Tuesday 21 June 2011

Eliane Plewman

Eliane Sophy Browne-Bartroli was born in Marseilles on 6th December 1917. After spending her childhood in France she was educated in England and Spain and then worked in Leicester, England.
At the outbreak of the war Eliane worked for the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon. In 1942 she returned to England to work in the Ministry of Information and also married a British Army officer. Shortly afterwards she joined the Special Operations Executive.
Eliane, a FANY, was parachuted into France on the night of 13-14th August 1943 to join the MONK network as a Courier. The network, based around Marseilles, was to suffer betrayal and she was arrested in March, 1944.
After being interrogated by the Gestapo for three weeks she was transferred to the civil prison at Karlsruhe in the Rhine Valley where seven other female agents were held - Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel, Sonia Olschanezky, Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment. Noor Inayat Khan was held at a subsidary prison of Karlsruhe, Pforzheim.
On 10th September 1944 Eliane Plewman, Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment and Noor Inayat Khan were moved to Dachau. Eliane Plewman was executed with the three other women at Dachau on 11th September, 1944 by a single shot through the back of the neck.
Eliane was 26 years old.

No comments:

Post a Comment