Rowden, Diana Hope, 1915-1944
Diana Hope Rowden (31 January 1915 – 6 July 1944) served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. Rowden was a member of SOE's Acrobat circuit in occupied France where she operated as a courier until she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.[1]Born in England In September 1941, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), working at the Department of the Chief of Air Staff as Assistant Section Officer for Intelligence duties, before being posted in July 1942 to Moreton-in-Marsh, where she was promoted to Section Officer. On 9 June 1943, Rowden received orders for her first mission, and a week later, on the night of 16/17 June, she stepped out of a Lysander on a moonlit meadow in the Loire Valley a few miles north-east of Angers.[9] Within minutes two other agents, Cecily Lefort and Noor Inayat Khan, had landed.[10] The three women, who had been sent to operate as couriers for the organizers of various circuits (also known as networks) in different parts of France, were met by a reception committee organized by F Sections' air movements officer, Henri Déricourt, and quickly spirited to their destinations.[10] Rowden was bound to the area of the Jura Mountains south-east of Dijon and just west of the Swiss border to work for the organizer of the Acrobat circuit, led by John Renshaw Starr.[10] Her papers were in her cover name of Juliette Thérèse Rondeau. Her name in the field among fellow agents was Paulette while her code name in messages to London was Chaplain. She lived in a small room at the back of the Hôtel du Commerce with access to a roof if she had to leave in a hurry without being seen.[10] In November, Young received a message that a new agent named Benoit would arrive. Benoit arrived at a nearby house and identified himself, after which M. Janier-Dubry drove him to Lons-le-Saunier to retrieve a suitcase and were accompanied by Rowden. In Lons they met Henri Clerk a résistant from St Amour, and had a drink with him at the Café Strasbourg, one of the circuit's mail drops.[15] They returned around six that evening and were chatting with Madame Juif, who was cooking dinner, when the door burst open and the room was filled with Feldgendarmerie, the German military police, armed with machine guns.[16]
Rowden, Young and Benoit were handcuffed and taken to Lons, though the false Benoit as he later came to be known returned with some of the Germans and confronted the family at gunpoint and demanded that they hand over the wireless set and crystals, at one point firing into the walls as the Germans searched the home but found nothing. The wireless set had been hidden by Young and later taken away by a local résistant, while Madame Juif had taken a radio crystal from Young's raincoat hanging behind the door and slipped it under the mattress of the baby's crib when no-one was looking. Benoit and the Germans left after looting the home of valuables and took Madame Pauly with them, who returned after the war after having been imprisoned in Ravensbrück.[16]
When the war ended the Janier-Dubry family expected to see Rowden again or at least to write, but they never heard from her again. Rowden liked to say that after the war she would return in her uniform and in a big American car and, instead of the laborious climb to the château on foot, they would shoot up the hill like a rocket.[16]
From Lons, Rowden had been taken to Paris the next day and remained at Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue Foch for two weeks and, on 5 December 1943, was placed in a cell in the women's division of Fresnes Prison, the grey fortress-like penitentiary a few miles south of Paris.
Moved to Germany On 13 May 1944, Rowden, together with three other captured female SOE agents, Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh and Sonia Olschanezky, were moved from Fresnes to the Avenue Foch along with four other women whose names were Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Odette Sansom, all of whom were F Section agents. Later that day they were taken to the railway station, and each handcuffed to a guard upon alighting the train. Some time between five and six in the morning on 6 July 1944, not quite two months after their arrival in Karlsruhe, Borrel, Leigh, Olschanezky and Rowden were taken to the reception room, given their personal possessions, and handed over to two Gestapo men who then escorted them 100 kilometres south-west by closed truck to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, where they arrived around three-thirty in the afternoon. The women's arrival was apparently unexpected as was the order by one of the women's escorts that the four women were to be executed immediately.[20][21] Inside the building housing the crematorium, each woman in turn was told to undress for a medical check and a doctor gave her an injection for what he told one of them was a vaccination against typhus, but was in fact a 10 cc dose of phenol which the doctor believed was lethal. When the woman became unconscious after the injection, she was inserted into the crematorium oven. Guérrise said, "The next morning the German prisoner in charge of the crematorium explained to me that each time the door of the oven was opened, the flames came out of the chimney and that meant a body had been put in the oven. I saw the flames four times." The door was locked from the outside during the executions, but it was possible to see the corridor from a small window above the door, so the prisoner in the highest bunk was able to keep up a running commentary on what he saw.[27]
