Spy Princess (33 page)

Sixty years after the war it is easier to assess the role of the SOE. According to Foot, the sacrifice made by the sappers (three-quarters of whom were killed or badly wounded) when they went to clear the minefields before the Normandy invasions was on a par with those demanded from Suttill, Noor and the other SOE agents. Both jobs had to be done to prepare for the invasion, and both jobs were absolutely invaluable.

Noor’s courage and performance in the field were exemplary and except for misunderstanding her instructions about carefully filing her stories (instructions which were in any event not at all clear), there would have been nothing to fault her with. If she had not been betrayed, Noor would have actually beaten the Gestapo at their own game. Her courage and strength led her to hold on till the end without giving in, and she stood proud till the last. When Vogt put it to her that her sacrifice had been in vain, she told him: ‘I have served my country. That is my recompense.’
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In the end, Noor was able to justify the faith that Maurice Buckmaster, Vera Atkins and Selwyn Jepson had put in her. She successfully used her training and wit to keep the Germans from arresting her for over three months by changing locations, changing her looks and using her circuit of loyal friends to help her. She would have returned to England if she had not been betrayed. Unlike other radio operators (like Brian Stonehouse or Robert Dowlen), who were caught by direction-finding vans while on the air because they transmitted from the same place, Noor was arrested through no fault of her own. Even her German captors admitted that she had evaded arrest for months despite their best efforts to trap her.

‘I had first learnt of the existence of Madeleine at the time of Archambaud’s arrest,’ said Goetz in his interrogation after the war.

We had a personal description of her and knew she was a W.T. operator of the
reseau
Prosper. It was, naturally, of the greatest interest to us to arrest her as we suspected she carried on W.T. traffic with London … The wireless detection station had such a sender under observation but could not close in on it as the place of transmission was constantly changing. In October or about this time it was thought that one was closing in on it, but again it was impossible to effect an arrest.
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And Josef Kieffer confirmed this: ‘We were pursuing her for months and as we had a personal description of her we arranged for all stations to be watched. She had several addresses and worked very carefully.’
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After Noor’s arrest, her behaviour was exemplary. Though the toughest of SOE agents cracked under interrogation and torture (Gilbert Norman and Dowlen, to name just two), Noor stood firm – revealing nothing despite torture and hardship. Even her captors could not help but be impressed by her. Kieffer apparently broke down before Vera Atkins at his interrogation when told that Noor had been sent to Dachau from Pforzheim and executed.

On 5 April 1949, Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the highest civilian honour in Britain.

The citation said:

The King has been graciously pleased to approve the posthumous award of the George Cross to Assistant Section Officer Nora Inayat Khan (9901), Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

Assistant section Officer Nora Inayat Khan was the first woman operator to be infiltrated into enemy-occupied France, and was landed by Lysander aircraft on June 16th, 1943. During the weeks immediately following her arrival, the Gestapo made mass arrests in the Paris Resistance groups to which she had been detailed. She refused, however, to abandon what had become the principal and most dangerous post in France, although given the opportunity to return to England, because she did not wish to leave her French comrades without communications, and she hoped also to rebuild her group. She remained at her post therefore and did the excellent work which earned her a posthumous Mention in Despatches.

The Gestapo had a full description of her, but knew only her code name Madeleine. They deployed considerable forces in their effort to catch her and so break the last remaining link with London. After three and a half months she was betrayed to the Gestapo and taken to their HQ in the Avenue Foch. The Gestapo had found her codes and messages and were not in a position to work back to London. They asked her to co-operate but she refused and gave them no information of any kind. She was imprisoned in one of the cells on the fifth floor of the Gestapo HQ, and remained there for several weeks, during which time she made two unsuccessful attempts at escape. She was asked to sign a declaration that she would make no further attempts but she refused, and the Chief of the Gestapo obtained permission from Berlin to send her to Germany for ‘safe custody’. She was the first agent to be sent to Germany.

Assistant Section Officer Inayat Khan was sent to Karlsruhe in November 1943 and then to Pforzheim, where her cell was apart from the main prison. She was considered to be a particularly dangerous and uncooperative prisoner. The Director of the prison has been interrogated and has confirmed that Assistant Section Officer Inayat Khan, when interrogated by the Karlsruhe Gestapo, refused to give any information whatsoever either as to her work or her colleagues.

She was taken with three others to Dachau camp on September 12, 1944. On arrival she was taken to the crematorium and shot.

Assistant Section Officer Inayat Khan displayed the most conspicuous courage, both moral and physical, over a period of more than twelve months.

The French had presented Noor with their highest civilian award, the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star, three years earlier on 16 January 1946. The citation said:

On the proposition of the Minister of the Armies, the President of the Provisional Government of the Republic, Chief of the Armies, Minister of National Defence, cites to the order of the army corps.

