Odette Sansom

Odette Sansom: Code Named “Lise”

Born Odette Brailly, Odette Sansom was a French citizen and daughter of a World War I hero who crossed the English Channel to become a wife and mother of three daughters in England. Despite unimaginable torture by the Nazis, imprisonment in concentration camps, and uncertainty over the fate of her lover and fellow spy, she never betrayed the clandestine ring she belonged to in occupied France. 

Code-named Lise, she entered espionage unexpectedly and proved skillful at it, according to her commanding officer, Peter Churchill. Leaving her daughters in a convent school, she worked as an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

At first her superiors viewed her impetuousness and arrogance as drawbacks to the work, but she also had determination, fearlessness, and a strong will. They ultimately decided to trust her with vital work for the Spindle circuit in France. As a courier, she became part of an effective team with Churchill (codenamed “Michael” and “Raoul”) and radio operator Adolphe Rabinovitch, a Russian-Egyptian Jew who went by the code name “Arnaud.” 

Espionage was tense work for Sansom, Rabinovitch, and Churchill. They faced not only Nazi agents from the Abwehr but also French double agents secretly working for the Third Reich. Their most dangerous foe proved to be Hugo Bleicher, a senior Nazi officer working against the resistance in German-occupied France. 

In January 1943, Churchill, Rabinovich, and Sansom, feeling vulnerable to German capture, moved north from the French Riviera to the quiet Italian-occupied Annecy area in the French Alps. Churchill and Sansom took up residence at a hotel in the village of Saint-Jorioz, later joined by other members of SOE, attracting the attention of the Italian fascist police and the Gestapo. Bleicher posed as an anti-Nazi German colonel and learned their location from one of Sansom’s colleagues. He got a letter of introduction to them from him and went to Saint-Jorioz where he introduced himself to Sansom as “Colonel Henri.” He spun a tale to her of their traveling together to London to “discuss means of ending the war.” He then departed Saint-Jorioz, planning to return and depart France with her and Churchill by clandestine aircraft on April 18. Sansom had Rabinovich send a wireless message to SOE headquarters in London reporting the contact. London replied immediately: “Henri highly dangerous . . . you are to hide across lake and cut contacts with all save Rabinovich.” But Bleicher arrested Sansom and Churchill in April 1943.

Sent to Fresnes prison, near Paris, Sansom was interrogated by the Gestapo fourteen times and tortured. Her back was scorched with a red-hot poker, and all of her toenails were pulled out. She refused to disclose the whereabouts of Rabinovitch and another British agent, stuck to her story that Churchill was the nephew of Winston Churchill, that she was his wife, and that he knew nothing of her activities, hoping to mitigate their treatment. Sansom succeeded in diverting attention from Churchill, who was only interrogated twice, and protected the identities of two officers. Bleicher occasionally appeared and invited her to travel with him to Paris to attend concerts and dine in restaurants to persuade her to talk. She rejected the overtures. 

She was condemned to death on two counts in June 1943, to which she responded, "Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once." 

Infuriated, Bleicher sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Sansom was kept in a punishment block cell, on a starvation diet, and could hear other prisoners being beaten. 

After the Allied landings in the south of France in August 1944, on orders from Berlin, all food was withdrawn for a week, all light was removed from Sansom's cell, and the heat was turned up. Despite a report by the camp doctor that she would not survive such conditions for more than a few weeks, after being found unconscious in her cell, she was placed in solitary confinement. Her condition improved in December 1944, when she was moved to a ground floor cell. When the Allies were only a few miles from Ravensbrück, the camp commandant took Sansom and drove to an American base to surrender. He hoped that her supposed connections to Churchill might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution. Sansom was one of few SOE members to survive imprisonment by the Nazis. Churchill survived the war but Rabinovitch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944.

After the war, she received the George Cross, the first woman who had faced enemy fire to receive the honor, the second-highest award in the UK. She testified against the prison guards charged with war crimes at the 1946 Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, which resulted in Suhren's execution in 1950. Sansom died at 83 in 1995.

A posthumous UK postage stamp honoring her for her wartime service lists her as Odette Hallowes, the surname of her third husband. Her wartime experience was the subject of a 1950 film, Odette. A book published in 2019, Code Name Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy, by Larry Loftis, aimed to bring her story to the public’s attention.