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Frank Pickersgill
Frank Herbert Dedrick Pickersgill (May 28, 1915 – September 14, 1944) was a Canadian Special Operations Executive agent. Biography Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Pickersgill graduated from Kelvin High School in that city. Holding an English degree from the University of Manitoba and a Master's degree in classics from the University of Toronto, Pickersgill set out to cycle across Europe in 1934, then returned to Europe in 1938 to work as a freelance journalist for several Canadian newspapers. During his travels he met Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work he hoped to translate into English, though the oncoming war distracted him from the project. Pickersgill served the first two years of the war in Saint-Denis Internment Camp (Stalag 220) as an enemy alien. He escaped by sawing out a window with a hacksaw blade smuggled into the camp in a loaf of bread. Once he was safely back in Britain, he rejected the offer of a desk job in Ottawa and instead received a commission in the newly crea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capt Frank Pickersgill
Captain is a title, an appellative for the commanding officer of a military unit; the supreme leader of a navy ship, merchant ship, aeroplane, spacecraft, or other vessel; or the commander of a port, fire or police department, election precinct, etc. In militaries, the captain is typically at the level of an officer commanding a company or battalion of infantry, a ship, or a battery of artillery, or another distinct unit. The term also may be used as an informal or honorary title for persons in similar commanding roles. Etymology The term "captain" derives from (, , or 'the topmost'), which was used as title for a senior Byzantine military rank and office. The word was Latinized as capetanus/catepan, and its meaning seems to have merged with that of the late Latin "capitaneus" (which derives from the classical Latin word "caput", meaning head). This hybridized term gave rise to the English language term captain and its equivalents in other languages (, , , , , , , , , kapitány, K ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its Metropolitan France, metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea; overseas territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean. Due to its several coastal territories, France has the largest exclusive economic zone in the world. France borders Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Andorra, and Spain in continental Europe, as well as the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Netherlands, Suriname, and Brazil in the Americas via its overseas territories in French Guiana and Saint Martin (island), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vera Atkins
Vera May Atkins (15 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War. Early life Atkins was born Vera May Rosenberg in Galați, Kingdom of Romania, to Max Rosenberg (d. 1932), a German-Jewish father, and his British-Jewish wife, Zefra Hilda, known as Hilda (d. 1947). She had two brothers. Atkins briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern languages and a finishing school at Lausanne, where she indulged her passion for skiing, before training at a secretarial college in London. Atkins' father, a wealthy businessman on the Danube Delta, went bankrupt in 1932 and died a year after. Atkins remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Great Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in mainland Europe. During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where Atkins lived on the l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roméo Sabourin
Lieutenant Roméo Sabourin (January 1, 1923 – September 14, 1944) was a Canadians, Canadian soldier and spy during World War II. Biography Born in Montreal, Quebec, Sabourin joined the Canadian Army, serving in the Canadian Intelligence Corps. Because of his training and fluency in both the French and the English languages, he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE). From London, he was parachuted into occupied France where he worked with the French Resistance, but was captured by the Gestapo with members of the Robert Benoist group and shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp on August 27, 1944. Twenty-one-year-old Roméo Sabourin was executed by the Nazis on September 14, 1944, along with two other Canadian SOE agents, Frank Pickersgill and John Kenneth Macalister. Lieutenant Sabourin is honored on the Groesbeek Memorial in the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery in the Netherlands. As one of the SOE agents who died for the liberation of France, Lieutenant S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concentration Camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement ''after'' having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word ''internment'' is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907. Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps (also known as concentration camps). The term ''concentration camp'' originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buchenwald
Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees. Prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union—Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. There were also ordinary criminals and sexual "deviants". All prisoners worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,545 deaths at Buchenwald of the 280,000 prisoners who passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps. The camp gained notoriety when it was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945; Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of its subcamps. From August 1945 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Benoist
Robert Marcel Charles Benoist (20 March 1895 – 14 September 1944) was a French Grand Prix motor racing driver and war hero. Early life Born near Rambouillet, Île-de-France, France, Robert Benoist was the son of Baron Henri de Rothschild's gamekeeper. As a young man, Benoist served during World War I in the French infantry, then as a fighter pilot in the new ''Armée de l'Air'' and ultimately as a flying instructor. Grand Prix driver Looking for excitement in the post-war world, Benoist joined the ''de Marçay'' car company as a test driver. He then moved on to Salmson and was very successful in cyclecar races before being signed to drive for Delage in 1924. The next year, teamed with Albert Divo, he won the French Grand Prix in the race that claimed the life of Italian racing star Antonio Ascari. In 1927, driving a Delage 15-S-8, he won the French, Spanish, Italian and British Grand Prix races, earning the season championship title for the French manufacturer. When ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
84 Avenue Foch
84 Avenue Foch (german: Avenue Foch vierundachtzig) was the Parisian headquarters of the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD), the counter-intelligence branch of the SS during the German occupation of Paris in World War II. Avenue Foch is a wide residential boulevard in the 16th arrondissement that connects the Arc de Triomphe with the Porte Dauphine on the border with the Bois de Boulogne. During the German occupation of Northern France, the buildings at numbers 82 and 86, either side of 84, were also commandeered by the German occupation forces. Counter espionage activities Number 84 was used for the interrogation of allied SOE agents captured in France. Prisoners were regularly brought to the building from Fresnes prison on the outskirts of the city. The second floor was used by the SD's wireless unit known as Section IV. It was under the control of Dr. Josef Goetz. The SD used captured allied wireless sets to transmit bogus coded messages in attempts to flush out resistance gro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sicherheitsdienst
' (, ''Security Service''), full title ' (Security Service of the ''Reichsführer-SS''), or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization and the Gestapo (formed in 1933) was considered its sister organization through the integration of SS members and operational procedures. The SD was administered as an independent SS office between 1933 and 1939. That year, the SD was transferred over to the Reich Security Main Office (''Reichssicherheitshauptamt''; RSHA), as one of its seven departments. Its first director, Reinhard Heydrich, intended for the SD to bring every single individual within the Third Reich's reach under "continuous supervision". Following Germany's defeat in World War II, the tribunal at the Nuremberg trials officially declared that the SD was a criminal organisation, along with the rest of Heydrich's RSHA (including the Gestapo) both individually and as branch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to accommodate Jews from other concentration camps. After 1945, the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945, almost 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there. Overcrowding, lack of food and poor sanitary conditions caused outbreaks of typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and dysentery, leading to the deaths of more than 35,000 people in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation. The cam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dhuizon
Dhuizon () is a Communes of France, commune in the Loir-et-Cher Departments of France, department in the region of Centre-Val de Loire, France. It is located about 27.5 km (17.1 mi) from Romorantin-Lanthenay, Romorantin. Population See also *Communes of the Loir-et-Cher department References Communes of Loir-et-Cher {{LoirCher-geo-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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