The George Cross awarded to a spy who parachuted behind enemy lines just two days after D-day is to be auctioned this month.
Violette Szabo was a wartime resistance heroine who was tortured and killed in a Nazi concentration camp after working with French resistance groups during the second world war.
She was arrested twice on her first mission to occupied France, but managed to keep her cover. On her second mission, two days after D-day, she parachuted into France again. A few days later – when her car was stopped by a German patrol – rather than making a run for it, armed with her Sten gun she embarked on a shootout with the Nazis.
With only an apple tree for cover she kept fighting until her ammunition ran out. In the months of imprisonment that followed she was tortured by the Nazis and was interned in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
The Nazis shot her in the back of the head in early 1945 – months before the camps were liberated by the allies.
Szabo’s acts of espionage were immortalised in the 1958 film Carve Her Name with Pride – a reference to how she carved her name into one of the prison cells she was held in.
Her gallantry medals are expected to fetch between £250,000 and £300,000 at Dix Noonan Webb auctioneers on 22 July.
