100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  In the early 1930s Hannah worked gathering evidence of growing anti-Semitism, and in 1933, after an arrest by the Gestapo, she fled Germany for France. When France was occupied by the Germans, she was imprisoned at the internment camp in Gurs. She was released and escaped the country when her husband, Heinrich Blucher, attained visas to the United States. Their US visas had been issued ‘illegally’ by Hiram Bingham IV, an American diplomat in France, whose father, grandfather, and great grandfather, the Hirams Bingham one through three, by total chance appear in two other women’s stories in this book. What is up with this family? They get around. (Hiram Bingham number four is the best Hiram Bingham, clearly.)

  Hannah taught in every prestigious American university you can think of. In 1959 she became the first female lecturer at Princeton, a place people go to say they’ve been to Princeton, and eventually ended up at the uncreatively named New School in Manhattan. Over the course of her career Hannah dealt with the most important issues of the century: totalitarianism, evil, and violence, among other such fun dinner party topics.

  In 1951 Hannah wrote Origins of Totalitarianism, which analysed Stalin and Hitler’s regimes as new forms of government distinct from previous breeds of tyranny. In 1958 her work The Human Condition sought to figure out the ways different political and social structures allow or prevent people from living good and happy lives. I made my clever friend Trevor explain the thesis of this book, because I am lazy and it’s complicated: ‘She pretty much writes a philosophical history of the entire world going back to antiquity, and then concludes that the basic condition of modern life is alienation, so philosophers spend all their time thinking about “the self”. But she thinks the claim that the contemplative life is better than the active life is false and restricts access to “a good life” to lucky people who sit around thinking all day.’ Thanks Trevor! (Trevor is one of those people who sit around thinking all day.)

  In her 1963 work On Revolution, Hannah argued that the reason for the failure of most revolutions is that they simply replace one governing power with another governing power, instead of the much more YOLO strategy of getting rid of power completely. Just another thing to think about the next time you’re feeling philosophical.

  Hannah Arendt is perhaps most remembered, though, for Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book, published in 1963, was based on her reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had managed the logistics of the deportation of Jewish people in the Holocaust. At the trial, she was struck by how very underwhelming this great monster of the century was. He sat inside a glass cage, with a bit of a cold, and defended himself as a simple administrator whose only aim was to follow the law and the command of the Führer. Hannah concluded that he was a fundamentally mediocre man, an idiotic ‘clown’ susceptible to cliché, and a bureaucrat – and that this fact was essential to understanding the nature of evil.

  She wrote that ‘evil comes from a failure to think’. It was this that had produced a man like Eichmann. ‘The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann,’ she wrote, ‘found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him”, the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and presents the true enigma of the trial.’ Evil became normal in Nazi Germany: ‘In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.’

  Hannah wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem about the way the Nazi regime used often contradictory lies to maintain its grip on power and the effect of this mendacity on the German populace: ‘The German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann’s mentality,’ she wrote. ‘These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.’

  The publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked huge controversy. Less than two decades after the end of World War II, the public and the surviving European Jewish community were still figuring out how to talk about the war and the Holocaust. Some saw this philosophical take to be too cold, and too soon. The book also criticised those Jewish leaders who had collaborated, which Hannah’s critics saw as victim-blaming. Others believed that in stating that Eichmann was not a madman, a psychopath, or even particularly clever, she was excusing him for his crimes – something she vehemently denied, but which led to her alienation from many of her friends. Nevertheless, the idea of evil as a banal thing provided a radical new framework to understand how it is born and spreads across a society as a normal and acceptable thing that ‘can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world’.

  Eichmann in Jerusalem ends with Hannah’s clear and devastating reasoning of why Eichmann must die, addressing him directly:

  And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

  88

  Noor Inayat Khan

  1914–1944

  Before you get your hopes up, this chapter has another sad ending. But don’t worry, first you get to hear about some old-school spying, some grit and survival against all odds, and more than one unbelievable escape from the Gestapo. This is the story of Noor Inayat Khan, the WWII secret agent who earned one of Britain’s highest honours, the George Cross, for her brave work from behind enemy lines in German-occupied Paris.

  The Special Operations Executive, or SOE, was set up in the summer of 1940 to create a network of spies with the task, in Churchill’s words, to ‘set Europe ablaze!’ They would do so by spying on and sabotaging the German war effort, funnelling weapons, money, and materials to resistance forces in occupied countries, and setting things on fire.

