Throughout the Second World War, there were a number of female spies who worked behind
enemy lines in France. British Special Operations Executive recruited a number of women who
they believed were suitable for working with the French Resistance. However being a spy
was incredibly dangerous, and the German Gestapo would hunt for them, and then once captured
they were tortured and many were executed. There was a female spy who was known for her
incredible bravery during world war 2, and she was seen as a very good shot and incredibly
brave. Diana Rowden however met an incredibly brutal and bloody end inside of the concentration
camps, and she was burned alive inside of a concentration camps’ crematorium. Join
us today as we look at the horrific execution of Diana Rowden the female spy burned alive.
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Diana Hope Rowden was born in England in January 1915, and she was the daughter of a British
Army Major. Her parents separated then she was a young child, and she then moved with
her mother and two younger brother’s to southern France. She had a lovely childhood,
and would play on the beach with her brother’s, fishing and boating. Her cousin would say
she was ‘a bit of a tomboy,’ but her mother was also regarded as an eccentric, and was
known to locals as ‘the mad englishwoman.’ Rowden attended a number of schools, but her
family then returned to England where she continued her education in Surrey. She lived
a very different life to when she was in France, and in 1933 when her education had finished
she returned to France and then tried to become a journalist. But when German invaded France
in 1940, she volunteered to work with the French Red Cross, and she worked in an Anglo-American
ambulance unit. The allies being pushed back, prevented her being evacuated from France
and she stayed there until summer 1941 when she managed to escape back to England passing
through Spain and Portugal.
But in September 1941, she was keen to continue her role in the war effort, and she joined
the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and then worked in the department of the Chief of Air
Staff, as an assistance Section Officer for intelligence. She had a minor operation, however
then met a convalescing pilot, who had been working for the French Section of SOE. She
then caught the attention of Special Operations Execution, who saw her file and requested
that she should be transferred to the spy branch. Diana was courted to join the resistance
work, and in March 1943 she received an invitation to an interview with an officer of SOE F Section.
During this interview, she impressed and it was said ‘she was very anxious to return
to France and work against the Germans,’ but after speaking to other members of F Section
she tried to give it a chance and a go. She was then immediately sent for training, and
she did excel in a number of specific fields.
Diana was a very good shot, and was not shy to attack with her gun, and she was also good
at throwing grenades. This made her a good and confident agent in the field, however
she was noted for not being very agile, but she did show a lot of courage. She excelled
in fieldcraft, and was a pleasant student to teach. She did struggle to master technical
details, and her signalling was described as harmful, however despite this Diana Rowden
displayed much determination, and she would then pass her training. On the 9th June 1943,
Rowden received her first mission, and a week later she was flown by Lysander into a moonlit
meadow in the Loire Valley. Along with Cecily Lefort and Noor Inayat Khan, the three woman
linked up and were sent to work in the field as couriers for different spy networks and
intelligence networks in different areas of France. Rowden was to be sent to the Jura
Mountains, south east of Dijon, and she was working just west of the Swiss borders. Her
cover name was Juliette Rondeau, and she was also known as Paulette with her codename being
Chaplain. Whilst in France, she lived in a small room at the back of a hotel which had
access to the roof so she could escape if needed.
As a courtier, Diana was to deliver messages between other agents and members of the resistance,
and she would be constantly travelling on bicycle through different neighbourhoods.
She even went further afield such as Marseilles, Lyon and Paris collecting and carrying messages
for transmission. On one of her trips to Marseilles, the Gestapo boarded the train and began to
inspect papers, so she locked herself in the toilet until they passed through. The local
resistance described her as without fear, and in the evenings she met with different
members of the resistance. She helped in recieving ammunition drops and weapons drops marking
out drop zones with flares, and many of these explosives were used in acts of sabotage against
the Germans. Some of these explosives destroyed a factory that were making German tank turrets,
however Diana Rowden’s biggest threat came from other spies being captured and interrogated.
But a month after she was arrived, another agent the leader of the Acrobat circuit was
arrested, and he had been betrayed by a double agent who infiltrated the network. With this
Diana Rowden went on the run, and she was sheltered in a shop. She stayed here for three
weeks with another spy, and an elderly widow and her family helped to hide them. However
Diana was being hunted, and to cover her identity she died her hair and changed how she wore
it, and she also borrowed other clothes. She dropped her codename and took a new one, and
she integrated with a family.
