrück camp was liberated by Russian troops
and if any camp records were ever found, they were not released. All of
the information about the women who were executed at Ravensbrück came from
the testimony of Johann Schwarzhuber and from some of their fellow
prisoners.

In April 1945, the Ravensbrück prisoners who were
still able to walk, were marched out of the camp toward one of the
sub-camps. Many of them escaped from the march; eventually the marchers
reached Allied lines in early May 1945 and were liberated. Odette Sansom
rode with the Ravensbrück camp Commandant Fritz Suhren in his car to the
American lines where he surrendered on May 3, 1945. He was expecting
Odette to put in a good word for him to save himself from being charged as
a war criminal, but she refused.

After the war, there were rumors that Odette had
survived Ravensbrück because she had been the mistress of Fritz Suhren,
who was a handsome man. The story of her toenails being pulled out was
being questioned; Odette was the only one who was tortured this way even
though she had told her captors that she was married to a relative of
Winston Churchill. Then it was learned that Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr
officer who arrested her in 1943, had found her in bed with Peter
Churchill at a hotel in St. Jorioz when she was supposed to be out helping
the French resistance. By 1959, Odette was being called a "phoney" and
there was even some talk of taking back her George Cross, according to
Sarah Helm's book.

Women agents were used by the British SOE because it
was believed that they would be better able to elude capture since the
Gestapo would not suspect a woman. They would be less conspicuous than the
men who would be routinely stopped and questioned because it was not
normal to see a young man who was not in uniform during the war. So it was
highly unusual that fifteen of the women SOE agents, or more than a third
of them, were captured. The Nazis had a very chauvinistic attitude
regarding women and it is even more unusual that 12 of the women who were
captured were executed.

Altogether, there were 470 agents in the French
section of the British SOE, and 39 of them were women or 8% of the total.
One third of the women died while in captivity or were executed. The male
agents made up 92% of the total; 81 male agents, or 18% of the men, died
while in prison or were executed. Twelve of the women SOE agents were
executed secretly and there were no records of these executions found
after the war. All of the information about their deaths comes from
eye-witness testimony or from the confessions of the
perpetrators.

According to Rita Kramer, the 8 women who were
executed at Natzweiler and Dachau were inexperienced and some were
emotionally unsuited for this type of work. They were no match for the
highly experienced Gestapo agents. If they were captured, it was no great
loss for the SOE.

Henri Déricourt

Henri Déricourt was a former French Air Force pilot
who had escaped to Great Britain after France surrendered in 1940. He
joined the British SOE and parachuted into France on January 22, 1943.
Déricourt was in charge of finding suitable landing places for small
aircraft and arranging for someone to meet the SOE agents when they
landed. Noor Inayat Khan, Diana Rowden and Cecily Lefort were the first to
arrive by air and they were met by Déricourt, whose code name was Gilbert.
Another SOE agent named Gilbert Norman was a wireless operator for the
Prosper Network.

Déricourt arranged for the transport by plane of
over 67 SOE agents including 7 of the SOE women who were allegedly
executed: Noor Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh, Cecily Lefort, Yolande Beekman,
Eliane Plewman, Diana Rowden and Andrée Borrel. One of the women allegedly
executed at Natzweiler was Sonia Olschanezky, who had been recruited in
France and was not flown in from England.

During the interrogation of Gestapo agents after the
war, it was learned that Déricourt had given information to Abwehr, the
German armed forces intelligence agency, and to the Gestapo, that had led
to the arrest of SOE agents including Noor Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh,
Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman, Diana Rowden and Jack Agazarian. Jack
Agazarian was a wireless operator who was flown to France on the night of
July 22, 1943; he was captured a week later and his radio fell into the
hands of the Gestapo. According to the PRO files, Agazarian was executed
at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on March 29, 1944 along with a long
list of other men.

In a book entitled "A Life in Secrets," written by
Sarah Helm, it is stated that Vera Atkins learned during an interview with
Hans Kieffer, the head of counter intelligence for the Gestapo in Paris,
that Déricourt was a double agent who was working for the
Germans.

From the PRO files, I learned that Francis Suttill
was suspected of cooperating with the Germans. Suttill, the leader of the
Prosper line, was arrested on June 23, 1943, the same day that Gilbert
Norman was captured. Suttill is alleged to have made a pact with the
Germans in which he agreed to give them information about ammunition dumps
in return for their promise to spare the lives of those guarding the
dumps. A short time later, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp.

