Anyone ever hear of Nancy Wake? The Australian woman who hated Nazis so much the Gestapo declared their #1 enemy and put a 5-million franc bounty on her head?
After witnessing Nazi brutality and the authoritarian nature of the far-right party during its rise to power in Austria in the 1930s, she promised herself -
"If ever the opportunity arose, I would do everything I could to stop the Nazi movement." Her hatred of the Nazis was "very very deep".
Born in New Zealand in 1912, Wake grew up in Australia but ran away from home at the age of 16 to become a nurse and later a journalist. She used an inheritance from an aunt to travel to New York, London, and then to Paris where she worked for a variety of news outlets during the 1930s.
When the local resistance network was betrayed in 1943, Wake fled Marseille, her husband remained behind to settle the family business and was captured and executed by the Gestapo after he refused to disclose her location. Wake was arrested in Toulouse, but was released four days later when the Gestapo didn’t realize her true identity.
After her release, she tried to escape five times into neutral Spain, but each of these attempts were thwarted by German patrols. At one point to escape, Wake was forced to hurl herself from a train window while dodging gunfire. Finally, on her sixth attempt Wake was able to cross into Spain while buried in the back of a coal truck.
From Spain, Wake made her way to Britain and was soon recruited by the Special Operations Executive, the British organization focused on conducting espionage and aiding resistance movements in Nazi occupied territory. Wake distinguished herself in training and parachuted into France in April 1944, less than a year after her daring escape.
Wake’s mission was to help the Resistance to prepare to assist the Allied invasion and she dedicated herself to building up various resistance groups into a cohesive fighting force. With her help, this group of 7,500 French Resistance guerrilla fighters assaulted factories and communications, successfully engaging over 22,000 German troops.
She scoffed at her portrayal in a film about her, which showed her cooking breakfast and getting romantically involved with another resistance member
“For goodness sake, did the Allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men?” she said. “There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money, and even if there had been, why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?” Wake died in London in 2011 at the age of 98.
An anti fascist resistance builder from New Zealand who threw herself out a window to escape persuit by fascists and is revered for her work building systems of resistance and a total badass... sounds familiar.
