Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1 January 1914-13 September 1944) was a British SOE agent who served in France during World War II. She aided the French Resistance until she was betrayed, captured, and executed by Nazi Germany at the Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
Biography[]
Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was born in Moscow, Russian Empire in 1914, the daughter of Sufi philosopher Inayat Khan and his American wife, and the great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The family relocated to London, England shortly after the outbreak of World War I, and the family moved to Suresnes, France in 1920. Noor published children's stories and poetry in both English and French, and the family fled to Bordeaux in 1940 during the Battle of France at the start of World War II. On 22 June 1940, the family fled to England once again, and, while Khan was a pacifist, she decided to participate in the war effort against fascism to make a bridge between the English people and the people of India. She joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in November 1940 and was recruited into the SOE intelligence agency in 1943, training as a wireless operator in Aylesbury. On 16-17 June 1943, she was flown into German-occupied France, keeping the French Resistance in radio contact with London. However, Sicherheitsdienst double agent Henri Dericourt betrayed her to the Germans on 13 October 1943, and she twice failed to escape interrogation in Paris. She consistently lied to Paris SD chief Josef Kieffer during interrogation, and, while she escaped on 25 November 1943, she was recaptured and was transferred to Pforzheim on 27 November and executed at Dachau on 13 September 1944 alongside her fellow agents Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, and Eliane Plewman.
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