Betrayal fear by UK schoolgirl with Nazi ‘lover’

Antonia Lyon-Smith was just 15 and separated from her parents when the Germans arrested her and sent her to an internment camp.

She was released on the grounds of her age, but ran into trouble again after becoming involved with a prominent Resistance group and was threatened with being deported to a concentration camp in Poland.

But a Gestapo chief saved her by taking her on as a housekeeper in his Paris offices, where a Nazi officer called Karl Gagel fell in love with her and made her promise to marry him once the war was over.

Miss Lyon-Smith was interrogated by MI5 but disclosed nothing about her relationship with Gagel, leading a British intelligence officer to conclude that she was his mistress and “almost certainly” betrayed all her knowledge of the Resistance cell to the Germans.

In her own memoirs, published in 1982, she revealed that Gagel was only one of four men she became engaged to during the war – none of whom she went on to marry.

The daughter of Royal Artillery officer Brigadier Tristram Lyon-Smith and a Canadian mother, the English schoolgirl was staying with her cousin in Concarneau, Brittany, northern France, when the Second World War broke out.

In December 1940 German soldiers took her into custody, along with other Britons, and held her in an internment camp in Besancon, eastern France.

She applied for release on the grounds that detainees had to be over 16. After being freed in March 1941, she went to Paris by herself and resumed her schooling.

In the summer of 1942, Miss Lyon-Smith decided to try to escape from France, but her attempts to flee over the Swiss border or make it to Spain with the help of the American Embassy failed.

She returned to Paris in September 1943 and was asked by a man called Claude Spaak, the brother of the Belgian foreign minister, to write a letter of introduction to help a friend of his gain safe passage into neutral Switzerland.

The British schoolgirl later insisted to MI5 that she did not realise at this time that Spaak was heavily involved in the Resistance.

It appears from the files that she was involved – perhaps unwittingly – in attempts to assist the escape of Leopold Trepper, the Soviet Union’s main spy in France.

But the Nazis intercepted Miss Lyon-Smith’s letter. She was arrested by senior Gestapo officer Heinz Pannwitz and taken to his offices in Paris for interrogation.

She claimed she was held there in solitary confinement until January 1944, when she was allowed to leave and stay with her cousin, who had by this time moved to Paris.

But her MI5 file, newly released by the National Archives, includes a report from a Nazi source suggesting that she “did little but make tea, sew and listen to radio” and had a “fair amount of freedom” while with the Gestapo.

She was even “frequently accompanied on shopping expeditions in Paris” by Gagel, it notes.

MI5 became involved when Gagel tried to contact her after the war via her father’s branch of Barclay’s Bank in Hove, East Sussex

The former Gestapo officer wrote to the bank in October 1945: “I should be much obliged if you would kindly inform Miss Antonia Lyon-Smith that I shall be in Germany for some time to come, and that I should like to have news of her.”

Brigadier Lyon-Smith was furious about this letter and asked British intelligence to track down Gagel.

An MI5 officer who interviewed the Army officer about his daughter noted: “She was apparently ‘befriended’ by Karl Gagel, who ostensibly arranged that she should not be sent to Fresnes prison in return for her undertaking to marry him when the war was over...

She also records a surprise visit from the comic author PG Wodehouse when she was seriously ill while in Gestapo custody in Paris.

The famous writer told her: “The Germans aren’t so bad, are they? They might have sent you to Fresnes.”