Noor Inayat Khan5

With the wave of arrests washing over the various groups, Noor's was one of the few radios still operating. With a sense of the importance of her unique position which amounted to a sense of mission, she refused an offer to bring her back to England. And from then on, she was on the run, transmitting from a series of different houses and apartments, trying to avoid the direction-finding trucks, several times just managing to elude the Gestapo. Noor refused yet another offer to get out and return to England. For the rest of the summer she moved around looking for places she could transmit from safely. She took a tiny room in an apartment block in Neuilly-sur-Seine, almost entirely inhabited by German officers, and a story has come down that one of them courteously offered her a hand when she was having difficulty hanging her aerial out on the branch of a tree.

Buckmaster's deputy, Bodington, was sent out to appraise the damage done to the groups following many arrests and he gave Noor instructions to lie low. Throughout all of this Noor carried her notebook wherever she went. It was an ordinary school copy book and in it she kept a record of all the messages she had sent and received since arriving in France, in code and in plain text. This was a stunning breach of the most elementary security precautions and it appears to have been the result of a misunderstanding on her part of the phrase in her operational orders instructing her to 'be extremely careful with the filing of your messages.'

Evidently she was unfamiliar with the use of 'filing' in the sense in which a journalist 'files' - that is 'sends' - a story, and thought she was meant to keep them in some sort of filing system! The tell-tale messages were on the table beside her bed when she was arrested in her room, along with her codes and her security checks. They would prove invaluable to her captors. Noor had eluded the Gestapo all through the summer and into the early autumn and at the end of September told some of her friends that she expected to be going back to England very soon.

It was early in October when the Gestapo was contacted by a woman who called herself Renee with an offer to sell them Madelaine, a name they knew well as that of an F Section radio operator they had so far been unable to track down. The woman seemed to know a great deal about F Section and for a small price, much less than the Gestapo were prepared to pay to get their hands on Noor, she passed on the address where Noor was now living. Like so many others of the apartments inhabited by F Section agents, it was only a few minutes away from Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch.

Noor put up quite a fight when she returned home and found a single Gestapo agent waiting for her, so much so that he had to cover her with his gun whilst he phoned for assistance in order to bring her in. They also retrieved her transmitter and the notebook containing all her messages, codes and security checks. On arrival at the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch she was taken up to the fifth floor and within an hour she had made an escape attempt, climbing out of a bathroom window onto a ledge where she was spotted and brought back in.

For the next five weeks she was interrogated daily but never mistreated although there was constant and increasing pressure on her to co-operate. She steadfastly refused and never told them anything of an official nature beyond that her name was 'Nora Baker' and that she was a WAAF officer. Noor attempted a second escape, with two other agents being held at Gestapo headquarters, but they were soon recaptured and Noor was shipped off to Germany.

She was locked up in the womens section of the civil prison at Pforzheim where, as a 'very dangerous' prisoner, she was kept in chains, her hands and her feet chained together, with another chain connecting hands to feet, unable to feed or clean herself. She was kept in solitary confinement separated from the rest of the prison by two sets of iron gates. The governor of the prison, interviewed years later by Jean Overton Fuller, "said he thought the tranquility did her good."

Some Frenchwomen sent to the prison as political prisoners managed to communicate with 'Nora Baker', as Noor was calling herself. By this time it was summer and Noor's messages noted the Fourth of July and Bastille Day. The last words from her, in a shaky hand, were "I am leaving". It was the 11th September 1944. That night, almost ten months after she had been locked up, she was taken by the Gestapo to Karlsruhe and from there, along with threeother women, to Dachau, about 200 miles away. The other three women were also F Section agents, Madeleine Damerment, Elaine Plewman and Yolande Beekman.

The two men, named Wassmer and Ott, who escorted the four women were the same two who had brought four other women to the camp at Natzweiler, two months previously, in the July. They arrived at Dachau around midnight and they walked up the hill from the station to the camp, where they were locked up separately overnight, and in the early morning they were taken to a spot strewn with sand, stained with blood and told to kneel down.

They knelt in pairs, holding hands, as an SS man came up and shot them from behind............

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Footnote:

"I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. It would help to build a bridge between the English and the Indians." These words of World War II heroine, Princess Noor Inayat Khan, could not have been more prophetic.

Fifty years later at the "VE" and "VJ" days to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II, the astonishing fact came to light at the roll call, that it was Indians who outnumbered even the British as the largest recipients of Victoria and George Cross medals, the highest British awards for bravery.

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