Nickname(s) Nadine | Unit Historian Name Lilian Rolfe | |
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Born 26 April 1914Paris, France ( 1914-04-26 ) Years of service 1943 (WAAF) / 1943-1945 (SOE) Rank Assistant Section Officer (WAAF) / Ensign (FANY) Awards MBE, Croix de Guerre (avec Palme), Mentioned in Dispatches Died February 5, 1945, Ravensbruck concentration camp | ||
Allegiance United Kingdom, France | ||
Lilian Vera Rolfe (26 April 1914, Paris, France - 5 February 1945, Ravensbrück, Germany) was an Allied secret agent in World War II.
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Early life
She and her twin sister Helen Fedora Rolfe were the daughters of George Rolfe, a British chartered accountant working in Paris. Although she grew up in Paris, as a young girl, she and her sister when they were about 7 and then again when they were 11 came to England for summer school to learn English as they spoke French at home. When she was seventeen had rheumatic fever while visiting an English family. When she had recovered she took part in swimming and dancing when the family moved to Brazil. She worked for the Canadian Embassy but when the war started she changed to the British Embassy. She did courses in first aid and Morse code.
World War II
At the onset of World War II, Rolfe worked at the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro before going to London, England in 1943 to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Because of her fluency in the French language, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where she was trained as a wireless operator.
On 5 April 1944, she was dropped near the city of Orléans in occupied France, where she was deployed to work with the "Historian" network run by George Wilkinson. Her job was to transmit Maquis and other important radio messages to London. Beyond her wireless duties, that included reporting on German troop movements and organizing arms and supply drops, she actively participated in missions with members of the French Resistance against the German occupiers and was involved in a gun battle in the small town of Olivet just south of Orléans.
Following the D-Day landings, an increasingly aggressive manhunt by the Gestapo led to the arrest of her superior officer. Nonetheless, Rolfe continued to work until her arrest at a transmitting house in Nargis on 31 July 1944. Transported to Fresnes Prison in Paris, she was interrogated repeatedly and brutally tortured until August 1944, when she was shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp. According to an admission made by a German officer after the war’s end, she was so ill that she could not walk. On 5 February 1945, 30-year-old Lilian Rolfe was executed by the Germans and her body disposed of in the crematorium.
Three other female members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, and Violette Szabo.
Honours
The name of Lilian Rolfe is engraved on the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, England. The "Lilian Rolfe House" at the Vincennes Estate, Lambeth was dedicated to her memory. In her honor, the government of France posthumously awarded her the Croix de Guerre. In the town of Montargis in the Loiret département, where she had been active, a street was named for her alias: "Rue Claudie Rolfe". As one of the SOE agents who died for the liberation of France, she is listed on the "Roll of Honor" on the Valençay SOE Memorial in the town of Valençay, in the Indre departément of France. Like many female agents she was seconded into the FANY when she joined SOE. Thus she is also commemorated on the FANY memorial at St Paul's Church Knightsbridge in London.
Depiction in Popular Culture
In the 1958 film Carve Her Name with Pride, the character of Lilian Rolfe was played by Anne Leon.