Who Killed William Goebel?

 

Who Killed William Goebel?

 

William Goebel (photo: public domain)

 

“Assassination is probably the only enterprise where private industry is not more efficient” ― Pierce Brown, Iron Gold”

Governor William Goebel and his friends Frank Helm and the Kentucky state Attorney General W.J. Hendricks walked to Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, Kentucky, when they came upon John L. Sanford, who had been leaning against a metal rail as though waiting for someone. With his right hand in his pocket, he shook hands with Helm and Hendricks with his left hand, turned to Goebel, and said, “I understand that you assume authorship of that article.”

“I do,” Goebel said.

Sanford pulled out a firearm. He shot at the governor, piercing his clothing. Goebel drew his own weapon, fired once, and killed Sanford with a single shot to the head. Goebel pocketed his weapon, called is brother Justus, and turned himself in to the police. A previous threat by Sanford to kill Goebel and the testimony of witnesses to the shooting acquitted Goebel the charges of dueling and murder.

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The Goebel-Sanford feud began years earlier, when Senator Goebel introduced a bill that reduced tolls on Kentucky’s roads, bridges, and railroads, including the Roebling Bridge between Covington and Cincinnati, one of Sanford’s investments. In retaliation, Sanford arranged through powerful men to block Goebel’s chance for a seat on the Court of Appeals.

Later, Goebel moved three of Covington’s accounts from Sanford’s bank to Frank Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, further enraging Sanford., who then threatened to kill Goebel.

Sanford had practiced for some time a custom of the period in which citizens could post scandalous remarks about their enemies in newspapers. Goebel retaliated by posting a comment about Sanford in which he referred to his enemy as “John Gon — h — ea Sanford. The sexual disease insult resulted in Sanford’s assassination attempt.

John L. Sanford was not the Senator’s only enemy. Indeed, Senator-turned-Governor Goebel possessed an abrasive personality that attracted the ire of powerful men.

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Before he ran for office in the Senate, William Goebel worked in his private legal practice where he took on corporations and railroads. For fifteen years he fought against corporations who abused their power over workers and the widows of men killed in train wrecks. During those years, he never lost a case against the L&N Railroad, the most powerful corporation in the state.

On entering politics in 1887, the Senator fought for the rights of blacks, women, and the working class while fighting abuses by corporations. The company that suffered most from Goebel’s populist crusades: the L&N Railroad. Goebel sought to have railroads pay their fair share of taxes, to raise those taxes, and to curtail the L&N monopoly’s generous lobbying that gave the company immense power in state government. When a bill to abolish the state’s Railroad Commission came before the Senate, L&N President Milton H. Smith’s lobbyists spent lavishly to encouraged friendly legislators to kill the bill. On learning of the lobbyist’s influence, an investigative committee sought and failed to get an indictment against the lobbyists, but the bill to abolish the commission died in the General Assembly.

During the 1890 convention to rewrite the state constitution to comply with amendments to the U.S. constitution. Goebel included in the new document a provision that secured the Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulated railroads.

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In 1899, Goebel ran for governor or and won the Democratic Party’s nomination at the raucous party convention held at Louisville’s Music Hall that the New York Times described as “a continuous performance of howling farce. . . .” (Walker)

L&N’s chairman, August Belmont wrote in 1999 a letter to Goebel saying he would do all he could “to counteract the evil influence of your unjustifiable hostility.” He told Goebel’s friend, Urey Woodson, that He and his associates had spent 500,000 dollars to defeat Goebel. L&N’s president, Milton Smith, took charge of the campaign against Goebel’s run for governor.

Goebel told Woodson that, as his first act as governor, “he would ask for a special grand jury and get an indictment against Milton Smith and his cronies for criminal libel and put them in in jail for at least two years.” (Walker)

Kentucky Secretary of State Caleb Powers participated in (and allegedly organized) a meeting to plan an armed force from the eastern part of the state to descend on Frankfort to influence legislative action.

Goebel lost the election, but the Democratic State Central Committee found thousands of illegal ballots and asked for a recount that gave Goebel a leading edge in the race. The Democratically controlled General Assembly voted to give the election to William Goebel over William Taylor. Taylor sent out letters to friend to hurry to the capital. Many of those friends came from the rugged eastern mountains and arrived with weapons. Most of them came by way of fee passes on the L&N Railroad.

On January 30, 1900 — the day before Goebel was to assume office — he walked across the capitol plaza with two friends when a shot fired from the Executive Building struck him in the chest.

