Jeannie Rousseau
Translator for the invading German army in France who fed vital information to the Allied forces
JEANNIE ROUSSEAU, who has died aged 98, was a Frenchgerman interpreter who took advantage of her photographic memory and her talent for flirting with Nazi officers to send intelligence on German military installations to London.
Her precise reports on the Germans’ secret development of the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets helped persuade Winston Churchill to bomb the test site at Peenemunde and blunted the impact of a weapon the Nazis had hoped would change the course of the war.
An only child, Jeannie Rousseau was born at St Brieuc, Brittany, on April 1 1919. Her father, Jean, was a civil servant in the French foreign ministry and became mayor of Paris’s 17th Arrondissement. Jeannie studied at the University of Paris, where she finished first in her class and showed a special gift for languages.
When the Germans invaded in June 1940, Jean moved the family and the arrondissement’s archives to the coastal village of Dinard, near St Malo, which he apparently thought the Germans would never reach. But they arrived in their thousands, preparing for an invasion of Britain. When the local mayor asked for a German speaker to provide a liaison with the army command, Rousseau volunteered his daughter.
The German officers enjoyed Jeannie’s company, offering her gifts and walks on the beach – which she refused. They talked to her about everything, including military plans. One day in September 1940, she was visited by a member of the Resistance who asked if she would be willing to pass on information she picked up. “I said, ‘What’s the point of knowing all that, if not to pass it on?’” she recalled.
Soon the British were receiving so much intelligence about German operations in the Dinard area that German spies in London reported that there must be a mole. Jeannie was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1941 and held in prison in Rennes. But German officers from Dinard insisted that their beautiful translator could not be a spy, and she was released, though banned from Brittany.
She moved to Paris, where she found work at the French Industrialists’ Syndicate, a job which involved regular meetings with the German military commander’s staff, based at the Hotel Majestic. In 1941, on a night train from Paris to Vichy, she ran into Georges Lamarque, a mathematician who remembered her from her university days. Lamarque told her he was building “a little outfit” that was gathering intelligence and asked her if she would be prepared to work for him.
She agreed and went on to tell him that there were certain parts of the Hotel Majestic that were out of bounds because the Germans were working on special weapons, but which she felt she could penetrate. Lamarque made her part of his network, known as the Druids, and gave her the code name “Amniarix”.
As luck had it, she soon met several German officers who had been her friends at Dinard and who were now working on secret projects. The officers would gather in the evenings at a house on the Avenue Hoche, often in the company of their beautiful young French companion.
There, they would talk freely among themselves about their work. “I had become part of the equipment, a piece of furniture,” she recalled. After these sessions Jeannie would go to a safe house and write out what she had heard.
In 1943 she overheard conversations about new weapons that were being designed in eastern Germany. “I teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted that they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any aeroplane. I kept saying: ‘What you are telling me cannot be true!’ I must have said that 100 times. ‘I’ll show you,’ one of the Germans said. ‘How?’ I asked, and he answered: ‘It’s here on a piece of paper!’”
The German officer showed her a document detailing the test site at Peenemunde, and even showed her drawings of the rockets.
By September 1943 she had gathered enough information about the V-2 rockets for Lamarque to send a detailed report to Britain – one of the great intelligence documents of the war. The information was on Churchill’s desk within days of its arrival.
In the spring of 1944 the British decided to evacuate Jeannie Rousseau by boat to England for debriefing, but in Brittany on April 25 the operation was blown and she was arrested.
She would end up in Ravensbrück concentration camp, her papers identifying her as a Madeleine Chaufeur. When the Germans demanded her name, she told them truthfully that she was Jeannie Rousseau. Yet somehow, they never realised the woman they were holding was a spy.
In August 1944 she was in a group of several hundred American, British and French women who were sent to Torgau to work in an underground ammunition factory. They protested and were later sent in mid-winter to Konigsberg-am-oder to haul rocks and gravel to build an airstrip. Eventually she smuggled herself on to a truck which was taking typhoid sufferers to the gas chambers at Ravensbrück.
There she was placed in the punishment block and was there when the “white buses” of the Swedish Red Cross arrived in April 1945. Jeannie Rousseau intimidated her Nazi guards, saying: “You will be in terrible trouble after the war ends. They know I’m here. They will come after you and find you and punish you.” She left the camp on one of the last rescue buses, on April 23.
When she arrived in Sweden, Jeannie Rousseau weighed little more than five stone but, after an operation on her lungs, she began a long period of recuperation. At a sanatorium in France she met her husband, Henri de Clarens, son of the Vicomte de Clarens, who had survived Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
After the war Jeannie Rousseau worked as an interpreter for the United Nations and other international organisations. When her fellow countrymen were reluctant to probe too deeply into the history of the occupation, Jeannie Rousseau put her memories to one side. Among other things her protest at the Torgau munitions factory had resulted in the death of some companions and some held her to blame.
In 1993 she accepted the CIA’S Seal Medal from its director James Woolsey and in 1998 she finally told her story. Her actions, she explained, had been “a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing”.
Her husband predeceased her.
Jeannie Rousseau, born April 1 1919, died August 25 2017