How France’s Top Woman Spy Escaped from the Nazis—Part 1
On a hot, sultry night in July 1944, the head of the most important Allied spy network in occupied France lay on a jail-cell cot and thought about killing herself.
A few hours earlier, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, code-named Hedgehog, had been captured by the Gestapo in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. The Germans knew she was an intelligence agent but at that point had no idea of her real identity or importance. According to her papers — forged, of course — she was a French housewife named Germaine Pezet. Dour and dowdy, she wore glasses, was drably dressed, and had lusterless, jet-black hair. It was the latest of her many disguises, this one concocted in part by a dentist in London who had made the dental prosthetic that had helped transform her appearance. No outward trace remained of the chic blonde Parisienne she’d been before the war — a woman born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamor.
As she lay on the cot, Marie-Madeleine was sure she would be interrogated and tortured the next day, and the Gestapo would discover her true identity. Should she swallow the cyanide pill she’d hidden in her purse? She hesitated. Not yet, she thought. Maybe — just maybe — she could find a way out.
*
Seventy-eight years after that night, l’m standing on a quiet, narrow street not far from Aix’s bustling center — in front of a barred window on the first floor of the stately stone building where Marie-Madeleine had been imprisoned. Having written about her extraordinary life in my book, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, I’ve come to Aix to retrace her movements and visit the places that figured in the most spine-tingling episode of her life.
Once the capital of old Provence, Aix today is one of the most beautiful towns in the south of France, with its cobblestone streets, majestic shade trees, elegant fountains, thriving markets, and vibrant café life. But in July 1944, it, like most German-occupied French cities and towns, was a tinderbox. The Allies had invaded Normandy the month before, and the Germans, their backs to the wall, were desperate to keep Allied troops bottled up in the north of the country and wipe out resistance fighters throughout the rest of France. One of the top targets on their most-wanted list was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the head of the Alliance network.
Marie Madeleine had joined the Resistance four years before, soon after the Germans vanquished France in June 1940 — one of a mere handful of French men and women to defy the Nazis that early in the war. In 1941, at the age of 31, she became la patronne — the boss — of Alliance, which would soon emerge as the largest and most influential Allied intelligence group in France. Throughout the war, Alliance, which had some 3,000 agents throughout the country, supplied the British and American high commands with vital German military secrets. In 1943, the network presented the Allies with one of the greatest intelligence coups of the war — information about Hitler’s new terror weapons, the V-I flying bomb and the V-2 rocket. In 1944, three months before D-Day, it handed over to the operation’s planners a 55-foot-long map showing every German gun emplacement, fortification, road, and beach obstacle on the Normandy beaches on which the Allies would land.
Until July 1944, Marie-Madeleine, the only woman to lead a major French resistance group, had managed to elude her foes. Many others in her network had not been as fortunate. For the previous year and a half, the Gestapo, in its relentless vendetta against this spy outfit that had caused so much havoc to German operations, had engaged in a ruthless effort to wipe Alliance out. Hundreds of her agents, among them the man she loved, had been swept up in wave after wave of arrests; whole sectors had been annihilated. In the summer of 1944, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade had no idea how many of her people were still alive.
For several months before D-Day, she had been in London, working with MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. MI6 officials, convinced she would be tracked down and killed by the Gestapo if she returned to France, begged her to stay in England. But she insisted on going back to rebuild her crippled network. Her first stop would be in southeast France, which boasted the only stable, secure Alliance operation in the country.
On July 10, Marie-Madeleine arrived in Aix-en-Provence and was met by the head of the southeast sector — Count Helen des Isnards — a daring, tough young aristocrat whose skills as a resistance leader had greatly impressed her and the men of MI6. Des Isnards took her to the hideout he’d found for her — a flat on rue Granet, a narrow, quiet street, which today is lined with elegant shops, near the Cours Mirabeau, Aix’s grand, tree-shaded boulevard.
Des Isnards left her with several thick stacks of intelligence reports from the surviving Alliance sectors throughout France, including information about the Germans’ secret terror weapons, as well as Wehrmacht troop movements on the Normandy front. She spent several days decoding them, then handed the decoded versions over to des Isnards for transmission to London.
At that point, he told her it was time to leave Aix. The Gestapo were on the rampage throughout Provence, tracking down, arresting, and executing dozens of local resistance members. It was only a matter of time before they found her.
On July 16, as she was packing to leave the next day, she heard loud voices on the stairwell. Her door crashed open, and more than a dozen gun-waving men speaking German rushed in. Grabbing her, the leader of the group shouted that they were looking for one of the leaders of a terrorist resistance network called Alliance — a tall, fair man whose code name was Grand Duke. He was describing des Isnards — and had no idea that the head of Alliance was standing right in front of him.
Ignoring Marie-Madeleine’s protests that she knew nothing about this man, the Germans began searching the flat, turning over the mattress in the bedroom, pulling out the contents of the closets, and rummaging through the cupboards, bureaus, and her suitcases. Initially, they missed the intelligence reports she had hidden under the divan and inside the cushions of two footstools. But just as they were about to leave, one of them glanced under the divan, and with a shout, pulled out a large handful of coded reports.
Incandescent with rage, the leader of the raiding party violently shook her. “Who are you?” he roared. She replied that she was a spy sent by London to meet some agents in Aix. She wouldn’t tell them her real name.
She was hustled into a car and driven through the streets of Aix to the Miollis barracks, an impressive complex of tall stone buildings with red-tile roofs on the edge of town. Built to house French troops, the barracks were now under German control; one floor of the headquarters building had been turned into a Gestapo prison for captured resistance fighters.
The other cells were full that day, so Marie-Madeleine was shoved into a small room near the guardhouse that had been turned into a spillover cell and stank of urine, sweat, and tobacco. She was told that Ernst Dunker, the fearsome head of the Gestapo in Marseille, would come to Aix the next morning to interrogate her. Sinking down on a cot covered with a filthy gray blanket, Marie-Madeleine glanced despairingly at the cell’s heavily bolted door.
Notwithstanding her outward composure in front of the Germans, she was in fact mortally afraid of the ordeal that would face her in the morning. Would she be able to remain silent and withstand the beatings and other forms of torture that would surely follow? Fearing she might break down, she thought about the cyanide pill in her purse.
But she realized that if she took it, des Isnards would not know what had happened to her. He would come to her hideout as planned the next morning to take her away, and the Gestapo would be there, waiting for him. He and his operation, the bulwark of Alliance, would be wiped out, and almost certainly the entire network as well.
Before deciding to take that irreversible step, she must explore — however unlikely — every possible means of escape.
