6. Captured Spies Were Routinely Tortured, but Torture Couldn’t Get This Spy to Talk
To keep them from entering Odette Sansom’s room, the quick thinking brothel madam claimed that the room housed her niece, who was infected with highly contagious smallpox. Odette got away that time, but she was eventually tracked down and arrested by the dreaded Gestapo. She refused to disclose her secrets, so she was taken to Fresnes Prison outside Paris. There, as they routinely did with captured spies, the Gestapo brutally interrogated Odette. They tortured her with red hot irons to her back, and yanked out all of her toenails. She screamed in agony, but insisted that she knew nothing. Eventually, the Nazis gave up on trying to squeeze information out of Odette, and sent her to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for women. There, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, kept her on a starvation diet, and housed her in a punishment block cell, from which she could hear other prisoners being tortured.
Odette survived, and testified against Suhren and various Ravensbruck prison guards after the war. The former Ravensbruck commandant was convicted and executed. As to Odette, she was personally decorated by King George VI after the war. She received awards such as Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), and the George Cross (GC) – the highest non-military decoration for gallantry. Between those and French awards, such as the Legion d’Honneur, she became WWII’s most highly decorated spy. Her adventures were depicted in the 1950 film Odette, starring Anna Neagle. Odette Sansom eventually married one of her fellow SOE spies, with whom she had become romantically involved during the war, but it ended in divorce in 1956. She remarried, to another SOE agent, with whom she remained until her death, in 1995.
