Antonia Lyon-Smith (20 September 1925 in Toronto, Ontario - 9 October 2010 in Seaton, Devon, England) was an Englishwoman who at age 14 was accidentally left in Brittany in France by her parents, at the start of World War II, when the area was overrun by the German advance in June 1940.
She made contact with the playwright Claude Spaak, a member of the French resistance, who was involved with a Soviet espionage group that would later be called the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle").
Unwittingly asked to write a letter of introduction for the Spaaks, for a member of the group to meet a Belgian doctor, who was also working in the resistance, it was eventually discovered by the Gestapo and she was arrested by the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and interrogated for several months.
[4][5] On 16 May 1943, Brigadier Lyon-Smith, who fought in the North African campaign, was recommended for a Distinguished Service Order for outstanding courage in the field.
[8] When she was six, Lyon-Smith travelled to Egypt with her parents, when her father was stationed there for two years at the British Army garrison in Heliopolis in Cairo.
[9] Two years later, her parents were posted to India and the family felt that the place was unsuitable for a child, so Lyon-Smith stayed with her cousins Marcel and Diane Provost, in Menglas, Concarneau in Brittany.
[11] Two years later, her parents were posted back to Great Britain and Lyon-Smith joined them at the military base at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire when she was thirteen.
[10] With the start of World War II, Lyon-Smith's father's regiment was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.
Phyllis Lyon-Smith's reasoning was based on the belief that the second world war would be similar to the first and that being in France meant her husband would not need to travel back to Great Britain to see them.
Claude Spaak was a member of the French resistance, a close friend of Leopold Trepper[24] who ran the Soviet espionage group, the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") in France and the Low Countries.
[31] In late August 1943, Claude Spaak decided that Lyon-Smith and Peters should abandon the escape attempts due to the increasing presence of German forces in the area and move back to Paris separately.
[34] While there, Suzanne Spaak asked Lyon-Smith to write a letter of introduction to the Belgian doctor, for two friends of theirs who needed to go into hiding.
[34] In reality, the letter had been requested by Leopold Trepper for his mistress, Georgina De Winter who was supposed to go to a safehouse in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse that was being run by the Belgian doctor.
[35] On 12 or 21 October 1943 (sources vary),[36][11] Lyon was arrested in Bourg-la-Reine by the Gestapo unit Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and taken to be interrogated at 11 Rue des Saussaies in Paris.
[45] Gagel persuaded Heinz Pannwitz, chief of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle to allow Lyon-Smith to attend the surgery of a doctor in the local neighbourhood for treatment.
[49] At the end of July, Gagel informed Lyon-Smith during a phone call that the Gestapo was leaving Paris and that they should meet to say goodbye, threatening her with the knowledge that he had his service pistol with him.
Phyllis Lyon-Smith had lived in a hotel in Ayr[52] for the duration of the war and worked as a member of the Royal Voluntary Service.
[11] From then to 9 February 1945, they received and evaluated a number of intelligence reports from several channels, on all parties that were involved including her family, her cousins, De Winter, Gagel, resistance members, the doctor, and others.
[11] In a report that Pannwitz made to the CIA in 1959 on the history of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle, he stated that Lyon-Smith was a straight-forward honest girl, who would have found it impossible to refuse to help the Spaaks as her father was a Brigadier, and would have never known the true nature of the group's resistance work.
[1] In the intelligence report, in a letter from a Nazi source after the war[55] it posits the fact that Lyon-Smith was not interned or jailed in a cell, but instead kept in nominal custody in the Sonderkommando offices in Paris.
[57] However, she did not mention Pannwitz in the biography nor present a visage of somebody who was free to walk about the Sonderkommando offices, nor agreeing to marry Gagel.