Odette Hallowes was awarded the George Cross, becoming the first woman to receive Britain's highest civilian award for gallantry.
On 20 August 1946, the award of the George Cross to Odette Sansom (later Hallowes) was gazetted, recognising her extraordinary courage and endurance under torture at the hands of the Gestapo and during her imprisonment at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
The George Cross is the highest gallantry award in the United Kingdom honours system that can be given to civilians, and Odette was among the first women — and the first woman to receive it while still alive — recognised for her wartime service with the Special Operations Executive. The citation praised her endurance of torture without disclosing any information that could compromise her fellow agents or the resistance network.
This award was historically significant not only for honouring individual heroism but also for publicly acknowledging, in the immediate postwar period, the vital and dangerous role women played in secret intelligence and resistance work — roles that had often been kept hidden even from their own families during the war due to the secrecy of the SOE.
Her George Cross elevated her to national heroine status in Britain, and her story was later dramatised in the 1950 film Odette, starring Anna Neagle, which brought widespread public awareness to the sacrifices of SOE agents.