The SS believed they had built the perfect machine.
Iron discipline, brutal training, total racial superiority, men who could break any enemy through fear alone.
They were wrong about one thing.
They were very wrong about women.
10 women you are about to meet looked like nothing.
A dancer, a teenage cook, a nurse with blonde hair, a widow with a tank.
The SS saw them and looked past them.
That mistake cost the Nazis thousands of lives, dozens of agents, entire networks, and at least one death camps worth of saved prisoners.
These women did not just fight back.
They walked into the heart of the SS machine and took it apart from inside.
They poisoned their food.
They wore their uniforms.
They killed their officers.
They freed their prisoners.
The SS hunted them, tortured them, and in some cases killed them.
But before the end, every one of them made the Nazis pay a price the records still cannot count.
Today, 10 women the SS underestimated who destroyed them from the inside.
Before we start, if you want to see who takes the number one spot, hit that like button right now.
It tells YouTube to send this video to more history fans like you.
Subscribe so you never miss our deep dives into the forgotten heroes of the Second World War.
Now, let us begin with number 10.
Number 10.
Elżbieta Zawacka, also known as Agent Zoh.
Poland.
In September of 1943, somewhere over occupied Poland in the dead of night, a British Halifax bomber slows to drop speed.
A figure steps to the open hatch.
The wind tears at her coat.
The pilot signals.
She jumps.
Polish underground operatives are waiting in a field below.
When she lands, they look at her with stunned silence.
Not because she is alive, not because the drop went well, because she is a woman and she is wearing a dress.
Her name is Elżbieta Zawacka.
The Gestapo will never catch her.
The communists will try to erase her.
History will almost forget her.
Almost.
Elżbieta is born in March of 1909 in Toruń, a city that bounced between Poland and Germany so many times that she grows up speaking both languages perfectly.
She studies mathematics at Poznań University, taught by one of the men who will later help crack the Enigma code.
By the time Germany invades Poland in 1939, she is a teacher, an organizer, and quietly ready for a war she has been expecting for years.
Within weeks, she joins the Union of Armed Struggle, the underground that will become the Polish Home Army.
Her nom de guerre is Selma, then Zo, the name that will follow her for the rest of her life.
The work begins with messages, then guns, then microfilm.
Zo becomes one of the most active couriers in the Polish underground, crossing the borders of Nazi-occupied Europe more than 100 times.
Her routes run from Warsaw through Berlin, through Sweden, to London and back.
She travels with forged papers, sometimes posing as a German oil company executive, sometimes as a businesswoman, sometimes as just another tired traveler with a battered suitcase.
She carries dollars sewn into the lining of her coat.
She carries weapons.
She carries the kind of intelligence that wins or loses wars.
On one trip, in 1943, she carries microfilm hidden inside a cigarette lighter.
That microfilm contains the first detailed evidence of Hitler’s vengeance weapons, the V-1 flying bomb, the V-2 ballistic missile, the most fearsome weapons of the war.
Allied scientists will study what she carried for The Gestapo knows someone is moving between Warsaw and London.
They do not know it is a small woman in a wool coat with mathematics textbooks in her bag.
On one mission, traveling by train from Krakow to Warsaw, Zoe realizes she is being followed.
A man two seats behind her keeps looking at her reflection in the window.
She walks to the toilet at the end of the carriage.
She locks the door.
She opens the window.
The train is moving at 40 mph.
She jumps.
She lands on gravel.
Her body is torn open by the stones.
She is bleeding from her face, her arms, her legs.
She crawls into the forest.
She survives.
The Gestapo arrives at her sister’s apartment two days later.
They arrest everyone connected to her.
Her parents, her sister, around 100 underground operatives.
Zoe never knows when she will hear the news that another family member has been taken.
She carries poison with her on every mission so the Gestapo will never break her if she is caught.
In 1943, Zoe becomes the only woman ever to serve as an emissary of General Stefan Rowecki, the leader of the Polish Home Army.
He needs someone to reach London, someone who can make it through Germany, France, Spain, and across to Gibraltar.
Someone who can do it alone.
He chooses her.
She makes the journey across enemy Europe in February of 1943.
She delivers her messages.
She is then trained by the British in Scotland for parachute drops, weapons, and silent killing.
She becomes the only woman ever to join the Cichociemni, the Silent Unseen, the elite Polish special forces unit trained in Britain and parachuted back into occupied Poland.
In September of 1943, she jumps from the Halifax.
She is home.
Then the Warsaw Uprising begins on the 1st of August 1944.
For 63 days, Polish fighters take on the German army in the streets of their own capital.
Zo fights through every day of it.
She organizes communications.
She runs supplies.
She commands an all-female unit of couriers and nurses who move through the sewers of the burning city.
She later says, “The first days of the uprising were the happiest of her life because for the first time since 1939, she could fight openly.
” The uprising fails.
200,000 Polish civilians die.
The Germans burn Warsaw to the ground.
Zo escapes to Krakow and continues underground work until the war ends.
Her reward from history is a cruel one.
The communist regime that takes control of Poland after the war does not want former Home Army officers walking around as heroes.
In 1951, they arrest Zo.
They sentence her to 10 years in prison.
She serves over 4 years before she is released.
The communist authorities forbid her from speaking publicly about her wartime service.
They forbid her from being honored.
She returns to teaching mathematics quietly in her hometown.
For more than 30 years, she is officially a nobody.
Then, the Berlin Wall falls.
In 2006, at the age of 97, Elżbieta Zawacka is promoted to Brigadier General of the Polish Land Forces.
She becomes only the second woman in Polish history to hold that rank.
She dies in January of 2009 at 99 years old.
The Gestapo never caught her.
The communists could not erase her.
And the SS who watched her cross their borders with a fake passport and a smile never once realized that the small woman with the blue eyes was carrying the secrets that would help end their war.
Number 10 on our list, Agent Zo, the only woman in the Silent Unseen.
Number nine, Marthe Cohn, France.
In February of 1945, in the freezing dark of a snow field somewhere on the German border, a small woman walks alone toward enemy lines.
She is 4 feet 11 inches tall.
She has blond hair.
She has blue eyes.
She is carrying false papers in the name of Martha Ulrich, a German nurse desperately searching for her missing fiance Hans.
Her real name is Marthe Hoffmann.
She is Jewish.
Her sister was murdered at Auschwitz.
Her real fiance was executed by the Nazis.
And she is about to walk into the most dangerous place in the world for someone like her, Nazi Germany itself.
Marthe is born on the 13th of April 1920 in Metz, France, in the disputed region of Alsace-Lorraine that has switched between French and German control for centuries.
Her family is Orthodox Jewish.
She is one of seven children.
She speaks German at home, French at school.
By the time the Nazis come to power, she is already old enough to understand exactly what is happening across the border.
She watches Jewish refugees fleeing east.
Her family begins hiding them.