However the other spy receiving information that a new agent named Benoit would join them,
and he arrived at a nearby house. The group headed to Lots where they met another resistance
member and had a drink at the Cafe Strasbourg, a place where the circuit dropped intelligence.
At 6 they returned and whilst the mother of the family they were staying with prepared
dinner, the door sprung open, and the room was filled with the Feldgendarmerie, the German
military police who carried machine guns. Immediately Diana Rowden with the other spies
was arrested and it turned out that Benoit was a fraud, he later arrested the family
at gunpoint. They had to hand over the wireless set which had being used and hidden, and they
then looted the home. The family hoped that they would see Diana again, and she mentioned
how she would return to say thank you, however she was taken to Paris and was held at the
Gestapo Headquarters in Avenue Foch for two weeks. She was then transferred in December
1943 to the women’s section of Fresnes Prison, which held many other spies.
But on the 13th May 1944, Diana was moved with three other female spies back to Avenue
Foch, and 4 other women who were all agents of F Section. Then they were taken to the
railway station with guards who were armed, and they were handcuffed to them. It was said
that, ‘We were starting on this journey together in fear, but all of us hoping for
something above all that we would remain together. We had all had a taste already of what things
could be like, none of us did expect for anything very much, we all knew that they could put
us to death. I was the only one officially condemned to death. The others were not. But
there is always a fugitive ray of hope that some miracle will take place.’ The women
were taken to Germany, and were placed in cells in prison in Karlsruhe, and they were
treated like other prisoners. They often heard Allied bombers heading to bomb targets, and
the women believed the war would come to an end soon, however Diana Rowden would not see
it.
She along with the women were taken into the reception room of the prison on the 6th July
1944, and they were then given their belongings and were then handed over to two gestapo officers.
They then took them 100 kms to Natzweiler Strutthof Concentration Camp in France, and
their arrival was not expected. Diana believed she wold to be executed immediately, and women
were a rare prisoner at the camp, and the German guards and other prisoners noticed
them. Diana along with the three other women were led through the centre of the camp to
the bottom of the camp by SS men, and they were held there that night. It was said that,
‘one could see from their appearance they hadn’t come from a camp, they seemed young,
they were fairly well groomed, their clothes were not rubbish, their hair was brushed and
each had a case in their hand.’ Diana Rowden along with the three other female SOE agents
had been sent to die.
She was held in her own cell, and through the windows the women managed to speak with
other prisoners. But then that evening the horrific executions of the women would come.
That evening the women were taken one by one into the crematoria where they were given
an injection which the doctors believed was lethal, and they were then still alive thrown
into the burning fire of the crematorium. Diana Rowden was led towards the crematoria,
where the doctor gave her the injection telling her it was a vaccination against typhus, and
then she was pushed into the oven alive. The prisoners would later tell of the horrific
executions of the women, including Diana Rowdens’ and they said, ‘We heard low voices in the
next room and then the noise of a body being dragged along the floor, and he whispered
to me that he could see people dragging something along the floor which was below his angle
of vision through the fanlight. At the same time that this body was being
brought past we heard the noise of heavy breathing and low groaning combined.…and again we
heard the same noises and regular groans as the [next two] insensible women were dragged
away.The fourth, however, resisted in the corridor. I heard her say "Pourquoi?" and
I heard a voice as I recognized as the doctor who was in civilian clothes say "Pour typhus".
We then heard the noise of a struggle and the muffled cries of the woman. I assumed
that someone held a hand over her mouth. I heard the woman being dragged away too. She
was groaning louder than the others. From the noise of the crematorium oven doors which
I heard, I can state definitely that in each case the groaning women were placed immediately
in the crematorium oven. When [the officials] had gone, we went to the crematorium oven,
opened the door and saw that there were four blackened bodies within. Next morning in the
course of my duties I had to clear the ashes out of the crematorium oven. I found a pink
woman's stocking garter on the floor near the oven”
There were many witnesses, and they spoke of the struggle of the fourth woman who was
shoved into the furnace. It was said, ‘ "When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she
had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled. As there were
sufficient men there, they were able to push her into the oven, but not before she had
resisted and scratched the executioners face." It’s not known whether Diana Rowden was the woman
who struggled or not, however her execution and killing was incredibly sadistic. She was
a woman who was seen as an ideal spy to work with the French Resistance. Today she is remembered
as one of many female SOE spies who were executed by the Germans, and her story is one which
deserves to be told.
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