Odette Hallowes

In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the French coastline for possible war use. Hearing the broadcast, Sansom wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, but she mistakenly sent her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. That brought her to the attention of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive.[6][5]

As cover for her secret work, Sansom was enrolled in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which supplied SOE with support personnel. She left her three daughters in a convent school, and was trained to be sent into Nazi-occupied France to work with the French Resistance.[6]

Originally Sansom was considered too temperamental and stubborn by SOE, with an evaluation stating "She is impulsive and hasty in her judgments and has not quite the clarity of mind which is desirable in subversive activity. She seems to have little experience of the outside world. She is excitable and temperamental, although she has a certain determination." However, the evaluation noted "her patriotism and keenness to do something for France." Buckmaster allowed her training to continue regardless.[3][7] A bad fall during training ruled out parachute entry into France.[4]

George Starr, one of SOE's most successful agents and a self-described martinet, called Sansom "a dreadful lady" and deplored what he portrayed as her seductive behaviour. [8][9]

Sansom 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 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.[3]

Adolphe Rabinovitch

At the time of her arrival in France, the Spindle network was beset by internal strife between the principal agent, André Girard, and his assistant and with the network's radio operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch. A list of 200 potential supporters, lost by André Marsac, a Girard courier, was obtained by the Germans. With Sansom stranded in Cannes, Churchill obtained Buckmaster's permission to scrap her original mission and for her to act as his courier.[3][4] 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 also 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 towards 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 of disloyalty about other members of the Spindle network, but declined to identify whom she suspected.[5]

In January 1943, the Spindle team of Churchill, Rabinovich, and Sansom, feeling vulnerable to German capture, moved north from the French Riviera to the quiet Italian-occupied Annecy area in the French Alps. Churchill and Sansom took up residence at the Hotel de la Poste in the village of Saint-Jorioz. They were joined there by several other members of the Carte network and SOE, a gathering which attracted the attention of the Italian fascist police and the Gestapo.[10] SOE agent Francis Cammaerts visited Annecy briefly in March or early April 1943 and assessed the security of Churchill and Sansom's network as deficient and likely to be penetrated by the Germans.[11]

Meanwhile, in Paris in mid-March, spy-catcher Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr counterintelligence officer, arrested Marsac, persuading him and another Carte associate, Roger Bardet, that he was an anti-Nazi German colonel and that they should work together. He learned from Marsac the location of Churchill and Sansom, got a letter of introduction to them from him, and proceeded to Saint-Jorioz where he introduced himself to Sansom as "Colonel Henri". He spun a tale to her of them travelling together to London to "discuss means of ending the war." He then departed Saint-Jorioz with a plan to return and for them to leave France together clandestinely by aircraft on April 18. Sansom instructed Rabinovich to send a wireless message to SOE headquarters in London reporting the contact. London replied immediately: "Henri highly dangerous...you are to hide across lake and cut contacts with all save Arnaud [Rabinovich]..."[12][13]

Churchill was in London consulting with SOE at the time of Bleicher's meeting with Sansom. He was warned to avoid contact with Sansom and 'Colonel Henri" on his return to France, but when he was parachuted back into the Annecy area on April 14/15, he was met by Sansom and Rabinovich. As Sansom did not anticipate Henri's return until April 18, she and Churchill proceeded to the hotel in Saint-Jorioz. At 2:00  a.m. on April 16, Bleicher, no longer in the guise of "Colonel Henri", appeared in the hotel with Italian soldiers and arrested Sansom and Churchill.[14][15][16]

Fresnes Prison

At Fresnes prison, near Paris, Sansom 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. 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.[17][18] 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.[19]

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.[20] Bleicher occasionally appeared and suggested that they might go to concerts and visit restaurants together in Paris, in return for which he hoped she could be induced to talk. Sansom rejected the overtures.[21]

In June 1943 Sansom was condemned to death on two counts, 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.[17]

Ravensbruck inmates in 1939

In Ravensbruck Sansom was kept in a punishment block cell, on a starvation diet, and could hear other prisoners being beaten.[21]

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 Sansom's 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 being found unconscious in her cell she was placed in solitary confinement. Her conditions only improved in December 1944, when she was moved to a ground floor cell.[3][21] The cell was located near the crematorium and 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.[21]

When the Allies were only a few miles from Ravensbrück, the camp commandant Fritz Suhren forced Sansom into his car and drove to the advancing Americans to surrender. He hoped that her supposed connections to the Prime Minister might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution.[22] Sansom removed Suhren's pistol, which is now held in the Imperial War Museum.[23]

Peter Churchill survived the war but Rabinovitch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944.

Sansom was aided in her endurance in prison by her early blindness and paralysis, and by the example of her grandfather, who "did not accept weakness very easily." She also accepted in advance that she might be captured by the Germans.[5] She adopted an attitude of defiance, and found that this resulted in a degree of respect by her captors and helped her survive the imprisonment mentally.[21]

Sansom said she believed she was "not brave, not courageous, but just make up my mind about certain things." She recalled in a post-war interview that while everyone has a breaking point, her feeling was that if she could "survive the next minute without breaking up, that is another minute of life. And if I can think that way instead of thinking what is going to happen in a half-hour's time," Because of her past illnesses she knew "I was able to accept this, and survive it." By accepting death, she felt that "they would not win anything. They'll have a dead body, useless to them. They won't have me. I won't let them have me." She described it as a "kind of bargaining."[5]

The Germans generally found persons of the prisoners' own nationality to carry out the torture, she later recalled, so that one "could not say they were tortured by the Germans." Her torture was carried out by a "very good-looking young Frenchman" who she believed was mentally ill.[5]