Today (13/09/2024) marks 80 years since Noor Inayat Khan was executed in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. A descendant of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth century ruler of the kingdom of Mysore in South India, Noor was the first female wireless operator to be sent from Britain to Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.
This Indian princess, turned British spy, was born in Moscow in 1914 to Ora Ray Baker and Inyat Khan, an Indian musician. She spent most of her life in France with her family where she became a keen writer and wrote children stories. In June 1940, just before the Nazi occupation of Paris, her family escaped to England and became ardent supporters of the British war effort. In November 1940, Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and trained as a wireless operator.
In February 1943, she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organisation that aided local resistance movements in occupied Europe. During her training to become an agent, Noor learnt how to shoot, read maps, fight without weapons, and how to throw grenades. In March 1943, she became the first woman to be sent for specialist SOE signals training, which included advanced wireless operator training, such as how to encode and decode messages, guidance on how a radio worked, and how to fix one. Due to her fluency in French and wireless skills, in June 1943, she was sent to France as a secret wireless operator, becoming the first female to be sent behind enemy lines in that country.
Noor posed as a children’s nurse called Jeanne-Marie Renier. Her role included transporting supplies to the French resistance and sending reports of Nazi activity to London. When communicating with the SOE she used the codename “Madeleine”.
In October 1943, Noor was arrested after she was betrayed and her address was sold to the Gestapo. The following month she was sent to Pforzheim prison in Germany, where she was kept in solitary confinement for ten months. Although she was chained-up and tortured, she refused to disclose any information. In September 1944, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp and was shot on 13 September. She was 30 years old.
In 2012, Britain honoured Noor’s wartime efforts by erecting a statue of her in Gordon Square Gardens in London. In 2020, she was awarded a Blue Plaque, becoming the first woman of South Asian descent to receive this honour.
I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians." Noor Inayat Khan
Noor’s story is important for a number of reasons—she was not only the first female radio operator to be sent into Nazi-occupied France, but she was also the first Muslim woman of colour to be assigned this crucial role. Noor’s heroic contributions to the war effort highlight how people of different faiths and backgrounds helped lead Britain to victory in the Second World War.
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