William Taylor seized control of the governorship, immediately declared a state of emergency, sent letters to friends requesting that they hurry to Frankfort, and called out the militia.

Democrats attempted to meet but were barred from the capitol by the militia. They met secretly at the hotel where Goebel lay dying and invalidated enough votes to declare Goebel as governor and John C. Beckham as lieutenant governor.

Over protests of his physicians, Goebel was sworn in as governor on his deathbed on January 31, 1900. He ordered the legislature to assemble and rescinded Taylor’s call to the militia. His order was ignored.

On February 1, 1900, Taylor signed vouchers to pay the militia (President Redman). Farmer’s Bank refused payment on the grounds that Taylor had usurped the office.

A court order restrained Taylor from interfering with the legislature. Alonzo Walker was deputized to serve the order on Taylor, but Taylor would not permit him to enter, so Walker tacked the order to the door, whereupon Taylor ordered the militia to apprehend him.

William Goebel died February 3, 1900. Lieutenant Governor John Beckham was sworn in as governor. The funeral train, February 6, 1900. On that day, Judge Moore ordered the release of Alonzo Walker. Taylor initially ignored the order but soon gave in. Goebel was buried with great pomp and ceremony on February 8.

Taylor withdrew the militia two days later. The legislature was permitted to meet for the first time since the crisis began.

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Surveyors determined that the shot came from Caleb Powers’ office. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Powers and John Davis, state Capital Square policeman.

“Governor” Taylor ordered the militia to deny Sheriff Sutter entry into the capitol to serve the warrants.

Powers and Davis escaped Frankfort disguised as soldiers and accompanied by twenty-five soldiers to Barbourville, a stronghold of the Taylor faction. Police chief Ross of Lexington stormed the train with his entire force and took Powers and Taylor prisoner after a desperate battle.

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In 1909, Governor Augustus E. Willson pardoned all parties involved in the Goebel assassination.

End

Sources:

[1] The Late Governor Goebel, Marianne C. Walker. HUMANITIES, July/August 2013, volume 34, Number 4. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-late-governor-goebel. Accessed 08/14/2019

[2] Nicholas C. Burckel, 1974, William Goebel and the Campaign for Railroad Regulation in Kentucky, 1888–1900 https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/publicationpdfs/48-1-5_William-Goebel-and-the-Campaign-for-Railroad-Regulation-in-Kentucky-1888-1900_Burckel-Nicholas-C..pdf citing The Louisville Courier-Journal, October 17, 26, 1899. Accessed 11/07/2021

[3] “Caleb Powers: United States Representative, Politician,” “The prosecution charged that Powers was the mastermind, having a political opponent killed so that his boss, Governor William South. Taylor, could stay in office.” https://prabook.com/web/caleb.powers/1060693

[4] “Goebel Shoots Sanford” www.nkyviews.com/Kenton/text/Goebel_shoots_sandford.html

 

 

God's Graffiti

 

Photo by author

I’ve almost finished reading Revolutionary Characters, by historian Gordon S. Wood, and have recently read biographies on George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. I intend to squeeze in Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton as soon as I can acquire the books, and I’ll look up the others on the internet. I look especially for information on their religious views and, so far, I have found nothing to indicate that the founding fathers were the devout men that Christian apologists and evangelicals would have us believe. Most of the Founders were deists, the prevailing sentiment held by the educated upper classes of the time, and they held in varying degrees of indifference and contempt the evangelical Christianity of the masses.

The religious right in this modern age like to point to references to God in the founders’ letters and documents as proof of the religiosity of the framers of the Constitution, but the God of the deists bore no resemblance to the angry meddling God whose words contemporary evangelist would have inscribed on every surface of every federal facility on the planet and taught as science in the classrooms of our public schools. Appeals to God in those letters and documents were appeals to Providence, not to some denominational creator who heaps beneficence on the faithful and severe judgment on those not obedient to His authority as expressed by one or another interpretive branch of His dictates.

