On The Day in History: April 16

Odette Sansom defies the Gestapo

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If I was captured by the fucking Gestapo and they said, “We’re going to torture you now” I bet I’d spill my guts before I lost a single fingernail. Not Odette Sansom. A spy for the British in France during World War II, she experienced unimaginable horrors at the hands of her Nazi cockwipe captors. All she said was, “I have nothing to say.”

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 16, 1943--

Sansom was born in France in 1912, and her father was killed by Germans in World War I when she was only six. It’s possible she may have held a grudge. When she was 19, she married an Englishman and moved with him to Britain. The couple had three daughters, whom she cared for when her husband joined the army to fight the fucking Nazis in WWII. Then, as a native of France, she came to the attention of the War Office and was convinced to spy for the Special Operations Executive. She hadn’t wanted to leave her daughters, but in hearing of the suffering of her family and fellow French, she stepped up.

Her evaluation questioned her ability to work undercover, saying, “She is excitable and temperamental, although she has a certain determination.” Determined to resist the goddamn Nazis. She landed in France in November 1942 and worked as a courier for the Resistance engaging in sabotage against those Nazi assbags. It’s worth noting that female couriers in France had the second highest Allied fatality rate (42%), second only to Bomber Command (45%).

Sansom was betrayed by a member of the network who’d been turned by Gestapo shitnuggets, and on April 16, 1943, she was arrested. The only thing she told them was a lie. Rather than admit she was a courier, she said she was the circuit leader to save the life of the actual circuit leader Peter Churchill who’d also been arrested. She said Churchill was her husband and also the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill (he wasn’t) who knew nothing of her operations in the hope it would save his life (it did).

Over the next two months Sansom was starved and tortured 14 times, burned with a hot poker and had all her toenails pulled out. If she had spoken, others would have died. She did not speak, other than in defiance. In June 1943 she was condemned to die on two counts, to which she replied, “you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once.” Continues below …

I can only die once but I’d like to buy some nice things before I do so please click the green button.

She was sent to the worst place to be a woman in all of Europe: Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. During the war it contained 130,000 women, and about 90,000 of them never made it out alive. But Odette Sansom refused to die. Starved and kept in solitary she suffered dysentery and scurvy, but she did not die. After the war she testified against her prison guards and was awarded the big medals. She died in 1995 at the age of 82.

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