Women who Spied for Britain by Walker Robyn

Author:Walker, Robyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2014-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

5

Diana Rowden (1915–44)

Code Name: Paulette

Late in the afternoon of 6 July 1944, four women arrived at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, the only German extermination camp known to have been located on French soil. This fact did not bode well for the futures of the four new arrivals. The presence of the women in what was an all-male camp sparked a wave of interest among the inmates, and speculation rippled through the barracks. This interest peaked later that evening when witnesses saw the four women being led towards the crematorium. Flames shot from the crematorium chimney four times, marking each time that the oven doors were opened and closed. The women were never seen again. One of these women was Diana Rowden.

Diana Hope Rowden was born on 31 January 1915 in London, England. The First World War was just a few months old, and no one could have predicted that the newborn baby girl would eventually lose her life defending her country in a similar conflict, less than thirty years later. Her parents, Aldred Rowden (a Major in the Army) and his Scottish wife Christian, separated when she was very young. Diana, her two brothers (Maurice and Cecil) and her mother then moved to the French Riviera where she enjoyed what was, by all accounts, an idyllic childhood. The family had enough money to afford a comfortable lifestyle and, indeed, lived much of the time aboard a yacht, named the Sans Peur (Without Fear), sailing up and down the French and Italian Mediterranean. Diana was an extremely capable boater and enjoyed many an afternoon dozing on deck with a string tied around her toe, waiting for the jerk of a fish on her line, which she would quickly reel in and gut with relish. She was known as quite a tomboy with a sweet and reserved personality.

When Diana was a teenager, the family returned to Britain so that Diana might receive a proper boarding-school education. She attended the Manor House School, located in Limpsfield, Surrey. Diana did not particularly enjoy her Manor House experience, and was terribly homesick for the Mediterranean, but it was here that she met and befriended Elizabeth Nicholas, a woman who later wrote a book about Diana, entitled Death Be Not Proud in 1958. Diana’s unhappiness at school was probably responsible for the impression that her personality left on Elizabeth Nicholas. Nicholas remembered Diana as a mature and introverted girl, who kept herself removed from teenage drama and who seemed to stoically endure life rather than embracing it. She was shocked, years later, to discover, during an interview with Diana’s mother, that Diana had been a true tomboy who relished life on the Mediterranean, and who spent her days boating and fishing and carousing with her brothers. Upon leaving Manor House School, Diana returned with her mother to France in 1933, while her brothers remained at school in Britain. Unsure of what she wanted to do with her life, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon, Diana enrolled at the Sorbonne to study journalism.

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