Henri Leonard Thomas Peulevé DSO MC (29 January 1916 – 18 March 1963) was a Special Operations Executive agent who undertook two missions in occupied France and escaped from Buchenwald concentration camp.

He eventually reached Nantes from where he and his men were evacuated, but the traumatic scenes he witnessed during the rout left Peulevé with a profound sense of humiliation, which spurred him to offer his services to the War Office.

In March 1942 he was interviewed by Major Lewis Gielgud and accepted for training with the French Section of the Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation formed in 1940 to encourage resistance and sabotage in occupied countries.

Both men parachuted 'blind' (without a reception committee) to a landing ground west of Nîmes at the end of July 1942, but were dropped too low: de Baissac sprained an ankle, and Peulevé suffered a compound fracture of the right leg.

Georges Audouard was a member of a circuit of croupiers with links to CARTE, the major resistance network on the Riviera, run by a painter named André Girard based in Antibes.

Moving continually between safe houses in Cannes and Antibes, Peulevé was able to stay for a time with the family of a young French assistant living at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Jacques Poirier.

Flying from RAF Tangmere in two Westland Lysander aircraft, they were received by Henri Déricourt at a field near Angers, who arranged for their onward journey to Paris.

Peulevé set up his network in the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, helped by Maurice Arnouil, an engineer and local businessman who owned premises at 26, Avenue de la Gare.

In January 1944 Peulevé began receiving supply drops from RAF aircraft, enabling him to arm numerous maquis of the Armée Secrète and communists across the Corrèze and Dordogne.

On the following day it was attacked by Allied aircraft, during which time three women agents were able to pass water to the confined men, one of them being Szabo (she had been captured on her second mission whilst attempting to make contact with Poirier in the Corrèze).

Four days later all thirty-seven agents were transported to Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, where they met four F Section men, Christopher Burney, Maurice Pertschuk and brothers Henry and Alfred Newton.

It became clear that the remainder would probably also be executed, and a desperate escape plan was hatched in collaboration with Eugen Kogon, secretary to one of the SS camp doctors, Dr Erwin Ding-Schuler.

In return for signed testimony stating that Allied prisoners had received his help, Ding-Schuler agreed for three men to be hidden in Block 46, where human guinea pigs were used to conduct experiments on new typhus vaccines.

As American forces reached the nearby city of Magdeburg on 11 April, Peulevé was able to escape from his working party, but as he neared the Allied lines he was stopped by two SS officers.