When France falls in 1940, the Hoffmanns are forced to leave Metz and travel south to Poitiers.
There, Marthe and her sister Stephanie continue helping Jewish refugees find safety.
In June of 1942, Stephanie is arrested.
She is deported to Auschwitz.
She never returns.
The rest of the family uses forged papers to escape to the unoccupied south of France.
Marthe finishes her nursing training.
She loses her fiance to a Nazi firing squad.
She loses her sister to the gas chambers.
She loses her home, her country, her religion in public.
And by the time the Allies push the Germans back across the Rhine in 1944, Marthe Hoffnung is 24 years old and ready to do something almost no one would dare.
She volunteers for French army intelligence.
An officer notices her perfect German accent.
He offers her a transfer to the intelligence service.
She says yes without thinking.
Months of training follow.
She learns to identify German uniforms by tiny details.
She learns to read maps from glimpses.
She learns to fire a pistol she has never held before.
She learns to lie under pressure.
Her cover is built carefully.
She is Martha Ulrich, a nurse from the German town of Bingen.
Her fiance Hans, a German soldier, has been missing on the Eastern Front.
She has come to look for him.
Every German soldier she meets feels sorry for her.
Every German officer wants to help.
The Germans, she later says, are very sentimental about these kinds of things.
Crossing the border is hell.
She tries 15 times before she succeeds.
On one attempt, her guide leads her across a snow field.
The ice cracks beneath her.
She plunges into freezing water up to her chest.
She climbs out, soaking wet in sub-freezing temperatures, and walks the rest of the way through enemy territory until she finds shelter.
Once inside Germany, she moves alone.
She walks through SS checkpoints.
She rides German trains.
She sleeps in barns and farmhouses.
She talks to every soldier she meets.
She remembers everything.
Troop movements, unit numbers, defensive positions, supply routes, names of officers, locations of artillery batteries.
Her most important piece of intelligence comes near the end of the war.
In the Black Forest, she learns from talkative German soldiers that the Wehrmacht has set up a deadly ambush waiting for the advancing allies.
She He learns that the Siegfried Line, the famous German defensive position along the Rhine, has been quietly evacuated.
The Germans are retreating to set up the trap deeper in the forest.
Marthe needs to get this information back to French command immediately.
Her usual courier is not available for days.
She makes a decision.
She walks into Switzerland and hands the message directly to a Swiss customs guard.
The information reaches French intelligence within hours.
Allied commanders adjust their advance.
Thousands of lives are saved.
For her work, Marthe Cohn receives the Croix de Guerre with two citations.
In 1999, more than 50 years later, France finally awards her the Médaille Militaire, the country’s highest military honor.
A decoration so rare it has been given to figures like Winston Churchill.
She receives the Legion of Honor as well.
She kept her wartime service secret for five decades.
Her own husband and children did not know what she had done until she finally wrote her memoir in the late 1990s.
Marthe Cohn died in May of 2025 at the age of 105, having outlived almost every Nazi she ever met.
A 4-foot-11 Jewish woman walked into Nazi Germany alone, gathered intelligence that helped end the war, and walked out again.
The SS saw a sad little nurse looking for her boyfriend.
They never saw the spy who was destroying them from the inside.
Number nine.
Marthe Cohn.
The Jewish girl who walked into the lion’s den.
Number eight.
Zinaida Portnova.
Soviet Union.
In August of 1943, in the occupied Belorussian village of Obol, a 17-year-old girl carries a tray of soup into a dining hall full of German soldiers.
She smiles at them.
They smile back.
She is small, polite, and quiet.
The Germans like her.
She has worked in their kitchen for several weeks now.
Nothing about her seems dangerous.
Within hours, more than a hundred German soldiers are convulsing on the floor, vomiting, dying, going into shock.
The Germans realize immediately that the soup was poisoned.
They drag the kitchen workers in front of them.
They drag in the small, polite girl.
They tell her she will eat the soup right now in front of them to prove she is innocent.
And the small, polite girl picks up a spoon and eats it.
Zinaida Portnova is born in Leningrad on the 20th of February, 1926.
She is 15 years old when Operation Barbarossa begins and the German army pours into the Soviet Union.
She and her younger sister, Galia, are visiting their grandmother in the Belorussian village of Zuya that summer.
When the front collapses, they cannot get home.
They are trapped behind enemy lines.
The German occupation reaches Obol within weeks.
One day, German soldiers come to confiscate the family’s cattle.
Zinaida’s grandmother resists.
A soldier strikes her in the face.
The old woman falls.
The cattle are taken.
And in that moment, a 15-year-old girl decides she is going to make these people pay.
In 1942, Zinaida joins the Young Avengers, the youth wing of the underground Komsomol resistance organization in Belarus.
She is 16.
The youngest member of the group is 15.
The oldest, Yeufrosinia Zenkova, is 18.
They are children fighting against the most powerful military machine on the planet.
Zinaida starts small.
She distributes propaganda leaflets through the village.
She steals German weapons and hides them for the partisans.
She reports on troop movements.
She learns from the older members how to handle pistols and explosives.
She participates in sabotage attacks against a water pump, a power plant, and a brick factory used by the Germans.
These attacks, according to later estimates, kill over 100 German soldiers.
Then in 1943, the Young Avengers find a way to get a member inside the German garrison itself.
The Germans need local labor for kitchen work.
Zinaida applies.
She is hired.
For weeks, she works in the kitchen of the German officers canteen, peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables, smiling at the men she plans to kill.
She studies the cooking schedules.
She maps the routine.
And in August of 1943, she puts poison in a massive batch of soup intended for the entire garrison.
The result is carnage.
German soldiers begin dying within minutes of eating.
The Germans round up every kitchen worker.
They demand to know who did it.
Suspicion falls on Zinaida.
They make her eat the soup.
She eats it.
She does not show any reaction.
She does not collapse.
She keeps a steady face.
The Germans, unable to believe a 17-year-old could be so calm under pressure, release her.
She walks out of the building.
She makes it to her grandmother’s house.
Then, her body breaks.
She begins vomiting violently.
Her grandmother forces her to drink way large amounts of it, hour after hour, until her body finally clears the poison out of her system.
The next morning, she does not return to work.
The Germans realize the truth.
They send patrols looking for her.
Zinaida flees into the forest.
She joins a partisan unit named after the Soviet officer Kliment Voroshilov.
For months, she fights as a partisan, leading attacks on German patrols, blowing up convoys, ambushing supply trains in In a letter she sends to her parents back in besieged Leningrad, she writes simply, “Mom, we are now in a partisan detachment.
Together with you, we will defeat the Nazi invaders.
In December of 1943, the partisan command sends her back to Obol.
The Young Avengers network has been compromised.
Members have been arrested.
Zinaida is to infiltrate the area, find out what went wrong, and contact the survivors.
Local police capture her almost immediately.
They turn her over to the Gestapo.
