The TERRIFYING Execution Of The Female Spy BURNED ALIVE

throughout the second world war there were a number of female spies who worked Behind Enemy Lines in France British Special Operations executive recruited a number of women who they believed were suitable for working with the French Resistance however being a spy was incredibly dangerous and the German Gestapo would hunt them and then once captured they were tortured and many were executed there was a female spy who was known for her incredible bravery during World War II and she was known for her very good shot and was very courageous Diana Rowden however met an incredibly brutal and bloody end inside of a concentration camp and she was banned alive inside of the concentration Camp's crematoria join us today as we look at the horrific execution of Diana Rowden the female spy burned alive but remember to support our Channel please make sure to subscribe Diana hope Rowden was born in England in January 1915 and she was a daughter of a British Army Major her parents separated when she was a young child then she moved with her mother and two young Brothers to summon France she had a very good childhood would play on the beach with her brothers fishing and boating her cousin would say she was a bit of a tomboy but her mother was also regarded as an eccentric there was no to locals as a mad English woman Rowden attended a number of schools but her family then returned to England where she continued her education in Surrey she lived a very different life to when she was in France and in 1933 when her education had finished she returned and tried to become a journalist but when the Germans invaded France in 1940 she volunteered to work with the French Red Cross and she worked in an anglo-american ambulance unit the Allies being pushed back prevented her from being evacuated from France and she stayed there until summer 1941 when she managed to escape back to England passing through Spain and Portugal was in September 1941 she was Keen to continue her role in the war effort and she joined the women's auxiliary air force and then worked in the department of the chief of air staff as an assistant section officer for intelligence she had a minor operation but then met with a convalescent pilot who had been working for the French section of soe she then caught the attention of Special Operations executive who saw her file and requested that she should be transferred to the Spy branch Diana was courted to join the resistance work and in March 1943 she received an invitation to an interview with an officer of soe f section during this interview she impressed and it was said she was very anxious to return to France and work against the Germans but after speaking to other members of f section she tried to give it a chance undergo she was then immediately sent for training she did excel in a number of specific fields Diana was a very good shot he was not shy to attack with her gun which was also very good at throwing grenades this made her a good and confident agent in the field which was noted for not being very agile but she did show a lot of Courage checks out in fieldcraft was a pleasant student to teach but she did struggle to master technical details and her signaling was regarded as harmful however despite this Diana rounded displayed much determination which would then pass her training on the 9th of June 1943 she received her first mission and a week later was sent by Lysander into a moonlit Meadow in the Lower Valley along with Cecily laforte and nuraniak Khan the three women linked up and were then sent to work in the field of couriers for different spy networks and intelligence networks in different areas of France Rowden was sent to work in the Euro mountains southeast of Dijon and she was working just west of the Swiss border her cover name was julietron though and she was known as Paulette with her code name being Chaplin whilst in France she lived in a small room at the back of a hotel which did have access to a roof so she could Escape if needed as a courier Diana was to deliver messages between different organizations and members of the resistance and she will constantly be traveling on bicycle throughout different neighborhoods she even went further Fields such as marseillion and Paris collecting and carrying messages for transmission on one of her trips to Marseille the Gestapo boarded the train and began to inspect papers so she locked herself in the toilet until they passed through the local resistance described terrorists without fear and in the evenings she met with different members of the resistance she then helped in receiving ammunition drops and weapons shops marking out Drop Zones with flares and many of these explosives were used in Acts of sabotage against the Germans some of these explosives destroyed a factory that were making German tank turrets however Diana rowden's biggest threat came from other spies being captured and interrogated but some of after she arrived another agent the leader of the acrobat circuit was arrested and he had been betrayed by a double agent who infiltrated the network with this Diane around and went on the run and she was shouted in a shop she stayed here for three weeks with another spy and an elderly Widow and her family helped to hide them however Diana was being hunted and to cover her identity she dyed her hair and changed how she wore it and she also borrowed other clothes she dropped her code name and took a new one and she integrated with the family however the other spot she was with received information that a new agent named Benoit would join them and he arrived at a nearby house the group then headed to a town where they met another resistance member and they had a drink at the cafe Strasbourg a place where the circuit did drop intelligence at six they returned and whilst the mother of the family they were staying with