Courageous young spy who warned Britain about the V2
As a young woman in Occupied Paris, Jeannie Rousseau worked as an interpreter for an association of French businessmen, representing their interests, and helping them to negotiate contracts with the Germans, at their HQ in the Hotel Majestic. Attractive, vivacious and fluent in German, she was well liked by the Nazi officers – and was invited to their parties, where they chatted blithely about their work. But the woman they knew as Madeleine Chauffour was not the naïf she seemed, said The New York Times. On the contrary, she was a French Resistance agent – using her charm and guile to winkle out their secrets. “I teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed,” she told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, decades later. “I insisted that they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, faster than any aeroplane. I kept saying, ‘What you are telling me cannot be true!’ I must have said that a hundred times.”
Eventually, one of the Germans decided to prove to her that he was telling the truth – and showed her the plans for Peenemünde, an experimental station by the Baltic Sea where the V1 and V2 rockets were being tested, and drawings of the rockets themselves. Rousseau didn’t have the expertise to understand everything she saw, but she had a photographic memory – and was able to relay the information in astonishing detail. Her report about this “stratospheric” new weapon found its way to the British physicist and miltary intelligence expert Reginald Jones – and landed up on Churchill’s desk. Based on it, the Allies bombed the plant, delaying the implementation of the V2, and saving thousands of lives. When Jones asked who had compiled the report, he was told only that her code name was Amniarix, and that she was “one of the most remarkable women of her generation”.
Born in 1919, Jeannie Rousseau excelled at languages at school, and graduated top of her class from the elite Sciences Po university in Paris in 1939. When war broke out, her father – a civil servant – moved the family to Dinard, in Brittany, hoping it would be beyond the reach of the advancing Germans. But the occupiers arrived in their thousands, and when they did, Rousseau, then 19, agreed to act as interpreter for the mayor, and made it her business to chat to the officers she met. In September 1940, she was asked, by an unnamed visitor, if she’d share what she learned. “I said, ‘What’s the point of knowing all that, if not to pass it on?’”
In fact, she passed on so much intelligence, the Germans realised there must be a spy in Dinard, and in January 1941 she was arrested. Employing her usual ingenuity, however, she persuaded her interrogator she couldn’t be an agent – and was released, on the condition that she left the coast. Returning to Paris, she secured her job with the business association, and resumed her intelligence-gathering. Soon after, on a night train, she ran into an old friend – Georges Lamarque. Talking in the corridor, he told her that he had a “little outfit” she might like to join. She passed him the basic, commercial intelligence that she had already gathered; then began work on military secrets.
In 1944, the British decided that she should come to the UK to be debriefed. En route, however, the French agent helping to arrange her passage was captured; her cover was blown, and she was arrested. She ended up in Ravensbruck, then at an even harsher camp in Königsberg, where she was tortured and starved. By the time she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in 1945, she was near death. Recovering in a sanitorium in Sweden, she met and fell in love with Henri de Clarens, a fellow patient and Auschwitz survivor, who became her husband. In later life, she worked as a translator. They once tried to tell their children about their experience in the camps, but “it was too hard”. Nor did she talk, in public, about her Resistance work. “The curtain came down on my memories, she told Ignatius. “What I did was so little... I was one small stone.”
Nevertheless, she was made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1955 and a grand officer in 2009. She was awarded the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre, and at a ceremony in 1993, she and Jones were both honoured by the CIA for their “momentous” contribution to the Allied war effort. Asked why she’d done what she did, she seemed puzzled by the question. “I just did it... It wasn’t a choice. It was what you did. At the time, we all thought we would die. How could I not do it?”