The interrogation is held in the village of Goriany.
The Gestapo investigator places his pistol on the desk while he questions her.
He thinks she is a frightened 17-year-old girl.
He is wrong.
Zinaida grabs the pistol off the desk.
She shoots the investigator dead.
Two guards run into the room.
She shoots both of them.
She runs out of the building and into the woods.
She is recaptured near a river not far from the village.
What follows is one of the most brutal interrogations in the records of the SS in Belarus.
They torture her for weeks.
They try to break her.
She gives them nothing.
She gives them no names, no locations, no information about the partisans, about her family, about anyone.
On the 15th of January, 1944, just over a month before her 18th birthday, the Germans take Zinaida Portnova to a prison yard in Polotsk and shoot her dead.
On the 1st of July, 1958, 14 years after her execution, the Soviet government posthumously names Zinaida Portnova a Hero of the Soviet Union.
She is the youngest female recipient in the history of the award.
She also receives the Order of Lenin.
Schools, museums, and monuments across the former Soviet Union still bear her name today.
A teenager poisoned a German garrison, killed a Gestapo officer with his own pistol, fought as a partisan, refused to break under torture, and died at 17 rather than betray a single comrade.
Number eight, Zinaida Portnova, the schoolgirl who killed an SS interrogator with his own gun.
Number seven, Maria Oktyabrskaya, Soviet Union.
In October of 1943, in the snow-covered fields near Smolensk, a T-34 tank rolls forward into a German defensive line.
The words fighting girlfriend are painted across the turret.
Inside, a 38-year-old Ukrainian widow grips the controls of a machine she paid for with every ruble she owned in the world.
She is here for one reason and one reason only, revenge.
The Germans killed her husband.
They are about to learn what one widow with a tank and absolutely nothing left to lose can do.
Maria Oktyabrskaya is born in August of 1905 on the Crimean Peninsula, one of 10 children in a desperately poor Ukrainian family.
She works at a cannery, then as a telephone operator.
In 1925, she marries a Soviet Army officer named Ilya Ryadnenko.
The couple changes their last name to Oktyabrsky in honor of the October Revolution.
Maria throws herself into life as a military wife.
She joins the military wives council.
She trains as an army nurse.
She learns how to drive military vehicles and how to handle weapons.
She believes with everything she has that being a soldier’s wife is itself a kind of service to her country.
In June of 1941, the Germans launch Operation Barbarossa.
The Oktyabrsky family is one of the first affected.
Maria is evacuated to Siberia.
Her husband, Ilya, stays at the front.
In August of 1941, only weeks into the invasion, he is killed in action near Kiev.
Maria does not learn of his death for 2 years.
When the news finally reaches her in 1943, something inside her breaks and something else inside her hardens.
She sells everything she owns, every dress, every piece of furniture, every keepsake.
She deposits 50,000 rubles, her entire life savings, into the National Bank.
Then she writes a letter directly to Joseph Stalin.
The letter reads, “My husband was killed in action defending the motherland.
I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and for the death of Soviet people tortured by the barbarians.
For this purpose, I have deposited all my personal savings, 50,000 rubles, to the National Bank in order to build a tank.
I kindly ask to name the tank Fighting Girlfriend and to send me to the front line as a driver of said tank.
” Stalin reads the letter.
The State Defense Committee sees the propaganda value immediately.
They agree.
Mariya is sent for 5 months of training, a thorough course in driving and maintaining a T-34 medium tank.
This is unusual.
Most Soviet tank crews are trained in just weeks.
The army puts time into her.
She is 38 years old when she arrives at the 26th Guards Tank Brigade in September of 1943.
The male tankers see her at first as a publicity stunt, a joke, a widow playing soldier.
That attitude lasts exactly one battle.
On the 21st of October, 1943, near Smolensk, Mariya Oktyabrskaya goes into combat for the first time.
She drives the Fighting Girlfriend straight into a German defensive position.
The crew destroys multiple machine gun nests.
They take out anti-tank guns.
They break through the German line ahead of their entire unit.
When the tank is hit by enemy fire and the tracks are damaged, Mariya does something her commanding officer has explicitly forbidden.
She climbs out of the tank under fire.
She repairs the tracks while German bullets snap past her.
She climbs back in.
She drives the tank back into the fight.
She is promoted to sergeant on the spot.
She does this again and again.
Over the next 3 months, Maria destroys German positions across the Western Front.
She climbs out of her tank to make repairs under fire multiple times.
Her commanding officers tell her to stop.
She ignores them.
Her fellow tankers begin to call her one of the bravest soldiers they have ever served with.
The same men who once mocked her now follow her into combat without hesitation.
On the 17th of January 1944, during the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive, Maria’s tank is hit by a German anti-tank shell.
The tracks are wrecked.
The crew is exposed in a forward position.
Maria does what she always does.
She climbs out to repair the tracks under fire.
While she works, a German artillery shell explodes nearby.
Shell fragments strike her in the head.
She loses consciousness immediately.
Her crew pulls her back inside the tank and rushes her to a Soviet field hospital near Kiev.
From there, she is transferred to Smolensk.
For 2 months, she lies in a coma.
Her body never recovers.
On the 15th of March 1944, Maria Oktyabrskaya dies.
She is 38 years old.
In August of 1944, she is posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
She is the first female tank driver to receive the award.
Her tank, the Fighting Girlfriend, fights all the way to Berlin in 1945 and is present for the final destruction of the regime that killed her husband.
A widow from Ukraine spent every ruble she had to buy a tank, drove that tank into battle, and personally killed dozens of the men who had taken her husband from her.
The SS had laughed at the idea of women in combat.
They were not laughing when the Fighting girlfriend was rowing toward them.
Number seven, Maria Oktyabrskaya, the widow with a tank.
Number six, Josephine Baker, United States and France.
In 1940, at the most glamorous embassy parties in Europe, the most famous woman in the world is laughing, dancing, drinking champagne with German diplomats, Italian generals, and Japanese ambassadors.
She is wearing diamonds.
She is wearing furs.
She is wearing nothing under her dress except military grade intelligence reports pinned to her underwear with safety pins.
Her sheet music has invisible ink notes scrolled between the staves describing German troop movements.
No border guard will dare to strip search her.
No customs officer will dare to confiscate her music.
She is Josephine Baker, the biggest star on the planet, and she is the most unlikely Allied spy of the entire war.
Josephine is born Freda Josephine McDonald in St.
Louis, Missouri on the 3rd of June, 1906.
She is born into poverty so deep that as a child she sleeps in rat-infested rooms and dances on street corners for coins.
At 8 years old, she is working menial jobs to help support her mother.
At 13, she is married for the first time.
At 15, she is touring with a vaudeville troupe called the Dixie Steppers.
By 19, she is on a steamship to Paris because the United States has nothing to offer a black woman with her talent except segregation and hatred.
In Paris, she becomes a sensation overnight.
