Violette Szabo, Secret Agent

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin? Is it a crime?

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Loving you dear like I do.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hi, my friends, and welcome to the last episode of
Criminal Broads for now. Criminal Broad's a true crime podcast
about wild women on the wrong side of the law.
I'm Tory Telfer, your host. It has been my pleasure
to be with you here for three years, I think,
with a big break in the middle to have a baby.

(00:43):
I hear your sadness that the podcast is ending. I
am moved by it and touched by it and flattered
by it. And if it doesn't like make your brain
irritated to stay subscribed to the podcast when it's not active,
then stay subscrib to the podcast Criminal Broads, maybe back
in a slightly different format at some point. I'm definitely

(01:05):
not done with a podcast world. I'm not flouncing away
from you, I promise. I just am unable to do
it all right now. And you know what I said
this like a year and a half ago or two
years ago, when I went on the break to have
my baby, and then I came back. So don't despair,
don't despair. I'm still here in some form or another.

(01:26):
I'm gonna put a bunch of links in the show
notes for how to stay in touch my email, Instagram, newsletter, website,
et cetera. So just go there to find them, or
you can always just google me Torritelfer Toytelfer dot com.
If my contact page doesn't pop up, then I've messed
up the SEO of my website, and that would be
like me so that I'm not saying that it's gonna

(01:49):
pop up, but I actually think it does.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
All right.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Before we get into today's story, I asked you last
episode to nominate the most loathed, the most despicable people
we've ever covered on this podcast, and three names have emerged.
Three big names. Several of you have nominated Larry Singleton
from two episodes ago, the man who attacked Mary Vincent,

(02:13):
who cut off her hands and left her for dead,
and then after getting out of prison relatively short sentence,
he went down to Florida and full on killed another woman. Yeah, truly,
in terms of like individual criminals, like people working for
themselves and not for a system, I think the most
loathsome person we've never covered, and aren't we kind of

(02:36):
glad he's not abroad It's like, no, we've covered some
bad criminal broads, but Larry, you don't even get to
be part of that group. You are other. We reject you.
The other two names that emerged were more part of
a system, but that doesn't excuse anything they did. There
was a little person called a dictator, Rafael Trujillo from
the Mirabelle Sisters episode who Yes, I agree. I mean

(03:00):
it's hard to top that one how many people he killed,
But another one I think could give him a run
for his money, not in terms of body count, but
just in terms of absolute evil. Irma Greza, the Hyena
of Auschwitz. I forgot that we covered her. We covered her,
I think it was in episode twenty nine, so it
was a long time ago, but you guys have excellent
memories and brought her up, and yes, she definitely deserves

(03:24):
a place and the ranking of most vile people we've
ever discussed on this podcast. And then one of you,
deep Cut, said, I think about that family of settlers
in the Midwest all the time, and I believe you
are talking, dear listener, about the Bender family, the Bloody Benders.
That was like episode two or three of the podcast.

(03:46):
So I'm very impressed you remember it. Yeah, the Benders
were pretty terrifying. It's like, if you like a cozy
B and B where you can go and get a
home cooked meal, you're gonna like the Bender story up
until the point where they're bashing you over the head
and then slitting your throat, rolling you into the cellar,
maybe still alive, stealing all your money, and then burying

(04:06):
you in a shallow grave and being like they have
no idea what happened. So yeah, I'm going to give
them honorable mention. I don't think they quite defeat the
others in terms of sheer evil, but definitely deserve an
honorable mention. All right. The fact that many of you
brought up the Hyena of Auschwitz is fitting because we're

(04:27):
doing another World War Two story on this podcast today.
Several years ago, we did a two part series on
World War Two that was very popular. I think it
was one of my most commented on episodes. I got
the most gasps of horror and then like cheers of
victory from you all from those two First, we covered
Erma Greza, who was gosh, she was creepily young. I

(04:50):
think she was maybe twenty one when she died like
nineteen when she started, but she worked at Auschwitz as
a you know, I don't remember her specific role, but
as a guard I guess, a female guard of some sort.
Just an absolute sociopath. So we began with that episode,
and then we Palette cleansed with an episode that I
called The Nazi Killers, in which we covered several stories
of women who fought back against the Nazis. There were

(05:13):
a couple stories of spies, and my personal favorite was
this Russian sniper who killed like three hundred Nazis. It's
just like a story you let's just say, don't hear
every day. So that episode was super popular. I feel
like we really needed it after going into the darkness
of Auschwitz. It just got a great reaction from you.

(05:34):
So when I was thinking of what episode to end on,
I was like, I don't want to end on a
story of a super famous, big evil woman, Like I
don't want to go there for this final episode. This
is not going to be a cheerful episode at all.
We're talking about World War Two, truly one of the
most traumatizing things that has ever happened to this planet.

(05:56):
But I wanted to do a story that was inspiring
in some way that you could root for the broad
at the center of it. So we're doing another story
of a female spy technically a female secret agent. And
I love this story because and do I say this
every episode or what it's not the clear cut narrative

(06:18):
of the movies where you have the makeover montage about
how she gets really good at the spy and then
she does her spy stuff and then she gets her
spy awards. Whoo, there's some bumps in the road. This
woman is both extraordinary and a heroine to all of us,
and like a really normal person who's very relatable and

(06:39):
sometimes gets in trouble for being spacey or like a
little bit rude to her dad, or just some very
human things. So I thought it was a good story
to end on. It's a long story, and this introduction
is long, so I'll let you go and we'll get
into it. We are going to Europe and our heroin

(06:59):
is born. You're in nineteen twenty one, but of course
most of the action is going to be in the
dreadful years of nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five,
the years of World War Two. Let's go when Violette

(07:31):
began her training as a secret agent. Everybody loved her,
but nobody knew what to do with her. She confused
her instructors as she treked through freezing mud and learned
how to jump out of a plane and wear on
the human body. You should plunge a knife if you
were trying to kill your enemy, but you didn't have
your machine gun with you. Violette was tough and confident

(07:52):
and bold and enthusiastic, and she got along great with
other people. But then other times she'd fall into a
dark depression, or she'd fail to ask the right questions,
like what happens if I complete this mission? What happens
if I fail? One of her supervisors called her a puzzle.
No one could decide if she should continue on with

(08:13):
the training. Did she have what it took to be
a secret agent? The real gret the spine of iron?
Why was she even here anyway? What did she hope
to get out of this? Villette probably could have explained
why she was having a bit of trouble with her
training if anyone had asked her. Her mind was in
two places. She was the mother of a one year

(08:36):
old girl who was far away in the care of others.
Her husband was dead. Of course, she was tough some
days and depressed others who wouldn't be. As far as
why she wasn't asking questions about the future, and why
she was even trying to be a secret agent in
the first place, it was simple. She was there for

(08:56):
the clearest, most unadorned reason in the world. She wanted
to avenge her husband's death. She wanted to kill Nazis.

