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This Housewife Became World War II’s Highly Decorated Spy

Khalid Elhassan June 12, 2019 24 min

Odette Hallowes - World War II — Odette Sansom and her daughters. Code Name Lise

2. Concentration Camp and Freedom

Fritz Suhren, Commandant of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. Picswe

Eventually, the Germans gave up on trying to squeeze information out of Odette, and sent her first to a women’s prison in Germany, and thence to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. There, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, upon being informed that she was a relative of Winston Churchill, marked Odette out for special treatment – and not the good kind of special treatment. She was kept on a starvation diet, and housed in a punishment block cell, from where she could hear other prisoners being tortured.

However, with German defeat drawing ever closer, Commandant Suhren reconsidered his treatment of Odette, and decided he would be better off after the war if he kept her alive. Accordingly, her conditions were improved, and she was moved to a normal cell, and given standard rations. On May 1^st, 1945, Suhren loaded Odette into his Mercedes, and drove to American lines, where he handed her over, in a bid to lessen his inevitable sentence. It did not work: Suhren had committed too many war crimes and crimes against humanity. Odette testified against him and other Ravensbruck guards in a 1946 trial, and he was executed in 1950.

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.