Diana Rowden Diana Hope Rowden MBE ( 31 January 1915 – 6 July 1944 ) was a Special Operations Executive ( SOE ) member who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp . Early life . Born in England , the daughter of British Army Major Aldred Rowden and his wife Muriel Christian ( née Maitland - Makgill ) . Her parents separated and she moved with her mother and two younger brothers , Maurice Edward Alfred and Cecil William Aldred Rowden , to southern France when she was still a young girl . She attended schools in Sanremo and Cannes on the French Riviera , but her family soon returned to England , settling at Hadlow Down , near Mayfield , East Sussex , where she continued her education at Manor House School in Limpsfield , Surrey . In 1933 , she returned to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne , before finding employment as a journalist in Paris . World War II service . When the Second World War began , she joined the French Red Cross , being assigned to the Anglo - American Ambulance Corps . The Allied collapse in May 1940 prevented her evacuation from France and she remained there until the summer of 1941 when she escaped to England via Spain and Portugal . In September 1941 , she joined the Women ' s Auxiliary Air Force , working at the Department of the Chief of Air Staff as Assistant Section Officer for Intelligence duties , before being posted in July 1942 to Moreton - in - Marsh , where she was promoted to Section officer . During a brief hospitalisation in the West Country , Rowden met a convalescing pilot who had been working for the French Section of SOE . She first came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive when Harry Sporborg , a senior SOE staff member , saw her file and requested that she be appointed his secretary . Having already joined the WAAF , she began military training instead . Some months later , she happened to meet Squadron Leader William Simpson , who worked part - time for SOE and with whom she discussed her desire to return to France and take part in resistance work . SOE work . In early March 1943 , she received an invitation to a preliminary interview with an officer of SOE F Section , and on 18 March began her training at Wanborough Manor . On 16 June 1943 she was flown to a location north - east of Angers , in the Loire Valley , in occupied France with fellow - agents Noor Inayat Khan and Cecily Lefort , where they were met by Henri Dericourt , the air movements officer for F section . From there , she made her way to St . Amour where she was assigned to the Acrobat network , led by John Renshaw Starr . Her duties included acting as a courier , delivering messages to other agents and members of the underground in Marseille , Lyon , and Paris . She also helped agent Harry Rée plan the destruction of the Peugeot factory at Sochaux , where tank turrets and aircraft engine parts were made . A month after Rowden ' s arrival , network leader Starr was arrested . Rowden and wireless operator John Young took refuge with a French family at the village of Clairvaux - les - Lacs , near Lons - le - Saunier . Capture and death . In mid - November 1943 , they were told by wireless from Baker Street to expect the arrival of a new agent . On 18 November , the new arrival appeared , but turned out to be a false agent planted by the Germans . Rowden and Young were arrested that evening and taken to Lons - le - Saunier . The next day Rowden was taken to 84 Avenue Foch , the Paris headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst , where she was interrogated for two weeks before being sent to Fresnes prison . On 13 May 1944 , Diana Rowden , along with arrested SOE agents Sonya Olschanezky , Andrée Borrel , Yolande Beekman , Vera Leigh , Eliane Plewman , Odette Sansom - Hallowes , and Madeleine Damerment were moved to concentration camp s in Germany . Only Sansom - Hallowes survived the war . On 6 July 1944 , Rowden , Leigh , Borrel , and Olschanezky were shipped to the Natzweiler - Struthof concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace ( France ) , where they are thought to have been injected with phenol and disposed of in the crematorium . They were meant to disappear without a trace , but their arrival at the concentration camp was witnessed by captured SOE agent Brian Stonehouse and Albert Guérisse , a member of the Belgian Resistance . Posthumous . Posthumously , she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire and Mentioned in Despatches and in France she was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d ' honneur and awarded the Croix de Guerre 1939 - 1945 . Her name is registered with the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle , at the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey , England , and on the " Roll of Honour " on the Valençay SOE Memorial in the town of Valençay , in the Indre département of France . The concentration camp where she died is a now a French government historical site : a plaque to Rowden and the three women who died with her is part of the Deportation Memorial on the site . In 1985 , SOE agent and painter Brian Stonehouse , who saw Rowden and the other female SOE agents at the Natzweiler - Struthof concentration camp just before their deaths , painted a watercolour of the four women which now hangs in the Special Forces Club in London .