[4] While in Rome, Corporal Lauwers assembled a team of German prisoners to work in counterintelligence and psychological warfare.

She conducted Operation Sauerkraut, which infiltrated enemy lines with teams of German prisoners that spread “black” propaganda regarding Hitler throughout occupied Italian towns.

[3] Lauwers was part of many successful campaigns, but her most revered stint occurred by chance while overhearing a German prisoner talk about Czech and Slovak soldiers attached to their command, who were relegated to menial work.

The message she wrote – that Czech and Slovak soldiers were being used by the Germans, so they should reclaim their self-respect by joining the partisans – was mass-produced and also broadcast on the BBC.

This mythical organization was to demoralize German troops[5] by making them believe that the females in their lives back home were having casual relations with other soldiers.

The operation was so successful that The Washington Post was fooled and ran a story on 10 October 1944 entitled, “German soldiers on leave from the Italian front have only to pin an entwined heart on their lapel during furloughs home to find a girlfriend.” The newspaper got the story from a circular which had been captured on the Eighth Army front and was actually written by Lauwers and carried behind German lines by the Sauerkraut agents.

For you who must spend your leave in a foreign town; for you whom the war has deprived of a home; for you who is alone in the world without a wife, fiancée or a flirt.