LIFE Heroes of World War II: Men and Women Who Put Their Lives on the Line
Page 2
PHOTO BY BOB TOMPKINS, COURTESY GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
Future fashion designer Bill Blass honed his vision. “He would sit on a bunk bed on Saturdays and Sundays, and he would do little thumbnail sketches of clothes,” recalled fellow Ghost Army veteran Bill Sayles.
JOE MACK. COURTESY STEPHEN MACK AND THE GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
Sergeant Joseph Mack made hundreds of paintings and sketches while in the service, like this one. After the war he founded the Huntington School of Fine Arts.
COURTESY GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
Dummy soldiers were set up around a fake artillery gun to trick the enemy.
COURTESY GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
Live troops stand in front of a specially modified half-track. The vehicles carried audio equipment capable of projecting sounds that mimicked the noise of an armored division, sending it up to 15 miles toward the enemy.
COURTESY GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
This convoy of military vehicles was actually just a row of inflatable cars.
The Parachuting Perfume Seller
Violette Szabo
Seeking to avenge her husband’s death, the former Le Bon Marché clerk—and new mother—became a spy behind enemy lines
TOPHAM PICTUREPOINT/PA
Violette and Etienne Szabo enjoyed a brief honeymoon in Aldershot, southwest of London, a year after Britain entered the war. Violette then returned to London, where she worked for the post office while Etienne headed to Senegal, South Africa, Syria, and finally North Africa, where he died.
The woman known by turns as Vicky Taylor, Corinne Leroy, Louise Leroy, and Madame Marguerite Blanchard was in fact Violette Szabo, a 23-year-old British widow and mother. She was also a spy who, posing as a seamstress, worked with the French resistance. On June 10, 1944, she was driving into German-occupied France with Jacques Dufour, a resistance member, on a mission to disrupt German communications, when they ran into an SS roadblock near Salon-la-Tour.
Dufour stopped the car, jumped out, and started firing his machine gun at the Nazis. Szabo followed with her Sten gun, but she was wounded in the shoulder, and she twisted her ankle as they ran toward the nearby woods. Now she could hardly move. Insisting that Dufour continue without her, she covered him by firing at the Germans—until she ran out of ammo.
“You can run after him,” Szabo said as the Nazis approached. “He is far away by now.”
She herself was not so lucky, of course. She was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Limoges, where she was tortured and sexually assaulted as the secret police tried to force her to talk: Who was she? What had she done? What and whom did she know? She refused to answer, but the truth might have shocked them.
Just four years before, Violette Bushell, born in Paris in 1921 to a French mother and English father, had been a perfume seller at Le Bon Marché department store in London. But her life changed forever on July 14, 1940, when she met Etienne Szabo, a 31-year-old French Foreign Legion officer, during a Bastille Day parade. They were married five weeks later, but their honeymoon didn’t last. Etienne was sent to North Africa, where he was killed during the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942—mere months after Violette had given birth to their daughter, Tania.
Determined to avenge her husband’s death, Szabo volunteered as a field agent and courier for Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), an espionage organization that sent spies behind enemy lines. The plucky, resourceful Szabo—“a dark-haired slip of mischief,” one colleague called her—was trained in parachuting, weaponry, escape, evasion, cryptology, and communication.
In April 1944, Szabo was sent on her first mission into occupied France. Acting as a courier to Philippe Liewer, a member of the French resistance, Szabo parachuted into an area just south of Paris. She was heading to bombed-out Rouen on a mission to reestablish contact with Liewer’s network, which had recently been uncovered by the Gestapo. Though she found the organization in tatters, during her month in France she was instrumental in the sabotage of Rouen’s Barentin viaduct, thereby disrupting an important Nazi transport route.
Mission accomplished, she spent the next few months in London with her daughter, but it wasn’t long before she volunteered for the mission that led to her capture—and eventual incarceration in Ravensbrück, the Third Reich’s largest concentration camp for women. Szabo was beaten, prostituted in camp brothels, and forced into hard labor wearing nothing but her summer clothes in the freezing cold.
In the winter of 1945, with the Russians closing in and an Allied victory increasingly likely, Ravensbrück officials worried that the nearly 50,000 surviving prisoners would expose the camp’s unspeakable atrocities: “medical experiments” that maimed and murdered Roma, the slaughter of thousands of children, and the systematic sterilization of women. So the Nazis began killing them en masse.
In February, Szabo and two SOE colleagues—wireless operators Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe—were taken from the barracks to the “shooting alley” near the camp commandant’s headquarters. Malnourished to the point of death, Bloch and Rolfe were carried in stretchers while the relatively strong Szabo followed on foot. After witnessing the execution of her friends, Szabo was forced to kneel and was shot in the neck. She was 23.
In 1947, Szabo’s four-year-old daughter, Tania, traveled with her grandparents to Buckingham Palace. There, she accepted a George Cross medal from King George VI on behalf of the woman who had called herself Vicky, Corinne, Louise, and Madame Marguerite Blanchard but whom Tania knew only as “Mum.”
