How wealthy Aussie socialite helped Allied soldiers escape Nazis in WWII
As a wealthy socialite, Enid Lindeman was the last person you’d expect to be an underground smuggler for the French Resistance in WWII. And that’s exactly how she managed to sneak escaped Allied soldiers into her safe house mansion dressed as maids.
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As a wealthy socialite, fashion icon and famed beauty, Enid Lindeman was the last person you’d expect to be an underground smuggler for the French Resistance in World War II.
Perhaps that’s why the Australian-born widow initially avoided suspicion while using her waterfront mansion on the French Riviera as a safe house for escaped Allied servicemen.
Enid Lindeman is the subject of a two-part series of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters, with Part 2 out today.
READ PART 1 OF ENID LINDEMAN’S STORY HERE
It was a step up from Enid’s role in World War I, when she became a nurse in Paris and bought and fitted out her own ambulance, which she drove to the battlefront to transport wounded soldiers to hospital, often as shelling continued.
As a new book, Enid, by best-selling author Robert Wainwright explains, during WWII the then thrice-widowed mother of three offered her palatial villa, La Fiorentina, to the French Resistance.
Her clifftop home was within the boundaries of Vichy France, ruled by an authoritarian puppet government in cahoots with Nazi Germany.
Wealthy playgrounds such as nearby Monte Carlo, Cannes and Nice had been transformed into deserted, gloomy towns, and even sunbathing was banned.
The government began rounding up and imprisoning Allied servicemen, but many were able to escape a prison close to Enid’s home.
Wainwright says La Fiorentina became an unlikely, and therefore valuable, link in the chain for resistance fighters channelling escaped servicemen out of France and back to London.
Escaped prisoners would stay in Enid’s home, where she had once entertained the likes of Charlie Chaplin, William Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward, until they could be moved on to the next point in the hazardous journey to the Spanish border.
“When there was a breakout, they would bring them and she would hide them, often disguising them as maids to confuse the German authorities who would come in searching,” Wainwright says.
“If they had found out that she was aiding and abetting, she would have probably been shot. So she was risking her life and did so for several years.”
With Enid’s wealth tied up overseas, she also found herself penniless for the first time in her life and struggled to survive.
“She turned much of the garden into a farm, she used to milk her own goat, she used to make her own soap, and she provided food for the nearby village as well,” Wainwright says.
When the Vichy police finally twigged that Enid was smuggling escaped prisoners, she was forced to flee to the safety of London, where she was hailed as a hero for her role in fighting the Nazis.
Listen now to the interview in today’s new free episode of the In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters on Apple/iTunes, Spotify, web or your favourite platform.
Listen to previous episodes including the story of how a policeman’s wife became Melbourne’s “high priestess of prostitution” Madame Brussels, the Aussie nurse who survived a WWII massacre by playing dead, and why one man wrote the word “Eternity” on city streets 500,000 times.
And see In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.