Jean Overton Fuller wrote several books about the
British SOE, including one entitled "Double Agent." In her book, she wrote
that Henri Déricourt told her in an interview that the leaders of the SOE
knew that the Prosper Network had been infiltrated by the Gestapo.
Déricourt claimed that both men and women agents were deliberately
sacrificed by the British in order to give misinformation to the Nazis
about the future invasions of Sicily and Normandy.

In Sarah Helm's book "A Life in Secrets," it was
mentioned that an F section wireless operator named Marcel Rousset had
been captured by the Gestapo on September 7, 1943. Rousset was taken to
Avenue Foch where he was told by Déricourt that the Gestapo knew all about
the SOE and that he and Francis Suttill had decided to admit everything in
order to save lives.

The first trace of Noor Inayat Khan came from a
report by Rousset, who had returned to England after the war. He had
learned after he was captured by the Gestapo that Noor, code name
Madeleine, was believed by the other captured agents to be at Avenue Foch
and that the Germans were using her wireless set.

At the end of his report, Rousset mentioned that he
was taken by bus to Germany on April 18, 1944 along with several other
agents including Prosper wireless operator Gilbert Norman, whose code name
was Archambaud. The German records show that Rousset, Gilbert Norman and
the others were taken to an unknown destination. On the way, the bus
stopped and picked up a group of women from the Gestapo prison at
Fresnes.

Rousset and the others, including Gilbert Norman who
had arrived in France on the same plane as Noor Inayat Khan, were taken to
Silesia where they were held in a prison at Ravitsch, near Breslau in what
is now Poland, although, at that time, Silesia had been incorporated into
the Greater German Reich. When Ravitsch was liberated by the Russians, the
prisoners were released and they headed east. This is why the search for
the 8 women who were allegedly executed at Dachau and Natzweiler first
began in the east, in what is now Poland.

Rousset's story is contradicted by the PRO files
which say that Gilbert Norman was executed at Mauthausen on September 6,
1944. Curiously, this is the same day that 6 SOE men were transferred from
Natzweiler to Dachau, where they survived.

In November 1946, Déricourt was arrested by the
French authorities, based on information obtained from the Gestapo files
after the war; he was finally put on trial in June 1948. British SOE agent
Nicholas Bodington testified at the trial that he had been Déricourt's
supervisor in the field. Bodington admitted that he knew that Déricourt
was in contact with the Gestapo, but that nothing of any importance had
been revealed to the Germans.

There were rumors that Henri Déricourt had been a
spy planted by MI6, the British special intelligence service, to work on
Cockade, the Allied plan to fool the Germans about the location and date
of D-Day, the invasion of Europe. His job was to make sure that phony
messages from London were received by the radios of the captured agents.
The Germans were not aware that the SOE knew that the wireless operators
had been captured and that their radios were being used by the
Gestapo.

Déricourt was acquitted mainly due to the testimony
of Nicholas Bodington. On November 20, 1962, Déricourt was allegedly
killed in an airplane crash, although his body was never found. Claims
have been made that he faked his death and then began a new life under
another name.

So what really happened to the 8 women SOE agents
who were allegedly executed at Dachau and Natzweiler? Where were 7 of them
really taken when they left Karlsruhe on July 6, 1944 and September 11,
1944, destinations unknown? Could they have been taken to Ravitsch, the
same prison where many of the male agents were taken? Were they released
from Ravitsch by the Russians and left to fend for themselves in the
middle of a war zone?

Their most likely destination was Ravensbrück, the
concentration camp for women; in the last 6 months of the war, there was a
typhus epidemic in Germany which spread to all the camps, including
Ravensbrück. There are no records in existence for the Ravensbrück camp,
since they were either destroyed by the Nazis or confiscated by the Soviet
Union and never released.

When 16 staff members of the Ravensbrück camp were
put on trial in a British Military Court in Hamburg in December 1946, the
chief prosecutor said in his opening statement that 120,000 women had
passed through the prison between 1939 and May 1945 and 92,000 of them had
died. If these figures are correct, then the death rate for the women was
more than three times that of the men. Compare this with the men's camp at
Dachau where 31,995 prisoners died out of a prison population of 206,206
between 1933 and April 1945 and half of those died during the time of the
typhus epidemic.