(09:32):
Violette Wren Elizabeth Buschell was born in France to an
English father and a French mother. She was born in
June of nineteen twenty one, the year of the first
to Miss America pageant, the year f Scott Fitzgerald and
his wife Zelda traveled to Europe for the first time
to party their brains out. It was a frothy, champagne
drenched sort of time if you were a young person

(09:54):
with a short haircut and money to burn. This was
a world that had just finished the Great War, a
world ecstatic that the fighting was over, A world that
couldn't imagine a day when the Great War would have
to change its name to World War One. Violette and
her older brother Roy moved back and forth between France

(10:17):
and England for a while, as their dad went in
search of work. They often stayed with relatives and sometimes
stayed apart from each other. It must have been a
fairly lonely childhood at first, but by the time the
Bouschelle family was reunited in England, Violette and Roy had
two younger brothers and then a third, until Viollette was
the only girl in a household of wild boys. She

(10:40):
was a tomboy from early on and would always be
called a tomboy, even in articles about her death. She'd
race right alongside her brothers, climb trees and scale walls,
and shoot guns right next to them. She and her
brothers still spoke French to each other, and they were
teased for this. Every time they spoke the language. Some
of their more paranoid neighbors clutched their pearls, sure that

(11:03):
these foreign looking kids were gossiping about them. Everyone who
remembers Viollette always talks about how much fun she was.
She was full of life, always up for a dare,
extremely physical. She joined a cycling club and she and
her older brother would bike around the countryside on trips

(11:23):
that lasted up to one hundred miles. She taught her
cousin how to sneak into the London Zoo without paying.
Always cheerful, her brother called her with a devil May
care attitude. She'd have this attitude with her for the
rest of her life, this idea that she was going
to do her thing, come what may. The one thorn

(11:44):
in her side was her father. The two of them
really didn't get along. They were always arguing. Once after
a particularly bad argument, Violette ran away. This wasn't the
type of runaway attempt that many kids make, where you
a really stuff a granola bar into your backpack and
sprint to the local park for forty minutes. No Violette

(12:06):
truly ran away. She packed her passport and a change
of clothes. She snuck onto a boat that crossed the
English Channel, and she ended up in France, where she
tracked down her aunt's house, discovered that her aunt wasn't there,
and then miraculously managed to track down her aunt. You
might say that this was her first mission, and it

(12:28):
was a resounding success. Her family was on pins and
needles for days until they finally got word from France
that little Violette was perfectly safe At fourteen, Vilett dropped
out of school. She wanted a job. Her first job
was at a place that made corsets, and there she
was basically an intern, bringing people coffee and sweeping the floors.

(12:50):
She hated it. Her next job was as a sales
assistant at a store called Woolworth, which lured in customers
with its cheap prices, and she liked this job better
given that it was more social. And Viollette was always social,
even though she was skeptical of jobs that were typically
given to women. She loved clothes, and so it was
fun for her to work around the clothes at Woolworth.

(13:13):
Her mother was a dressmaker, and so Violette had grown
up around well tailored outfits. She herself liked to experiment
with her fashion, which impressed some and scandalized others. A
neighbor remembered that in summer, Villette would wear shorts shocking
and cuff them scandalous, and then she would tie her

(13:33):
shirt up so that it exposed her mid riff outrageous.
She was definitely ahead of her time, said the neighbor.
It had to be noted just how pretty Viollette was.
She had hair so dark it looked like it could
have had a bit of blue in it. Honestly, she
looked like she could have been a movie star, with

(13:54):
her flawless chin line and her perfect eyebrows and dark
eyes and gently waved care. Plus she was fun and
chatty and confident, and so it wasn't very surprising that
men were always falling in love with her. She had
several boyfriends, one of whom lived nearby. He would open
his window and play a song from Madame Butterfly on

(14:15):
his gramophone so loudly that Viollette could hear it too
from her room. But none of these boyfriends were serious.
They were the sort to ride bikes with, to joke
around with. She didn't seem truly in love until she
met her Frenchman. And she only met her Frenchman because
something new was looming in the background of her life,

(14:37):
something terrible, bloody, ominous, something that she, as a teenager,
paid no attention to. It.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
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(17:45):
wide again go to Dame products dot com slash criminal
broads today for fifteen percent off site wide. On September one,

(18:17):
nineteen thirty nine, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World
War began. Germany was led by a man who gave
himself the nickname Wolf, Adolf Hitler, a man who dreamed
of a world under his new order, in which a
master race of Aryan Nordic people would control Europe. In

(18:38):
this world, Jewish people, Slavic people, Roma people, and anyone
else he considered racially inferior or unworthy of life would
be slaughtered, and Germany would be free to expand across
Europe and maybe eventually across the entire world, like the
Angel of Death with his wings open wide. To achieve

(19:00):
this dream of Hitler's, Poland had to fall first, and
so Germany invaded. Two days later, France and the United
Kingdom declared war on Germany. Now both of Villette's home
countries were involved, and soon enough her family was affected too.
Her dad started working as an air raid warden, and

(19:22):
three of her four brothers signed up to fight as
soon as they were old enough. The fourth was still
too young. Despite all this, the war seemed surreal to
Violette and a bit impersonal. It didn't start feeling personal
until the following spring, when her beloved France fell to
German invaders. By June twenty third, nineteen forty, Hitler himself

(19:45):
was posing for smug photos in front of the Eiffel Tower. Suddenly,
Violette felt like she had to do something. They were
in France, her homeland. She had to help. She quit
her job, which was then as a perfume saleswomen, and
joined something called the Women's Land Army. But she was
disappointed when her mission, should she choose to accept it,

