Tortured and Executed — The Grand Story of Noor Inayat-Khan
A formidable heroine of World War Two
The four women were made to kneel in the sandy yard. Behind them stood the German soldiers aiming guns at their hands.
The grim sky over the Dachau concentration camp was dark from smoke rising out of the crematorium. Noor-un-Nisa said a silent prayer as the women held each other’s hands. One minute later, they were dead, shot in the back of the head.
More than 500 agents were recruited by the British to become ‘Special Operations Executives’ (SOE). Fifty were women. Charged with ‘Setting Europe Ablaze’, the freedom fighters were parachuted behind enemy lines in World War Two as part of the resistance to Nazi Germany.
Their training began at an air base in England. Practising how to roll on the ground after jumping from a moving truck at 30 mph. The advanced class finished with an airplane jump at just 500 feet, at night, giving them a mere 30 seconds before they crashed into land.
Once the parachute jump was perfected, they moved onto unarmed combat, silent killing, weapon usage and sabotage with plastic explosives. Their final training was in the art of codes, secret inks, blowing safes and forging documents. SOE agents were woken in the middle of the night and interrogated to see how they handled stress and pressure.
One such agent was Noor-un-Nisa Inayat-Khan. Code named ‘Madeleine’, Noor landed by plane one dark night in June 1943 in northern France. Armed with her ‘L-pill’, a lethal capsule of cyanide to be used if captured, she made her way to Paris. She was to be the first woman wireless operator sent into France.
Before the war, Noor wrote children’s fairy stories for French Radio. She had one book published in Britain in 1939 and spoke French like a native. A huge supporter of Indian independence, Noor had said”
“”I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.”
Turns out, Noor was to be that person.
Noor was a Sufi Indian born in the Kremlin of Czar Nicholas, 1914. Her father was the head of a Sufi sect, an ascetic Islamic religious movement which emphasised a direct, personal experience of God.
Her mother was an American. Noor was descended from the legendary Tipoo Sultan, a man who fought Wellington in Mysore in 1799. Her fighting spirit glowed brightly!
Classically trained in music, her family lived in London and then Paris where she studied the veena (a sitar-type of instrument), piano and harp. At the Sorbonne University she would go on to finish a degree in child psychology.
When France fell to the Germans, Noor’s family fled to Britain. She joined the RAF as part of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force where she caught the eye of the recruiters for SOE. Noor was perfect for the role of a wireless operator.
in June 1943 she was sent to France, where she assumed the name Jeanne-Marie Renier, posing as a children’s nurse. Madeleine was her code name. Noor was constantly on the move in France.
The Gestapo struggled to keep up with her as she swiftly moved from one safe house to another. She managed to stay one step ahead of the Germans by constantly changing her address.
At one point, huddled late at night transmitting her coded messages, she could her the German soldiers reveling in the apartment below her. Noor had taken up residence in an apartment block full of German officers. SOE twice offered her repatriation to Britain, but she refused and remained working.
“Her transmissions became the only link between the agents around the Paris area and London,” Ms. Basu wrote in her biography “Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan.”
Eventually, for the grand sum of 100,000 francs, a French woman, named Renée Garry, betrayed Noor. Garry was arrested after the war and trialed for treason. She was found not guilty by a single vote.
Captured and taken to the Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, Noor escaped almost immediately. She made a 2nd escape On 25 November 1943, along with fellow SOE agents John Renshaw Starr and Léon Faye, but was recaptured in the vicinity.
Noor was viciously tortured as the Germans attempted to extract information from her. Chief of German police, Heinrich Himmler had ordered:
“The agents should die, certainly, but not before torture, indignity and interrogation has drained from them the last shred of evidence that should lead us to others. Then, and only then, should the blessed release of death be granted them.” Source — Ungentlemanly Warfare
Torture of women included beatings, sleep deprivation, cutting breasts off, pulling out finger and toenails and near-drowning. Still, Noor refused to give up any information. Hans Kieffer, the former head of the SD in Paris, testified after the war that she did not give the Gestapo a single piece of information, but lied consistently.
The Gestapo finally had enough after she refused to sign a declaration renouncing future escape attempts. On 27 November 1943, Noor was transported to Germany “for safe custody” and imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement as a “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”: condemned to “Disappearance without Trace”) prisoner, in complete secrecy. For ten months, she was kept there, shackled at her hands and feet.
For almost a year, manacled, barely able to move, Noor was kept this way in solitary confinement. Her food was passed through a tiny hatch in the door. As the prison director testified after the war, she remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives. In despair at the appalling nature of her confinement, other prisoners could hear her crying late into the night.
In September 1944, Noor was removed to the Dachau concentration camp. The following day, after arrival, she was executed. Gestapo agent, Christian Ott, gave a statement to US investigators after the war as to the fate of Noor.
He described a scene where the women cried and asked for a priest. On refusal, they were led outside and shot in the neck. The pair of women held hands. One was shot twice as she had shown signs of life.
Ott’s statement is considered unreliable and in 1958 an anonymous Dutch prisoner asserted that Noor was cruelly beaten by an SS officer named Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot from behind.
Her last word was reported as “Liberté” — freedom. She was 30.
Noor-un-Nisa Inayat-Khan (meaning ‘light of womanhood’) was awarded the posthumous George Cross and MBE.
Use this referral below so I can hijack a portion of your membership fees and spread intolerant views, lewd behavior, and gut-wrenchingly bad prose.
And if that’s not to your liking, then you can either fuck off or simply subscribe in the knowledge that you are in the company of an inscrutable swine who doesn’t give any fucks.
That’s your last warning.
