Molly Sasson beat the Nazis and fought just as hard for Australia

During the Nuremberg Trials, Molly Sasson interviewed senior members of Hitler’s high command – many of whom were found guilty and hanged.

Molly Sasson at her retirement home three years ago when she answered questions from The Australian. Picture: Courtesy of Drew Thompson

Molly Sasson lived a life of service and secrecy. When, at the age of 92, she finally wrote the necessarily guarded story of her life and career – the two were indivisible – she titled it More Cloak Than Dagger.

Even now, after her death, there are as many questions about her life as there are answers. Where was she really born? To whom? Did she really serve in Britain’s Royal Air Force? Why was she invited to work in Australia? And, never revealed, who was the ASIO operative she first identified as a spy within ASIO in 1974?

But notwithstanding all that, no one has any doubt that she was a committed patriot – for the Netherlands, Britain and Australia, where she spent the last half of her incredible life.

Sasson was born Maria Olde Rickerink and adopted out to an English mother and a Dutch father. She was studying medicine in The Hague in May 1940 when Germany invaded the officially neutral country. She managed to catch the last flight out of Amsterdam to England to live with an aunt. Her parents were immediately part of the resistance movement and Sasson knew that with her knowledge of four languages she could help.

She was identified as an asset by MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence unit, and trained by it before being parachuted back into the thinly populated Zeeland province where she ostensibly worked for the Red Cross while gathering intelligence.

Sasson secretly flew to London for further briefings in 1943 and was returned to Zeeland in one of the then secret Royal Navy midget submarines. One of her key tasks was to identify V1 and V2 missile launch sites. Both had a limited range and were mostly fired at London from sites on the Belgian and French coasts. They were designed by Wernher von Braun. He might have been hanged for war crimes but was taken to the US after the war and became instrumental in its NASA space program.

While working on the borders, then at the epicentre of the European conflict, Sasson and her colleagues would be bombed by both sides. At one stage she was given a small explosive device to assassinate the hated Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom Adolf Hitler had appointed as governor of The Netherlands. There he worked with uncommon enthusiasm, as he had in Poland in that role, to send all its Jews to gas chambers. Sasson may have failed to kill him but she interviewed him after the war while working as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials at which Seyss-Inquart was found guilty and hanged.

She worked for MI6 and MI5 in London after the war and it was a busy time with nests of communist sympathisers undermining the West by passing secrets to Moscow. Among these were the infamous Cambridge Five whose members included Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, both of whom defected to the Soviet Union. It was often a two-way trade; in 1947, with Sassons’s assistance, brilliant Russian rocket scientist Grigory Tokaty defected to the British quarter of Berlin and moved to London where Sasson helped him establish his new life. Tokaty eventually rose to professor of aeronautics at London’s City University, a few kilometres from the Soviet embassy.

In 1969, ASIO director-general Sir Charles Spry finally persuaded Sasson to join the organisation in Australia. He was to have met her on the dock in Sydney, but two staffers met her instead. Spry had had a heart attack that day and never returned to work.

In 1974 Sasson told the Hope Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security about a spy in ASIO’s ranks. And there were certainly communists working in senior positions: lying NSW Labor member Arthur Gietzelt had been a senator since 1970 – and a Communist Party member for decades longer. Judge Robert Hope himself had tried to join the Communist Party while at university.

I was the last person to interview Sasson, in 2021, by which time she was in a retirement home in Melbourne. I wanted to speak to her about the big lie of World War II – that Albert Speer, a confidant of Hitler, was, as he liked to label himself, “the good Nazi” who knew nothing of the Holocaust.

At Nuremberg she also had interpreted for Speer, the only senior Nazi to plead guilty and to avoid the noose.

She told me that he was very well spoken and a gentleman with impeccable manners. But “Speer knew”, she said. “Every German knew. They all saw people coming and going – the trainloads of people. They couldn’t not know.”

Molly Sasson

Intelligence officer. Born February 18, 1923, Leiden, Netherlands; died Melbourne, June 18, aged 101.