ADN-BILDARCHIV/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY
Winston Churchill established the Special Operations Executive to aid subversive activity behind enemy lines. The Germans captured Szabo during her last operation and sent her to Ravensbrück, where the Nazis worked women prisoners to death.
POPPERFOTO/GETTY
In 1948, Szabo’s daughter Tania proudly wore the George Cross medal that King George VI awarded her mother posthumously.
Political Heroes
Winston Churchill
With Britain in the early stages of war, the Prime Minister brought inspired leadership and steely resolve
© YOUSUF KARSH
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” Winston Churchill said in a rousing address to the United Kingdom’s Parliament on May 13, 1940. It was his first speech as newly installed prime minister, but it electrified his audience, earned the nation’s confidence, and buoyed an uneasy Britain in the first months of a new war. On September 3, 1939, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain and France entered the conflict—and 65-year-old Churchill became the galvanizing face of the British resistance.
Born to Lord Randolph Churchill and New York socialite Jennie Jerome on November 30, 1874, the future statesman was an indifferent, rebellious student who nevertheless distinguished himself in the British military and as a writer before entering politics in the early 1900s. His early career was “central to the strength of his war leadership,” wrote Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer. “Churchill could draw upon knowledge acquired in the many fierce political battles and tough international negotiations.”
He mixed this hard-won skill with native wisdom and guts. “Certainly Churchill’s most heroic moment came on May 28, 1940, when, defying many of his wavering colleagues and what appeared to be all military reality, he declared that he would fight to the finish,” Richard M. Langworth, CBE, senior fellow of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, tells LIFE. Trying to win the support of his cabinet, the statesman said, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
He was a resounding success. “His colleagues rose as one, shouting and clapping him on the back,” Gilbert wrote. “All talk of negotiation ceased forever.” But after German forces defeated most of Western Europe within two months, France signed an armistice with Germany on June 17, 1940.
In August, the German Luftwaffe attacked England in what became known as the Battle of Britain, but an onslaught by British RAF fighter pilots resulted in a German retreat. Yet the future still looked grim, so Churchill rallied his countrymen by emphasizing courage in the face of adversity. “We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering,” he said. “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.”
In December 1941, after the United States entered the war, Churchill was instrumental in establishing his country’s alliance with the U.S. and the Soviet Union, thus ensuring an Allied victory. After Germany surrendered in 1945, Churchill once again addressed the British people—this time, from the balcony of the Ministry of Health. “God bless you all,” he said. “This is your victory.” “No, it is yours!” the people responded, proving that, as Time magazine wrote, “what he gave his country, above all, was leadership.”
The Nazi Who Saved Jews
Oskar Schindler
The corrupt, philandering, moneygrubbing gambler rescued more than 1,000 Jews with his lifesaving list
ISRAEL TALBY/AKG-IMAGES
Oskar Schindler with workers at his enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland, which he bought in November 1939. He ultimately employed nearly 1,300 Jews there.
He was a drunk, a womanizer, a chain-smoker, a gambler, and a Nazi who became the unlikely savior of nearly 1,300 Jews during the Holocaust. His name was Oskar Schindler, and his transformation from scoundrel to secular saint—made famous by Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List—is one of the most moving stories to emerge from World War II.
Born in 1908 in Zwittau, Moravia—then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the money-hungry Schindler joined the Nazi party in February 1939, thinking that it would be good for business. After the German invasion of Poland that September, Schindler moved to Krakow, where he took advantage of the German mandate to “Aryanize” Jewish businesses and commandeered an enamelware factory formerly owned by Jews. He staffed it with the cheapest labor he could find—Jews from the nearby ghetto—but his opportunism soon turned to empathy.
“We could see horror emerging gradually in many ways,” Schindler said in an interview outside his West German apartment in 1964. “In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years ’41 and ’42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism.” During a German raid on the ghetto in the summer of 1942, Schindler watched in horror as Jews were piled into trains and shipped off to the death camps. “Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” he said. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”
In March 1943, the Nazis liquidated the Krakow ghetto. The Jews who weren’t killed immediately were sent into forced labor at the Plaszow camp and eventually to their deaths at Auschwitz. Plaszow’s sociopathic commandant, Amon Goeth, was particularly brutal, shooting children for sport, siccing dogs on prisoners, and playing lullabies on loudspeakers while sending inmates to Auschwitz. “When you saw Goeth,” one later said, “you saw death.”
Schindler often intervened to help his workers, spending his fortune to bribe guards and smuggle food and supplies into the camp, but he soon took an even riskier step. In October 1944, he obtained Nazi permission to relocate his plant to Moravia by calling it an armaments factory, thereby justifying its importance. In truth, his goal was to save as many of his “Schindlerjuden” as he could—ultimately nearly 1,300—by claiming he needed them to work in Moravia. So began his famous list of names. “He did something when it appeared that the Germans were winning,” Schindler’s attorney, Irving Glovin, later said, “and he did it over a long period of time, about four years, and he did it in the worst area, Poland, and he did it openly … He did it for strangers.”
