GEORGE CROSS AWARD

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24961, 23 August 1946, Page 4

GEORGE CROSS AWARD

TRIBUTE TO MRS SAMSON

EXPLOITS OUTLINED BY BRITISH OFFICER

LONDON, August 21. Mrs Odette Samson, who was awarded the George Cross for her courage and endurance under the Nazis in France,, was one of 30 women who were working among French patriots under the direction of British intelligence officers, said Colonel M. K. Buckmaster, who was responsible for coordinating British aid to the French resistance movement. Twelve of them were taken prisoners and several were tortured by the Gestapo. “Mrs Samson was selected for the work because she had a brilliant intelligence and a flair for reading the other fellow’s mind,” said Colonel Buckmaster. “She had sufficient intelligence to know that torture might be her lot, but she established an extraordinary ascendancy over her captors in the sense that they were frightened of her because they wondered what would happen to them at the end of the war when she got away. “It was purely her own personality which enabled her to escape from the Ravensbruck camp shortly after DDay. She persuaded the German camp commander to accompany her in a car to the American lines, then produced a revolver and forced him to drive on and surrender to tlje Americans. All the London newspapers to-day featured the award to Mrs Samson, and several published large photographs of her with her three young daughters at_her Kensington home. She told an interviewer that during her wanderings in occupied France she returned to her native village where she saw her mother in the street, but could not speak to her in case she was recognised.

Mrs Samson added that she was betrayed to the Germans by a member of the French resistance movement and she was aware of his identity.