Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Women Won WWII: Sabotage and a Jewish Spymaster

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Today in our series, we return to the art of espionage. During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood that boots on the ground were only one piece of the puzzle to drive out the enemy. In order to sabotage German operations across Europe, he knew Britain needed to build an army of secret agents. And one of its most successful leaders was a Romanian-born Jewish woman named Vera Atkins. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany controlled the majority of the European mainland. They had forces in Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood that boots on the ground were only one piece of the puzzle to drive out the enemy. In order to sabotage German operations across Europe, he knew Britain needed to build an army of secret agents. And one of its most successful leaders was a Romanian-born Jewish woman. Welcome to Episode 7 of How Women Won World War II. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. 64 Baker Street in central London is a nondescript building.

It is a boxy six-story frame with a drab stone facade. So perhaps its unassuming appearance was one of the reasons why it became the headquarters of one of Britain's best-kept secrets. And yes, I'm talking about the same Baker Street that was made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who lived up the road at 221B Baker Street. Number 64, however, was home to the real-life Baker Street Irregulars and became a revolving door of Britain's most talented intelligence officers. The officers were called the Baker Street Irregulars as a nod to Doyle's fiction, but they went by a few other names too. Churchill's Secret Army, or my personal favorite, the Ministry

of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Officially, the men and women who worked out of 64 Baker Street were known as Special Operations Executives, or SOE agents. Who were they? They were spies. Who were they? They were spies. And their mission, according to Prime Minister Churchill, was to set Europe ablaze. So let's travel back a few decades to 1908. A girl was born in the country of Romania to a British mother and a German father. The family, the Rosenbergs, were Jewish, and they named their only daughter Vera. Vera's father made his fortune through the lumber industry, and by the time Vera and her two brothers were born, the family was incredibly

wealthy. They lived on a large estate near the Ukrainian border, and while Vera was given an extensive classical education, she also mastered some more adventurous activities, especially skiing. Vera was educated all over Europe. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became fluent in French and English. And then she was sent to finishing school in Switzerland. But the 1930s turned everything in Vera's world on its head. Her father went bankrupt in 1932 and died the following year. Vera, who had been studying in London at the time of his death, finished her secretarial courses and returned to Romania to be with her widowed mother. While home, she connected with a circle of British diplomats. Her mother was British-born,

remember? So even though the Rosenbergs had fallen on hard times, her pedigree would have made Vera natural company for visiting diplomats. But these men weren't just diplomats. They were part of the British intelligence service, and Vera began to work for them as a stringer, which meant that they paid her to do a few odd intel jobs. Vera was super intelligent. She was fluent in multiple languages, and she was discreet and trustworthy. Vera's work caught the attention of Sir William Stevenson, who was a Canadian spymaster working as the head of a covert operation within British security services. William was in recruitment. Back then, Winston Churchill wasn't yet the prime minister,

but he was still a very powerful politician. And as Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he wanted trustworthy people out in the field, so to speak, and to report any news of interest back to Britain. Under Sir William's direction, 25-year-old Vera took on a number of these fact-finding trips and sent intel back through the pipeline to Churchill. She was young, beautiful, and refined. Plenty of men were more than happy to have her attention, and when she had their attention, they blabbed about all sorts of useful things. But antisemitism was spreading like wildfire throughout Europe, and Vera knew it would be safer to shift her identity to be less conspicuously Jewish.

She borrowed a surname from her mother's side of the family and officially changed her name to the more British-sounding Vera Atkins. Even with the name change, it grew increasingly dangerous to be Jewish in Central Europe, so Vera and her mother emigrated to London in 1937. It wasn't long before Vera's move gave her the opportunity to level up in her spy work. Even though Vera Atkins wasn't a British citizen, she was hired as a secretary into the French branch or F-section of the Special Operations Executive, otherwise known as the French branch, or F-section, of the Special Operations Executive, otherwise known as the SOE, which was part of the British Intelligence Services. When the new decade began, the morale in Britain was at an all-time low. The Nazis were bombing cities across the country in

what came to be known as the Blitz, and most of Europe had fallen to the Germans. Great Britain was vulnerable, and the work of the SOE became crucial. The goal of the SOE was to engage in a secret war in German-occupied cities through espionage and by growing a large resistance network across Europe. They were going to help turn the tide of war, not through military maneuvers, but through sabotage. France was ground zero for these efforts because a strong resistance force had already begun to organize in the German-occupied portion of the country. The SOE F-Section acted as a liaison between the French Resistance Army and Great Britain. Vera began her work with the SOE as a secretary to Colonel Maurice Buckmaster,

an officer who had spent the first year of the war in active duty, but who was recruited into the SOE in 1941 and appointed as the head of the F-Section, Vera and Maurice worked well together. Instead of misusing Vera's skill set and relegating her to work as a typist or an errant girl, Colonel Buckmaster valued her input. Her reconnaissance work during the 1930s gave Vera the confidence to know exactly what to look for in an intelligence operative recruit, and the F-section needed all the recruits they could get their hands on. And let me take a minute to tell you about a person you've never heard of, but probably should have. Does the name Selwyn Jepson ring a bell?

