Conventionally, spies are men; think of James Bond or Graeme Greene’s George Smiley. But in World War II’s desperate struggle with Nazi Germany, the Allies realized that women could bring particular qualities to dangerous undercover work in occupied territories. In her 2021 book about WWII women spies, Professor Juliette Pattinson points out that “several wartime accounts indicate that male agents were less resourceful and inventive than their female colleagues.”
Even so, life for women spies was never anything less than highly hazardous. Stark evidence for this comes from the fact that four out of every 10 women sent to France as agents did not live to tell the tale. Read on to meet some of these exceptionally brave women.
Related: 10 of the Most Ingenious Deception Tactics Used in War
10 Virginia Hall
A talented linguist, Baltimore-born Virginia Hall ended up working at the American Embassy in Turkey in the 1930s. It was during this period that she lost the lower part of her left leg in a hunting accident. Fitted with a wooden prosthetic, 27-year-old Hall wasn’t a woman to let this mishap defeat her, so when war broke out, she was determined to do her bit. Rejected by the U.S. Foreign Service, Hall found a position with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, a spy outfit that trained her in the dark arts of espionage.
The British sent Hall to France in 1941, where she worked undercover for over a year, gathering intelligence and supporting the French Resistance. With the Gestapo (which dubbed her “The Limping Lady) at her heels, she was forced to flee back to England. Now employed by the American Office of Strategic Services, she returned to France to support resistance fighters in 1944 as the war to defeat the Nazis neared its end. Surviving the war and being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Hall went on to work for the CIA until her retirement in 1966.[1]
9 Elzbieta Zawacka
When the Soviets and the Nazis invaded and divided Poland in 1939, Elzbieta Zawacka joined the underground Polish resistance movement, taking the code name “Zo.” Blonde and fluent in German, she was ideally suited to operating as a courier, smuggling crucial intelligence on microfilm. But the Nazis infiltrated Zawacka’s network, and Poland became too hot for her. So she traveled to London to work with the Polish government in exile.
After a perilous journey, Zo made it to England, but her one aim was to return to her homeland to fight the Germans. Parachuting back into Poland in September 1943, she helped to organize the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, a rebellion that took the Nazis 63 days to crush. Zo escaped with her life only to be arrested after the war’s end by the new Polish communist government, which viewed resistance fighters with suspicion. After six years in jail, Zo was released, and when Communism fell, she was given the rank of brigadier general. She lived on to the age of 99, dying in 2009.[2]
8 Yelena Mazanik
In German-occupied Byelorussia (now Belarus), resistance fighters decided to assassinate the Nazi governor Wilhelm Kube. Making that decision was easy enough for the partisans, but how they would actually accomplish the deed was far from obvious. Kube was surrounded by heavy security whenever he was out in public, so a street assassination was impossible. But Yelena Mazanik worked as a maid in Kube’s household in the capital city of Minsk, so she had ready access to the man.
Speaking to the New York Times in 1975, Yelena recalled that “The sentence was already passed by the people. It was up to me to put it into effect.” The fact that her husband had died in a German POW camp no doubt strengthened her resolve. Yelena smuggled an explosive device into Kube’s home in her handbag and planted it in his bed. The device was timed to explode when Kube would be in his bed, and it did just that, killing the governor instantly. Yelena escaped and survived the war.[3]
7 Elizabeth “Betty” Pack
A Minneapolis native, Elizabeth “Betty “Pack was a woman prepared to use all the weapons at her disposal to fight the Axis powers—including her own body. One contemporary description said she was “unusually beautiful, [with] an exquisite, narrow-boned figure.” And she wasn’t shy about using her sexual charms to extract information from the enemy. Asked if she was ashamed of using sex in the service of espionage, Betty replied, “Wars are not won by respectable methods.”
Her greatest coup came in 1941 when Betty was working as a spy for the British in Washington, D.C., and infiltrated the French embassy there. The embassy represented Vichy France, the Nazi puppet regime that controlled part of French territory. She started a relationship with one Charles Brousse, an embassy official who was himself a secret anti-Nazi. The two decided to steal the Vichy French naval fleet codes stored at the embassy. Caught in the act, they covered up their true purpose by pretending they were simply indulging in clandestine sex. The ruse worked, and they secured the codes.[4]
6 Diana Rowden
English-born Diana Rowden was in France when the country fell to the German onslaught in 1940. She volunteered for the French Red Cross but also worked with the French Resistance to help wounded Allied soldiers escape to Britain via Spain and Portugal. Using the same route, she made her way to England in 1941. There, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force but was recruited by Britain’s Special Operations Executive as an agent in 1943.
