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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

34. Killing Her First Nazi

A train derailment caused by the French Resistance. Getty Images

Simone Segouin killed her first Nazi on July 14^th, 1944. Around 5 AM, she waited in ambush in a roadside ditch, and when two Germans rode by in bicycles, she opened up with her submachine gun, killing both. She then went on the road, searched the bodies, collected their papers and weapons, then made her way alone through the woods, to deliver the haul to her Resistance hideout.

Simone Segouin posing for news reporters in 1944. US National Archives

She confessed to having enjoyed killing the detested occupiers, which came as no surprise to her comrades. She was intensely patriotic, and was inspired by her father, a decorated soldier who had fought in WWI. When first recruited into the Resistance, she was asked if she felt queasy about killing Germans, and she replied: “No. It would please me to kill Boche“. As she put it decades later, it was simple: “The Germans were our enemies – we were French“.

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.