If the 7 women who left Karlsruhe were sent to
Ravensbrück, they might have been transferred to Bergen-Belsen, as was
Yvonne Rudellat, a courier in the Prosper Network. According to Rita
Kramer's book "Flames in the Field," Rudellat was shot in the head at the
time that she was captured. She was taken to a hospital and after she
recovered, she was sent to Ravensbrück, than transferred later to Belsen
where she died after the camp was liberated.

Noor Inayat Khan most likely died at Pforzheim
prison. She was classified as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner which means that
her family would not have been notified in the event of her
death.

In January 1947, nine months after the file on Noor
had been closed, Vera Atkins was given a letter written by Yolande
Lagrave, a former French political prisoner at Pforzheim. Lagrave had been
sent to Pforzheim prison in early 1944, two months after Noor had arrived;
she claimed that she was the only woman prisoner to survive Pforzheim.
According to Lagrave's story, all the other women were taken out, raped
and then shot; their bodies were buried on the prison grounds in a mass
grave. For some unknown reason, Lagrave was kept alive and she was
released when the Allies liberated the prison on May 1, 1945.

Lagrave began writing letters to Noor's brother and
others, in which she revealed that Noor Inayat Khan had left Pforzheim
some time in September 1944, although the exact date was unknown. When
Atkins saw the letter, she realized that Noor could not have been murdered
at Natzweiler, as she had testified at the trial of the Natzweiler staff.
The transcript of the trial was changed to reflect that the fourth woman
was "unidentified." It was not publicly known that the transcript had been
altered until 1976, according to Sarah Helm's book "A Life in
Secrets."

Noor was kept in solitary confinement at Pforzheim,
far apart from the other prisoners, but they managed to communicate with
her by scratching messages on the bottom of their mess tins with knitting
needles, according to Yolande Lagrave's story. Each day, the women would
look on the bottom of their mess tin at meal time to see if Noor had
scratched a message when she had previously used the same mess
tin.

In September 1944, Noor had scratched a message,
with no date, which said that she was leaving. With this new information
provided by Yolande Lagrave, it was then assumed by Vera Atkins that Noor
had been taken from Pforzheim to Karlsruhe on September 11, where she
joined three other women who were released on that date and sent to an
unnamed concentration camp.

On May 19, 2006 a documentary entitled "The Princess
Spy" was shown on the BBC2 Timewatch program. In this documentary, about
the life of Noor Inayat Khan, alias Nora Baker, records in the Pforzheim
archives were shown with the name Nora Baker, her address in London, her
birthplace in London, and the date of her transfer - September 11, 1944.
Noor was actually born in Moscow, of an Indian father and an American
mother.

The BBC2 documentary contradicts the statement of
Marcel Schubert, a prisoner at Pforzheim who worked as an interpreter.
Schubert claimed that "the British woman's name was never written in the
prison register." Noor had revealed her name, and also two of her
addresses, only to the other women prisoners by scratching this
information on the bottom of a mess tin, according to Yolande Lagrave, who
said that she had written down the addresses and sewn the paper inside the
hem of her skirt. After the war, Yolande had attempted to contact Noor,
but her letters were returned.

According to Sarah Helm's book, the SOE was not
above fabricating stories about Noor Inayat Khan in order to make her into
more of a heroine that she actually was. In the citation for Noor to
receive the George Medal, an award given to civilians for gallantry, it
was noted that Noor "has also been instrumental in facilitating the escape
of 30 Allied airmen shot down in France." Such an escape never happened,
according to Sarah Helm.

According to Sarah Helm's book "A Life in Secrets,"
Hans Kieffer, the man who had ordered Noor to be sent to Pforzheim prison,
told Vera Atkins that he had no knowledge of her execution.

There is no documentation whatsoever that supports
the story that 12 women SOE agents were executed at Dachau, Natzweiler and
Ravensbrück. The story of the executions of these 12 female SOE agents is
based on hearsay testimony, or the biased testimony of male SOE agents who
wanted these women to go down in history as heroines, and/or the
confessions of SS men whose depositions, taken by Vera Atkins, were
repeated in the courtroom. As a Jewish refugee from Romania who had
escaped Nazi persecution, Vera Atkins was strongly motivated to make sure
that justice was done and that her agents were not relegated to the
"missing and presumed dead" file.

The official web site about the
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This page was last updated on August 26, 2007