By the late 1920s, she is the highest-paid entertainer in Europe.
She headlines the Folies Bergère.
She stars in films.
She walks pet cheetahs through the streets of Paris on a diamond collar leash.
She is, by some measures, the most photographed woman in the world.
She is granted French citizenship.
France gives her, as she later puts it, the freedom and dignity that the country of her birth refused to offer.
When Germany invades France in 1940, Josephine is 43 years old and has every reason in the world to leave for the safety of America.
She refuses.
She tells everyone who will listen that France is her country now, and France will not be abandoned.
The head of French military intelligence, Jacques Abtey, approaches her.
He needs spies.
Specifically, he needs spies whose fame is so massive that no one would ever suspect them.
Josephine Baker is by definition the worst possible spy.
She cannot move quietly.
She cannot blend in.
She cannot travel without attracting crowds.
And that is exactly why Abtey wants her.
Her fame will be her cover.
She accepts immediately.
She refuses any payment.
She tells Abtey, “France made me what I am.
The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life.
” She begins gathering intelligence at embassy parties across Paris and across neutral Europe.
She charms German officers.
She listens to Italian diplomats.
She picks up details about troop movements, supply lines, ship deployments, and air defenses.
She writes the intelligence down on her sheet music in invisible ink.
She pins detailed notes inside her underwear, secured by a safety pin.
She knows that no border official, German or otherwise, will dare to strip search Josephine Baker.
She also turns her chateau in the Dordogne, the Chateau des Milandes, into a base for the French Resistance way.
Refugees hide in her basement.
Resistance fighters use her wine cellar as a meeting point.
When German High Command receives intelligence that Josephine is hiding resistance members, the SS sends officers to search her home.
She charms them.
She offers them drinks.
She tells them stories.
She poses for photographs.
She entirely makes them forget about the basement where men with guns are listening to every word.
The SS leaves.
The resistance fighters survive.
In November of 1940, French intelligence needs documents smuggled out of France to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government in London.
Josephine and Abtey come up with the plan.
She will travel to neutral Portugal under the cover of a tour of South America.
She will carry the documents herself.
She hides photographs under her dress.
She writes intelligence notes in invisible ink on her sheet music.
At the Spanish border, every officer present is too busy staring at the international superstar to even glance at her secretary who is actually the chief of French military counterintelligence.
They cross the border without a single document being checked.
She continues to spy throughout the war.
She tours North Africa performing for Allied troops while gathering intelligence about Axis operations.
Her intelligence about beaches, tides, and German defensive positions helps support Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.
She refuses to sing for segregated American troop audiences demanding that black soldiers be allowed to sit with white soldiers at every show.
After D-Day and Paris is liberated, she walks through the streets of her adopted city wearing a military uniform.
She sells her jewelry to buy food and coal for hungry Parisians.
France awards her the Croix de Guerre.
She receives the Medal of the French Resistance with rosette.
Charles de Gaulle personally names her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest civilian decoration France can give.
In 1963, she stands at the March on Washington wearing her Free French uniform and gives the only speech delivered by a woman that day, speaking just before Martin Luther King delivers his I Have a Dream address.
In 2021, more than 45 years after her death, she becomes the first black woman to be inducted into the Pantheon in Paris, France’s highest national honor.
The SS had access to every party where she performed.
They watched her dance.
They drank her champagne.
They never once suspected that the laughing American singer in the gold dress was carrying their own secrets back to London inside her clothes.
Number six, Josephine Baker, the most famous spy in the world.
Number five, Pearl Witherington, Britain and France.
In the early morning hours of the 22nd of September 1943, a Halifax bomber drones over central France.
The bomb bay opens.
A 29-year-old British secretary steps into open air and falls into the dark.
Her code name is Marie.
By morning, she will be one of the most dangerous agents the Special Operations Executive has ever put into occupied Europe.
Within months, she will be commanding thousands of armed fighters.
By the end of the war, 18,000 German soldiers will surrender to her personally.
The Germans will put a 1 million franc bounty on her head.
And the British, after the war, will try to give her a civilian award.
She will tell them, in no uncertain terms, exactly where they can put it.
Cecile Pearl Witherington is born in Paris on the 24th of June, 1914, the daughter of British parents who have moved to France in search of a better life.
Her father turns out to be an alcoholic drifter who is rarely home.
Pearl grows up sometimes scrambling for food, sometimes fighting off debt collectors at the door, but always devoted to her mother and her three younger sisters.
By the time she is a teenager, she is the family’s main breadwinner, working as a secretary at the British Embassy in Paris.
She falls in love with a young Parisian named Henri Cornioley, the son of a perfume merchant.
When France falls in 1940, Henri is captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner of war camp.
Pearl and her mother and sisters escape over the Pyrenees and finally reach England.
She joins the Air Ministry as a secretary, but Pearl wants to fight.
She has watched France fall.
She has watched her fiance stay taken.
She volunteers for the Special Operations Executive in June of 1943.
SOE training reports describe her as outstanding.
The official report calls her “probably the best shot, male or female, we have yet had.
” She is parachuted into occupied France on the 22nd of September, 1943, to serve as a courier for the Stationer network run by Maurice Southgate.
For 8 months, Pearl crosses central France by train, by bicycle, by foot, posing as a cosmetic saleswoman.
She has no fixed home.
She sleeps on trains.
She is stopped at German checkpoints constantly.
She is searched.
Her false identity papers are examined.
Every time she talks her way through.
Every time she walks away.
In May of 1944, the Gestapo arrests Maurice Southgate and sends him to Buchenwald.
The wireless operator is arrested the following day.
Pearl is the only senior agent of the Stationer network still free.
SOE in London makes a decision unprecedented for an officially non-combatant female agent.
They tell her to take over.
She becomes the leader of a new network called Wrestler.
Her new code name is Pauline.
She operates in the Valençay-Issoudun-Châteauroux triangle in central France.
Her network swells from a few hundred maquis fighters to over 3,000.
Some accounts say her command eventually reached 3,800 fighters.
With the help of her fiance Henri, who has escaped his German camp and rejoined her, Pearl organizes air drops of weapons and supplies.
She trains her men in sabotage.
She does not personally issue combat orders to French men, knowing that a young English woman commanding French farmers would create problems.
Instead, she finds a willing French colonel to act as the field commander while she runs the network’s intelligence, communications, and supply.
In June of 1944, in the days after D-Day, the Wrestler network and its sister network Shipwright cause more than 800 breaks in railway lines across central France.
The Paris-Bordeaux line, vital for moving German reinforcements to Normandy, is cut so badly that an entire SS Panzer division, Das Reich, takes more than 2 weeks to reach the Normandy front when it should have taken 3 days.
Pearl’s men slow the Germans down by every means imaginable.
By the time the Germans arrive, the allies are already secure on the beaches.
On the 11th of June, 1944, the Germans attack her network’s headquarters at the Le Suech Chateau near Dun le Poelier.