  Not just anyone could be an SOE agent. To survive behind enemy lines in the SOE’s French section, an agent had to be perfectly fluent in the language. This didn’t just mean being able to convincingly ask, ‘Où est la bibliothèque?’, though that’s a good start, but rather to be an expert in all French mannerisms and customs. You had to speak on the phone like a French person, dress like a French person, and even comb your hair like a French person. How do you comb your hair like a French person? I don’t know, that’s why I’m not a spy. (Or am I?)

  Noor perfectly fitted the bill. Though she was born in Moscow, and lived some years in England, she spent most of her life in Paris with her family. France was home. Her father was a Sufi teacher descended from Indian Muslim nobility, and her mother a white American who converted to Islam. Their home in Paris was a centre of religious and musical gatherings, and when her beloved father died, Noor and her siblings took care of their broken-hearted mother. Noor became a published children’s author, and was quiet, musical, and sensitive. When Germany invaded France, Noor and her family escaped to England, but Noor was determined to return to France to help her country. She was perfectly fluent in French, and presumably could comb her hair in the mysterious French fashion, whatever that means. She was, however, told off a few times in SOE training and in the field for making tea the English way, milk first, instead of the French way, milk second – a trivial thing that English people like
to have long, pointless arguments about,25 but which in the field could be a life-or-death distinction.

  The cover story of an SOE agent headed behind enemy lines had to be completely bulletproof. Agents had to learn an entire backstory to their fake identity, which usually hailed from towns whose records had been destroyed in the war, so that the Germans couldn’t check if they really existed. Agents had to invent entire extended families and know their details off by heart, which is especially impressive considering how hard I find it to remember my first cousins’ names. An agent was given a fake name (Noor’s was Jeanne-Marie Renier) as well as a code name (Madeleine). Noor’s true identity was also hidden under yet another name: Nora. She’d applied to work for the war effort as Nora rather than Noor, since the British apparently had trouble with ‘foreign’ names, bless them and their ignorant ways.

  Noor was recruited to the SOE for her French background and the strength of character she had shown in her work in other areas of the war effort. Over a year of training, Madeleine aka Jeanne-Marie aka Nora aka Noor learned the art of spy craft in its entirety, from complicated codes, to spotting and interpreting hidden messages that would be sent to them via programmes on the BBC French service, to physical combat. Noor was to learn to be a radio operator, responsible for sending coded messages between agents in the field and the SOE headquarters in Baker Street in London. She would be the first female radio operator sent to occupied France. It was one of the deadliest roles an agent could have, as the job required lugging around 30 pounds of radio equipment in a heavy suitcase, whose purpose would be obvious to any Germans or sympathisers. Even worse, the Germans were constantly searching for the direction of intercepted radio signals. A radio operator had to search for new locations every day to set up her equipment, which included a 70-foot aerial, and had to keep her communications as brief as possible before leaving the area. In Paris, the Germans only needed a half hour to track down a transmission.

  Some instructors had doubts if the 5'3'' Noor, such a gentle, quiet young woman, would cut it as an agent. While a highly skilled telegraphist, she had reacted with great stress under some of the SOE’s training exercises, such as when instructors would burst in on trainees’ sleeping quarters in the middle of the night to subject them to a mock Gestapo interrogation. Another worry was that she was too beautiful to be able to blend in (same). ‘If this girl’s an agent, I’m Winston Churchill,’ one instructor had said. Over the course of her service, however, Noor would prove those who doubted her wrong. She never questioned that she was the right person for the job, and fully understood her service would likely result in her death. The average radio operator in occupied Paris lasted six weeks before capture – Noor would break this grim record by a long way. Nevertheless, each time an agent died the position would have to be immediately replaced, as radio operators were the only link between agents and the French Resistance and London.

  Knowing the danger that awaited her, Noor set out for France. A friend recalled Noor’s excitement a few days before she left: ‘She had stars in her eyes. She wanted to go.’ Vera Atkins, an SOE official who saw off the agents from London, sent Noor away with four pills: a sleeping pill to slip to someone if needed, a stimulant pill should she need to stay alert for hours or days at a time, a pill to give herself a fake stomach illness, and finally, a suicide pill.

  Nearly as soon as Noor arrived in France, things went wrong. The very agent who received her aircraft in a field in France in the early hours of the 17th of June, 1943, later turned out to be a double agent giving information to the Germans. The bad luck would only continue. Noor was arriving into a circuit of spies that had already been compromised by the capture of two Canadian agents whose parachute drop had gone wrong. The Gestapo had arrested the pair and discovered on them the code names and addresses of other spies in the network. One by one, members of the so-called Prosper circuit were arrested by the Gestapo – as well as the French families who had helped and hidden them.