Probably not, right? And that's okay because we don't talk about him much these days. But during the mid-20th century, he was one of the most popular mystery writers in England. Many of his stories made their way to the United States, and one of his books was adapted into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. During World War II, he lived a double life. While he was penning his most popular detective series, he was also serving as the SOE's most skilled recruitment officer under the alias E. Potter. And who was he recruiting? Women. Here's what Selwyn said in an interview many years later. I was responsible for recruiting women for the work in the face of a good deal of opposition, I may say, from the powers that be. In my view, women were much better than men for the work.

There was opposition from most quarters until it went up to Churchill, whom I had met before the war. He growled at me, what are you doing? I told him, and he said, I see you're using women to do this. And I said, yes, don't you think it's a very sensible thing to do? And he said, yes, good luck to you. Good luck to you. Between 1941 and 1945, the SOE's F-section recruited 39 women. Vera Atkins' work at Baker Street turned into a complicated web of finding the right people both in and out of France to help carry out the SOE's ongoing sabotage plans. She became known for giving her spies the most thorough preparation of any program in the SOE. She was so detail-oriented that she even had special clothing designed for them. She knew that matching their garments to the cultural dress and local trends where they were stationed was a spy's version of armor.

Blending in could absolutely mean the difference between life and death. Vera was still living in London as an immigrant, and even though she was employed by the government, she knew she could face deportation at any moment. She played a little covert game of her own, dressing in smart British-made suits and removing the Eastern European accent from her voice when she spoke. Despite being completely devoted to England, she was still a foreigner, and she was Jewish. In December of 1941, Britain declared war on Germany's allies, the countries of Finland, Hungary, and Romania. Technically, Vera was the enemy. And while she undoubtedly felt stressed by her status in the country where she served, she didn't let it interfere with her job. Vera

attended daily meetings with the SOE section heads and spent countless hours after work hovering in the signals room, waiting on coded wireless transmissions from her spies in the field. She wrote letters to the families of her agents to assure them of their safety, and she monitored everything with an eagle eye, which didn't always win her popularity points. Before agents were sent into the field, they had to go through the spy version of finishing school. Their French had to be impeccable. They had to learn how to pick locks and how to maintain a cover story under duress. In other words, they had to pass simulated torture situations. They practiced jumping out of a low-flying plane with a parachute and were given code names and invented backgrounds.

Over the course of their time serving in the SOE, most agents would burn through multiple aliases. Like one of the F-Section's most successful spies, a woman who the SOE knew as Hélène and French Resistance knew as André. The Gestapo called her the White Mouse because she constantly slipped through their traps. The spy who was on the Nazis' most wanted list was a New Zealand woman named Nancy Wake. And she was the perfect recruit. She grew up in an impoverished home in Sydney, and at the age of 16, she made her way to New York first, and then to Paris, writing articles for Hearst newspapers. She married a wealthy Parisian man and settled in Marseille, France. Of course, there was no happily ever after for Nancy because

Germany invaded mere months later. Much like Josephine Baker, she was determined to do what she could for her adopted country. She said, I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas. Nancy waved her husband a proud goodbye and then promptly joined the French resistance. She worked on what was known as the Pat O'Leary line. This line of resistance workers across France helped downed or stranded airmen make their way to safety out of occupied France and back to Great Britain. As a contact in Marseille, Nancy outfitted the soldiers with food, clothing, and fake papers, and then helped plan their journeys through the Pyrenees Mountains on the border of France and near-neutral Spain. She was wealthy and a woman,

so she could go most places with relative ease, and she used it to her advantage. She even used an ambulance to help drive people over the border into safety. The historian Juliet Pattinson notes in her book Behind Enemy Lines that several wartime accounts indicate that male agents were less resourceful and inventive than their female colleagues. Women spies were less conspicuous than their male counterparts. A plainly dressed woman with a demure attitude and a market bag was much less likely to be detained or interrogated at checkpoints. This made them extremely successful couriers who could carry vital information back and forth

between resistance units and the wireless operators who were a lifeline to Britain. Eventually, the Gestapo caught on to Nancy's resistance participation. They made her their number one target, offering five million francs to anyone who could lead them to her. One step ahead, Nancy safely made the trek over the Pyrenees herself and took refuge in Great Britain until the SOE scooped her up and put her right back to work. Unfortunately, her husband paid the price for her escape, and he was interrogated, tortured, and killed by Nazi officers. Nancy didn't even learn about his murder until the end of the war. After passing through the SOE training school, Nancy parachuted back into France, this time in the rural South. She went to work with the Maquis there, which was a guerrilla

