FEMALE SECRET AGENTS IN WW1
Brussels was occupied by the Germans
during the First World War.
Although German troops got within 30 miles of the French Capital City,
nevertheless Paris remained free for
the duration of WW1, which meant it was a meeting place for all sorts of
people.
The popularly accepted idea these days of Mata Hari
as being a typical spy during the First World War could not be further from the
truth. Mata Hari, who lived
in Paris, is believed to have been a spy but the singer Mistinguette apparently
did more to help the Allied cause.
In the years prior to the War a parliamentary study
revealed that there was ‘widespread German infiltration’ but ‘there was no
organization’ of counter-espionage.
So the British Government brought the Secret Service Bureau into
being. Notable male spies
were Sidney Riley and the writer W. Somerset Maugham.
The Service adapted and expanded during the 1914 –
1918 years and women were used extensively as secret agents, many of them were
discovered and shot. Here is just one of the
stories of some of those women.
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MARTHE MATHILDE CNOCKAERT
(1892 – 1966) - BELGIAN
Marthe Cnockaert was born on 28th October 1892 in Westrozebeke in the west of Belgium. When The First World War broke out Marthe was a student at Ghent University and had trained as a nurse. The village was burnt and Marthe became separated from her family. In 1915, she went to work in a German military hospital in Roulers, Belgium, where her family had found shelter when their home was burnt down. There, Marthe was recruited into the British Intelligence by a Belgian neighbour, working with two other Belgian women agents. For two years Marthe worked as a nurse in the German hospital and also in her parents’ café, gathering vital intelligence information for the British.
A German agent who was billeted in her home tried to
recruit Marthe to work for the Germans and she worked for a time as a double
agent. When that became too
complicated, she arranged for the German agent to be killed. Marthe discovered a disused sewer
tunnel system under a German ammunition dump and placed explosives there. Unfortunately, Mathe lost her watch,
which was engraved with her initials, as she placed the explosives and that led
to her capture. Marthe was
sentenced to death but due to her expertise as a nurse and the fact that she
had been nursing German wounded, for which she had received the Iron Cross, the
sentence was commuted and Marthe spent two years in prison in Ghent.
After the War, Marthe received recognition for her
work from the British and the French. She married a British Army Officer – John McKenna - and
wrote her memoirs, for which Winston Churchill wrote a foreword, as well as
novels.
In 1933 a film of Marthe’s life story was made called
“I was a Spy” with the actress Madeleine Carroll in the starring role.
Marthe died in Westrozebeke in 1966.
The German Iron Cross MedalThe Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III established the Iron Cross on 13th March 1813, at the beginning of the German campaign as part of the Napoleonic Wars. The design was a silver-framed cast iron cross. Iron was a material which symbolised defiance and reflected the spirit of the age. The Prussian state had mounted a campaign steeped in patriotic rhetoric to rally their citizens to repulse the French occupation. To finance the army, the king implored wealthy Prussians to turn in their jewels in exchange for a men's cast-iron ring or a ladies' brooch, each bearing the legend "Gold I gave for iron" (Gold gab ich für Eisen). The award was reinstituted for the wars in 1870 and 1914.
Emperor Wilhelm II reauthorized the Iron Cross on 5th August 1914, at the start of The First World War. The 1813, 1870, and 1914 Iron Crosses had three grades:
Iron Cross 2nd Class (Eisernes Kreuz 2. Klasse, or EKII)
Iron Cross 1st Class (Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse, or EKI)
Grand Cross of the Iron Cross (Großkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes, often simply Großkreuz)