A/S/O Nora Inayat Khan, WAAF

Sent into France by Lysander on June 16th 1943, as a wireless operator with the mission of assuring transmissions between London and an organisation of the Resistance in the Paris area. Shortly after her arrival a series of arrests broke up the organisation. Obliged to flee, she nevertheless continued to fulfil her mission under the most difficult conditions. Falling into an ambush at Grignon, in July 1943, her comrades and she managed to escape after having killed or wounded the Germans who were trying to stop them. She was finally arrested in October 1943 and deported to Germany.

This citation carries the award of the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star.

Signed – General Charles De Gaulle

At a memorial service in Paris for Noor, Madame de Gaulle-Anthonioz, the General’s niece, President of l’Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées et Internées de la Résistance, said:

Nothing, neither her nationality, nor the traditions of her family, none of these obliged her to take her position in the war. However she chose it. It is our fight that she chose, that she pursued with an admirable, an invincible courage.

No, we will never forget Noor Inayat Khan, auxiliary officer of the English army who was also a fighter of the French Liberation Forces. She returned to France, gave up her marriage, left her training to replace the lives of ours that the Gestapo had decimated. She never gave up the fight, struggling up till the end against all natural prudence till her arrest … For all of us, for the children of our country, what a marvellous example.

Her chiefs at SOE remembered the petite Indian girl, who had caused such controversy at Beaulieu, with fondness. Buckmaster had always had a paternal attitude to Noor and admired her courage greatly. He, along with Vera Atkins, had recommended that Noor’s George Medal be converted into the George Cross after they learnt the full extent of her courage both in the field and, later, in prison.

In a final comment Buckmaster added: ‘A most brave and touchingly keen girl. She was determined to do her bit to hit the Germans and, poor girl, she has.’

A plaque at the crematorium in Dachau pays tribute to Noor Inayat Khan and her three colleagues who were killed there. There is another plaque in her memory in the Remembrance Hall of the Museum in Dachau.

A plaque at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, London, dedicated to the thirteen SOE agents who never returned from France, bears the name of N. Inayat Khan – GC.

Her name is included in the RAF Memorial in Runnymede in Surrey dedicated to the RAF personnel with no known graves and is inscribed on the Memorial Gates to the Commonwealth soldiers near Hyde Park Corner in London.

There is a plaque in her honour at the agricultural school in Grignon where she first began transmission.

A plaque outside her childhood home in Suresnes says:

Here lived Noor Inayat Khan 1914–44

Called Madeleine in the Resistance

Shot at Dachau

Radio Operator for the Buckmaster network

A leafy square in Suresnes has been named ‘Cours Madeleine’ after her and every year on Bastille Day – 14 July – a military band plays outside Fazal Manzil on the rue de la Tuilerie, remembering the sacrifice of the young Indian woman who gave her life for France and freedom.

Ten days after the announcement of Noor’s George Cross in April 1949, Amina Begum died. She had never quite recovered from the news of Noor’s death. It had weakened her physically and mentally. Vilayat, carrying the burden of the family on his young shoulders, had brought Amina back to Paris. It was as if she had clung to life just to hear the posthumous honour of her daughter and to return to the house she had set up with Inayat Khan all those years ago.

Fazal Manzil was the same when they returned, nearly seven years after they had left it. The war had taken its toll but it was still home. It had been preserved by their friends and neighbours and the uncles who had stayed back in France. Noor’s harp was returned to Fazal Manzil, where it joined Inayat Khan’s memorabilia.

Noor’s achievements become even more important today, sixty years after the war, when we see her as a Muslim woman of Indian origin who was prepared to make the highest sacrifice for Britain. Though committed to Indian independence, she had no doubts about supporting the Allied war effort against Germany. At a time when the Indian freedom struggle was reaching its peak with the Quit India movement of 1942, she was applying for a commission at the RAF, giving her frank views about India, her support for the freedom struggle and the reasons she was keen to support England in the war. She would back England during the war and back the freedom struggle after the war. Her brother Hidayat was convinced that if she had lived, her next cause would have been Indian independence.
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In prison Noor stuck to her story of being Nora Baker. There are reports that the Germans treated her worse than others because of her dark skin, but she bore it all with dignity, never betraying her colleagues or giving out any information about her organisation.

In the end, Noor’s monkeys did cross the bridge. They escaped from the wicked king and found the road to freedom. On a slightly chilly September morning in a bleak death camp in Germany, Noor knelt down and made the ultimate sacrifice. Today on the site, just near the crematorium at Dachau, where the ashes of over 30,000 victims lie buried, the simple flower garden symbolises her gift to the free world.