resistance army working to sabotage the Nazi troops who occupied the region. She kept tabs on a network of around 7,000 resistance fighters and coordinated secret nighttime airdrops of weapons, explosives, funds, and supplies from the British. It was dangerous and violent work. According to her own account, though it hasn't necessarily been verified by historians, Nancy once killed a Nazi soldier with her bare hands. One man said she was the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts, and then she is like five men. Nancy maintained for the rest of her life that her most heroic act during the war was a 310-mile bike ride she did alone. Her wireless operator lost both his radio and codes

during a fight with the Germans, and if they weren't replaced, the British wouldn't be able to send fresh supplies or ammunition to the Maquis. Nancy rode through several German checkpoints, each time asking the soldiers, do you want to check me? They glanced at the tired-looking woman and waved her on, saying, no, mademoiselle. The bike ride took her 72 hours. Her thighs were rubbed so raw that she couldn't walk for days. She was exhausted and hungry, but she was also victorious. The new radio and codes were sent with the next parachute drop. Nancy survived the war and became the most decorated SOE agent, earning honors from Great Britain, France, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. When she died at 94 in 2011, her last wish was to have her ashes scattered in the very center of France. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio!

Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a

second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. and wherever you get your podcasts. Nancy was lucky that she survived the war. Vera Atkins regularly reminded her recruits that almost every agent in the field would be captured, and one in three of them would die. Of the F-Section's 470 agents sent into France, 117 were confirmed killed, including 14 of the 39 female agents. At one point, the Germans infiltrated

one of the F-Section's primary spy networks, and no one back on Baker Street seemed to notice. On October 1st, 1943, they received a message that four of their agents were captured by the Germans. But Colonel Buckmaster and Vera Adkins hesitated to act. They continued to receive communication from one of the wireless operators who was listed as captured. They believed that she was safe and passing along sound intel. But the operator, whose codename was Madeline, really had been arrested, and it was the Germans who were operating her wireless radio. Atkins and Buckmaster sent 27 agents to the drop coordinates the Germans

who were masquerading as Madeline gave them. All 27 agents were killed in an ambush. Only the pilot escaped. The real Madeline was actually Noor Khan, a Muslim woman who came from Indian royalty. Her father had been a Sufi preacher who taught the principles of pacifism. But Noor was dedicated to the SOE's mission and became the first woman wireless operator sent into occupied territory. And although her training reports were filled with mixed marks about her strength as an agent, it was Vera who judged her ready to be sent into the field. After Noor was arrested in Paris, she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp with three of her fellow agents. And on September 13, 1944, all four of the women were executed.

the 1944, all four of the women were executed. After the war ended, Vera learned that by 1943, the Germans had been almost completely successful in destroying the SOE networks in the Netherlands and Belgium. No one had shared this information to the F-section leaders, which very likely contributed to the mistakes Vera and Buckmaster made in being lax with their security checks on incoming transmissions. They had no idea how devastating the Germans had been to SOE recruits across Europe. But maybe they should have known better, because even with their own networks in France, the chance of betrayal and infiltration was high. works in France, the chance of betrayal and infiltration was high. Virginia Hall was an American socialite who had big aspirations. She wanted to be a diplomat. Never mind that she was a woman. Never mind that a hunting accident in Turkey left her with a wooden leg, whom she nicknamed Cuthbert. Never mind that she kept getting passed over and assigned desk work instead,

she knew what she wanted. While she waited for the rest of the world to catch up with her ambitions, she worked. At first, she drove an ambulance in France, but she left when Germany closed in. Safe in the UK, an SOE recruiter noticed Virginia, her grit and her fluent French. After a mere three weeks of training, Virginia left for Lyon as the first female SOE agent to be sent to France. And you will not be surprised to learn that just like Nancy Wake, Virginia was incredibly savvy at her new job. She smuggled in agents and supplies and kept the SOE well-informed of the growing resistance network in Lyon. She took risks and was a highly wanted woman. Posters were hung throughout the city offering rewards for the limping lady. The Nazi named

Klaus Barbie, who had his own terrifying nickname, the Butcher of Lyon, was known to say, I would give anything to lay my hands on that woman, except replace woman with a very derogatory word. And he almost did. Virginia was betrayed by a double agent, a priest named Robert Alash, who she had trusted, but who had passed on intel about her to the Germans. Virginia fled the city, but several of her closest contacts and resistance comrades were captured and murdered. Virginia took the same route out of France that Nancy Wake did, traveling through the Pyrenees on foot in the dead of winter. She climbed through the rough snow-covered terrain on a wooden leg and made it out to the other side safely.

