Who Was Violette Szabo?

 

During the Second World War, Szabo was recruited by
the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work as an
agent in German-occupied Europe. She spoke fluent
French and was sent to France in 1944, having been
recruited as an agent in 1942.


Szabo joined the SOE’s ‘F’ Section after the death of
her husband Etienne, who had been fighting as part
of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. On her
first mission to France in April 1944, she acted as
courier to Philippe Liewer, whose resistance network
in the Rouen area of France had been uncovered by
the Gestapo. Violette’s job was to try to and
re-establish contact with members of the network
and gather vital intelligence.

Her second mission began on 07th June 1944, the day
after D-Day. She, Liewer and another agent
parachuted into south-west France, near Limoges, to
set up a new network with local resistance groups.

Three days later Szabo was on a courier trip with a
resistance leader known as ‘Anastasie’ when they
encountered German forces. Their car was stopped
at a road block and a gun battle took place. Violette
was captured but helped ensure that Anastasie was
able to escape. After capture, Szabo was brutally
interrogated in Fresnes prison in Paris before being
deported by train to Germany. During the journey the
train was attacked by British aircraft, and Violette and
another female prisoner took the opportunity - at
great personal risk - to take water to the male
prisoners.
Szabo was executed at Ravensbruck concentration
camp in early 1945.
Szabo’s story and those of other SOE agents feature
in our exhibition ‘Spies, Lies and Deception’, currently
on at IWM London. See the link in our bio for more.
The first photo shows Szabo and the second shows
her daughter, Tania, receiving her mother's
posthumous George Cross, 28th January 1947.

Herta Kasparova Czech Collaborator

  Herta Kasparova, a female
collaborator who worked with the Germans during the
occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War ll, at the
time of her execution by pole hanging...
Herta Kasparova was born on  01st June, 1923, in the
small Czech town of Trest', into a world that never
treated her gently. From birth, she lived with a visible
disability—a damaged right leg that caused a
pronounced limp. In a society that prized physical
normalcy and conformity, especially in the interwar
years, this marked her early. As a child and adolescent,
she was mocked, isolated, and made painfully aware
that she was seen as different. Long before politics
entered her life, she had already learned what it meant
to be vulnerable and watched.

When Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia,
survival often depended on language, usefulness and
proximity to power. Herta spoke both Czech and
German fluently, a skill that suddenly gave her value in
a brutal system. The Gestapo in Trest' used her as a
translator, placing her in rooms where fear dictated
every word. She translated documents and
interrogations, and later was accused of acting as an
“investigator,” reporting on suspected dissidents
within her own community. Whether driven by
coercion, fear, a desire for protection, or a fragile
sense of belonging, her role tied her fate tightly to the
occupiers.

After the war, the moral landscape shifted violently
and quickly. Collaboration trials swept through
Czechoslovakia, fueled by grief, rage, and a desperate
need for justice or vengeance. Herta was arrested,
tried, and sentenced to death. She was just 23 years
old.

On 13th September, 1946, at 6:38 p.m., she was
executed by pole hanging, a method designed not for
mercy but for spectacle and punishment. The
execution device was stark and imposing. When she
was brought before it, terror overtook her body. Her
legs collapsed beneath her, and guards had to lift her
upright. Witnesses noted her visible fear as the ropes
were tied, her chest strapped, her body raised. In her
final moments, the procedure was carried out with
calculated brutality, ending her life publicly and
decisively.

Jean Bartik ENIAC,

 CAPTURED IN FRANCE, TORTURED, AND SENT TO
RAVENSBRUCK, SHE WAS SENTENCED TO DEATH-TWICE-
AND NEVER SPOKE A NAME. MOST DID NOT SURVIVE
WHAT SHE ENDURED. BUT SHE DID SURVIVE.
LIBERATED IN ‘1945. SHE WALKED OUT ALIVE WHEN
SURVIVAL ITSELF WAS RESISTANCE.

 Jean Bartik entered computing
at a moment when no one even knew what the job was
called. In the 1940s, she and five other women were
assigned to the

ENIAC, a 30-ton machine built to
calculate artillery trajectories. It filled a room, roared
with heat, and had no programming language, no
manuals, no diagrams, and no precedent. What existed
was hardware—cables, switches, and panels—and the
expectation that these women would somehow make
it work.

Programming ENIAC meant thinking in pure logic.
Bartik learned to translate complex mathematical
equations into physical actions, crawling inside the
machine, rewiring it by hand, setting thousands of
switches, and debugging problems by sound and
instinct. When something went wrong, there was no
code to review—only miles of wiring to trace. They
weren't just using the machine; they were inventing
the very idea of how a computer could be instructed

Their most revolutionary achievement came when
they transformed ENIAC from a single-purpose
weapon calculator into the first stored-program
computer. This leap—allowing a machine to hold
instructions rather than be rewired for every task—
became the foundation of modern software. Yet when
ENIAC was unveiled to the public, the women who
made it function were largely ignored, mistaken for
models or assistants rather than architects of a new
field.

Bartik spent decades watching computing become
one of the most powerful industries in the world while
the women who built its foundations were erased from
its origin story. Only later in life did she begin receiving
recognition for what she had always known: that
modern computing did not begin with sleek code or
corporate labs, but with women who taught a machine
how to think before society was ready to credit them
for it.

https://share.google/UKH8n2kFpnB2547jB

Soviet Sniper Rosa Shanina

 

 Smart, Beautiful, and Deadly:
19-Year-Old Soviet Sniper Roza Shanina with 59
Confirmed Kills, 1945

Roza Shanina, the Soviet sniper who captured global
attention at only 19 years old, achieved 59 confirmed
kills during World War ll — including 12 during the
Battle of Vilnius alone.

After her brother was killed in 1941, she volunteered
for the army and chose to become a front-line sniper.
She quickly gained a reputation for exceptional
accuracy and for performing doublets — hitting two
targets with two rapid shots.

By 1944, Canadian newspapers were calling her “the
unseen terror of East Prussia", and she became the
first Soviet female sniper to receive the Order of
Glory.

Despite Soviet orders to withdraw female snipers
from direct combat, Shanina refused to step back.
She repeatedly asked to return to the front line, even
writing to General Krylov and to Stalin himself. Her
request was denied, yet she went anyway — receiving
only administrative punishment, and continuing to
fight.

In her diary, she wrote about feeling “an unknown
force" pulling her toward battle, and about losing her
comrades one after another. She fully understood she
might be killed, but kept advancing.

On 27th January 1945, she was mortally wounded while
shielding a wounded artillery officer, and died the next
day — leaving behind deeply emotional diary entries
from a brave, strong young woman worn down by war
and loss.