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Fresnes Prison
Fresnes Prison (''French Centre pénitentiaire de Fresnes'') is the second largest prison in France, located in the town of Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, south of Paris. It comprises a large men's prison (''maison d'arrêt'') of about 1200 cells, a smaller one for women and a penitentiary hospital. Fresnes is one of the three main prisons of the Paris area, Fleury-Mérogis (Europe's largest prison) and La Santé (located in Paris) being the other two. History The prison was constructed between 1895 and 1898 according to a design devised by architect Henri Poussin. An example of the so-called "telephone-pole design," the facility was radically different from previous prisons. At Fresnes prison, for the first time, cell houses extended crosswise from a central corridor. The design was used extensively in North America for much of the next century. During World War II, Fresnes prison was used by the Germans to house captured British SOE agents and members of the French Resistance. Held ...
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Fresnes Prison 05
Fresnes may refer to the following places in France: * Fresnes, Côte-d'Or, in the Côte-d'Or ''département'' * Fresnes, Loir-et-Cher, in the Loir-et-Cher ''département'' * Fresnes, Yonne, in the Yonne ''département'' *Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, in the Val-de-Marne ''département'' * Fresnes-au-Mont, in the Meuse ''département'' * Fresnes-en-Saulnois, in the Moselle ''département'' * Fresnes-en-Tardenois, in the Aisne ''département'' * Fresnes-en-Woëvre, in the Meuse ''département'' * Fresnes-lès-Montauban, in the Pas-de-Calais ''département'' * Fresnes-Mazancourt, in the Somme ''département'' * Fresnes-sous-Coucy, in the Aisne ''département'' * Fresnes-sur-Apance, in the Haute-Marne ''département'' *Fresnes-sur-Escaut, in the Nord ''département'' * Fresnes-sur-Marne, in the Seine-et-Marne ''département'' * Fresnes-Tilloloy, in the Somme ''département'' See also *Fresnes Prison Fresnes Prison (''French Centre pénitentiaire de Fresnes'') is the second larges ...
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Philippe Leclerc
Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque (22 November 1902 – 28 November 1947) was a Free-French general during the Second World War. He became Marshal of France posthumously in 1952, and is known in France simply as le maréchal Leclerc or just Leclerc. The son of an aristocratic family, Hauteclocque graduated from the ''École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr'', the French military academy, in 1924. After service with the French Occupation of the Ruhr and in Morocco, he returned to Saint-Cyr as an instructor. He was awarded the ''croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures'' for leading ''goumiers'' in an attack on caves and ravines on Bou Amdoun on 11 August 1933. During the Second World War he fought in the Battle of France. He was one of the first who defied his government's Armistice to make his way to Britain to fight with the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle, adopting the ''nom de guerre'' of Leclerc so that his wife and children w ...
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Marcus Bloom
Marcus Reginald Bloom (24 September 1907 – 6 November 1944) was a British Special Operations Executive agent during the Second World War. Early life Bloom was born in 1907 in Brick Lane, Whitechapel (as per his birth certificate) but the family later moved to Tottenham, London, the son of Harry Pizer Bloom and Anna Sadie Davidoff Bloom, in an orthodox Jewish home. He helped out working at his father’s cinema in Wandsworth, their mail order textile firm, or in their restaurant business. In the 1930s his father sent him Paris to run the mail-order business, and he became fluent in French. The firm closed after five years and he returned to London and married in March 1938. World War II He served in the Royal Artillery in 1941 and joined the Special Operations Executive in February 1942. On the night of 3/4 November 1942 he was landed at Port Miou, near Cassis in southern France, with SOE agents George Starr, organiser of WHEELWRIGHT; Mary Herbert, courier for SCIENTIST; ...
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Maurice Pertschuk
Maurice Pertschuk MBE, LdH, CdeG (31 July 1921 – 29 March 1945) was a French Special Operations Executive agent during the Second World War. Early life The son of Jacob Joseph Pertschuk and Ethel Muriel (née Sborowfsky), Russian-born Jews who had become British citizens after escaping pogroms, he was born in Paris on 31 July 1921. In Paris, where his father ran a fur business, Pertschuk attended the Lycée Rollin, but as the French economy worsened, in December 1933, the family moved back to England. Pertschuk finished his education in French, attending the Lycée Français in Kensington. The family moved back to France in 1939, where Maurice got a teaching certificate from the University of Lille. World War II That September, after England and France declared war with Germany, Pertschuk returned to London to volunteer for the British Army. By 1940 he was called up by the Royal Sussex Regiment. As a bilingual bi-cultural dual French-British national, he was recruited b ...
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Henri Frager
Henri Jacques Paul Frager (3 March 1897 – 5 October 1944) was a member of the French Resistance during World War II . He was in succession, second in command of the CARTE network (under André Girard), then head of the SOE (F section) network DONKEYMAN, rising to the rank of major within SOE. He was betrayed to the Germans, deported and executed. Early life Henri Jacques Paul Frager was born in France on 3 March 1897, the son of Alphonse Jean Frager and Eugénie Louis Adolpine Frager, née Sauvier. He married the Russian-born Louba Frager and worked as an architect in Nice in civil life. On 25 November 1940 he dined with André Girard in a restaurant in Antibes. Girard wanted to develop a local network, whereas Frager was then preparing to get to London via Algeria. He reached Algeria in December that year but, after several failed attempts to get from there to London, returned to Antibes in April 1941 and got back in contact with Girard, who recruited him into CARTE as h ...
