La Liberté

An excerpt from Great British Adventurers:

After their arrests by the Gestapo, on 10 September 1944 Noor Inayat Khan GC, MBE, Croix de Guerre and three other Special Operations Executive agents (Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment), were taken to Karlsruhe prison and, the next day, they were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp.

During the night of 12-13 September 1944, the four women were taken outside and shot in the back of the head. A former Dachau prisoner later came forward and said that Noor was first cruelly beaten by a sadistic SS soldier called Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert and that her last words had been to shout: "La Liberté!". As modern societies whittle away at Liberty, on any old excuse, ranging from our own health and the need to protect us from ourselves, to the need to protect us all from the vague threat of terrorism, by the ‘authorities’ treating everyone as a suspect, we might occasionally pause to consider how many people have actually given their lives to protect Liberty; which is far more precious than the ‘safety’ to be found in all the smokeless zones and all the airport body searches in the world.