Capture and Death
In mid-November 1943, they were told by wireless from Baker Street to expect the arrival of a new agent. On 18 November, the new arrival appeared, but turned out to be a false agent planted by the Germans. Rowden and Young were arrested that evening and taken to Lons-le-Saunier. The next day Rowden was taken to 84 Avenue Foch, the Paris headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, where she was interrogated for two weeks before being sent to Fresnes prison.
On 13 May 1944, Diana Rowden, along with arrested SOE agents Sonya Olschanezky, Andrée Borrel, Yolande Beekman, Vera Leigh, Eliane Plewman, Odette Sansom-Hallowes, and Madeleine Damerment were moved to concentration camps in Germany. Only Sansom-Hallowes survived the war.
On 6 July 1944, Rowden, Leigh, Borrel, and Olschanezky were shipped to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace (France), where they are thought to have been injected with phenol and disposed of in the crematorium. They were meant to disappear without a trace, but their arrival at the concentration camp was witnessed by captured SOE agent Brian Stonehouse and Albert Guérisse, a member of the Belgian Resistance.
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Famous quotes containing the words capture and/or death:
“To capture robbers, first capture their leader.”
—Chinese proverb.
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)