(20:08):
was being sent to a farm to pick the strawberry crop.
This wasn't the glorious save the world type work she'd
envisioned for herself. She quit after the strawberries were harvested.
In the meantime, London was filling up with French citizens
who had fled the Nazis. Many of them were French
soldiers who'd come to London to meet up with a

(20:29):
promising French officer named Charles de Gaull. He was busy
starting an army called the Free French Forces, an army
designed to fight against Germany and its allies. And eventually,
hopefully ideally, to retake France for its own. The fact
that the Free French forces were forming in London meant
that well, a lot of very handsome young Frenchmen were

(20:53):
now gathering in London to fight. They were wearing their uniforms,
their eyes blazed with a sense of purpose, Their muscles
could have cut glass. It wasn't the worst place in
the world for a straight teenage girl to find herself. Anyway.
These frenchmen planned to hold a parade in London on
July fourteenth, Bestielle Day, and Villette's mom, who was a

(21:15):
frenchwoman herself, told Violette and her friend to head out
to the parade and find the nearest homesick frenchman and
invite the poor guy home for a nice French meal.
So the girls went to the parade and lurked about awkwardly.
As it turned out, it was hard to just invite
a random man back to your mom's house. It came

(21:35):
across a little aggressive. But finally one of these French
soldiers did the work for them. He was a bit older,
thirty years old, and his name was Sergeant Major Etienne Sabo.
Rumor has it that He asked Viollette for the time,
and she laughed when she looked at his wrist and
saw a watch and realized that he was just flirting

(21:56):
with her. She invited him to dinner. The two of
them found themselves really hitting it off. Before Etienne left
that night, he asked Violette if he could see her again.
Their courtship was speedy, as wartime courtships often are. They
saw as much of each other as they could while
he was still in London, and then when he was

(22:16):
shipped south to his army camp, they sent a flurry
of letters back and forth. Before long he was asking
Villette's parents for her hand in marriage. Viollette was a miner,
and so she needed her parents' permission to wed. Her
parents were shocked. The two of them barely knew each
other and the age difference. Their daughter was only nineteen.
But if there was one thing the Bushells had learned

(22:38):
in their decades on this green earth, it was that
life was easier if you let Viollette get her way.
Their daughter was strong willed, independent, insistent, and if she
didn't get her way, she just might run away to France. Yes, Etienne,
they said, you can marry our girl. The wedding was

(22:59):
a humble affair. After all, there was a world war
going on. There would be no long white veil for Violette,
no banquet hall set with hundreds of candles, no little
cannopis passed around by waiters in black. They were married
on August twenty first, in nineteen forty, at a registry
office near where Etienn was stationed. She wore a striped dress,

(23:21):
a chic belted coat, a dark hat pulled down over
one eye. He wore his army uniform. The rest of
the world didn't stop for their vows. That same day,
Leon Trotsky died in Mexico City, assassinated by a Russian
agent after a long career spent criticizing Hitler's dictator best

(23:41):
friend Stalin. Still, Violette and Etienne sank into a honeymoon
bubble together and forgot about the rest of the world
for one week. After that week, Etienne was sent to
West Africa to fight, and Violllette wouldn't see him for
another year. If you're thinking West Africa, then let me

(24:03):
just remind you this was a world war. West Africa
was then under the control of VCH France, which was
basically the bad French state that collaborated with the Nazis
during occupation. Long story short, Etienne and his men were
sent there to try and convince Vch France's army to
join up with them the Free French forces, and try

(24:23):
and get their country back together. It didn't work. With
her new husband marching across the desert, Villette found herself
terribly bored. There was a war raging, and she had
nothing to do. Etienne didn't want her to work. Maybe
it was for her safety, maybe it was just an
old fashioned sort of husbandly demand. So she sat around,

(24:46):
waiting for his letters and wishing there was something she
could do to help with the war effort. Finally, her
boredom grew so extreme that she took a temporary job,
thinking that that was a clever way around Etienne's no
work for my wife life rule. She began working as
a switchboard operator in London and worked through most of
the London Blitz when German planes relentlessly bombed the city. Eventually,

(25:11):
even the place where she worked was bombed. She wasn't
in the building, thankfully, but that was pretty much the
end of that job. She was safe, but her old
restlessness quickly returned. Almost precisely a year after her wedding,
Viollette finally got to see her husband again. Etienne flew

(25:31):
to Liverpool, Villette met him there and the two had
a second honeymoon. Like their first, this one was only
one week long. Then he returned to the fighting, this
time flying into North Africa, and Violette went back to
London to live with her parents. She had found a
solution for her boredom though. She'd managed to convince Etienne
to let her join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which was

(25:55):
the women's branch of the British Army. Many of the
women in the ATS were given jobs like cook or
baker or tailor, important jobs it really did help the
war effort, but jobs that Violette didn't want. With her
history as a corset maker's intern and a perfume saleswoman,
she really didn't want a job that had the slightest
whiff of women's work. She wanted to be where the

(26:17):
men were doing the things that men got to do,
and her wish was granted when Private Violette Sabo was
assigned to the section of the ATS that dealt with
heavy anti aircraft guns. She was sent to northern England
to help gun German planes down from the sky. Okay,

(26:55):
so Violette wasn't actually allowed to fire the guns. Only
men could fire the guns because the British government didn't
think it was right for quote life givers to be
life takers. Still, the women in her section soon proved
just how valuable they were in the anti aircraft field.
They really shown when it came to the calculations. They

(27:17):
had to figure out the best way for the missile
to hit the plane by predicting the plane's path, measuring
the plane's height and so on. It was complicated work,
with far more math than I personally am comfortable with,
but Villette did it brilliantly. She and her colleagues were
called gunner girls or ac act girls. She herself was

(27:39):
known as gunner Sabo. Locals who lived in terror of
bombs raining down on them from the sky found the
existence of these gunner girls incredibly soothing. As one local
told one of the girls, whenever we heard the guns
open up, it gave us a bit of hope to
hold on to. When Violette wasn't figuring out how to

(28:02):
get missiles to slam into the sides of German airplanes.
She was making friends like she always did. She was
very popular among the gunners, and on one particularly memorable night,
everyone put on a talent show and Violette performed a
belly dance. She got so into it that she concluded
the dance by somersaulting backwards and part of her costume

(28:24):
flew off. She was terribly embarrassed, but everyone loved it.
Though she really thrived while doing this work, her time
as a gunner girl was cut short when she found
out she was pregnant. She worked as long as she could,
but before long her first trimester symptoms were so bad
that she had to stop. At first, she moved home,

(28:45):
but the old arguments with her dad started up again.
He nagged her about her life choices, and she ended
up finding her own apartment in London rather than stay
with her parents on the outskirts of the city. Better
to risk German air raids than to be with her father.
As her due date crept closer and closer, Etienne was

(29:06):
in the Libyan desert, crouched underground, waiting for the German army.
On June third, nineteen forty two, the fighting began Germans
bombed him from above as their tanks rolled towards him below.
Five days later, his daughter was born. Her name was Tanya,
but the Germans didn't break for birth. In the desert.

