French Nazi Spy Who Betrayed 60 Friends for “a Meal and a Man” JJ
June 1940, France. The roads are choked with refugees as families push handcarts loaded with bedding and whatever they have managed to carry from their homes. In barely six weeks the French army, lately reckoned the strongest in Europe, has collapsed. Paris is occupied by Nazi Germany, and an aged Marshal Pétain, former hero from Verdun, goes on the wireless to tell the nation the fighting must end.
Among the wounded and the displaced is a Frenchwoman, a former schoolteacher now working as a nurse, who has resolved, in a phrase she will later use of herself, to die if need be as a martyr for France. Within a year she will help build one of the largest Allied spy networks in occupied France, but later she will betray it to the Germans: its agents, codes and secrets, all handed over in a single night to save her own life.
Dozens of resistance fighters will go to prison and to concentration camps, and some will never return because of her actions. Her name is Mathilde Carré. Mathilde Carré was born as Mathilde Lucie Bélard on 30 June 1908 in Le Creusot, an industrial town in the Saône-et-Loire department of eastern France. She showed early academic ability, and in the 1930s she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and qualified as a teacher.
In 1933 she married Maurice Carré, a fellow teacher, and the couple moved to French North Africa. The marriage did not endure. By the time the Second World War, which started on 1 September 1939, reached France, Carré had returned to the continent, a restless and ambitious young woman in a world that was about to be turned upside down.
When Germany invaded France in May 1940 and the country collapsed within six weeks, Carré was working as a nurse and watched her homeland fall under occupation. In the autumn of that year, she met the man who would give her life its decisive direction. Roman Czerniawski was a Polish air force officer who had escaped the defeat of France and was building an intelligence network in Paris on behalf of the Allies.
The Poles knew him by the cryptonym Walenty and to the French he was known as Armand. His organisation, called Interallié, was a Franco-Polish network reporting to British intelligence in London, and it grew with remarkable speed. Initially, microfilms were sent to the United Kingdom across the demarcation line to Marseille, where they were then forwarded to London.
By the spring of 1941 the organisation established wireless contact with London and soon after the network had agents operating across almost the whole of the German-occupied zone in France, making it one of the largest resistance networks in France. Carré joined the headquarters section. Following the network’s practice of giving its central staff codenames beginning with the letter V, she became known as Victoire.
But the nickname that endured was: La Chatte, the Cat, for the stealth and composure with which she operated and also because her contemporaries were surprised by the way she kept eluding death and were convinced she had nine lives like a cat. She and Czerniawski became lovers, and she quickly emerged as one of Interallié’s most valuable members.
Cool-headed, charming, and able to draw information out of German officers she met socially, she supplemented the network’s intelligence with what she gathered from her own contacts. Her wireless messages to London became known by their opening line as The Cat reports and she was known by this nickname also inside the intelligence community in the United Kingdom.
In October 1941 the network came to the attention of the Germans. The task of breaking it fell to Hugo Bleicher, a French-speaking intelligence sergeant who would become one of the most effective German spy-catchers in occupied France. A captured agent gave him names and addresses, and the arrests began. In November some twenty-one members were seized in Cherbourg, and on 17 November the leaders, Czerniawski and Carré among them, were arrested in Paris. After a single night in custody, Carré broke.
She asked to speak to Bleicher and gave him everything: the names of the network’s members, the hiding place of documents and also the location of its cash and material. The information allowed the Germans to dismantle Interallié almost completely. She was released the following day and went to live with Bleicher, who became her lover as well as her handler.
She kept her old codename, Victoire, but now she worked for the Abwehr, the German military-intelligence service, against the very people she formerly fought with against the occupiers. She rode with the Germans on their raids, and on at least one occasion identified a former comrade in person, greeting him with a kiss at a café moments before he was taken away.
She helped the Germans catch at least sixty of her former colleagues. Many were arrested, a number were deported, and some were executed. The Germans also captured four of the network’s radio transmitters, and with Carré supplying the codes, the transmission schedules and the prearranged security checks, they were able to go on sending messages to London as though nothing had changed.
It was this captured radio link that drew in the man who would end her double game. Pierre de Vomécourt, an agent of the British secret service – the Special Operations Executive, working under the codename “Lucas,” had no wireless operator of his own and no means of reaching London, and was financing his work out of his own pocket.
In late December 1941 he was introduced, through a Paris lawyer, to Carré, who offered him access to a transmitter. To test her, he had her send a request to London for money – two days later the reply came, and he collected the funds. Reassured, he did not know that the network was already “burned,” or that the woman assisting him answered to the Abwehr. She introduced Bleicher to him as a Belgian resistance leader named Jean Castell.
Vomécourt’s suspicion returned in January 1942, when he asked Carré to obtain forged identity papers and she produced them too quickly and too well. Confronted, she confessed that she was working for the Germans. By then she had become his mistress, and rather than expose or kill her, Vomécourt conceived a more ambitious scheme.
He persuaded her to take on a third role: to convince the Germans that she should travel to London with him in order to spy on the British, while in reality he intended to deliver her into British hands. The Abwehr, expecting her to report back from London, agreed. On the night of 27 February 1942, after several failed attempts, the two crossed to England aboard a British naval vessel.
It was the end of Carré’s career as an agent of any side. In London she was questioned closely by British intelligence about Abwehr methods, and her radio link was played back for a time to deceive the Germans until its usefulness was exhausted. Then, at the request of the French authorities and in light of the part she had played, she was arrested in the summer of 1942 and held for the remainder of the war, first in Holloway prison in London and then in the women’s prison at Aylesbury, where at one point she went on hunger strike to protest at her conditions. She remained in British custody for some three years.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, with the liberation of France complete, Mathilde Carré was flown back to Paris and handed over to the French authorities. She spent the next years in detention at La Santé and at Rennes while her case was prepared. Her trial opened on 3 January 1949 and lasted four days.
The prosecution read aloud from her own wartime diary a line that would define her in the public mind: that what she had wanted most was a good meal, a man, and to hear Mozart’s Requiem once again. Her defence did not dispute that she had betrayed the network, but pleaded the impossible position in which she had been placed and reminded the court that she had begun the war as a genuine member of the resistance.
On 7 January 1949 she was sentenced to death. The sentence was not carried out. Three months later it was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labour and afterwards reduced again. She was released in 1954, having spent in all some twelve years in custody across two countries. In 1959 she published her memoirs under the title “J’ai été La Chatte”, meaning “I Was ‘The Cat'”.
The book was revised and republished in 1975 as “On m’appelait La Chatte”, or “They Called Me the Cat.” In them she protested her innocence and sought to minimise her guilt, presenting herself as a woman trapped by circumstance rather than a traitor who had chosen her own survival over the lives of her comrades. After her release Carré withdrew almost entirely from public life.
Her obscurity was so complete that for decades reference books recorded her as having died around 1970, and her true fate was established only much later. In fact, she lived on quietly in France for more than half a century after her wartime treachery. Carré’s story illustrates the complexities of human life during the greatest conflict in human history.
For some period of time, she had been exactly what her comrades believed her to be: brave and trusted with the secrets of one of the Allied networks in occupied France. But after one night in a cell, everything changed. Forced to choose between loyalty and survival, she betrayed the network she had helped to build. Dozens of those who had trusted her were arrested, deported to concentration camps, or killed.
For some, her betrayal made her even worse than the Nazis themselves, because the resistance expected treachery from the occupiers, not from a trusted member of their own network. Despite everything, the former “Cat” served her sentence and then lived out a long life in the country she had once betrayed. Mathilde Carré died in Paris on 30 May 2007 – she was 98 years old.
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