George Washington, ever aware of his public image, attended church to display his affinity with his constituency in much the same way modern politicians, steeped in corruption and self-interest, cater to a religious constituency to appear as one of the people. Alexander Hamilton used Christianity to achieve political ends and did not express adherence to the faith until the early nineteenth century, decades after his prominence in Revolutionary politics. John Adams openly expressed in belief in deism but thought church attendance essential to man’s morality. Thomas Paine’s masterpiece, The Age of Reason, promoted deism and criticized Christian doctrine. Benjamin Franklin considered himself a deeply religious man, but in his writings, he often refers to “the deity” and “providence,” without mention of Christianity. He endeavored to virtue, but of course, virtue does not rely on religion for its practice or existence. James Madison rigorously defended and promoted religious freedom. Of the founding fathers, only John Jay and Patrick Henry attested to orthodox Christianity. They did not belong to the class of educated men who adhered to the prevailing theology of deism among the landed elite in the northern colonies. Evangelical Christianity was, to those who aspired to a republican aristocracy in the Age of Enlightenment, the religion of the unenlightened masses.

The furor over the place of religion in patriotism began with Francis Scott Key’s words in the Star-Spangled Banner: “And this be our motto: In God is our trust.” We can assume without further research that the god referred to is the Judeo-Christian deity.

Proselytizers and enforcers of religious have only the motto “In God We Trust” as a wedge and as justification for their attempts to force fundamentalist Christianity on an entire nation, but that graffiti did not appear on American currency until the Civil War's religious revival period, at a time of religious revival in the United States and was not adopted as the national motto until the Eisenhower administration in 1956, when the aristocratic values inherent in the Age of Enlightenment ceased to have relevance. Its acceptance as the national motto was accelerated when positioned as a response to “Godless Communism”.

The most militant atheist quarrels with inscriptions of the national motto on currency and the Ten Commandments on the face of federal buildings, but most Americans view those allusions to religion with ambivalence. The motto refers only to “God” and does not promote the god of a favored group, and the Decalogue represents a historical event and is not the sole province of any particular philosophy. The exact wording belongs to the Judeo-Muslim-Christian heritage, but identical admonitions come from multiple cultures and religions ranging from the code of Hammurabi to definitions of proper behavior in Scientology. It does not require religious thought to know that rules set forward in the Commandments represent common-sense applications for an individual to live by if he is to live at peace in a society. The problem many deists have with religious graffiti on taxpayer-funded property lies in the rigid enforcement by brown-shirt religious leaders to limit those inscriptions to their particular faith. Why not include Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, and the Sutras of Patanjali? Buddhism and Hinduism, are, after all, well represented in American society, as are Wicca, Paganism, Scientology, and any number of groups and doctrines that have sprung up to challenge the rigid and chauvinist dogma of Christianity and its history of torture, mass murder, and denial of reason and free thought to enforce its adherence.

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Cross Dressing on the Elizabethan Stage

 

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

In William Shakespeare’s time, the depiction on stage of a young, respectable, unmarried woman ran counter to social conventions. When playwrights presented contemporary works or modernized Greek Drama, they changed the character from female to male, or—where the character’s gender gave the play its form and plot—a young male dressed in feminine attire played the part. With the presentation of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare turned social convention on its head with an ironic twist: he had a young woman, played by a male actor, disguise himself (herself?) as a man. The humor in the man-turned-woman-turned-man-turned-woman romp would have delighted an Elizabethan Age audience, with the exception of domineering social prudes. Their representation in the play by Malvolio would have doubled the fun and had the spectators gasp at Shakespeare’s genius in his subtle use of irony in poking fun at society through story. Even the title had meaning to the crowds at the Globe Theater: the Twelfth Night refers to the twelfth night after Christmas, or the Feast of Epiphany, when custom had men dress as women and women as men. Disguise and confused identity are common themes in Shakespeare’s works.

Students of history can easily see how he found favor with Elizabeth, the popular queen and only the second woman to rule the country.

The law of primogeniture that dictated a male line of succession to the English monarchy had collapsed with the fall of Salic Law in France under the threat of English claims to the French crown. By the time Mary Tudor ascended to the throne, the only restraint on a female monarch was the concern of Henry VIII, her father, that a woman could not hold together the Tudor line and a country that seemed destined for civil war. With the death of Henry’s only son Edward, the line of succession fell to Mary, whose reign of terror and her cozy relations with Spain infuriated the English people.

On Mary’s death, Elizabeth I resumed the Tudor monarchy. Her reign marked the beginning of the Renaissance in England. The arts and sciences flourished, the English navy ruled the seas, and explorations of Asia, Africa, and the New World reached a fever pitch. Knowledge founded on reason surged forth and a revolution in societal standards and mores swept away the old values of the Medieval Age. In the new age of learning and relaxed attitudes, William Shakespeare found fertile ground for his wit.