(29:29):
Most of the French troops were hiding underground, but they
had tents of wooden soldiers above ground. These tents were
marked with red crosses to indicate these men are hurt,
leave them alone. The Germans ignored the red crosses and
bombed the tents anyway. It was a miracle that any
Frenchman survived the battle. But one night, as the Germans slept,

(29:52):
the frenchmen rose up from their trenches and crept forward
on foot through the one gap in the German line.
When the Germans came racing forward the next day to
finish them off, they were shocked to find that nobody
was there. After this battle was over, Etienne got the
news from Violette that their daughter had been born. He

(30:15):
was overjoyed and desperate to be granted leave so that
he could fly to London and meet his baby. But
the months ticked by June into July, into August, September, October,
and he wasn't allowed to go. By the end of October,
he and his men were in Egypt being asked to

(30:35):
do the impossible. They needed to creep over a plain
covered in land mines while German and Italian troops fired
at them, and then if they survived that, they needed
to scale the rocky vertical side of a mountain, and
if they managed to get to the top, well, then
they needed to fight all the Germans and Italians that
they'd find there. The Frenchman tried again and again. It

(31:00):
was while climbing up that mountain, leading his men straight
into the maw of the enemy, that Etienne was hit.
It was while being taken away in an ambulance that
he was hit again, either by enemy fire or by
a landmine. He didn't survive. The battle raged on so

(31:21):
bad that even the German general wanted to retreat, but
Hitler wrote him a scathing letter saying, yield not a
meter of ground and throw every gun and every man
into the battle. As to your troops, you can show
them no other road than that to victory or death.

(31:42):
In the meantime, Viollette was writing happy letters to her
dead husband, telling him all about how amazing their little
girl was. The battle where Etienne died which would become
known as the Second Battle of el A Le Maine,
was eventually won by the A, which included the Free
French forces. Winston Churchill would later say, it may almost

(32:06):
be said, before Alamine, we never had a victory. After Alamine,
we never had a defeat. But it certainly didn't feel
like a victory for Villette. She'd been working at a
factory when she got the news, making aircraft switch gears,
but when she learned that her husband had been mowed
down by enemy fire, not once but twice, she quit.

(32:31):
She couldn't function for weeks. She cut off the world
around her. She could hardly find consolation or joy in
her baby. Then she swung the other way, going out
with her friends, constantly dancing until all hours of the morning,
socializing like a mad woman. She was heartbroken, but more

(32:52):
than that, she was angry, so so angry at the
people who'd taken her new husband from her, the Nazis.

(33:18):
And then one day Violette got a mysterious letter. It
was from a man named Selwyn Jepson, asking her to
meet him at his office. She thought it must have
something to do with her husband's pension, and so she
headed to the meeting. There, Selwyn brought up the fact
that she spoke French. This was very good, he said,

(33:40):
potentially useful, could be advantageous in something like a well,
a covert role. Do you mean a spy, Viollette blurted.
As it turned out, the mysterious meeting was far more
enigmatic than Via could have ever guessed. She was being

(34:02):
recruited for a shadowy organization called the SOE the Special
Operations Executive. If you can't tell what the Special Operations
Executive did from the rather vague title, well the SOE
wanted it that way. This was a secret organization created
the month after France fell to the Nazis, the same

(34:25):
time when Villette's desire to join the war effort was
really ramping up. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, told his
Minister of Economic Warfare, to create an organization that would
help local resistance movements in France and Belgium and Greece
anywhere that was controlled by the Nazis. Set Europe ablaze,

(34:46):
Churchill said, And the SOE was formed to do just that.
Its agents would be dropped into enemy territory by parachutes,
where they had to live behind enemy lines under strict
alter egos. It was incredibly dangerous work. Of the SOE
agents who worked in France, about one fourth of them

(35:08):
never came home. When Violette asked Selwyn, do you mean
a spy? He told her, well, not exactly, but this
role can be unconventional and a bit dangerous. That was
enough for Violette. She needed work, and she'd been longing
to do something more meaningful, more boots on the ground

(35:31):
than strawberry picking or making airplane parts. Yes, she said,
she was definitely interested, and so Violette began her training.
Do you remember the training scene in the movie Mulan
where Mulan is really bad at first, but then she
gets better and better, and before long she's hitting all
her targets and running uphill while carrying weights and fighting

(35:54):
with perfect form. That scene is so satisfying because it
happens in a perfect arc from bad to good. If
only Violette's training went the same way. She did really
well at some things and really terrible at other things,
and her instructors kept writing memos basically saying, Hmm, I'm
not sure this young woman is cut out for the

(36:15):
spy life. Her training started in August of nineteen forty three,
and for the first section of training she got a
D grade overall with this painful note. A quiet, physically tough,
self willed girl of average intelligence, out for excitement and adventure,
but not entirely frivolous, has plenty of confidence in herself

(36:38):
and gets on well with others. Plucky and persistent in
her endeavors, not easily rattled in a limited capacity, not
calling for too much intelligence and responsibility, and not too boring.
She could probably do a useful job, possibly as a
courier in a limited capacity, not calling for too much

(36:59):
intelligences and responsibility. Ouch Still, she was sent on to
the next level of training, the paramilitary part. Here Viollette
learned how to memorize a route in case her map
was destroyed. She learned where exactly on the human body
she should plunge a knife in order to be the
most effective, how to operate foreign weapons, how to fight

(37:21):
like a gorilla warrior, how to crawl across rough terrain
on her belly while remaining undetected as she approached her target,
and more. At the next level, she learned to recognize
German military uniforms, how the Gestapo was organized, how to
code and decode, how to shimmy out of handcuffs, how
to survive off the land by killing her own food,

