Her fearless, erotic performances in Paris propelled her to massive stardom, and she became one of the wealthiest and most celebrated performers in Europe. She was posthumously awarded France’s Croix de Guerre and Britain’s George Cross.īorn in 1906 in Missouri, Josephine Baker joined a vaudeville act in her teens, but racism in the US sent her to France, where segregation didn’t exist on the same scale as it did at home. Noor was deported to a German prison, was tortured, and was ultimately executed at Dachau Concentration Camp. She managed to continue for four months before being betrayed by a Frenchwoman. The first female wireless operator (WO) sent to Occupied France she went in spite of knowing WOs had a life expectancy of six weeks behind enemy lines.Īfter her network was compromised, HQ urged Noor to return to London, but she was the last WO left standing in her region and she refused to abandon her post. As a bilingual member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, she was recruited for the British clandestine service, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). After the fall of France, her family escaped to London. She was a pacifist, a writer of children’s books, and a descendent of an 18th century Muslim ruler. Little did he know she was just one of many women operating in the shadows to destroy the Nazis-women whose stories would be unbelievable if they weren’t true.īorn in 1914 in Moscow to an American mother and an Indian father, Noor grew up across the globe, but mostly in France. How surprised Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, “The Butcher of Lyon,” was to discover one of the most troublesome resistors in his region was not only a woman, but a woman with a prosthetic leg.īarbie christened Virginia Hall “ La Dame qui Boite (The Lady who Limps), Most Dangerous of Allied Spies” and put her face on wanted posters. German propaganda at the time depicted a feminine ideal of woman as mother, preferably of four or more children, tending home quietly and with docility. Because of this, women were often overlooked in the hunt for resistors and spies.

Nazis largely didn’t think women were as brave, intelligent, and even devious and vengeful as men. While researching my latest novel, The Invisible Woman, about Allied spy Virginia Hall, I made a surprising discovery. Maurice Buckmaster, They Fought Alone: The Story of British Agents in France “From the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us…”

Noors english spy agent in wwii