2,000 German troops with artillery surround the Chateau where Pearl is staying with about 140 Maquis fighters.
The fight lasts 14 hours.
Pearl hides her network’s cache in a tin and crawls into a wheat field where she stays hidden until lightfall.
Her fiance Henri stays behind to fight.
The Maquis hold the Chateau.
The Germans take heavy losses and pull back.
The Wrestler network survives.
The Germans put a 1 million franc bounty on Pearl’s head.
They never collect it.
By the end of the war, her network has killed or captured thousands of German troops.
As the German army collapses in central France, 18,000 German soldiers surrender to her personally rather than face the partisans.
They walk in single file across her territory and lay down their arms in front of a 29-year-old British secretary.
After the war, Pearl is recommended for the Military Cross, the British Army’s standard combat decoration.
She is informed that women are not eligible.
She is offered an MBE instead, the civilian version.
She refuses it.
She writes a letter to SOE’s Vera Atkins that includes one of the most famous lines in the history of female military service.
The work which I undertook was of a purely military nature in enemy-occupied country.
There was nothing remotely civil about what I did.
She demands a military decoration.
In 1946, she gets one, the military MBE.
She marries Henry in Kensington Register Office in October of 1944.
They are together until his death decades later.
In 2004, at the age of 90, Queen Elizabeth II presents her with a CBE in Paris.
In 2006, the British government finally agrees to give Pearl Witherington her parachute wings, which she has been denied for over 60 years on the technicality that she only made four jumps and a fifth was required.
As she pins them to her cardigan in her old people’s home, she tells the press she has been complaining about it for 63 years and is delighted to finally be entitled.
She dies in February of 2008 at the age of 93, the British secretary who commanded an army.
Number five, Pearl Witherington, the woman who refused the wrong medal.
Number four, Krystyna Skarbek, also known as Christine Granville.
Poland and France.
On a warm August morning in 1944 in the small town of Digne-les-Bains in the south of France, a young woman in summer clothes cycles up to the gates of the local Gestapo headquarters.
She has no weapon.
She has no backup.
She has no plan beyond what she can think up on the way to the door.
Three British SOE agents, including her own network commander Francis Cammaerts, are inside that building.
They are scheduled to be executed by firing squad within hours.
She has come to talk them out, not break them out.
Talk them out.
And she is going to do it by bluffing the Gestapo so completely that they will hand her three men they have just sentenced to death.
Krystyna Skarbek is born in Warsaw on the 1st of May 1908.
Her father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, is Polish aristocracy descended from one of the oldest noble families in the country.
Her mother, Stefania Goldfeder, comes from a wealthy assimilated Jewish banking family.
Krystyna grows up between palaces, riding stables, and ski slopes in the Tatra Mountains.
She is fluent in Polish, German, French, and English.
She is an Olympic-level skier.
She is, by every account, breathtakingly beautiful.
When the Germans invade Poland in September of 1939, Krystyna is 29 and married to a Polish diplomat, but she is already restless, already in love with someone else, already looking for a way to make herself useful in the coming storm.
She and her husband escape to London.
She walks into a meeting with George Taylor of the British Intelligence Service and tells him she has a plan.
She wants to be inserted into Hungary, which is at this point still officially neutral.
From Hungary, she will ski across the Tatra Mountains into German-occupied Poland and establish contact with the Polish underground.
Taylor is astonished by the audacity of the proposal.
He approves it.
Krystyna becomes the first female agent recruited by British Intelligence for the Second World War and the longest serving female agent of the entire war.
In the winter of 1939 and into 1940, Christina makes the journey across the Tatra Mountains by ski multiple times in freezing temperatures, sometimes alone, sometimes with a guide.
She carries microfilm, propaganda leaflets, cash, weapons, and false documents into occupied Poland.
On her final trip out, she carries microfilm so important that British intelligence still studies it today.
The film contains detailed evidence of German preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.
She has handed Britain advanced warning of the largest land invasion in history.
In January of 1941, Christina and her colleague Andre Kowerski are arrested by Hungarian police and handed to the Gestapo.
They are interrogated for hours.
The Gestapo plans to use more brutal methods if cooperation does not begin.
Christina does something only she could think of.
She bites her own tongue until her mouth fills with blood.
She begins coughing the blood up.
She tells the Gestapo, with apparent embarrassment, that she has tuberculosis, an infectious lung disease feared in Europe.
A German doctor examines her.
He notices old lesions in her lungs, the result of an actual mild lung infection she had years before.
The Germans, terrified of being infected, release her and Kowerski rather than risk it.
The trick is so effective that SOE will later adopt it as a standard deception method taught in agent training manuals.
She is given British papers, a new name, and a new identity.
Christina Skarbek becomes Christine Granville.
The name follows her for the rest of her life.
She continues working for British intelligence through North Africa and the Middle East.
In July By 1944, she is parachuted into the Vercors region of southeastern France to support the maquis ahead of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France.
She uses the code name Pauline.
The local maquis call her Miss Pauline.
They are skeptical of a Polish woman commanding their respect at first.
She earns it within weeks.
She negotiates with Polish soldiers who have been forced into the Wehrmacht to defect to the maquis.
She brings entire units of Polish conscripts over to the Allied side.
Then, in August of 1944, comes the moment that makes her a legend.
Her network commander, Francis Cammaerts, his lieutenant, Xan Fielding, and a French officer named Christian Sorensen are captured at a German roadblock in Digne.
They are taken to Gestapo headquarters.
They are interrogated.
They are sentenced to death.
The maquis commanders refuse to launch a rescue.
The prison is too well defended.
The mission is suicide.
Krystyna does not ask permission.
She cycles 40 km to the Gestapo headquarters by herself.
She walks inside.
She demands to speak to whoever is in charge.
She speaks to Albert Schenk, a French liaison officer working with the Germans, and a Gestapo officer named Max Waem.
She has no backup.
She has no proof of anything she is about to say.
She begins to bluff.
She tells them she is a British agent.
She tells them she is the niece of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
She tells them Allied invasion forces are about to overrun Digne within hours.
She tells them that anyone who executes Allied prisoners at this stage will be hunted down and personally prosecuted as a war criminal when the Allies arrive.
But anyone who shows mercy and releases prisoners might be treated leniently.
She offers them a bribe of 2 million francs parachuted in from London the night before.
Every word is a lie.
There is no invasion coming.
There is no Montgomery connection.
There are no Allied tanks rolling toward Dean.
Schenk believes her.
Wem believes her.
Faced with what they think is certain prosecution versus possible survival, they choose survival.
They release Kamerts, Fielding, and Sorensen.
Krystyna walks out of Gestapo headquarters with all three SOE agents alive.
They had been hours from execution.
Kamerts later writes that there has never been, in the history of any war, a more astonishing rescue of captured agents.
Winston Churchill describes Krystyna as his favorite spy.