(37:44):
how to shadow, how to evade someone if she was
being shadowed. She was also, and this is key, trained
to jump out of an airplane with a parachute. Like
I said earlier, SOE agents were usually parachuted into enemy territory,
so this was a vital skill. At first, Violette learned
how to jump from tall heights, how to fall and

(38:06):
roll forward to avoid injury. But when it came to
her first real jump out of a plane, she landed wrong,
and she hurt her ankle so badly that she had
to leave training entirely and recover at home. There's a
picture of her from this time, smiling and sitting in
a wheelchair. She hadn't lost her nerve, but that bad

(38:28):
ankle would come back to haunt her. She got a
few more embarrassing reports during this level of training. I
seriously wonder whether this student is suitable for our purpose.
One instructor wrote. She seems lacking in a sense of responsibility,
and although she works well in the company of others,
does not appear to have any initiative or ideals. She

(38:50):
speaks French with an English accent. Later, though, this same
instructor recommended that Violette continue on with the training. She
would very temperamental, he wrote, ranges from enthusiasm to depression
for no apparent reason at all. She was a puzzle,
he said, but has proven to possess certain qualities which

(39:11):
I never would have expected her to have, and for
this reason I consider it advisable for her to carry
on with the training. Surely, no one who knew Violette
during training would have foreseen her future when her name
would be on monuments across Europe. People liked her, but
no one thought she was all that extraordinary. After Villette's

(39:34):
ankle recovered, she had to complete her parachute training before graduating.
In February of nineteen forty four, she took the parachute
course a second time. She was very nervous on the
first jump, but she finished it successfully, and then she
jumped from the plane two more times. Her instructor noted
that she completed those final two jumps with verve. The

(39:57):
old Violette was back. Now she was ready to go
behind enemy lines to the land of her birth, a
land crawling with Nazis. She left Tanya with a friend
and asked the friend if she would raise Tanya if
something happened to Viollette. She really didn't want her parents
raising her child, since she and her father got along

(40:18):
so poorly. The last thing she did before she left
was right her will. She left everything that she had
and it wasn't much to her tiny daughter, and then
she climbed into the plane and prepared to jump. Viollette's

(40:57):
first mission concerned one of the soees, networks of spies
called circuits. This particular circuit, called the Salesman's Circuit, had
been compromised. Several members had been arrested, but the SOE
didn't know whether or not they were talking. They didn't
know just how compromised the circuit was, so Violette and

(41:18):
her team needed to go to France to find out
what did the Germans know, what was still safe? Could
the circuit be saved? Did it need to be abandoned completely.
On the night of April fifth, nineteen forty four, Violette
and her colleague Philippe Lever parachuted into France. Viollette's English
identity had been scrubbed from her She was now Corinne

(41:41):
Reine le Roi, a French secretary. All her clothes were
made in the French style. Everything in her purse, from
her coins to her brand of cigarettes, was French. She
was twenty two years old when she plunged through the
air that night, and when she landed, tangled in her parachute,
she heard voices in the darkness. She froze, thinking that

(42:03):
the Germans were nearby, but no, they were speaking French.
They were fellow resistance fighters sent to rescue her. She
and Philippe were taken to a nearby safe house and
the next day they went on to Paris, and then
Violette got on a train alone to head north to
Ruan to see if the salesman's circuit could be saved.

(42:26):
The train was crawling with German soldiers, and what do
you know, they all wanted to help Violette. They insisted
on helping her find her seat, giving her a cigarette,
helping her to get a drink of water. Men always
swarmed around her, and apparently German soldiers were no different,
But she tried to talk to them as little as

(42:47):
possible so that her English accent wouldn't emerge. She got
to Ruan safely, but what she found there was grim.
The city was plastered with photos of Soe agents that
she was working with, including Philipe. Clearly the Nazis new things.
She snooped around as delicately as possible, of course, and

(43:09):
found that most of the circuit members had been arrested,
some had been tortured, others would eventually be murdered, and
so she went back to Paris with her depressing report.
In Paris, all the street signs were in German now,
and people walked around in wooden clogs because there was
no leather left to make shoes. She and Philippe had

(43:31):
a few days before they had to sneak back out
of the country, and so Villette made time for a
rather incongruous activity. She went shopping. Paris may have been occupied,
but it was still full of fabulous fashion, and she
couldn't resist. She bought perfume for her mother and a
little dress for Tanya. The dress was too big for

(43:52):
her daughter, since there were no clothes for tiny children
sold in Paris then because all the tiny children had
been evacuated, but Violllette knew that it would fit her
daughter someday. For herself. She went wild, buying three very
expensive dresses in black, red plaid and a floral print

(44:12):
if you're curious, and a pair of earrings, more perfume,
and a yellow sweater. She may have been a secret
agent whose life was perpetually at risk now, but she
was also a twenty two year old girl who loved
good clothes. The flight back from Paris was terrifying. She
and Philippe were taken in separate planes, and during the

(44:33):
flight Germans started firing at Violette and her pilot. The
pilot Bob had to fly like a maniac to avoid
the fire, and Viollette was thrown around in the back
of the plane like a piece of popcorn. The Germans
hit one of their plane's wheels, and so the landing
in England was so bumpy that Viollette was convinced they'd

(44:54):
been shot down and that this was a crash landing.
When the pilot Bob jumped out of the plane and
came around to help her get out, she screamed at him.
She hadn't seen him before because he'd been at the
front of the plane and he was blonde, and she
thought he was a German soldier. When Bob finally managed
to make her understand what was going on. She was

(45:14):
so relieved that she flung her arms around his neck
and kissed him. Later, he said that the kiss made
the whole terrifying flight worth it. At home, Viollette was promoted.
The memo about her promotion was very different from the
snarky notes she received during secret agent training. Just returned

(45:37):
from an important mission in the field, which she has
performed admirably, The memo said, it was time for mission

(46:03):
number two, but first some time with her daughter. Tanya
only has two memories of her mother. At least she
thinks the pretty woman in her memories was her mother,
whom she later called her lovely lady. In one memory,
her mother is taking her for a walk in the stroller,
talking to her and smiling at her, and then when

(46:25):
the sunny day turned cloudy and the stroller's top went up,
Tanya remembers crying because she couldn't see her mom anymore.
In the other memory, Tanya is standing with her grandmother
and watching that pretty lady walk away from them. They're
waving and saying goodbye, and suddenly the lady disappears down
a dark hole. Later, Tanya realized that the dark hole

