When World War II began, twenty-year-old Jeannie Rousseau had just graduated at the top of her class at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, an elite institution credited with producing some of France’s most distinguished intellectuals, government leaders, researchers, and scientists. Adept at concealing her brilliance beneath a disarmingly guileless exterior, Rousseau took advantage of the fact that most men, while beguiled by her effervescent charm and pert good looks, failed to take her seriously. Such was the case in June 1940 when she went to work for the Germans in the seaside town of Dinard, in the northwest corner of Brittany.
Rousseau and her family were there because her father, a former high-ranking civil servant in Paris, had decided to move them out of the capital when the Germans invaded France, thinking that such a remote place would be safe from the occupiers. To his chagrin, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, whom Hitler had put in charge of planning a possible invasion of Britain, established his headquarters in Dinard, and Wehrmacht troops poured in by the hundreds.
The mayor of the town, who lived next door to the Rousseaus, told Jeannie’s father he needed someone to serve as a translator and interpreter for the German high command. Rousseau suggested his precocious daughter, who was fluent in five languages, one of them German. She got the job and soon was a favorite of von Reichenau and his staff. “The Germans still wanted to be liked then,” Rousseau later recalled. “They were happy to talk to someone who could speak to them.” Her new employers spoke openly in front of her about military tactics and strategy—“all the things that older men imprudently let themselves discuss with a pretty young girl who speaks such good German,” the Washington Post journalist David Ignatius wrote years later in a profile of Rousseau.
JEANNIE ROUSSEAU
A few months after the Germans arrived, a man from a nearby town who had heard about Rousseau’s new job paid a call on her at home. He asked if she would be willing to share with him any interesting information she picked up from the Germans. He, in turn, would relay it to the British. Rousseau immediately agreed.
Not long afterward, Berlin began to notice that the British seemed to know a great deal about military operations in the Dinard area; officials suspected a spy at work there. In January 1941, Rousseau was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to prison in the city of Rennes, but the officers with whom she had worked protested, adamantly insisting that their lovely translator was incapable of espionage. With no concrete proof against her, the young freelance spy was released and ordered to leave the coastal area. She traveled to Paris, where she looked for another post that would give her access to sensitive information, a job “that would take me into the lion’s den, which was where I wanted to go.”
The news of Rousseau’s arrest apparently was never passed on to the Gestapo in Paris, and soon after she arrived, she found the kind of work for which she had been searching. She was hired as an interpreter for a syndicate of French industrialists who often met with the staff of the German military command in Paris to discuss commercial issues, such as the placing of German orders with French firms. In time, Rousseau became the syndicate’s chief staff person and met almost daily with German army officers at their headquarters at the Hotel Majestic. “I knew all the details about the plants and commodities in Germany,” she recalled. “We were building up knowledge of what they had, what they did, and we could keep an eye on what they were doing—‘we’ being me.”
As it happened, some of the officers Rousseau met at the Majestic were old friends of hers from von Reichenau’s headquarters in Dinard, who worked in a different office than the ones she frequented. Delighted to see her, they took her out for drinks one evening, and in the course of it, dropped hints that their work involved a top-secret weapons project.
Having acquired a great mass of intelligence about German industry, not to mention the tantalizing possibility of information about a new weapons program, Rousseau grew increasingly frustrated about her inability to pass on such vital material to the British. Then Georges Lamarque appeared on the scene.
One night in early 1943, Rousseau, as part of her work, took a train from Paris to Vichy. Soon after she boarded, she spotted a familiar face. It was Lamarque, an old friend of hers from her university days in Paris. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and, finding no empty seats on the train, they stood in the corridor and caught up on each other’s lives.
Rousseau told him about her job with the syndicate and her constant contact with German officers. She also mentioned the secret work being done in other offices at the Majestic. In turn, Lamarque told her about his job. He had created “a little outfit” that was gathering intelligence for the British, he said. It was called the Druids. He asked her if she would like to work for him, and she enthusiastically agreed. He gave her the code name of Amniarix.
Rousseau’s German friends from Dinard began inviting her to their evening social gatherings at a house on the avenue Hoche, near the Arc de Triomphe, where they ate, drank, and talked freely about their work, including frequent mentions of secret weapons being developed on Germany’s Baltic coast. She never used sex—what she called “Mata Hari games”—to get information, she later said. What she did do was listen. “I had become part of the equipment, a piece of furniture,” she remembered. “I was such a little one, sitting with them, and I could not but hear what was said. And what they did not say, I prompted.”