After the war, Britain awards her the George Medal and the Order of the British Empire.
France awards her the Croix de Guerre, but Britain has no further use for her.
She is dismissed from SOE in 1945 with 2 weeks of severance pay.
She becomes a stateless person.
Poland is now under communist control.
She cannot go home.
She takes work as a steward on cruise ships.
On the 15th of June, 1952, in a London hotel, an obsessed fellow steward stabs her to death.
She is 44 years old.
The Polish aristocrat who skied microfilm across the Tatra Mountains and bluffed the Gestapo out of three SOE agents is buried in a London cemetery in what is meant to be a quiet grave.
Number four.
Krystyna Skarbek, Christine Granville, Churchill’s favorite spy.
Number three.
Virginia Hall, United States and France.
In November of 1942, in the freezing dark of the Pyrenees Mountains, a woman walks through the snow at 50 miles a day with a wooden leg strapped to her right thigh.
The Gestapo calls her La Dame Qui Boite, the Limping Lady.
They consider her, in writing, the most dangerous of all Allied spies, Klaus Barbie himself, the Butcher of Lyon, has personally vowed to capture her.
Posters with her face have been pasted on walls across France.
She is 40 miles from the Spanish border.
The pass she has to cross is 7,500 ft high.
The temperature is below freezing.
Her artificial leg, which she has nicknamed Cuthbert, is digging into the stump of her thigh and turning the skin to a bloody mess.
And she is walking step by step because the alternative is to stop and let the SS take her.
Virginia Hall will never stop.
Virginia Hall is born on the 6th of April, 1906, in Baltimore, Maryland, to a wealthy and progressive family who put no limits on what their daughter could do.
She is voted most original in her high school yearbook.
She studies in Paris and Vienna.
She becomes fluent in French, German, and Italian with some Russian on top.
She applies to the United States Foreign Service.
She is rejected on the basis that women cannot be officers.
She keeps trying.
She moves to Turkey as a consular clerk.
And then in 1933, during a bird hunting expedition, her shotgun discharges into her left foot while she is climbing over a fence.
Gangrene sets in.
Doctors amputate her left leg below the knee.
She is fitted with a 7-lb wooden prosthetic with an aluminum foot.
She names it Cuthbert.
The State Department rejects her again.
They cannot have officers with artificial legs.
She quits in disgust.
She moves to Paris in 1939, becomes an ambulance driver, then drives wounded French soldiers from the front to military hospitals after the German breakthrough.
When France falls, she goes to London and walks into a recruiting meeting with the newly formed Special Operations Executive.
They are impressed by her language skills, her courage, and what they perceive as her sheer stubbornness.
They make her the SOE’s very first female agent inserted into France.
She arrives in Vichy France in August of 1941 posing as a reporter for the New York Post.
Her code name is Diane.
Her circuit is called Heckler.
From a small apartment in Lyon, Virginia Hall does what no one before her has done.
She builds an entire spy network from scratch.
She recruits French civilians.
She organizes safe houses.
She arranges weapons drops.
She helps downed Allied airmen escape across the Pyrenees.
She passes intelligence on German troop movements to London.
She organizes the breakout of captured SOE agents from prison in Mauzac.
Within a year she has become so essential to British operations in France that Klaus Barbie has dedicated significant Gestapo resources to finding her.
The Germans know she is in Lyon.
They know she is American.
They know she walks with a limp.
They do not know her name.
Posters appear across France.
The woman with the limp must be found.
Virginia changes her appearance constantly.
She dyes her hair.
She changes her name.
She uses Marie Monin, Germaine, Camille, Brigitte, Diane.
She avoids photographs.
She trusts very few people.
In November of 1942, when the Germans occupy all of France after Operation Torch, Virginia knows she has hours to get out.
She begins her escape across the Pyrenees with two guides who at first refused to take a woman, let alone an amputee.
She convinces them.
She walks 50 mi in 3 days through snow-choked mountain passes at 7,500 ft in winter with a wooden leg that is shredding her thigh into bloody pulp.
She radios SOE during the crossing.
She mentions in a half-joking aside that she hopes Cuthbert will not be too bothersome on the way over.
SOE in London, not understanding that Cuthbert is her prosthetic leg, assumes Cuthbert must be a difficult agent traveling with her.
They send the deadly serious reply, “If Cuthbert is troublesome, eliminate him.
” She makes it to Spain.
She is arrested by Spanish authorities for crossing the border illegally.
The American Embassy negotiates her release after 6 weeks.
She wants to return to France.
SOE tells her she is too compromised.
The Germans know too much about her.
She would be dead within days.
So, in 1944, she joins the American Office of Strategic Services and is sent back to France anyway.
The OSS disguises her as a 60-year-old peasant milkmaid.
Her hair is dyed gray.
Her teeth are filed down.
She walks with the shuffle of an old woman to hide her limp.
She arrives in Brittany by motor gunboat on the 21st of March, 1944.
Her new code name is Diane again.
In central France, she becomes the operational center for Allied resistance in the Haute-Loire region.
She organizes three battalions of Maquis fighters.
She maps drop zones.
She receives parachuted weapons and supplies.
She runs her own wireless radio, one of the most dangerous jobs in occupied Europe, transmitting intelligence to London.
Her forces destroy four bridges.
They cut multiple rail lines.
They derail freight trains.
They kill an estimated 150 German soldiers.
They capture another 500.
They direct Allied air strikes against German positions.
By the time American forces arrive in September of 1944, the Maquis under Virginia Hall have already cleared the entire department of Haute-Loire of German troops.
She is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by President Truman, who wants to hold a public ceremony.
She declines.
She tells him she is still operational and most anxious to get busy.
She says she does not want her face known.
The medal is pinned on her in a small private ceremony attended only by her mother and General William Donovan, the head of the OSS.
She is the only civilian woman to receive the Distinguished Service Cross in the entire Second World War.
She joins the CIA after the war.
She works there until her mandatory retirement at 60.
She refuses nearly all interviews.
Her family does not know what she did until decades later.
She dies in 1982 at the age of 76.
Klaus Barbie hunted her for years.
Wanted posters with her likeness covered the walls of France.
The Gestapo committed her in writing to be the most dangerous of all Allied spies.
They never caught her.
She walked across the Pyrenees with a wooden leg.
She walked back into France in disguise as an old woman after they had marked her for death.
She helped build the resistance army that would liberate central France.
Number three, Virginia Hall, the Limping Lady the SS could not stop.
Number two, Hannie Schaft, the Netherlands.
On the morning of the 17th of April, 1945, three weeks before the Allies liberate the Netherlands, two men walk a 24-year-old woman with red hair through the cold dunes near the village of Bloemendaal.
She has been beaten, tortured, and starved.
She has spent four weeks in solitary confinement.
She knows what is about to happen.
One of the men raises his pistol.
He fires.
The bullet only wounds her.
