beardsbeerandliterarybadassery:

In the mid-1930s, an Australian journalist visited Germany to report on the rise of fascism and interview Adolf Hitler. The atrocities she saw there, which included the public beating of Jews, forever changed the course of her young life. Nancy Wake would spend World War II fighting Nazism tooth and nail, saving thousands of Allied lives and winding up at the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list. When Germany invaded France, where she had settled, in May 1940, Wake threw herself into the resistance movement, helping thousands of Jewish refugees and Allied servicemen escape to Spain. Until she developed a reputation as the elusive “White Mouse,” as her enemies dubbed her, she brazenly flirted with German soldiers to waltz through checkpoints. In 1943, aware that her hunters were finally closing in, Wake fled to Spain and later to Britain, where she convinced special agents to train her as a spy and guerilla operative. In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters. During the violent months preceding the liberation of Paris, Wake, who died in August 2011 at 98, killed a German guard with a single karate chop to the neck, executed a female German spy, shot her way out of roadblocks and biked 70 hours through perilous Nazi-controlled zones to deliver radio codes for the Allies.

(via lipsredasroses)