The awful fate of betrayed volunteer who operated behind enemy lines in France
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR IN HER Women’s Auxiliary Air Force uniform, Diana Rowden looks like any other young female volunteer to help Britain’s war effort.
But Rowden became a secret agent dropped behind enemy lines in France and her story has been revealed in full for the first time.
A new book details Rowden’s work with the French Resistance as part of the Special Operations Executive. It also lays bare her fate.
Betrayed, she was executed by the Nazis shortly after D-Day, aged 29.
This week, for the first time, Rowden’s family met a descendant of the French family that sheltered her before she was captured.
Poppy Lloyd, who bears a striking resemblance to her distant cousin, said: “The family knew a little of what Diana did and that she died tragically. We are proud and humbled to hear her story.”
Born in Chelsea, west London, in 1915, Rowden spent her childhood living in the South of France. After a spell at a Surrey boarding school she moved to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne.
When war broke out, she joined the Red Cross but in 1941 she returned to England and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her bilingual skills meant she was soon recruited by the SOE and in 1943 she was sent to France, working as a courier in the Jura region.
With another British agent, John Young, she lived in the village of Clairvaux-lelacs under the care of the Janier-Dubry family, who owned a sawmill. But five months after her arrival, she was betrayed. A new mem- ber of the SOE named Andre Maugenet, codenamed “Benoit”, was sent to Clairvaux. The Germans were tipped off about his arrival and Maugenet was captured and interrogated. When “Benoit” arrived in the village – historians do not know who this really was – he led the Gestapo to the mill. Rowden was caught and taken for interrogation by the SS in Paris. On July 5, 1944 she was transferred along with three other female agents – Andree Borrell, Vera Leigh and Sonya Olschanezky – to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace.
That night the women were given lethal injections before their bodies were thrown into a furnace.
Rowden was posthumously awarded an MBE and the Croix de Guerre.
Pascal Juif, from the Janier-Dubry family, travelled from France for the London launch of the book about Rowden, Her Finest Hour, by Gabrielle McDonald-Rothsell. He said: “I heard about this story from my grandmother. In those few months she became a member of our family.”