(19 19-1944)
British secret agent during World War II. Andre Borrel was born outside Paris on November 18, 1919, to working-class parents. She imbued the socialist sentiments prevalent in her class and left school when she was fourteen to become a seamstress. She moved to Paris in 1933 and took a job as a shop assistant. During her free time, she was an avid hiker and cyclist, pastimes that would later serve her well. At the beginning of the war, she moved to Toulon. She trained as a nurse with the Red Cross and attended wounded French soldiers. Following the fall of France in June 1940, Borrel and her friend, Maurice Dufour, joined a Resistance group, which helped downed Allied airmen escape France. When the group was uncovered, Borrel and Dufour made their way to Portugal, where she was able to find employment with the Free French Propaganda Office of the British Embassy. In April 1942, she went to England. The Gaullists in England were suspicious of her because of her socialist sympathies. After interrogation to determine whether she might be a secret agent of the Nazis, Bor-rel was cleared to join the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Bearing the code name Denise, Borrel parachuted into France with Lise de Baissac on September 24, 1942. She was assigned as a courier to the Prosper network led by Francis Suttill. Foot (1984, 156) judged Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, and Nancy Wake "three of F section’s best couriers." Borrel proved herself much more than a courier. Her left-wing political outlook was useful among the workers of Paris’s Red Belt suburbs. She became an organizer, trainer, and active participant in sabotage operations. By March 1943, she had risen to second in command in "Prosper." Suttill said, "Everyone who has come into contact with her in her work agrees with myself that she is the best of us all" (Foot 1984, 257).
On June 23, 1943, Borrel, Suttill, and Gilbert Norman, their radio operator and the other key figure in Prosper, were arrested. After interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo during which "she treated them [the interrogators] with fearless contempt throughout" (Foot 1984, 316), Borrel was held in the Fresnes prison in Paris. On May 13, 1944, she was sent from Fresnes with seven other captured British women agents to the Karlsruhe civil prison in Germany. On July 6, 1944, on the direct order of Ernest Kaltenbrunner, the head of the SS Security Office, Borrel, Sonia Olschanezky, Vera Leigh, and Diana Rowden were moved to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. The day of their arrival, the women were ordered to undress in front of a camp doctor. They refused, but, when told that they were to be inoculated against typhus, bared their arms and were injected with phenol. They fell into a stupor and were put directly into a crematorium. As the last was being shoved into the oven, she regained consciousness and resisted but was nevertheless burned alive. A watercolor of Borrel and her three companions executed by Brian Stonehouse, an SOE agent who as a prisoner had witnessed their arrival at Natzweiler-Struthof, has a place of honor in the Special Forces Club in London.
