In 1933, as soon as Hitler came to power, Ingeborg Helene Abshagen, known as Inga, born into a well-to-do Prussian family, was sent to London to further her education, her parents believing that she should escape the influence of German teachers, who were mostly Nazis. She studied briefly at the London School of Economics under the socialist Jewish professor Harold Laski. When she returned to Germany, fluent in English, strikingly attractive and with a different worldview from her peers, she easily found a high-powered job working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, as secretary for its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. In 1940, immediately after the city fell, she moved with Canaris to Paris, where she lived at the Ritz but worked at the German-requisitioned H?tel Lutetia during the day.
Inga was emphatic that Canaris was always critical of the Nazi regime from the moment he had witnessed, in Poland in September 1939, what he said were war crimes committed by the SS including the destruction of the synagogue in B?dzin and the burning to death of the town’s Jewish residents. He warned then that ‘Germany will never be forgiven unless some action is taken against these criminals.’ Inga thus became close to a group of like-minded Wehrmacht officers in more or less permanent tension with the SS, one of the few German women in Paris working as a double agent supplying false passports to Jews and other persecuted minorities, sometimes delivering these in person. This treacherous work was endorsed by Canaris, who believed that the young and glamorous Inga, looking to all the world like a genuine Parisienne, would evade detection by French police. In 1942 she married a much older senior army officer, Werner Haag, and at the end of the year the pair left Paris for Hungary, no doubt fortunately for her as Paris was by now increasingly dangerous. ‘You lived in fear that you were going to be arrested. So I took my father’s advice to try to know as little as possible because what you didn’t know you couldn’t talk about and betray under torture.’
Gisèle Casadesus, then a young mother of two and a hard-working actress at the Comédie-Fran?aise, whose audience was always full of non-uniformed Germans, said, ‘You never knew who you could trust, so nobody ever spoke about anything that mattered just in case. Food was the constant topic of conversation. What can you eat, how to cook it and where can you get it?’
Although by 1942 Paris was full of German as well as French women, the former never acquired the chic of their local counterparts and in any case most had to wear uniform. Sometimes they were dubbed Blitzm?dchen or Blitzweiben (because they had a stripe, or Blitz, on the shoulder), but the favourite French nickname for them was Grey Mice. These Grey Mice looked with cool dislike on their local rivals, who, they had been told in advance, were women of loose morals. The attitude was reciprocated. ‘The French were respectful to girls in uniform. We were treated politely by them. Not with kindness.’