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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

10. Tortured by the Gestapo

Inmates of Ravensbruck concentration camp. All That Is Interesting

The Gestapo eventually tracked down and arrested Odette Sansom. When she refused to spill the secrets she knew, she was taken to Fresnes Prison outside Paris. There, she was interrogated over a dozen times by the Gestapo, who burned her back with red hot irons, and pulled out all of her toenails. She screamed in agony, but insisted that she knew nothing.

Eventually, the Germans gave up on trying to squeeze information out of her, and sent her to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. There, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, kept her on a starvation diet, and housed her in a punishment block cell, from where she could hear other prisoners being tortured. She survived, and testified against him and other prison Ravensbruck prison guards after the war. He was convicted and executed.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.