Nancy Wake: The White Mouse

 by Victoria de Bruijn

The World War 2 resistance heroine - Nancy Wake - was a force of nature, who topped the Gestapo’s most-wanted list. She became known as the “White Mouse” due to her uncanny ability to escape the Gestapo in occupied France, in spite of a five million franc bounty on her head. The war ended in personal tragedy, however. Upon returning home to Marseille after the liberation, she discovered her husband, Henri Fiocca - who she regularly described as the love of her life, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to speak of her location. 

Born in New Zealand on August 30,1912, Wake grew up in Australia but fled home at 16 to become a nurse. She used an inheritance from her aunt to travel to New York, but shortly after arriving, left for London where she trained herself as a journalist. In Paris, she worked for a number of newspapers during the 1930s and, from there rose through the ranks and became a European correspondent, travelling from country to country. Wake reported and observed while Adolf Hitler rose to power, documenting the Nazi Party; their preaching of anti-Semitic propaganda and the German people who adopted these Nazi ideals. She and her husband, Henri Fiocca - a wealthy industrialist - were living in Marseille when Germany invaded France.

Undaunted, Wake became a courier for the French Resistance in 1940, risking her life to help stranded British military personnel return to the UK and Jewish people escape capture. She explained her strategy of using her femininity to pass German patrols, explaining “a little powder and a little drink on the way, and I'd pass their posts and wink and say, 'Do you want to search me?’” This plan worked flawlessly until her arrest in Toulouse, nonetheless, she was released after four days because the Gestapo did not realise her true identity. 

Later, she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive - a British organisation dedicated to conducting espionage and aiding resistance movements in occupied territories. In training she was noted as a “very good and fast shot” - so much so that after the war she would declare that “the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better.” She parachuted back to France in April 1944, where she became leader of the Maquis in France; she dedicated herself to building up the various resistance groups into a cohesive fighting force. 

After the war, Wake was honoured by Australia, France, Great Britain, and the U.S. for her service; she continued to work as an intelligence officer and published her autobiography, “The White Mouse” in 2011, which was transformed into several movies. However, she scoffed at her portrayal in many of these, where she was seen as having relations with other resistance members, even though it was her strong independence and lack of conformity to societal norms that brought her to the top of Gestapo’s most-wanted list. Mourning the loss of her husband, she kept this mindset until her passing, maintaining that she “killed a lot of Germans, and am only sorry I didn’t kill more.”