Diana Rowden

The concentration camp where she died is now a French government historical site: a plaque to Rowden and the three women who died with her is part of the Deportation Memorial on the site. In 1985, SOE agent and painter Brian Stonehouse, who saw Rowden and the other female SOE agents at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp just before their deaths, painted a watercolour of the four women which now hangs in the Special Forces Club in London.

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. Sansom, in an interview after the war, said:

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.

In early March 1943, she received an invitation to a preliminary interview with an officer of SOE F Section, during which the interviewer was favourably impressed. It was duly noted that she was “very anxious to return to France and work against the Germans”, and after she had been seen by other members of F Section staff, it was decided that she would be given the chance she had been looking for. She was officially posted to Air Intelligence 10, actually seconded to SOE, on 18 March 1943, and immediately sent off to training.

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. Within minutes two other agents, Cecily Lefort and Noor Inayat Khan, had landed. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

When Germany invaded France in 1940 she volunteered to serve with the French Red Cross, being assigned to the Anglo-American Ambulance Unit. The Allied collapse in May 1940 prevented her evacuation from France and she remained there until the summer of 1941 when she escaped to England via Spain and Portugal.

Posthumously, Rowden was appointed a MBE (later withdrawn due to the policy on posthumous awards of this order) and Mentioned in Despatches by the British government, and awarded the Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 by the French government.

In 1933, when Rowden was considered sufficiently educated, if not entirely finished, she returned to France with her mother (leaving the two boys at school in England) and enrolled at the Sorbonne, and tried her hand at free-lance journalism.

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.

Born in England, Rowden was the daughter of Major Aldred Clement Rowden (British Army) and his wife, Muriel Christian Maitland-Makgill-Crichton, whom he married on 16 July 1913 at St Mark’s, North Audley Street in London’s fashionable Mayfair district. The marriage was not successful and her parents separated when she was still a young child, whereupon she moved with her mother and two younger brothers, Maurice Edward Alfred and Cecil William Aldred, to southern France as a small income went farther there than in England. She and her brothers spent much of their time there on the beach, fishing and boating, swimming and gliding.