Helped by his long-suffering wife, Emilie, Schindler succeeded—as much as anyone could have—by using the very things that had made him such a scoundrel. “If he was a virtuous, honest guy, no one in a corrupt, greedy system like the SS would accept him,” said Zev Kedem, who was 11 when he became one of the Schindler Jews. “In a weird world that celebrated death, he recognized the Jews as humans. Schindler used the corrupt ways, creativity, and ingenuity against the monster machine dedicated to death.”
The end of the war brought little peace to Schindler, who faced threats from former Nazis and the enmity of his fellow Germans. Because he had been a Nazi, he was barred from the United States, so he and Emilie moved to Buenos Aires. Schindler remained a philanderer, cheating on his wife and finally leaving her behind when he returned to Germany in 1958—they never saw each other again. On October 9, 1974, he died penniless and virtually unknown in Hildensheim, but thanks to the Jews whose lives he had saved, his last wish was fulfilled: He was buried in Israel. “My children are here,” he said.
POPPER LTD./ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY
Schindler, surrounded by some of those he had saved, after arriving in Israel in 1962. Proclaimed a Righteous Gentile by the Israeli government, the industrialist flew there for the planting of a tree in his honor on Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous.
MICHAEL LATZ/AP
Part of Schindler’s famous lifesaving list.
ALIK KEPLICZ/AP
Ludwik Kuczer—one of the nearly 1,300 people the industrialist saved—tearfully recalled the war during a visit to Krakow for the 65th anniversary of the Nazi liquidation of that city’s ghetto.
The Word Warrior
Sophie Scholl
A founding member of the White Rose, a Munich-based resistance group, she risked her life by writing anti-Nazi tracts
JÜRGEN WITTENSTEIN/AKG-IMAGES
Sophie Scholl, with her brother Hans, left, and their friend Christoph Probst. The three joined with others to form the White Rose in Munich and distributed anti-Nazi tracts.
In the spring of 1942, with mass deportations of Jews underway in Nazi Germany, Sophie Scholl bought a small printing press so that she, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst could write and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets. With the help of Sophie’s philosophy teacher, Kurt Huber, and a handful of others, these three brave people—all in their early twenties—became the Munich-based resistance organization known as the White Rose.
Raised in a household marked by intellect and humanism, Sophie and Hans had originally supported Hitler, but life under the dictator quickly became oppressive—even as most Germans continued to deny the horror behind the initial promise. Now there were whispers of concentration camps, and Hans himself had witnessed the abuse of Jewish laborers while stationed as a soldier on the eastern front.
It was time to act.
“Western civilization must defend itself against fascism and offer passive resistance, before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield,” read the White Rose’s first pamphlet, which the young people distributed in June 1942. They left copies around the University of Munich, sent them in the mail, left them in telephone booths, and brought them at great risk to surrounding areas via police-patrolled trains.
Over the next eight months, the White Rose released five further pamphlets addressing the Nazis’ vile treatment of Jews, calling for the destruction of the National Socialist dictatorship, and declaring that “Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss.”
The sixth and last pamphlet proved the most extreme, bringing attention to the suppressed news of the humiliating German defeat at Stalingrad one month earlier—the point at which the war turned against the Nazis. “The brilliant strategy of the World War I corporal has rushed into irresponsible death and destruction 330,000 German men,” it read. “Führer, we thank you!”
The bitter language sealed the group’s fate. On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans were distributing hundreds of copies of the last pamphlet at the University of Munich when they were spotted by a Nazi handyman named
Jakob Schmid, who sounded the alarm. The building doors were locked, and Sophie and Hans were arrested.
Four days later, the siblings and their friend went on “trial” for treason before an emergency session of the People’s Court in Munich’s Palace of Justice. The judge was Roland Freisler, who was known for hysterical performances that were often filmed and shown to Hitler. But that day his characteristic shrieks and shouts were interrupted by Sophie. “Somebody had to make a start,” she said calmly. “What we said and wrote are what many people are thinking. They just don’t dare say it out loud!”
At one point, Hans and Sophie’s parents, Robert and Magdalena, tried to gain entrance to the trial but were denied by the apoplectic judge. “There is a higher justice!” Robert shouted as he was dragged from the courtroom. “They will go down in history!”
Sophie, Hans, and Christoph were convicted of high treason and sentenced to swift execution. Sophie remained calm and philosophical throughout. “Such a beautiful sunny day, and I have to go,” she said to her cellmate. “How many are dying on the battlefields, how many young lives full of hope … what difference does my death make if our actions arouse thousands of people?”
She even comforted her grieving mother, who visited her in prison just before the execution. “You’ll never come in that door again,” Magdalena lamented. Sophie replied, “Oh, mother, what are those few years anyway?” But later, in private, she cried.
Within some 24 hours of the trial, the three were beheaded in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison. As Hans faced his death, he cried out, “Long live freedom!” They were not the last in the group to die: The Nazis began systematically rounding up everyone associated with the White Rose. But the movement’s voice could not be silenced. A few days after the executions, graffiti appeared on the University of Munich walls: “Scholl lives!” The sixth leaflet—now called “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich”—was smuggled out of the Third Reich, and the Allies dropped millions of copies all over Germany.