prepared dinner the door sprung open and the room was filled with fell gendarmony the German military police who carried machine guns immediately Diana Rowden with the other spies was arrested and it turned out that Benoit was a fraud and he later arrested the family at gunpoint they had to hand over the wireless sets which had been used and hidden and they then looted the home the family hoped they would see Diana again and she mentioned how one day she would return to say thank you however she was taken to Paris and was held at the estapa headquarters in Avenue fog for two weeks she was then transferred in December 1943 to the women's section of the frenay prison which held many of the spies but on the 13th of May 1944 Diana was moved from three other female spies back to Avenue Fox and four of her women who were all agents of f section they were then taken to a railway station with guards who were armed and they were handcuffed to them it was said that we were all starting on this journey together in fear but all of us hoping for something above all that we would remain together we had all a taste already of what things could be like none of us did expect for anything much we all knew that they could put us to death I was the only one officially condemned to death the others were not but there was always a fugitive Ray of Hope that some miracle will take place the women were taken to Germany were placed in South in prison in karsrua and they were then treated like other prisoners they often heard Allied bombers heading to bomb targets and the women believed the war would come to an end soon however Diana Rowden would not live to see the end of the war she along with the women were taken into the reception room of the prison on the 6th of July 1944 and they were given their belongings and then handed over to two gestapo agents they then took 100 kilometers to Natural concentration camp Crossing back into France and their arrival was not expected Diana believed she would be executed immediately and women were a rare prisoner at the camp and the German Garden of a prisoners noticed some Diana along with the three other women were LED through the center of the camp to the bottom of it by SS men they were then held there until that night it was said that one could see from their appearance that they hadn't come from a camp they seemed young they were fairly well groomed their clothes were not rubbish their hair was brushed and each had a case in their hand Diana Rowden along with the free other soe agents had been sent to die she was held in her own cell and through the window the women managed to speak to each other and other prisoners but then that evening the horrific executions of the women would come that evening the women were taken one by one into the crematoria where they were given an injection which the doctors believed was Lethal they were then thrown still alive into the burning fire of the crematoria Diana Rowden was led to Wars the Crematory in the oven where the doctor gave her an injection telling her it was a vaccination against typhus which was then pushed into the oven alive the prisoners would later tell if the horrific executions of them including Diana Rowden and they then said we heard low voices in the Next Room then the noise of a body being dragged along the floor and he whispered to me that he could see people being dragged something along the floor which was below the angle of vision through the fan light at the same time that this body was being brought we heard the noise of heavy breathing and low groaning and again we heard the same noises in regular groans as in X2 insensible women were dragged away the fourth however resisted in the corridor I heard her say poqui and I Heard a Voice as I recognized as a doctor who was in civilian clothes saying poor typhus we then heard the noise of a struggle in the muffled cries of the woman I assumed that someone had a hand over her mouth I heard the woman being dragged away too she was groaning louder than the others from the noise of the Crematory oven doors which I heard I can State definitely that in each case a groaning woman replaced immediately into the crematorium oven when the officials had gone we went to the crematoria oven opened the door and saw that there were four blackened bodies Within next morning in the course of my duties I had to clear the ashes out of the Crematory oven I found a pink woman's stocking garter on the floor near it there were many witnesses and they spoke of the struggle of the fourth woman who was being shoved into the furnace it was said when the last woman was halfway in the oven she had been put in feet first she had come to our senses and struggled as there were sufficient men there they were able to push her into the oven but not before she resisted and scratched Executioner's face it's not known whether Diana Rowden was the woman who struggled or not however her execution and killing was incredibly sadistic she was a woman who was seen as an ideal spy to work with the French Resistance today she is remembered as one of many female soe spies who were executed by the Germans and had stories one which deserves to be told thanks for watching to support our Channel please make sure to subscribe and once again thank you so much for watching

Channel: TheUntoldPast

Views: 124,494

Keywords: world war 2, the holocaust, second world war, execution ww2, executions world war 2, world war 2 executions, ww2 executions, concentration camp, diana rowden soe spy, diana rowden spy, diana rowden, diana rowden female spy, execution of diana rowden, execution diana rowden, diana rowden execution, death of diana rowden, diana rowden death, female spy burned alive, female spy burned alive ww2, natzweiler struthof spies execution, spy burned alive execution ww2, burned alive

Id: vC50UKFunto

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022