Dame Blanche (resistance)

La Dame Blanche (French; lit. 'The White Lady') was the codename for an underground intelligence network that operated in German-occupied Belgium during World War I. It was named after a German legend that foretold the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty would be signaled by the appearance of a woman in white.

The network gathered information on German troop movements by monitoring the railway system.

Walthère Dewé
Chapel Saint-Maurice "Memorial Walthère Dewé" in 2011
Chapel Saint-Maurice, statue of the Dame Blanche (White Lady) by Jules Brouns

The Dame Blanche network was founded in 1916 by Walthère Dewé [fr], an engineer working in a telegraph and telephone company in Brussels. The decision was prompted by the arrest and execution of Dewé's cousin, Dieudonné Lambrecht [fr], who had himself founded an intelligence network codenamed "Lambrecht". In order to save the group, Dewé took control and developed it under the name Dame Blanche, with the assistance of his friend Herman Chauvin.

The network was initially affiliated with the British military intelligence service of Cecil Aylmer Cameron via Folkestone. After persistent infiltration by agents working for Colonel Walter Nicolai and Abteilung III b, the German counterintelligence service, La Dame Blanche transferred its allegiance to the British Secret Service (later known as MI6) station in Rotterdam, where their new handler was Captain Henry Landau. After the war, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, head of the Secret Service, estimated that Dame Blanche had supplied as much as 70 percent of all military intelligence collected by Allied intelligence services worldwide, not just that from German-occupied Belgium and northern France.[1]

By the end of the war, its 1,300 agents covered all of occupied Belgium, northern France and – through a collaboration with Louise de Bettignies' network – occupied Luxembourg. The network was known for its high proportion of female members; women may have made up as much as 30 percent of its total personnel.[2]

During the second German occupation of Belgium in World War II, Dewé used the experience of the Dame Blanche network to start a new network, codenamed Clarence,[3][4] to which several former members of Dame Blanche belonged.[5] He was shot and killed while trying to avoid capture by the Germans in January[5] 1944.[6]

A monument to the Dame Blanche resistance organisation has been built near the city of Liège. It is the Chapelle Saint-Maurice (mémorial Walthère Dewé), Rue Coupée 94, Liège, Belgium.[7]

  1. ^ Ruis, Edwin. Spynest. British and German Espionage from Neutral Holland 1914–1918. Briscombe: The History Press, 2016.
  2. ^ "Walthère Dewé". Les malles ont une mémoire 14–18. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  3. ^ "Resistance in Belgium in World War Two". 23 January 2013. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  4. ^ Palo, Michael F. (8 July 2019). Neutrality as a Policy Choice for Small/Weak Democracies: Learning from the Belgian Experience. BRILL. p. 240. ISBN 978-90-04-39585-5.
  5. ^ a b Veranneman, Jean-Michel (30 November 2018). Belgium in the Great War. Casemate Publishers. ISBN 978-1-5267-1662-0.
  6. ^ Vescent, Heather; Gilbert, Adrian; Colson, Rob (27 October 2020). The Secrets of Spies: Inside the Hidden World of International Agents. Weldon Owen International. ISBN 978-1-68188-721-0.
  7. ^ "Battlefield Tours". The Belgian Tourist Office – The official website of the Tourism and Convention Bureau of Brussels and Wallonia. Archived from the original on 13 April 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2014.