Gestapo tortured ex-Brit spy Nearne, BBC documentary reveals after her death
By ANITuesday, November 2, 2010
LONDON - More than a month after she died, a former British spy’s tale of how she was tortured by the Gestapo of the German Nazi regime during the height of the Second World War, has come to light.
According to a BBC documentary, former British spy Eileen Nearne, who died aged 89 in Torquay in September without any family to arrange her funeral, has given a rare insight into her life during the Second World War.
The documentary quotes her, as saying that the Nazis captured her in July 1944 after she had spent months undercover in Paris sending messages back to Britain in preparation for D-Day.
Still using her wartime code name “Rose” and wearing a wig while speaking fluent French, she told a BBC documentary in 1997 that she was caught because she had to send a vital message.
“I preferred to use the old house from where I knew I could get through, but I shouldn’t have done it. That’s how I got myself arrested,” The Telegraph quotes her, as saying.escribing the Nazi officer who interrogated her, she said: “He rushed at me and slapped me as hard as he could around the head calling me a liar, a spy, a dirty bitch.
“And the other one said, ‘We have ways of making people talk who don’t want to’.
“They took me into a room where there was a bath and they held me under the water. You suffocate under the water, but you must stick to your story. I remembered what we’d been taught; never to be afraid, never let them dominate you,” she recalls.
Nearne managed to convince her inquisitors that she was a French shop girl who knew nothing about undercover operations.
However, she recalled the last words they said to her before she was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany in August 1944.
“‘We are giving you the benefit of the doubt, but we are sending you to a concentration camp,” she said.
From Ravensbruck, she was transferred to a forced labour camp in Silesia, on the German border, before she escaped and finally met up with the Americans in Leipzig. (ANI)