She is still alive.
She looks at her executioner.
And then Jannetje Johanna Schaft, the girl with the red hair, says five words that will be remembered forever in the Netherlands.
I shoot better than that.
A second officer steps forward and finishes the job.
Three weeks later, the war is over, but Hannie Schaft has already become a legend.
Hannie Schaft is born Jannetje Johanna Schaft in the Dutch city of Haarlem on the 16th of September, 1920.
Her parents are teachers and committed socialists.
Her older sister died when Hannie was young and her parents have raised their surviving daughter with intense protection and intense political conviction.
Hannie is bright.
She is serious.
She is studying international law at the University of Amsterdam when the German army invades the Netherlands on the 10th of May, 1940.
Two of her closest friends at the university are Jewish students named Philine Polak and Sonja Frank.
Within months, both will be in danger of being deported.
Hannie begins her resistance career the way many young women in occupied Europe begin it.
She steals identity papers.
She forges documents.
She helps her Jewish friends and their families hide and obtain ration coupons.
In 1943, the German authorities require all Dutch university students to sign an oath of loyalty to the occupation.
Hannie refuses.
She drops out of school.
She returns to Haarlem and joins the Council of Resistance, a militant underground group with ties to the Dutch Communist Party.
She does not join the Communists because she shares their ideology.
She joins them because, she later tells her parents, they are the only ones actually fighting.
The Council of Resistance wants her to be a courier.
She refuses.
She tells them she wants to kill Germans.
They run her through firearms training.
They run her through explosives training.
They want to be sure.
As her final test, a senior fighter in the resistance points out a man in the street and tells Hannie, “This man is a senior Gestapo officer who must be eliminated immediately.
” He hands her a pistol.
Hannie walks up behind the man, raises the pistol to his head, and pulls the trigger.
The pistol clicks.
It is unloaded.
The man, it turns out, is a member of the resistance.
The whole encounter has been a test.
She has passed.
What follows over the next 18 months is a campaign of armed resistance that the Germans cannot stop.
Working alongside the Oversteegen sisters, Truus and Freddie, two other young women in the same Haarlem network, Hannie Schaft sabotages railway lines.
She blows up power stations.
She gathers intelligence from German soldiers by pretending to flirt with them in cafes.
She steals weapons.
She smuggles them in baby carriages.
She passes Jewish children to families willing to hide them.
And, increasingly, she assassinates.
The targets are Nazi collaborators, Dutch traitors who have been informing on resistance members, and German SS officers identified by the resistance as particularly brutal.
Hannie carries out attacks in broad daylight, riding past her targets on a bicycle and firing as she passes.
The Germans become obsessed with catching her.
A passport photograph is found on the body of one of her associates after a failed sabotage attack on a power station in Velsen-Noord.
The photograph shows a young woman with striking red hair.
The hunt begins.
The Germans put up wanted posters across the Netherlands.
Wanted: the girl with the red hair.
Hannie dyes her hair black.
She wears glasses with plain lenses.
She changes her appearance constantly.
For over a year, she avoids capture.
On the 21st of March, 1945, with the war within weeks of ending, Hannie is stopped at a routine military checkpoint in Haarlem while distributing copies of the underground communist newspaper De Waarheid.
The checkpoint guards search her bicycle.
They find the newspapers.
They find secret resistance documents she is also transporting.
She is arrested and taken to a prison in Amsterdam.
She is interrogated.
She is tortured.
She is placed in solitary confinement.
She refuses to give any information about her fellow fighters.
Then her former colleague Anna Weinhoff, who has been broken by the Germans, identifies her by the red roots of her dyed black hair.
Hannie admits her own resistance activities.
She gives the Germans no names.
By the middle of April, the Germans and the Dutch resistance have agreed to halt all executions because the war is essentially over.
Hannie Schaft is excluded from the agreement.
The Dutch Nazi officials in charge of her case decide she is too dangerous to let live even in defeat.
On the 17th of April 1945, with German surrender only 3 weeks away, two officers, a Dutchman named Martin Kuiper and a German named Matthias Schmitz, drive Hannie to the dunes near Bloemendaal, the same dunes where hundreds of Dutch resistance members have been executed throughout the war.
Kuiper fires first.
The bullet wounds her, but does not kill her.
Hannie raises her head from the sand and says the words that will be carved into Dutch memory forever.
Ich schieß besser.
I shoot better.
Schmitz steps forward with a submachine gun and finishes her.
She is 24 years old.
3 weeks later, the Germans surrender.
The Netherlands is liberated.
On the 27th of November 1945, Hannie’s body is reburied in a state funeral attended by Queen Wilhelmina, who calls her the symbol of the resistance.
422 bodies were discovered in those dunes.
421 were men.
Only one was a woman.
Hannie Schaft, a 24-year-old law student with red hair riding a bicycle killed Gestapo officers and Nazi collaborators across her own country for 2 years.
She refused to give a single name under torture.
She mocked her own executioner with her dying breath.
Number two, Hannie Schaft, the girl with the red hair, the girl who shot better than the man who killed her.
Number one, Nancy Wake, Australia, France, Britain.
In April of 1944, somewhere in the dark sky over central France, a 31-year-old Australian woman leaps out of a Liberator bomber and parachutes into German-occupied Europe.
The parachute catches in the branches of a tree.
She hangs suspended in the dark, swinging gently in the wind.
A French Maquis fighter named Henri Tardivat approaches the tree.
He looks up at the woman dangling above him and says, “I hope all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.
” She looks down at him and replies, “Don’t give me that French nonsense.
” Within months, she will be commanding 7,500 armed French resistance fighters.
She will personally kill an SS sentry with her bare hands.
She will lead a guerrilla raid on Gestapo headquarters that wipes out the building in 30 seconds.
She will bicycle 500 km through German checkpoints in 72 hours.
The Gestapo will put a 5 million franc bounty on her head.
They will call her La Souris Blanche, the white mouse.
She is at the top of their most wanted list in Vichy France.
They will never catch her.
Her name is Nancy Wake, and she is the most decorated Allied servicewoman of the entire war.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake is born in Wellington, New Zealand on the 30th of August, 1912.
Her family moves to Sydney, Australia when she is 2 years old.
Her father abandons the family soon after.
Nancy grows up poor, fiercely independent, and determined to see the world.
At 16, she runs away from home to work as a nurse.
At 20, she uses a small inheritance from an aunt to travel to New York and then London, where she trains herself as a journalist.
By the mid-1930s, she is working for the Hearst newspaper empire in Paris.
In 1933, she is sent to Vienna to interview Adolf Hitler.
She witnesses Jewish men and women being beaten by Nazi gangs in the streets.
She makes a private vow that day to do everything in her power to oppose Hitler for the rest of her life.
In 1939, she marries a wealthy French industrialist named Henri Fiocca.
They live in Marseille.
When France falls in 1940, Nancy joins the French Resistance almost immediately.