After rigorous training, she was flown into France to work as a courier and organizer with the French Resistance. Not long after she had settled into her role and helped to sabotage an armaments factory, her commander in France was betrayed by a double agent and arrested by the Germans. She fled but soon fell victim to the treachery of an informer and was captured. Brutal interrogation ensued, and eventually, she was imprisoned in the Natzweiler concentration camp. In 1944, shortly after the Allied D-Day landings in France, she was executed.[5]
5 Andrée Borrel
Frenchwoman Andrée Borrel ran a safe house in southern France for downed airmen, Jews, and others who urgently needed to evade the Nazis by escaping to Spain. But in 1940, the Germans raided the house, and Borrel herself had to flee across the French border to Spain, from where she made her way to England. There, the Special Operations Executive recruited her, but only after they had satisfied themselves that she wasn’t a German double agent.
Borrel parachuted into France in 1942 and made her way to Paris, where she was employed by a resistance outfit, the Prosper Network. By 1943, at just 23, she had become second-in-command of Prosper, with her boss Francis Still describing her as having “a perfect understanding of security and an imperturbable calmness.” But soon after her promotion, the Gestapo arrested her and two of her comrades. Eventually, in May 1944, the Nazis transported her to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, where she and three other female agents were executed by lethal injection.[6]
4 Christine Granville
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, later Christina Granville, was born in Poland in 1908 into an aristocratic Jewish family. In 1938, she became a countess thanks to her marriage to Count Jerzy Giżycki. As the couple traveled in Africa the following year, news reached them that the Nazis had invaded their Polish homeland. They immediately left for London, where Maria was engaged by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the first woman to work for the agency.
Her early missions involved grueling ski runs over the Alps into Poland, smuggling arms and cash for the resistance. On her return journeys, she carried crucial intelligence. In 1941, the Gestapo arrested Granville and her lover, fellow spy Andrej Kowalski. By biting her tongue and appearing to cough up blood, Granville convinced the Nazis that she had tuberculosis. Spooked by the danger of this highly infectious disease, the Gestapo released the pair. This and her many other unimaginably dangerous exploits earned her an ultimate accolade. Winston Churchill himself declared that this Polish countess was his favorite spy.[7]
3 Pearl Witherington
Born to British parents living in Paris, Witherington’s fluent French was an ideal qualification for an undercover role in wartime France. But after escaping the German invasion in 1940, she ended up as a secretary in the Air Ministry in London, a mundane job she detested. Desperate to do something active in the war against the Nazis, at the age of 29, she joined Britain’s Special Operations Executive and, in 1943, parachuted into occupied France.
There, Witherington took on the persona of a cosmetics saleswoman called Genevieve Touzalin but spent her time working as a courier for a resistance network. When the Nazis apprehended the network’s British organizer, Maurice Southgate, Witherington stepped into his shoes. That meant she was responsible for organizing a band of 2,600 resistance fighters. During her time as organizer, the network killed some 1,000 Germans and occasioned the surrender of 18,000 more.[8]
2 Virginia d’Albert-Lake
Born in Florida, Virginia Roush was traveling in Europe when she met her future husband Philippe d’Albert-Lake. After marrying in 1937, the couple settled in France, only to see the country overrun by the Nazis a couple of years later. Philippe wanted Virginia to retreat to the safety of the U.S., but she refused. Instead, along with her husband, she joined the French Resistance. The two were involved in helping downed British and American airmen to escape the clutches of the Germans so they could return to active service.
In 1944, the Gestapo caught up with Virginia, but despite the threat of execution, she didn’t divulge any of the Resistance’s secrets. The Nazis sent her to the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp; when she was finally released in 1945, she weighed just 76 pounds (34.5 kilograms). Reunited, Virginia and Philippe had a son, Patrick. Years later, he said of his mother, “After her release from Ravensbruck, I think she thought she’d been given a second life. She loved life. She had a fantastic sense of humor. It was very sharp, very American. And she loved having fun.”[9]
1 Odette Sansom
According to Time Magazine, Frenchwoman Odette Sansom “was a wife and mother of three who didn’t drink, smoke, or swear, and to the casual observer, she was quite ordinary, perhaps even boring.” But nothing about her wartime exploits with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) could be described as “boring.” Living in England with her British husband when war broke out, she joined SOE and was landed by boat on the French coast in 1942.
Sansom was part of a British unit running a resistance network until 1943, when disaster struck. She and her boss were arrested by the Gestapo, and she now faced a prolonged period of hideous torture. This included being branded with a hot iron and having her toenails ripped out. But Sansom never betrayed any of her comrades, and miraculously, she survived the war. In a 1986 Imperial War Museum interview, she recalled how she had endured the torture by saying to herself, “If I can survive the next minute without breaking up, this is another minute of life.”[10]