The opening lines of Twelfth Night set the tone for the remainder of the play. The idea of romantic love existed in medieval Europe, but it was tightly bound in cultural proscriptions. Arranged marriages and marriages of convenience represented the cultural norm. Orsino’s both praises the joys of love and laments it in the opening lines of the play (Act 1, scene 1: 1-15). We know immediately that this is a play about love.

Much of Shakespeare’s language is lost to the modern reader. Metaphor anchors language, and metaphors change in time until they lose meaning. One must be a Shakespearean scholar to fully understand and appreciate much of his writing, but some metaphorical meaning has survived the nearly five hundred years since they had found life under Shakespeare’s pen. His subversive and bawdy humor doubtless drew chuckles with lines like those spoken by Sir Toby Belch to Sir Andrew at Maria’s farewell: “And thou let part so, Sir Andrew, would thou mightst never draw sword again” (Act 1, scene 3: 56-57). William Shakespeare’s use of wit and humor to both transgress and reveal his society’s attitudes under a thin veil of metaphor makes worthwhile the time required to fully grasp the meaning of a five-hundred-year-old language.

Code Madeleine

Photo: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1252238/Noor-Inayat-Khan-international-women-s-day-british-spy-princess-british-military

     Under a full moon, a lone Royal Air Force Westland Lysander airplane circled a meadow outside Paris in Nazi-occupied France on the night of June 16, 1943. Men carrying an assortment of hunting rifles, shotguns, and antique pistols emerged from the shadows and lit torches to guide the British aircraft to a makeshift landing field. The little vehicle said to have the ability to land on a cow pile, lived up to its legend. The plane came to a halt after a steep descent and a short approach. Members of the French resistance rushed forward to retrieve containers of weapons, explosives, and survival supplies for those men in their ranks forced by their Gestapo pursuers to live in the wild. The underground fighters tossed mailbags into the aircraft and escorted the two young women cramped in the cockpit to the woods and shadows. The aircraft departed with the same stealth and agility it demonstrated on landing. Men ruffled grass crushed by landing wheels, extinguished the landing lights, and they too faded into the darkness. The Lysander, flying low to avoid Luftwaffe patrols sped back to the English Channel and the relative safety of England. Below, the French countryside lay abandoned in the dim moonlit darkness.

     The two women, Diane Rowden and Noor Inayat Khan arrived the next day at their respective assignments. Noor Inayat Khan, code-named Madeleine, occupied a safe house in Paris and began one of the great tragedies of a war marked by brutality and grief.

     Before the Crimean War (1854-6), women rarely served with military units at or near the front lines. That situation changed when Florence Nightingale and her nurses shared rations with fighting men at the battle lines. By World War I, nurses, and female ambulance drivers served within the range of enemy artillery though did not yet engage in the dangerous work of combat. A revolution occurred in the role of women in war with the end of the Phony War and the German Wehrmacht rolled its blitzkrieg into France and completed its control of the country in June 1940.

     Following the 1939 invasion of Poland and Winston Churchill’s rise to power, Churchill found the old SIS military intelligence agency complacent, bureaucratic, and riddled with security leaks. He created the Strategic Offices Executive (SOE) in order to bypass the men in the SIS who supported peace with, and even an alliance with, Nazi Germany. The new group came into being with only two directives: “Set Europe ablaze,” and to make the lives of men in the German military “an eternal torment.”

     The SOE inserted men with language skills into Axis-occupied countries to provide weapons, organize partisans, and radio information back to London. However, the intelligence and operations services ran into a problem with agents in France. German and Vichy authorities regularly rounded up young men for forced labor in German mines, factories, and labor camps. Women freely traveled the French countryside by bus, rail, and bicycle in search of food, work, and families missing or displaced by the invasion, and as clerks and nurses for armies on the move. The new organization began a search for women fluent in French to fill the need for people to take on the dangerous work of guerilla warfare and rear-guard action.

     Winston Churchill gave the unofficial approval for women in the covert operations service in April 1942, but the SIS scrapped plans for the recruitment of women before it got off the ground by pointing out that the 1929 Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention did not offer prisoner-of-war protections to women. The men who drafted those treaties had not envisioned women as warriors. Colonel Colin Gubbins, head of SOE military operations, used his connections to sidestep the legal arguments by enrolling women agents in FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). As a civilian group that acted as nurses and ambulance drivers, FANY gave women recruits a thin layer of Geneva Convention protection if captured. The women of SOE wore FANY uniforms, but their training and chain of command rested entirely within the SOE. An intensive effort to find and train agents began in 1942 and by mid-1944 over half of FANY’s numbers were in the service of the SOE.