(46:49):
was the mouth of the train station and that her
mother was leaving for her second mission to France. For
this mission, Villette and her colleagues were going to establish
a to replace a portion of the doomed salesman circuit.
This one would be called Salesman two. It took forever
for the mission to start. In fact, her team was

(47:10):
on a plane flying to France on D Day, but
they had to turn around when they realized that their
contacts in France weren't waiting for them. D Day, for
anyone who needs a refresher, was a huge invasion of
France by the Allied forces. Hours after Dwight Eisenhower said okay,
we'll go, thousands and thousands of ships left England and

(47:32):
landed on the shores of Normandy, France, before advancing inland.
There was still a lot of war left to go
on D Day eleven months, but when those boats landed
on the shores of France, it marked the beginning of
the end of Nazi rule. Villette and her colleagues were
pretty annoyed when they found that they had literally been

(47:53):
flying over all the D Day action. They grumbled to
themselves that if someone had just told them about D Day,
they could have looked through the parachute jumping hole at
the bottom of their plane to see the ships. But
oh well. The night after D Day they left again
for France. Before jumping out of the plane, Violette kissed
all eight members of the plane's crew for luck. Then

(48:16):
she winked at the youngest member of her team, a
nineteen year old American boy, before jumping into the blackness below.
Her team had been led to believe that they'd find
a well oiled resistance movement waiting for them, but this
was not the case. Philippe wrote scathingly that the resistance
group that met them was strictly not trained, and commanded

(48:39):
by the most incapable people I have ever met. Still,
they forged ahead. Viollette's assignment was to meet up with
the leader of another circuit, the Digger Circuit. The night
before she left, she went for a walk with the
nineteen year old American boy, who, let's be honest, was
probably wildly in love with her. They talked under the

(49:00):
stars and she told him some of her big thoughts
on what life was all about. People had to take
chances in life, she said. She was going to take
chances because she was determined that her life would make
a difference. The next morning she left on her mission.
Another resistance fighter was going to drive her a part

(49:21):
of the way, and then she'd bike the rest of it.
Remember she was a great biker from those childhood days,
spent biking one hundred miles around the English countryside with
her brother. Her cover story was that she was the
French widow of an antique dealer, but she insisted on
heavily arming herself with a machine gun called a sten gun,

(49:42):
and ironically, the presence of that gun made her less safe.
Why would the widow of an antique dealer have a
sten gun strapped to her as she biked around the countryside. Still,
Villette wanted it, As she'd told another SEE member earlier,
she was here to kill Jerman. So she strapped her
bike to the back of the car, got in and

(50:04):
tucked her gun away. She and the driver picked up
another resistance fighter, a young man who was going to
accompany the driver on his way back, and they were off.
As they drove toward a quiet little village called Salon Latout,
they saw something menacing ahead. A German roadblock They didn't

(50:24):
know this, but the Germans were searching for one of
their own. One of their leaders had been captured by
some of the French resistance fighters. The Germans were stopping
every car. What to do? The Germans could already see them.
They couldn't turn their car around and speed off. That
would look incredibly suspicious, and if the Germans searched their car,

(50:45):
they'd see their weapons, including Viollette's machine gun. The three
of them had no choice. They were going to have
to run. The driver gave a friendly wave to the
Germans to indicate that he was I'm totally going to cooperate.
Nothing to see here, and then he whispered to Violette
that she should jump out and run as soon as

(51:07):
he stopped the car. The third member of their car,
the young resistance fighter, didn't need to be told twice.
He was unarmed and running was his only hope. As
soon as the car stopped, he jumped out of the
back and sprinted away. The driver jumped out with his
gun and started firing at the Germans. Viollette jumped out
of the passenger seat, but she didn't run. Instead, she

(51:31):
whipped out her machine gun and started firing too. One
of the Germans went down, though it's hard to know
who to credit for that death. As the driver fired steadily,
Viollette was able to fall back to a nearby wheat field,
and from there she fired at the Germans. As the
driver himself fell back and joined her. They started moving

(51:52):
through the field, sure they were hidden, but before long
they heard machine guns spraying bullets dangerously close to where
they were. They realized that as they walked, the wheat
was moving with them, giving them away, so they dropped
to their hands and knees and began to crawl. It
was agonizing progress, and they knew their enemies were close by.

(52:15):
They could hear them. Some of the Germans even ran
into the wheatfield to fire at them on foot, so
Violette and the driver would take turns holding them off
with their own gunfire as the other continued to crawl.
At some point during this chaos, people think that Violette
hurt her bad ankle again. Either she sprained it or

(52:37):
maybe a German bullet hit it, but either way, she
realized that she wasn't going to make it. She wasn't
going to be able to run. When she and the
driver were almost at the far edge of the wheat field.
She turned toward him and told him to go on
without her. She was too exhausted, she said, she was
bleeding and her clothes were ripped to shreds. Go, she said,

(53:04):
So he ran out of the wheat field, toured a
nearby farm, and hid under a haystack there. About a
half hour later he heard Violette walk past him, but
this time she was with the Germans. They asked her
where her colleague was, and he heard her laugh, You
can run after him, she said, he is far away

(53:27):
by now. A girl from the farm there says that
one of the German soldiers offered Violette a cigarette, perhaps
charmed by her like so many others, and she spat
in his face and told him to free her arms
because she could smoke her own cigarettes. Violette told the

(54:03):
Germans that her name was Vicky Taylor. She was taken
to the Gestapo headquarters and then to prison as the
rest of her team scrambled to organize a rescue attempt.
But before anything could be planned, she was moved again,
and then no one in the soe knew where she was.
The work went on without Violette. Of course, it had

(54:25):
to the salesman. Two Circuit continued to resist. They blew
up bridges, they destroyed train tracks, they cut the electricity
at submarine bases, anything to hobble the Nazis, to keep
them from their supplies, to foil their plans. No one
forgot about Violette, though. When her team member Philippe got

(54:45):
back to England, he recommended that Violette be given the
highest possible decorations because of the great coolness and gallantry
that she showed while fighting off the Germans. Was Villette
tortured in prison? Some people have claimed passionately that she was,

