How a ring tells the story of a forgotten secret agent (BBC)
By Jon Kelly
BBC News
5 hours ago
A French World War Two hero who worked as a British agent behind enemy lines had been all but forgotten. But now his story can be told - thanks to a 98-year-old British veteran and a golden engagement ring.
At 15:30 on 9 September 1944, just inside the front gates of the notorious Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, 16 prisoners of war stood waiting.
All were Allied agents who'd been captured behind enemy lines. Eight of them were Frenchmen working with the UK's Special Operations Executive (SOE) - Churchill's "secret army" - and the remainder were British, Canadian and Belgian. Before these men had been caught by the Germans, they had been parachuted into occupied territory to support the Resistance ahead of D-Day.
Earlier that day, their block chief at the camp had been handed a list of their names. Each one had been struck through in red by the Gestapo.
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"Only little Marcel Leccia, who came from Ajaccio, said, 'We're going to be hanged,'" the block chief, a German political prisoner named Otto Storch who worked as a kapo or inmate-orderly, recalled after the war.
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more: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-56215177
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