Rousseau “teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapons that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane.” Over and over, she exclaimed: “What you are telling me cannot be true!” Finally, one of the officers had had enough of her playful skepticism. “I’ll show you,” he said, pulling from his briefcase drawings of a huge rocket and a map of an experimental testing station, called Peenemünde, on an island off the Baltic coast. He also showed her documents detailing, among other things, how to enter the testing site, the passes that were needed, and even the color of each pass.
After each evening with the officers, Rousseau, who had a photographic memory, went to a Druids’ safe house on the Left Bank and wrote down what she had heard, word for word. “I would absorb it, like a sponge,” she said. “I wasn’t asked to paraphrase, or to understand.” As it turned out, she didn’t understand most of it. When the Germans talked about raketten, for example, she hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant. What she did know was that this purloined information was “very serious.” She suspected it might be one of the top secrets of the war.
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER, on October 3, 1942, a gleaming black-and-white rocket, nearly five stories tall, sat on a launchpad in a clearing surrounded by a dense thicket of pine trees. German scientists and engineers, watching tensely from the assembly building at Peenemünde, could see clouds of vapor streaming from the missile. There was the sharp scream of a siren, then the beginning of a ten-second countdown.
As the countdown ended, flames shot out from under the rocket, and, with a thunderous roar, it slowly rose from the pad and began to accelerate. Within seconds, it thrust itself into the stratosphere, broke the sound barrier, and then, exactly as planned, veered to the east and traveled 120 miles before crashing into the Baltic.
When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, “This afternoon, the spaceship was born.” But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance. He told Wernher von Braun, the young director of the V-2 project, that “the new superweapon must be put into production as soon as possible for the Führer and victory.”
It had been six years since the German military had taken over the Baltic island of Usedom, a popular summer retreat for Berlin’s upper crust, then torn down its tiny village, called Peenemünde, and created the world’s largest missile testing center and launch site. It was there that von Braun and other top German scientists and engineers worked on the development of new aerial weapons, particularly the long-range rocket, dubbed the V-2, and a pilotless jet aircraft armed with bombs, known as the V-1.
The success of the V-2 test flight came at a particularly crucial moment for Hitler and his generals, who were soon to face two major military disasters—the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa. Hoping that the V-2 and V-1 would help Germany regain the initiative in the war, Hitler gave top priority in early 1943 to their mass production, pouring huge amounts of money and assigning thousands of slave laborers to the task. Calling the missiles “the new weapons that will change the face of the war,” he told his top military officials that by the end of 1943, London would be leveled, Britain forced to capitulate, and any planned invasion of the Continent rendered impossible. The attacks would begin on October 20, 1943, he declared. The V-2 rocket would be the first to launch.
Even though security was extremely tight at Peenemünde, small amounts of information about the test site had been leaked to the British by resistance members from various countries who had worked as slave laborers there. British officials knew that the Germans were conducting experiments on guided bombs and building launch sites along France’s Atlantic coast. But they lacked specific details of the missiles and their tests.
And then, unexpectedly, Jeannie Rousseau’s report turned up in London. Providing a wealth of detail, she described what she called the “stratospheric bomb,” including its size, launch speed, range, fuel supply, deficiencies, the locations and other information about its launching sites, and even the sound it made during launch—“as deafening as a Flying Fortress.” According to her sources, “50–100 of these bombs would suffice to destroy London” and would be aimed at “most of Britain’s large cities during the winter.”
After her report had been sent, Rousseau wondered whether British officials would ever actually receive it or put it to any use. Years later, she would describe the loneliness that she and other intelligence agents felt—“the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on—or passed on in time.” In her case, she need not have worried.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade immediately sent the document to MI6, which passed it on to Dr. Reginald V. Jones, a young physicist from Oxford who served as assistant director of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry and unofficially as Winston Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare. Jones, who instantly grasped the implications of what he called “this extraordinary report,” asked who the source was. Fourcade told him only that she was “une jeune fille la plus remarquable de sa génération” (the most remarkable girl of her generation). The information provided by Rousseau reached Churchill the following day.
Along with the other material received by the British about Germany’s new terror weapons, Rousseau’s document, described years later by one historian as a “masterpiece in the history of intelligence gathering,” convinced Churchill and his team that a large-scale attack must be launched as soon as possible against Peenemünde.
SHORTLY AFTER 11:00 P.M. on August 17, 1943, Wernher von Braun was going to bed after attending a party with some of his fellow scientists at the officers’ club at Peenemünde. It had been a beautiful, clear evening, and a few of the partygoers were still outside, enjoying the balmy air and star-filled sky.
