Vera Leigh (17 March 1903 – 6 July 1944) was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II.

[1][2] Leigh was a member of the SOE's Donkeyman circuit and Inventor sub-circuit in occupied France until she was arrested by the Gestapo.

[4] After gaining experience as a vendeuse at the house of Caroline Reboux, she went into partnership with two friends to found the grande maison Rose Valois in the Place Vendôme in 1927, when she was only 24.

[4] When Paris fell in 1940, she left for Lyon to join her fiancé of seven years, a man called Charles Sussaix, the managing director of a Portuguese-owned film company.

[4] She had intended to find a way, with his help, to get to England, but she became involved with the underground escape lines, guiding fugitive Allied servicemen out of the country, and it was not until 1942 that she herself took the route over the Pyrenees into Spain.

[4] As with many who made this journey, Spanish authorities put her in the internment camp at Miranda de Ebro, about 65 kilometres south of Bilbao.

[6] The interviewer noted further, "It is clear that commerce is her first allegiance", but the authorities saw no reason to doubt her motives, while her pre-war life in Paris and her perfect French seemed to make her a natural for the job.

[6] One of her instructors later remembered that she had a hard time dealing with maps and diagrams, but was "extremely good with her fingers; she could do fiddling jobs with charges and wires and all that remarkably quickly and neatly".

Leigh's codename among fellow agents was Simone, and Almoner for radio communications with London; while her assumed identity in France was Suzanne Chavanne, a milliner's assistant.

[9] With papers in her assumed name, she moved around Paris and as far away as the Ardennes in the northeast, carrying messages from Jones to his various wireless operators and to Henri Frager (who headed a sub-circuit of the Prosper circuit).

She moved into an apartment in the elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement, made rendezvous routinely at cafés frequented by other agents, and took up life as a Parisienne again.

[11] In her spare time, she began escorting some of these downed fliers, who spoke no French, through the streets from the safe-house to their next point of contact on the escape line.

[12] She spent time with SOE agent Aisner in an imposing building in a courtyard off the Place des Ternes from which she ran her husband's business, an effective cover for Leigh's activity as Déricourt's courier.

[13] Taken to the Fresnes Prison several kilometres outside Paris, she was registered as Suzanne Chavonne and placed in Cell 410 of the Troisième Section Femmes.

She had been taught in training to hold out for 48 hours after capture to give fellow agents a chance to vacate any premises and destroy any records she might be forced to reveal, but is almost certain she had no need to do so.

[14] On 13 May 1944, Leigh together with three other captured female SOE agents, Andrée Borrel, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden, were moved from Fresnes to the Gestapo's Paris headquarters in the Avenue Foch along with four other women whose names were Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Odette Sansom, all of whom were F Section agents.

[17] The agents were treated no differently from other prisoners – markedly better than those in concentration camps – and were given manual work to do, peeling potatoes, sewing, etc., which helped pass the time.

[17] Occasionally, through the high bars, they could hear Allied bombers headed for targets within Germany, so on the whole, the situation looked promising for them, even if there was the possibility of dying in an air raid.

[21] Albert Guérisse, a Belgian army physician who had headed the Pat O'Leary escape line in Marseille,[22] recognized Borrel as one of his former helpers.

[28] According to a Polish prisoner named Walter Schultz, the SS medical orderly (Emil Brüttel) told him the following: "When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled.

Franz Berg was sentenced to five years in prison[30] but received the death penalty in another trial for a different crime and was hanged on the same day as Rohde.