She becomes a courier for the escape network run by Captain Ian Garrow, later taken over by Albert Guerisse and renamed the Pat O’Leary Line.
The network smuggles Allied airmen, escaped prisoners of war, and Jewish refugees out of France through Spain to Britain.
Over the next two and a half years, Nancy personally helps over a thousand men escape occupied France.
The Gestapo notices.
They cannot identify her, but they begin tracking the woman who keeps evading their checkpoints.
They cannot catch her.
She always slips through.
They call her the white mouse.
They put a 5 million franc bounty on her head.
They make her the number one most wanted person on their list in Vichy France.
Henri tells her to leave.
By the autumn of 1943, the Gestapo is closing in.
After six failed escape attempts of her own, Nancy finally reaches Spain and then England.
Henri stays behind.
The Gestapo arrests him.
They torture him to find out where his wife has gone.
He never tells them.
They execute him in October of 1943.
Nancy will not learn of his death until the war ends.
In England, she joins the Special Operations Executive.
Her instructors at SOE write that she is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts.
Then she is like five men.
She is trained in weapons, explosives, sabotage, parachuting, silent killing, and unarmed combat.
On the night of the 29th of April, 1944, she parachutes into the Auvergne region of central France.
Her mission is to coordinate the local maquis groups ahead of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Within weeks, she has united the scattered maquis cells of the Auvergne into a unified fighting force of 7,500 armed men, eventually rising to 8,240 fighters in 18 separate groups under her overall coordination.
She organizes weapons drops.
She trains fighters.
She enforces discipline.
When a captured German agent posing as a French woman is exposed in her camp, Nancy interrogates her.
She determines the woman is a spy.
The other maquis members do not have the heart to execute her.
Nancy does.
She tells them she will do it herself.
The maquis fighters reluctantly agree.
Nancy executes the German spy by firing squad and walks away without a second glance.
On a raid against a German weapons factory, an SS sentry spots Nancy and raises his rifle to fire and alert the rest of the garrison.
Nancy is 10 ft away from him.
She closes the distance before he can shout.
She uses the silent killing technique SOE has trained her in.
A single judo chop to the throat with the side of her hand.
The sentry dies before he hits the ground.
She later describes the moment in a television interview with characteristic understatement.
They had taught this judo chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practiced away at it.
But, this was the only time I used it.
Whack, and it killed him all right.
I was really surprised.
In June of 1944, after D-Day, her wireless operator is forced to destroy the radio codes during a German raid to prevent capture.
Without the codes, Nancy’s maquis cannot request weapons or supplies from London.
The nearest SOE operator with spare codes is over 250 km away through German-controlled territory.
Nancy volunteers to go herself.
She gets on a bicycle.
She cycles 500 km, more than 300 mi, in 72 hours through multiple German checkpoints.
She flirts her way through some.
She talks her way through others.
She arrives exhausted, retrieves the codes, and cycles back.
Her communications are restored within 4 days.
Her men cannot believe she survived.
She later says, “It was the only time during the war she truly thought she would die.
” Her finest hour comes in the late summer of 1944.
Nancy plans a raid on the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon.
She picks the time herself, 12:25 in the afternoon, 5 minutes before the Gestapo officers will gather with characteristic German punctuality for their 12:30 meal.
Nancy and her maquis arrive in four cars.
They jump out.
They throw grenades into every room of the building.
They follow up with submachine gun fire on both floors.
30 seconds, they are back in the cars and gone.
The building is destroyed.
Many Gestapo officers are killed in their own dining room.
By the end of September 1944, Nancy’s maquis have effectively cleared the Auvergne of German forces ahead of the advancing Allied armies.
The German 19th Army loses thousands of soldiers in the Auvergne to Nancy’s guerrilla operations.
When the war ends, Nancy Wake is the most decorated Allied servicewoman of the entire conflict.
She receives the George Medal from Britain.
She receives the Croix de Guerre from France three times.
She receives the Médaille de la Résistance.
She receives the Legion of Honor from France.
Decades later, Australia gives her the Companion of the Order of Australia.
She returns to Marseille after the war and learns that Henri has been dead for over a year, executed by the Gestapo for refusing to betray her.
She never forgives herself.
She works briefly for British Intelligence.
She runs for political office in Australia, unsuccessfully.
She marries a former RAF pilot named John Forward and moves back to Sydney.
He dies in 1997.
She sells her medals in 2003 to support herself, saying with her usual humor, “There was no point in keeping them.
I will probably go to hell, and they would melt anyway.
” She moves to London.
She spends her final years at the Stafford Hotel in St.
James drinking gin and tonic at the bar with her own dedicated bar stool.
She dies on the 7th of August, 2011, at the age of 98.
Her ashes, at her own request, are scattered in the hills around the Château de France, where she fought with her maquis.
A bank clerk from Adelaide became the most wanted woman in occupied France.
She helped over a thousand men escape Nazi Europe.
She killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.
She cycled 500 km through enemy territory to save her network.
She led 7,000 maquis fighters to victory against the German army in the mountains of central France.
She destroyed Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon in 30 seconds.
The SS hunted her with everything they had.
They never caught her.
They never even learned her name during the war.
They only knew her by the nickname she gave them, the White Mouse.
Number one, Nancy Wake, the most dangerous woman in Hitler’s Europe.
10 women, 10 different countries, religions, ages, and stories.
A Polish aristocrat who skied microfilm across the mountains.
A Jewish nurse who walked alone into Nazi Germany.
A teenage poisoner who killed an SS officer with his own gun.
A widow who bought a tank with her life savings.
The most famous entertainer in the world spying in her underwear.
A British secretary commanding 3,000 fighters.
A Pole bluffing the Gestapo into freeing three condemned agents.
An American with a wooden leg the Germans could not catch.
A Dutch law student who mocked her own executioner.
And an Australian bank clerk who became the most decorated woman of the war.
The SS believed in many things.
They believed in racial superiority.
They believed in military discipline.
They believed in the absolute power of fear.
They did not believe that the women in front of them were threats.
They learned, one by one, what that mistake costs.
Thousands of German soldiers died because these women existed.
Hundreds of Allied agents lived because these women fought.
Entire networks operated for years because these women refused to break.
But here is the real question.
Did we get the ranking right? Should Nancy Wake be number one? Or should Virginia Hall? Should Hanni Schaft be higher because she paid the ultimate price? Should Zinaida Portnova be number one because she was only 17? Drop a comment right now and tell us your ranking.
Tell us who we missed.
Tell us where you are watching from.
Our community spans the entire world and you are part of what makes this channel work.
If this video changed how you see the women of the Second World War, smash that like button.
Every like tells YouTube this is content people want to see.
Hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss our deep dives into the forgotten heroes of military history.
We have more rankings coming, more stories that never made it into the textbooks, more history that deserves to be remembered.
Thank you for reading.
