Denise Bloch

Denise Madeleine Bloch (21 January 1916 – 5 February 1945) was a French citizen who worked as an agent with the clandestine British Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in the Second World War.

The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, Sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially those occupied by Nazi Germany.

SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

Bloch was born to a Jewish family (Jacques Henri Bloch and Suzanne Levi-Strauss) in Paris, France in 1916.

She had three brothers.

Bloch and her family, Jews, evaded capture by the Germans in Paris after its occupation by Nazi Germany in summer 1940.

Her father and two of her brothers were French soldiers taken prisoner by the German army in 1940.

The Germans occupied northern France in summer 1940 and anti-Jewish campaigns began.

Her mother, her brother Jean-Claude, and Denise then lived a clandestine life avoiding persecution as Jews by using false papers and identities.

In 1942 the family escaped to Lyon.

Bloch became involved in the French Resistance and narrowly avoided arrest in Lyon.

Fleeing to southwestern France, she worked for SOE agent George Reginald Starr as his courier.

In May 1942, she made a dangerous crossing of the Pyrenees into Spain and hence to SOE headquarters in London to present Starr's request for more aid to his resistance forces.

In the summer of 1942, the family was smuggled across the border from occupied to unoccupied Vichy France arriving in Lyon on 17 July.

In Lyon Bloch became a secretary for Jean-Maxime Aron, a Jewish engineer for Citroen who was working with the French Resistance and the SOE network led by Philippe de Vomécourt.

Bloch began working for Aron as a courier, delivering messages to agents around the region.

Through her work with Aron, Bloch met several Jews working in the French Resistance and SOE agents sent from London to help the Resistance.

As a cover she fabricated an engagement to Dominique Mendelsohn, also involved in the resistance.

She helped SOE radio operator Brian Stonehouse and courier Blanche Charlet.

She witnessed Stonehouse being escorted by police officers after his arrest on 14 October 1942.

(Stonehouse survived the war in German prison camps; Charlet escaped prison and survived.) Mendelsohn was also soon arrested.

Realizing she was in danger, on 26 October SOE agent Paul Sarrette decided that he would accompany her from Lyon to a safe house in Marseilles.

Bloch sent a telegram to her mother in Lyon with her travel plans.

The Germans intercepted the telegram.

As a result, Aron, who accompanied Bloch to the railroad station, was arrested.

Bloch and Sarrette evaded arrest.

After Aron's arrest, Bloch went into hiding in Lyon and later Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera.

She dyed her black hair blond as a disguise, but her height of 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) made her conspicuous.

In January 1943, Sarrette accompanied Bloch to Toulouse which was the territory of SOE agents George Reginald Starr and Henri Sevenet.

Starr and Sevenet initially regarded Bloch as a nuisance and Starr proposed "to liquidate her."

However, they decided instead to evacuate her over the Pyrenees to Spain.

The mid-winter crossing on foot was thwarted by heavy snow.

Bloch returned to Toulouse where she first met Starr in person.

He was impressed and invited her to become his courier and stay with him at his base in a house in the isolated village of Castelnau-sur-l'Auvignon.

The two became inseparable and possibly lovers.

Starr had no radio operator at the time and Bloch weekly made the long journey to Toulouse to communicate with SOE headquarters in London with SOE agent Marcus Bloom's radio.

However, in April 1943, Bloom was arrested by the Germans.

Without a means of communicating with London and in desperate need of supplies for his resistance groups, Starr sent Bloch to London with a written report of his activities and as an advocate for him.

Although known to the Germans and with a price on her head, Bloch was trained as a radio operator by SOE and sent back to France in 1944 to help carry out Sabotage missions against the Germans.

She was captured and sent to prison camps in Germany and executed in late January or early February 1945 at Ravensbrück concentration camp.