Back in Britain, Virginia made a lateral move. Instead of continuing with the SOE, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. She was American, and the Americans had joined the war effort not just with armed forces, but with their intelligence agency too. The OSS sent Virginia back to France, this time disguised as an old peasant woman. She changed roles, moving from a courier to a radio operator. For the duration of the war, Virginia monitored German intelligence, organized supply drops, and helped plan sabotage efforts on the rail lines, tunnels, and bridges that were used by the Germans. so let's talk about the oss for a minute at its peak during the war it employed about 13 000 people a third of which were women they weren't all field agents in fact one of their most famous

employees was never sent to spy, although she wanted to. Julia Child of cooking fame, who was then Julia McWilliams, joined the agency in 1942, hoping to be sent overseas. Instead, she got a job working for the Special Projects Division of the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment. And you want to know what she did? She worked with a team to develop shark repellent. That is correct. Julia Child's wartime fight was with the Atlantic Ocean's shark population. By 1943, shark attacks made daily headlines in the United States. Truthfully, there had only been about 20 shark attacks on Navy personnel during the first three years of the war, but they were also pests when it came to sniffing around underwater mines meant for German U-boats.

Julia, along with the rest of the department, was tasked with finding a way to keep sharks from attacking and inadvertently setting off the mines which were intended to destroy German submarines. In the end, they made cakes. They were little spongy discs made with copper acetate mixed with a black dye that hooked onto life vests. And guess what they smelled like? Dead sharks. Not exactly pleasant for anyone wearing one, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was probably better than being eaten by a shark. being eaten by a shark. And remember, this was Julia before she was the infamous Julia Child. She had not yet mastered the art of French cooking. Her first dessert was not a delicate Parisian pastry, but a disgusting cake that repelled even the hungriest of ocean predators. even the hungriest of ocean predators.

When the war ended, the OSS evolved into a government agency that we know today as the CIA. Julia left for France, but Virginia Hall continued on. She worked for the CIA for 15 years, even though the work was mostly desk work, and Virginia faced regular discrimination from her male colleagues. She took many of her wartime espionage stories to the grave with her, and a tribute display in the CIA museum explains why. It quotes Virginia as saying, many of my friends were killed for talking too much.

In early 1944, as Virginia made the switch from working as an SOE agent to working with the OSS, Vera Atkins made a switch too. With the help of Colonel Buckmaster and Sir Stevenson, who used their citizenship and military status in a way that Vera couldn't, Vera's naturalization application was officially approved, and she was finally recognized as a full citizen of Great Britain. She spent her last year at the SOE wearing a women's military uniform and serving as a full intelligence officer of the F-Section. When the SOE began to shut down at the war's end in the summer of 1945, Vera knew her work wasn't finished. Funded by the newly established Secret Intelligence Service, or

MI6, Vera traveled to France and Germany as a women's auxiliary Air Force officer. She relentlessly searched for the missing F-section agents who had never made it home. 14 of them were women she had directly recruited and helped train. In the end, Atkins confirmed that 117 out of 118 missing agents from the F-section had been killed, and she discovered the fates of all 14 women. All but two of them had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. It's easy to think that Vera's motivation started and ended with responsibility for her agents, and absolutely that would have been a major motivator, but we can't forget that Vera herself was Jewish. She spent an entire lifetime living under the oppression of anti-Semitism and witnessing unspeakable violence

carried out on her people. She didn't only want closure for her missing agents, she wanted to see the Nazis persecuted for their war crimes. Vera's biographer, Sarah Helms, writes the following about one of her investigations in a small German town. Vera spent her first few days becoming acquainted with the war crimes legal staff and the all-important Haystack men. Haystack was the name of a group of highly motivated Nazi hunters, mostly volunteer German or Austrian exiles, usually Jewish, who are capable of finding a needle in a haystack by tracking Nazi war crime suspects hiding out in the German hills or mountains, or just as likely amid the rubble of bombed cities. Vengeance is a motivation we often attribute to men, but there's no doubt that Vera aligned herself

with the war crimes legal staff and the Haystack men in order to pursue justice, to both honor her fallen agents and to be personally assured that the Nazis received punishment for the horrors they had committed. We can't know if Vera was ever satisfied with how justice was served to the Nazis, but we do know that she worked harder than ever when she returned to Great Britain. With the information she collected about her murdered agents, she was able to ensure that they were officially recognized and honored by the British government. It is because of Vera that we know their names, their contributions, and their unfaltering bravery as they face down the enemy.

Next time, we'll talk about another group of women who helped to thwart Nazi plans during the war. And while they weren't using code names and cover stories in occupied Europe, they were absolutely instrumental in the success of thousands of Allied missions. And their expertise? Cryptography. I'll see you again soon. I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting.

This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin. Edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.