  As the network collapsed, the SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street asked Noor to return to London. The circuit was busted, and it was simply too dangerous for her to remain. Noor, however, said she would stay in Paris. She was the only radio operator left, and wanted to try and rebuild the spying network. For the next three months, often completely alone and left to her own wits, Noor managed to evade the Gestapo who were constantly hunting the elusive Madeleine. She used her incriminating transmission equipment to arrange deliveries of money and equipment as the French Resistance prepared for the long-awaited Allied invasion of France. She planned the successful escapes of other agents to safety, got false papers for spies, and managed the escape of 30 Allied airmen who had been shot down in enemy territory. She transmitted messages both to the SOE headquarters and to Charles de Gaulle from his exiled Free French headquarters in London. She had to move location constantly to evade capture, relying on her old friends from her more innocent days in Paris as a student, musician and children’s author, who couldn’t believe the daring agent she had become. She was able to send letters back to her family in Britain – letters that unbeknownst to her were being photocopied by that double agent prick and shared with the Germans.

  You already know how this ends, but first we can enjoy the times that Noor escaped arrest despite absurd odds.

  One time, Noor was pressed for time and left with no choice but to set up her giant aerial out of her own window. She lowered it from her window, then went out into the street in order to arrange it in a tree without being spotted. To her horror, a German officer saw her and asked, ‘May I help you?’ Instead of fainting, screaming, running away, or any of the other reactions she might have reasonably decided upon, Noor simply said, why yes, she’d be ever so grateful if he would. Imagining Noor to be a pretty lady trying to set up a radio antennae to listen to some music, the German officer helped her set up her actual spy equipment and then went on his merry way, probably pleased at himself for gallantly assisting such a delightful young Frenchwoman.

  Another time, Noor was riding the metro with her equipment, a dangerous daily task since the Gestapo frequently checked the luggage of anyone on public transport. She noticed she was being watched by a pair of German soldiers, but couldn’t get off at the next stop without appearing suspicious. When the Germans approached her to ask what she was carrying, she kept cool once again, and told them it was a ‘cinematographic apparatus’. She opened her suitcase just a bit to point out to them the various components of her cinematographic apparatus, and the soldiers, not wanting to admit that they didn’t know a thing about what a cinematographic apparatus should look like, believed her, because of course, of course that thing in her suitcase is a cinematographic apparatus, only idiots don’t know what a cinematographic apparatus looks like. ‘We thought it was something else,’ they said, and left her alone with her giant suitcase filled with exactly the thing they thought it was.

  Here’s the bit that really, really sucks: after managing to keep working for three months on the run, dying her hair, always changing her location, and staying alive, Noor was betrayed by the sister of a resistance member who went to the Gestapo and demanded money in exchange for the address of a British agent. The Gestapo offered her 100,000 Francs, about a tenth of what a British agent would normally fetch. Noor was just a few days shy of her replacement’s arrival. She was meant to head home at last on the 14th of October. Instead, on the 13th, she was captured and taken to the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch.

  Mistakes were made. Noor had misunderstood her instructions from London to carefully ‘file’ her messages. London meant ‘file’ in the journalistic sense – to carefully transmit her messages. She thought they meant ‘file’ as in keep them. And so, when arrested, her codes and old messages were seized with her, as well as her radio equipment, which the Germans then used to send fake messages to London requesting arms, money and agents directly into the Germans’ hands.

  London made mistakes too. When Noor sent a distress code
under German watch, to communicate that she had been captured – a special key that was exactly 18 letters long – they assumed she had made a mistake, even though she never made mistakes in her codes. They didn’t realise she had been captured for months. She didn’t reveal anything in interrogations, but the Germans were able to inflict great harm on the Allies using their ‘radio games’.

  Even in captivity, Noor wasn’t done trying to escape the Gestapo. As soon as she arrived, she demanded to take a bath. She was so stubborn and so absurd in asking for it, that they just let her, and even shut the door when she demanded privacy. As soon as she was alone, Noor crawled out the window and onto the roof. She was quickly caught and brought in through another window.

  She hadn’t given up yet, however. Knowing there were inmates in the cells around her, Noor tapped in Morse code on the wall, and managed to make contact with two other captive agents. Noor and the two men hatched a plan to escape through the barred windows at the tops of their cells by passing notes and a pilfered screwdriver hidden in the toilet between them. One night, on the 25th of November, the three finished loosening the bars on their skylights with the screwdriver, and escaped onto the roof. Unfortunately for them, an RAF attack soon set off air-raid sirens, and their captors discovered their escape and set up a cordon for the area. They swung into the window of a neighbouring house, but once inside, were trapped. They made a run for it, and were captured yet again. (It’s possible that Noor then made a THIRD escape from the Gestapo, but if she did, the Germans didn’t record it, probably out of embarrassment.)