Odette and Peter Churchill were arrested by the Gestapo at Saint-Jorioz, beginning a period of brutal imprisonment and torture.
On 16 April 1943, Odette Sansom and fellow SOE officer Peter Churchill were arrested by the German Abwehr/Gestapo at their base in Saint-Jorioz, France, after their network was betrayed by a double agent, Hugo Bleicher.
Following her arrest, Odette was interrogated repeatedly and subjected to horrific torture, including having her back burned with a hot iron and her toenails torn out, in efforts to extract information about the resistance network and Peter Churchill's identity. She steadfastly refused to break, giving false information to protect her comrades and claiming she and Churchill were married to protect him, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that this might spare his life since she implied he was related to Winston Churchill.
Her capture is historically significant as one of the most documented cases of an SOE agent enduring sustained torture without betraying her network. She was subsequently sentenced to death by a German court but her execution was never carried out, and she was instead sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Her extraordinary resilience under torture became a cornerstone of postwar accounts of resistance heroism and directly informed her selection for Britain's highest civilian honours after the war.