(55:05):
even that she was sexually assaulted. There was even, weirdly,
a lawsuit between a writer who thought she wasn't tortured
and some other people who insisted that she was. But
her biographer, Susan Ottaway has scoured the evidence and doesn't
think that she was tortured. Violette herself even told someone
during her imprisonment that she hadn't been tortured. Still, surely

(55:29):
she feared being tortured. Surely she heard people being tortured
or saw the results of torture, and she was certainly questioned.
It seems like the Gestapo may have been planting ideas
in her head too. She told one of her fellow
prisoners that she had been betrayed, that someone within the
SOE had told the Germans exactly who she was and

(55:50):
what she was up to. Susan Ottaway didn't find a
lot of evidence for this either, but she did note
that the Gestapo had a nasty habit of convincing their
prisoners that someone had rated them out. It was a
way of sowing paranoia and divisiveness, and it probably got
some of their prisoners to talk more. By early August

(56:11):
of nineteen forty four, about two months after her capture,
Viollette was chained to seven other girls and thrown onto
a crowded train and taken on a long, tortuous journey
toward that most terrible of Nazi constructions, the concentration Camp.
Two of the girls she was chained to were also
SOE members, Denise Block and Lilian Rolfe, both wireless operators.

(56:36):
They would become some of Villette's closest friends at the
concentration camp. She may have also been chained to the
SOE agent nor Inayat Khan, who we covered in episode thirty.
Their chains connected their wrists to their ankles, and the
chains were so short that the girls couldn't walk upright.
They had to bend over and shuffle forward. After a

(56:57):
terrible journey during which their train was bombed by Allied
forces who apparently didn't realize that the train was full
of prisoners, the girls arrived at the dreaded Robinsbrook, a
concentration camp just for women that was surrounded by gorgeous
pine trees and situated by a peaceful lake. Robinsbrook was

(57:17):
the sort of place that was so filthy it had
its very own typhus epidemic. Prisoners were shot, sent to
the gas chambers, sterilized, and given non consensual amputations and
bone transplants that often killed them. Some of them were
forced to work in brothels, which were created to reward

(57:39):
the male prisoners who worked extra hard. The on site
hospital was a nightmare place without a doctor. Instead, it
was run by a female guard whose job was to
give poison to sick prisoners. She was assisted not by nurses,
but by two orderlies whose job was to beat the

(57:59):
prisoner to death if they didn't take the poison. Violllette
arrived at Robinsbrook completely exhausted, but after a friend let
her sneak into her bunk bed and sleep until evening
roll call, Viollette seemed to get some of her old
spunk back. As days turned into weeks and months, Villette

(58:19):
was always the one of the three See girls who
kept her spirits up the most. She even started making
plans to escape. Once, miraculously she managed to get a
key maid that would have unlocked one of the Robinsbrook gates,
but a fellow prisoner found out and ratted her out
to the guards, and Viollette had to throw the key

(58:39):
away to avoid while probably to avoid being killed then
and there. Still, as much as Viollette tried to remain hopeful,
the Nazi concentration camp system had a lot of experience
when it came to breaking young women's spirits. Viollette was
transferred around to various work locations each week on Awful

(59:01):
and as the winter arrived, she was given a job
clearing trees and digging into the ice cold ground so
that the Germans could have themselves a nice new air field.
She and her fellow workers were fed with two tiny
slices of bread per day, along with a soup that
was made from water and dirty potato peels, with some

(59:22):
dirty beet peals thrown in as a bonus. As the
temperature plummeted, Villette was only allowed to wear one thin,
short sleeved dress. At one point, the cold almost made
her lose her mind. She fell into her friend's arms, screaming,
saying over and over again, I am so cold, so cold.

(59:42):
Her friend warmed her slowly and then gave her a
few potatoes that she'd managed to scavenge and had warmed
by sticking them to the side of a stove for
a while. And then suddenly things changed. Viollette, Denise and Lilian,
the three SA girls, were told that they were leaving

(01:00:02):
the work camp and being sent back to Robinsbrook. Before
they left, the Nazis gave them some gifts. They were
given new clothes, well old clothes but new to them,
and some soap and a comb. Villette was thrilled at
the chance to clean herself to get the lice out
of her hair, but she wasn't thrilled about the sudden

(01:00:24):
change of plans. When saying goodbye to one of her
friends at the work camp, she wept and said that
she had a feeling only horrible things were ahead. Of her.
When she got back to Robinsbrooke, the prisoners there were
shocked to see how awful she looked, how thin and
sick and worn down. All that, even though she carefully

(01:00:46):
scrubbed herself and combed her hair for the first time
in months. At Robinsbrook, things were off. Some of the
other prisoners noticed that the guards were acting strangely. There
were hurried meetings between officers and extra alcohol for the guards.
The prisoners who'd been there a long time knew what

(01:01:09):
all of this meant. The smell of death was in
the air. Someone was going to be killed. And then
one evening, at seven pm, Viollette, Denise, and Lilian were
taken out to the courtyard by the crematorium. The camp's
commander was waiting for them there with a little piece

(01:01:30):
of paper. He read from it. It was an order
for the three young women to be shot, one at
a time. A corporal brought each secret agent forward. The
others had to watch another corporal shot each of them

(01:01:50):
through the back of the neck. They fell one by one.
A doctor stepped forward to confirm that each one was dead,
and then Viollette's body, and Denise's body and Lilian's body
were shoved into the crematorium and burned into nothingness. Denise

(01:02:12):
was twenty nine, Lilian was thirty, Viollette was twenty three.

