A Nazi pistol stolen by a female spy in the final days of WWII is to go on display in the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester for the first time.
Odette Hallowes snatched the Walther PPK pistol from Camp Commandant Fritz Sühren as he drove her away from Ravensbrück concentration camp—with the Allied advance he hoped to use her as a bargaining tool, as he (wrongly) believed her to be a relative of Winston Churchill. Hallowes demanded the soldiers arrest him and took his pistol, which was used as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.
Hallowes was born in France in 1912 and moved to London in the 1930s; during the war she was recruited as a secret agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and became one of few female secret agents parachuted into France by SOE. Odette left for France in 1942, leaving her young family behind. When her spy network was exposed, she was imprisoned by the Gestapo and later sent to Ravensbrück, where was she was kept and tortured for four years.
“In the Spotlight: A Secret Life: Odette Hallowes and the Nazi pistol” will be on display from 24th October for a year.