As von Braun began to drift off to sleep, the air raid sirens began to wail. After quickly dressing, he hurried to the testing station’s communications center to get a status report. He was told that several waves of bombers from England were now over Denmark and approaching Germany but that they were believed to be on their way to Berlin.
Walking back to his quarters, von Braun noticed that an artificial fog system in the complex had been activated, and a heavy mist now enshrouded nearby buildings. Looking up, he saw what he and his colleagues called “Christmas trees”—red and green marking flares dropped by RAF advance bombers. A thunderous roar filled the sky, and antiaircraft guns bellowed into action. As von Braun and dozens of other Peenemünde workers raced to the main air raid bunker, the first bombs were already falling.
Almost six hundred British aircraft, comprising virtually all of RAF Bomber Command’s frontline units, swept over the island, dropping a lethal mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs. Before they took off from England, the air crews had been told that the raid’s outcome “would affect the whole course of the war.” In an attempt to destroy the brains behind the weapons, the first wave of bombers targeted the scientists’ and engineers’ living quarters. Succeeding waves were aimed at laboratories, production plants, and testing facilities.
When the raid finally ended and a dazed von Braun left the shelter, he gazed out at a nightmarish landscape of splintered trees and burning buildings. “It was like hell,” one of his colleagues recalled. Another Peenemünde worker described the scene as “a veritable sea of flames.”
Accompanied by his secretary, von Braun rushed into the blazing building containing his office to try to salvage key documents and plans. They were able to collect a few piles of paper before the flames and extreme heat forced them out. Overall, the raid exacted a heavy toll: Most of the blueprints and model devices of the V-2 were destroyed, many key installations were heavily damaged, and an estimated 180 scientists and engineers were killed.
In a poignant irony, several of the workers who had earlier reported to the British about the V-1s and V-2s at Peenemünde also died during the bombing. “A substantial proportion of our bombs fell to the south of the establishment itself,” Reginald Jones recalled, “and particularly on the camp which housed foreign laborers, including those who had risked so much to get the information through to us.”
As Winston Churchill later noted, the raid “had a far-reaching influence on events.” Workers were evacuated from Peenemünde, and research there was halted. The production and testing of both weapons were pushed back several months, long enough to prevent an attack from interfering with the June 1944 Allied invasion of France, which had been a main goal of German officials.
Initially, the V-2 was to be used almost simultaneously with the V-1, which could have had calamitous consequences for Britain. But thanks to the raid on Peenemünde and to difficulties with the V-2’s production and testing, the Germans repeatedly had to postpone its use. Instead, as Churchill and his men discovered from reading later reports from Jeannie Rousseau, the V-1 was to be deployed first. It was finally fired at Britain on June 13, 1944, eight months after Hitler’s planned launching date and one week after the Allies successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy.
“Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”
For nearly three months, thousands of these pilotless missiles—called buzz bombs because of the noise they made—showered down on London and its outskirts, killing more than 6,000 residents, injuring some 16,000, and destroying about 23,000 houses. But while losses were heavy and the fear and worry excruciating, the damage caused by the V-1s was considerably less than it might have been. The British could not prevent them from being launched, but in the fifteen months that they had known about the weapon’s existence, they had been able to plan countermeasures, such as improved antiaircraft defenses, to greatly lessen its impact.
Of the more than 8,500 V-1s fired at London, fewer than thirty percent overall reached their targets. By August, less than one bomb in seven—about fifteen percent—got through to the London metropolitan area. Early in September 1944, the V-1 campaign came to an abrupt end when Allied troops fighting in France overran the areas containing the buzz bombs’ launching sites.
Londoners, however, enjoyed only a few days of relief. On September 8, from sites in still-occupied Holland, the Germans unleashed the V-2 rocket, which tormented the British capital until just a few months before the end of the war. To most people, the V-2s—which traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence—were even more terrifying than their predecessors. More than five hundred of them exploded in and around London, rocking the city like an earthquake and killing nearly three thousand people.
Again, though, the death toll and scale of damage were far less than they would have been had Germany been left unhindered. Without the delays caused by the Peenemünde raid, the rockets would have been fired months earlier and from shorter ranges. “Although we could do little against the rocket once it was launched,” Churchill observed, “we postponed and substantially reduced the weight of the onslaught.”
Jeannie Rousseau, meanwhile, had no knowledge during the war of the astonishing impact that her report had had. By the time the V-1s and V-2s were launched, she was in a German concentration camp, struggling to remain alive.