The FANY Agents — Andrée Borrel

image-Photograph of Andrée Borrel Croix de Guerre

Codename(s): Denise / Monique / Whitebeam

This brief biography has been extracted from Flames in the Field, copyright 1995 by Rita Kramer.
I am most grateful to her for agreeing to contribute to the web site.

Andrée Borrel was born in November 1919 and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. She left school at fourteen and worked at various sales jobs in Paris, spending her spare time in rugged activities like hiking, climbing, and bicycling. When war broke out she headed to the unoccupied zone in the south, where she worked as a Red Cross nurse and joined an underground escape line guiding British servicemen to safety. Betrayed by an informer, the line was shattered and Andrée made the journey over the Pyrénées via Spain to Portugal and eventually from Lisbon to London, where she was greeted with suspicion by De Gaulle's people because of her leftist background and her previous activities on behalf of the British. F Section had no such qualms, seeing in her a bona fide Frenchwoman who would be able to move around in France without arousing suspicion, and she was enthusiastically recruited for the first group of women agents trained by SOE in the spring of 1942.

Tough and self-reliant, judged "absolutely reliable", she became the first woman to be dropped by parachute into occupied France. It was the autumn of 1942 and her assignment was to serve as courier to the chief of the vast network in the Paris area known as Prosper. As Denise, she became more than a messenger, serving as an invaluable partner as she and Prosper travelled through the north organising circuits and training them in the use of the weapons and explosives they supplied them with for sabotage actions, in which Andrée often took an effective part. By the end of May 1943 she and Prosper and their radio operator were a close-knit threesome, with drop zones and stored arms on farms all over the Île de France and beyond.

Unfortunately, they proved too successful. The amount of activity over the skies of northern fields, the number of men and women involved, and the increasing inattention to the demands of security that accompanied the mistaken belief that an Allied invasion was imminent, together with the efficiency with which the Germans had tracked F Section activities with the help of informers and wireless detection techniques, doomed them. All three were arrested in the last week of June. Andrée was imprisoned in Fresnes, where she remained for almost a year before being removed to a civil prison in Germany, from which she was removed along with fellow F Section agents Vera Leigh and Diana Rowden and volunteer Sonia Olschanezky, who had worked for the head of a Jewish sub-section of Prosper, and transported to Struthof-Narzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. Following orders from Berlin, the officials there killed all four women by means of lethal injection and burned their bodies in the camp's crematorium.

Andrée was 24 years old. Today a simple plaque in the crematorium records their names.