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Vera Leigh
Vera Leigh (17 March 1903 – 6 July 1944) was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II. Leigh was a member of the SOE's Donkeyman circuit and Inventor sub-circuit in occupied France until she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Early life Vera Leigh was born Vera Glass on 17 March 1903 in Leeds, England. She had been abandoned as a baby and adopted while still an infant by H. Eugene Leigh, a well-known American racehorse trainer with an English wife, who renamed his adopted daughter Vera Eugenie Leigh. After Mr Leigh's death his wife married Albert Clark, whose son Victor Alexander Dalzell Clark became Leigh's step-brother and friend. When it came necessary to name a next-of-kin Leigh chose Clark. Vera grew up around the stables of Maisons Laffitte, the training centre and racing course near Paris. Clark later remembered that as a child she wanted to ...
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Marcel Clech
Marcel Clech (1905 – 1944) was a French agent in the French section of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. He was sent to France on three missions and worked as a wireless operator in three different networks before his arrest, and was executed at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Early life Marcel Rémy Clech was born in Brittany on 11 October 1905. He lived in London working as a taxi driver. World War II He joined the Special Operations Executive, section F, as a wireless operator. He was commissioned as Lieutenant in the British Army on the general list First mission On 1 August 1940 a motorboat attempted to land three French agents: Clech, Tilly, and Victor Bernard at Carentec in Brittany but had to abort the mission after coming under fire and returned to England. Second mission Clech became the radio operator of the 'Autogiro' network of Pierre de Vomécourt (codename "Lucas").''SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special ...
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Sidney Charles Jones
Sidney Jones Croix de Guerre, CdeG Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, MBE (1902–1944) was a British Special Operations Executive agent during the Second World War. Early life Sidney Charles Jones was born in France on 25 November 1902, the son of Charles and Emily Louise Jones. Before the war he worked as Elizabeth Arden, Inc., Elizabeth Arden’s representative in France.''SOE in France an account of the work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944'', MRD Foot, HMSO, London, 1966. Wartime activities He was nearly 40 when he arrived in the French Riviera by felucca in late September 1942 with the mission of establishing the SOE F Section networks#Inventor, INVENTOR network as a sabotage circuit in Marseilles. Before the German occupation of Vichy France in November 1942 he had set up several sabotage teams which had burnt fifty goods wagons destined for Germany, and had damaged port installations. After five months in the fie ...
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Odette Sansom
Odette Sansom (28 April 1912 – 13 March 1995), also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes, code named Lise, was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during the Second World War. She was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross by the United Kingdom and was awarded the Légion d'honneur by France. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. Sansom arrived in France on 2 November 1942 and worked as a courier with the Spindle network (or circuit) of SOE headed by Peter Churchill (whom she later married). In January 1943, to evade arrest, Churchill and Sansom moved their operations to near Annecy in the French Alps. She and Churchill were arrested there on 16 April 1943 by spy-hunter Hugo Bleich ...
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Peter Churchill
Peter Morland Churchill, (14 January 1909 – 1 May 1972) was a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer in France during the Second World War. His wartime operations, which resulted in his capture and imprisonment in German concentration camps, and his subsequent marriage to fellow SOE officer, Odette Sansom, received considerable attention during the war and after, including a 1950 film. Early life and career Churchill's father was William Algernon Churchill (1865–1947), a British Consul who served in Mozambique, Amsterdam, Pará in Brazil, Stockholm, Milan, Palermo, and Algiers. His father was also an art connoisseur, and author of what is still the standard reference work on early European paper and papermaking, ''Watermarks in Paper'',. His mother was Violet (née Myers). He was a brother of Walter Churchill, a Royal Air Force pilot during the war, and Oliver Churchill, who was also an SOE officer. Churchill was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 14 Janua ...
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Roger Bardet
Roger Bardet was a member of the French resistance organisation known as CARTE, based in Cannes, organised by André Girard. He was betrayed by a fellow agent and became a double agent. In November 1942 CARTE courier André Marsac was arrested in Paris by German intelligence officer ‘Colonel Henri’ Hugo Bleicher who put him in Fresnes prison, where he convinced Marsac that he was an anti-Nazi German officer and could help release him, but this would require the help of a fellow agent. Marsac wrote a letter to Roger Bardet asking him to visit him in prison to discuss his escape. Armed with this letter and another to Marsac's wife, Bleicher set off for Saint-Jorioz on the banks of Lake Annecy where Peter Churchill had relocated the SPINDLE network, to meet Mme Marsac and persuaded her to come to Paris. He also met Bardet and Odette Sansom «Lise».''Flames in the Fields'', Rita Kramer, Penguin Books, 1966 London's response to Bardet's request for air transport for Marsac and ...
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Berty Albrecht
Berty Albrecht (15 February 1893 – 31 May 1943) was a French feminist and Resistance martyr. Life Albrecht was born Berthe Wild in Marseilles on 15 February 1893 to a middle-class Protestant family. She married the Dutch banker Frédéric Albrecht in 1918. They had two children, Frédéric and Mireille. Separated from her husband, she moved to Paris, where she made friends with Victor Basch, a teacher at the Sorbonne and the president of the Human Rights League. She founded a feminist journal, ''Le Problème Sexuel'' (''The Sexual Problem''), in which she campaigned for the right to access contraception and abortion. Conscious of the reality of Nazism and hostile to the Munich Accords, she founded a welcome centre for German refugees. There she met Captain Henri Frenay and participated in all of his Resistance initiatives, despite their political differences. She was close to the Communists, whereas Frenay, although a visceral enemy of the Nazis and collaborators, made an ...
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