Eliane Plewman

Eliane Plewman (1917 - 13 September 1944) was a French SOE agent and member of French resistance.

Plewman was born Eliane Browne-Bartroli in Marseille. The daughter of an English father and Spanish mother, she was educated in England and in Spain. When she finished college she moved to Leicester to work for an import company.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Plewman worked for the British Embassies in Madrid and Lisbon. In 1942 she went to Britain to work for the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information. That same summer she married British army officer Tom Plewman. Later she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was given a codename "Gaby."

On 13–14 August 1943 Plewman parachuted into France and joined a MONK resistance network of Charles Skepper. She worked as a courier in the area of Marseilles, Roquebrune and St. Raphael.

When the network was betrayed in March 1944, Plewman was also arrested. The Gestapo interrogated her for three weeks and then transferred her to Fresnes Prison. On 13 May 1944 the Germans transferred her and three other SOE agents (Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment and Noor Inayat Khan) to prison at Karlsruhe. On 10 September they were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, where she, Beekman and Damermant and Inayat Khan were forced to kneel in pairs and were executed by a single shot to the head on 13 September 1944.

Eliane Plewman is remembered on the Brookwood Memorial in Surrey (Panel 26 Column 3) and the F Section Memorial, in Valencay, France.

Honours and awards

 * King's Commendation for Brave Conduct
 * Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 with bronze star (France)