     One of the earliest of those women, Noor Inayat Khan, trained as a radio operator for the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). She was the daughter of Hasra Inayat Khan, a prominent Sufi mystic who traveled the world to bring Sufi thought to a troubled world. Hasra and Noor were descendants of Tupi Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, and the last Muslim ruler of Southern India. The Khan family ancestry made Noor a princess in the royal lineage.

     On a trip to America, Hasra met Ora Ray Baker, a relation of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church. They were married in France in March 1913 and traveled to Moscow where Hasra accepted a teaching assignment at the Conservatoire. Noor was born in the Kremlin on New Year’s Day 1914. Further travels had made her multi-lingual and familiar with European terrains. She studied child psychology at the Sorbonne, wrote a children’s book, Twenty Jataka Tales, and performed in a children’s radio program in Paris. Her father had returned to India where he died in 1927.

     With the outbreak of war, Noor and a sister joined the French Red Cross as nurses, and on the invasion of France found themselves cut off from their unit. The Khan family regrouped in Bordeaux and escaped to England aboard a Belgian Freighter.

     Though raised under Sufi doctrine, she and a brother felt that Fascism was of such a significant evil that their pacifism must be set aside in the face of the Axis threat. They joined the Royal Air Force where Noor rose in rank until she felt her talents were not used to her fullest potential. A request for greater responsibility and her fluency in French brought her to the attention of the SOE, who soon called for an interview. She left a favorable impression on her interviewer and agreed on the spot to accept training for an eventual drop into Occupied France.

     In training, her instructors noted that she was “clumsy,” “otherworldly,” and “not burdened with brains.” Those handlers who did praise her efforts were often considered smitten by her dark beauty, as was Leo Marks, code master at SOE. Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE operations, refused to accept the criticisms, as she was an excellent wireless telegraph operator whose skills the French underground desperately needed.

     Following a rigorous training program, she landed in France on 16 June 1943 under a full moon. News of her pending arrival reached the French Resistance fighters—the Maquis—through the Prosper circuit under Francis Suttill and his radio operator, code-named Archambaud (Gilbert Norman). Another SOE agent, Henri Déricourt, met her on landing. He was not yet suspected of working for the Germans. The Maquis took her to Paris to meet Cinema, Henri Garry, so named for his striking resemblance to the American film star Gary Cooper, to take her assigned place as radio operator for his Cinema circuit. Soon after the meeting, London thought the name “Cinema” gave too much information to German eavesdroppers and changed the circuit name to “Phono.”

     Garry took her to meet Professor Alfred Serge Balachowski and his circuit operating out of the École Nationale d’Agriculture at Grignon. Following the meeting, on 1 July, a large group of German police arrested and interrogated the director, Monsieur Vanderwynckt, but returned him when they could get no information about Resistance cells from him. They came back again to arrest Balachowski, and on 10 July, arrested Vanderwynckt.

     Within days of her landing, The Gestapo arrested Francis Suttill and his radio operator, Gilbert Norman, and hundreds of Free French fighters in the Prosper circuit. The Germans forced Archambaud to continue communications with London. He had no choice but to cooperate after London failed to observe security checks that would have warned them the radioman was operating under duress. Before the collapse of the Prosper circuit, German intelligence had no knowledge of the SOE, but now, thanks to their Prosper network prisoners, knew precise details of its organization and of scheduled drops. The Gestapo knew “Madeleine” was in France; they only needed to find her.

     In communications with London, the SOE offered to fly Noor back home by the next available Lysander flight.  She refused to leave her French compatriots without a radio operator. The date and location for D-Day landings were a secret, but Noor was aware that every agent operating in France increased the probability of the success of the invasion. Her refusal to abandon France made her now the most important Allied agent operating in the country. With the collapse of Prosper and the arrests of Balachowski sub-circuit, Noor operated alone.

      She had come on air on 22 June, just days after her arrival, and for the next month coordinated landing and pickup sites, established escape routes for airmen shot down over France and identified targets for RAF bombers. In early August, she had lunch with a fellow agent, “Octave,” and on returning to her apartment near the Bais de Boulogne in Paris, found it crawling with Gestapo. She slipped away unnoticed, and on 13 August met with “Claire” at a Paris rail station.

