Violette Reine Elizabeth Szabo, GC (née Bushell; 26 June 1921 – c. 5 February 1945) was a British-French Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent during the Second World War and a posthumous recipient of the George Cross.

Szabo's father, son of a publican from Hampstead Norreys, was serving as a British Army driver in France during the First World War when he met her mother, a dressmaker originally from Pont-Remy, Somme.

In early 1940, Bushell joined the Women's Land Army and was sent to carry out strawberry picking in Fareham, Hampshire, but she soon returned to London to work in an armaments factory in Acton.

It was Étienne's death that made Szabo accept an offer to train as a field agent in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) as her best way of fighting the enemy that killed her husband.

[13] It is unclear how or why Szabo was recruited by F-Section, as her surviving official file is thin, but her fluency in French and her previous service in the ATS probably brought her to the attention of SOE.

[15] Szabo was sent to the SOE "finishing school" at Beaulieu, Hampshire, where she learnt escape and evasion, uniform recognition, communications and cryptography, and had further training in weaponry.

[17] On 24 January 1944, Szabo made her will, witnessed by Vera Atkins and Major R. A. Bourne Paterson of SOE, naming her mother, Reine, as executrix and her daughter Tania as sole beneficiary.

[23] On the night of 5/6 April 1944, Szabo and Liewer were flown from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire in a Westland Lysander aircraft and landed in German-occupied France, near the village of Azay-le-Rideau in the heart of the Loire Valley.

[25] Under the code name "Louise", which happened to be her nickname (she was also nicknamed "La P'tite Anglaise", as she stood only 5'3" tall),[26][27] she and SOE colleague Philippe Liewer (under the name "Major Charles Staunton"), organiser of the Salesman circuit, tried to assess the damage made by the German arrests, with Szabo travelling to Rouen, where Liewer could not go as a wanted man (both he and Maloubier were on wanted posters with their codenames), and to Dieppe to gather intelligence and carry out reconnaissance.

Szabo returned to Paris to brief Liewer, and in the two days, before they were due to depart, she bought a dress for Tania, three frocks and a yellow sweater for herself, and perfume for her mother and herself.

[28] While the destruction of Salesman was a heavy blow to SOE, her reports on the local factories producing war materials for the Germans were important in establishing Allied bombing targets.

[35] However, due to poor intelligence gathering by the local Resistance, Liewer was unaware that the 2nd SS Panzer Division was making its slow journey north to the Normandy battlefields through his area.

[citation needed] At 9.30 am on 10 June, Szabo set off on her mission, not inconspicuously by bicycle as Liewer would have preferred, but in a Citroen driven by a young maquis section leader, Jacques Dufour ('Anastasie').

[citation needed] Their car raised the suspicions of German troops at an unexpected roadblock outside of Salon-la-Tour that had been set up to find Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, a battalion commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, who had been captured by the local resistance.

As armoured cars arrived at the scene, Szabo crossed the road to join Dufour, and they leapt a gate, before running across a field towards a small stream.

Szabo's captors were most likely from the 1st Battalion of 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment Deutschland (Das Reich Division) whose commanding officer was the missing Sturmbannführer Kämpfe.

A recent biography of Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer for the French section of SOE, notes that there was a great deal of confusion about what happened to Szabo—the story was revised four times—and states that the Sten gun incident "was probably a fabrication".

)[42] From there, she was moved to Fresnes Prison in Paris and brought to Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch for interrogation and torture by the Sicherheitsdienst, who by now knew of her true identity and activities as an SOE agent.

[citation needed] With the Allies driving deep into France and George Patton's Third US Army heading towards Paris, the decision was taken by the Germans to send their most valuable French prisoners to Germany.

At some point in the journey, probably outside Chalons-sur-Marne, an Allied air raid caused the guards to temporarily abandon the train, allowing Szabo and Bloch to get water from a lavatory to the caged male prisoners in the next carriage, the two women both providing inspiration and a morale boost to the suffering men.

When the train reached Reims, the prisoners were taken by lorries to a large barn for two nights, where Szabo, still tied at the ankle to Bloch, who was in good spirits, was able to wash some of her clothes in a rudimentary fashion and to speak about her experiences to her SOE colleague Harry Peulevé.

[citation needed] From Reims, via Strasbourg, the prisoners went by train to Saarbrücken and a transit camp in the suburb of Neue Bremm, where hygiene facilities were nonexistent, and food was only indigestible bread crusts.

The British women also made contact with French prisoners at a nearby POW camp who, being better fed, provided them with extra rations and offered to send messages to London with a transmitter they had built (there is no evidence they were successful).

[49] In late October 1944, the protest women were transferred to a punishment camp at Königsberg, where they were forced into harsh physical labour felling trees, clearing rock-hard icy ground for the construction of an airfield and digging a trench for a narrow-gauge railway.

In the bitter East Prussian winter of 1944, each day the women were forced to stand for Appell (roll-call) in the early morning for up to five hours before being sent to work, many of them freezing to death.

[50][51] According to Christine Le Scornet, a seventeen-year-old French girl whom Szabo befriended, and Jeannie Rousseau, the co-leader of the Torgau revolt, she maintained her morale, was optimistic about liberation and continued to plan to escape.

[56] Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe – neither of whom could walk and were carried on stretchers – were shot at the same time, by order of the highest Nazi authorities; the bodies were disposed of in the camp crematorium.

17 December 1946 The KING has been graciously pleased to award the GEORGE CROSS to: — Violette, Madame SZABO (deceased), Women's Transport Service (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry).

[83] The 2009 video game Velvet Assassin by Replay Studios is inspired by Szabo's life as an allied spy during the Second World War, with the protagonist sharing her first name.

[84] The 2018 ten minute short play, "The Life That I Have", developed for the 365 Days of Women by playwright Libby Mitchell, is inspired by Szabo's last moments and her time in Ravensbrück.