(01:02:36):
On May eighth, nineteen forty five, Germany surrendered four months later,
so did Japan. The war the Second World War was over.
Hitler was dead, dead of a self inflicted gunshot wound
to the head about a week before the surrender. The
concentration camps were liberated by soldiers who would never forget

(01:02:57):
the horrors they saw there. The people so thin they
looked like skeletons, the unburied corpses, the things that weren't
corpses but implied that there had been corpses, like the
piles of shoes. Happy crowds celebrated the victory in the
streets of Allied countries. Others cried their hearts out over

(01:03:19):
the millions who would never come home. Scholars believe that
seventy to eighty five million people died, that's about three
percent of the total population of the world, and one
of those millions was Viollet. Her body was never recovered,

(01:03:41):
of course, since it had been burned, and it took
a long time before people knew exactly what had happened
to her. It took thirteen years for one of her
friends from prison to track down her parents and tell
them what she'd known of Violet. But slowly, after the
war ended, and as German officials were arrested and interrogated

(01:04:03):
about what went on at those concentration camps, Viollette's story
emerged into the world's consciousness and people were spellbound. This
goofy twenty three year old girl who argued with her
dad and snuck into the zoo and rushed into marriage
and belly danced until her costume fell off and got

(01:04:25):
embarrassingly bad grades at spy school was one of the
great heroines of the war. She had been incredible, from
her missions in France, to the bravery she showed while
fighting the Germans, to the spirit she kept in captivity,
and even down to the way she died. One of

(01:04:46):
the commanders from Robinsbrooke, now a prisoner himself, confirmed that
she and Denise and Lilian had been killed, but he
added all three were very brave and I was deeply moved.
Once Viollette's death was established, a war official wrote to
her parents with a terrible news. Death was instantaneous and

(01:05:09):
the body was immediately cremated. He wrote, you must be
very proud of the way your daughter maintained her calm,
dignified courage throughout her ordeal. It is testimony to that
courage that she impressed and moved even those who were
responsible for her death. Today, Viollette's name, along with the

(01:05:32):
names of her friends and colleagues who never came home,
is on a huge silver cross in France, and in London,
not far away from the headquarters of the British Secret
Intelligence Service, there's a little monument with a bronze bust
on top of it. The bust is a Viollette, and

(01:05:53):
she stares ahead, unflinchingly forever. The accompanying plaque reads this,
this monument is in honor of all the courageous SOE agents,
those who did survive and those who did not survive
their perilous missions. Their services were beyond the call of duty.
In the pages of history, their names are carved with pride.

(01:06:18):
It's not the only memorial Villette has been given. There's
a movie about her called Carve her Name with Pride.
Her daughter Tanya has written a book called Young, Brave
and Beautiful. There's a museum about her. But perhaps The
most emotional honor she received happened in January of nineteen

(01:06:39):
forty seven, when Villette's parents took little four year old
Tanya to Buckingham Palace. There at the palace, King George
leaned forward and handed little Tanya a medal, a medal
meant for her mother. It was the George Cross, a

(01:07:00):
cross hanging from a dark blue ribbon. It's an award
given for acts of the greatest heroism or for most
conspicuous courage and circumstance of extreme danger. Tanya curtseyed as
the King handed her the cross. She was wearing the
little silk dress that her mother had bought for her

(01:07:24):
in Paris. All right, my loves, that's the end. I

(01:07:46):
hope you enjoyed this story as well as this very
one oh one intro to the sweeping history of World
War Two. You guys, the reading I had to do
about battles. I was looking for, like who won this
battle mark and what day did it start? And I
would just get these detailed breakdowns of like first Plan

(01:08:06):
A was implemented, code name this, next up, that plan
was discarded. Plan B was implemented. At the same time,
the Italians were doing plans D through Z and I
was like, I don't know how to interpret this. Can
you just tell me who won? And also like was
it extra horrible? And should I mention that? Or as

(01:08:27):
hell as they say? But reading descriptions of battle breakdowns
if you are not a military buff is its own
type of minor. I won't say hell, I'll say your
attent anyway. I hope you enjoyed the history in this episode.
I couldn't resist throwing in you know a bit here
and there. You guys, all my friends know that Criminal Broads,

(01:08:47):
of all the podcasts in the world, has not the
most listeners, maybe not the wealthiest listeners. Now, I'm not
vibing you for not being millionaires. I'm not a millionaire either.
I'm saying this and Aliday with you, but the best listeners. Seriously,
all my friends know that I have the best listeners.
My fellow podcasters know this. Just everyone I talk to,

(01:09:10):
whoever gets a glimpse of the types of comments you
guys leave or the types of emails you send, And
I will also say the types of emails and comments
you don't send me. I have gotten a couple, you know,
emails that range from annoying to ugly over the years,
but I thought I was going to get so many
more because it's part of the gig, right, it's part

(01:09:31):
of the gig. Like, not everyone's going to like what
you do. And I've just been blown away by the
type of listeners I got. I don't know how you
found this podcast, but just the way you interact with
these stories is so caring and intelligent and sensitive. I
remember being so afraid when I released a Lisa Montgomery episode,

(01:09:52):
which is about the death penalty. Who wants to talk
about the death penalty? Who wants to talk about the
sort of crime she did? And you all were give
do with just like the most nuanced loving arms. It's
such a cliche to be like, there's no nuance anymore,
Like everything's black and white, no shades of gray. But
I feel like in these stories there's only shades of gray. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

(01:10:14):
there's black and white. I'm sorry. We just did an
episode that involved a world war in concentration camps. There
is black and white in the world. There are things
that are evil, there are things that are good, but
there's also so much that's in between. And this podcast
has so often tried to grapple with that, and I'm
just so lucky that I have listeners that were able

(01:10:35):
to grapple with that with me. We're willing to, we're
excited to. So again, I don't know where you came from,
but I'm so glad you're here. And to the people
who supported the podcast monetarily or just by a follow
or a review or telling a friend, I mean, it's
so helpful, and it's when you're a small, independent podcast
those things are really felt, like you really feel it.

(01:10:58):
So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And
I feel guilty that this is the last episode for now,
but I hope you don't feel like I'm abandoning you.
I'm still going to be working and writing again. There'll
be links in the show notes if you want to
follow my other work. And I hope to return to
the podcasting sphere someday. You know, if some friendly billionaire

(01:11:20):
emphasis on friendly is listening to this podcast and it's
like I really want to be a patron of the arts,
well you know where to find me. Thank you to
the people who've helped with the podcast Cloud ten, my
awesome network who's helped me get the ads that you've
heard on this show, lit Hub Radio, my former Awesome Network, Jillian,
my research assistant, Matt Noble, my editor, everyone I've worked with,

(01:11:42):
oh Anna tell Her, my sister for the theme music.
In the conclusion, everyone I've worked with on this podcast
has been absolute delight. All Right, I'll stop rambling and
let you go. I hope you enjoy the last few
days of summer and have a brilliant fall ahead of you,
and I'll talk to you at a later date. Love
you so much, Goodbye.

Speaker 1 (01:12:01):
Maybe I'm right, Maybe I'm wrong loving you dear like
I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, you,
guilty of loving you.

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