     To avoid detection, she stayed constantly on the move with her wireless set. Two German officers in a rail car on one occasion demanded to know what was in her suitcase. She opened the case, revealing the radio inside. She told them it was a “cinematographic projector.” “See the bulbs,” she said. “Haven’t you seen one before?” The soldiers apologized and moved on. This, from a woman raised on spiritualism, who believed that telling a lie was a great sin.

     In July 1943, she escaped a trap set in Grignon by the Germans by killing or wounding the agents sent after her. For her bravery, the French government in exile, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, awarded her the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star

     Her movements thwarted the Sicherheistdienst (SD) wireless detection station, which had her radio traffic under observation. Her arrest came on October 13, not from triangulating her radio signals, but from a description given by an unknown double agent, possibly Déricourt, or by Noor’s landlady who betrayed her for a sum of money. Agents recognized her on the street and closed in, but Noor slipped away from them. With the information given by her betrayer, she was captured at a bakery on the ground floor of her apartment building and escorted to Gestapo interrogation cells at 84 Avenue Foch, a short distance from her apartment. A search of the flat turned up her incriminating message log. Conveniently for the Germans, Noor had proposed in her last message that she lie low for a while, giving SOE nemesis Josef Goetz time to process her logs and prepare for a game of deception with the British.

     London received word of the arrest of Noor and Garry but discounted the news when her radio came back on the air. Months passed before the SOE began to suspect that her wireless set was compromised. As a result, France Anthelme with his w/t operator, Lionel Lee, and courier Madeleine Damerment parachuted into a drop zone they thought the Phono circuit controlled. The Gestapo waited for them as they fell to earth. The Germans continued their ruse, informing London on Noor’s radio that Anthelme had fractured his skull on landing. Four agents sent earlier to form the “Scientist” circuit also landed into the waiting hands of the Gestapo, and all seven met execution in extermination camps.

     Noor escaped soon after her imprisonment in a fifth-floor cell at 84 Avenue Foch. She made it to the roof before her guards quickly recaptured her and returned her to her cell. In a neighboring cell, another captured SOE agent, John Starr, had achieved a trusty status; and on the other side, a Frenchman, Colonel Faye. Starr had artistic talents, and the Germans used him to draw charts and graphs for them, allowing him pencils and paper in his cell that he used to communicate with Noor. She, in turn, tapped out Morse code with Faye. She devised an escape plan that called for Starr’s help as a prison trusty. He obtained a screwdriver, and the three of them took turns with the tool to loosen the bars in overhead skylights. The guards permitted makeup for women prisoners that the escapees used to make a powder and cream plaster to conceal damage to the walls. When the time came for the escape, Noor had not yet loosened her bars, and the two men waited on the roof for two hours. When they finally hoisted her out of the skylight shaft, an air raid siren wailed, the guards checked the cells and discovered the damaged cells. Within minutes, the guards returned the three roughly to their cells.

     Incredibly, their prison-keeper, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Kieffer did not have them beaten and executed. Instead, he demanded they sign an oath that they would not attempt another escape. Noor and Colonel Faye refused and were sent immediately to a secure prison in Germany.

     The SD placed Noor into a category known as Nacht und Nebel, prisoners who were destined to disappear into the “night and fog.” Chains bound her hands and feet and a guard stood continuous watch outside her cell. During her stay, the prison warden took pity on her and ordered her hands free, but a guard reported him to the SD. The warden received a withering reprimand, and the manacles returned. The Gestapo ordered her sent to the concentration camp at Natzweiler where she was beaten and possibly raped by a particularly sadistic guard (executed for war crimes at Nuremberg). Due to the color of her skin, the guard assumed her a Creole. He considered his treatment of her as above punishment, as “colored” and Nacht und Nebel prisoners had no protection under rules of conduct from Berlin.

     Following some confusion by the camp’s commander as to how she should die, she was sent to Dachau where she was executed by a bullet to the head and burned in the ovens.

     For her service to the British military and for her contributions to the French Resistance and to the success of the Allied invasion at Normandy, she received posthumously the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star.

     Of the fifty women sent into action for the SOE, fifteen were captured and only three of those survived. The women warriors of the SOE proved women could, indeed, carry their weight in warfare. Though largely unknown in America, the freedom-loving French and British have not forgotten “Madeleine.”