Brigadier’s daughter who was suspected of betrayal

A BRITISH brigadier’s teenage daughter trapped in France by the Nazi invasion was suspected of becoming a Gestapo officer’s mistress, previously-secret MI5 records reveal.

Antonia Lyon-Smith was only 15 and separated from her parents when the Germans arrested her and sent her to an internment camp.

She was released on the grounds of her age, but ran into trouble again after becoming involved with a prominent Resistance group and was threatened with being deported to a concentration camp in Poland.

But a Gestapo chief saved her by taking her on as a housekeeper in his Paris offices, where a Nazi officer called Karl Gagel fell in love with her and made her promise to marry him once the war was over.

She was interrogated by MI5 but disclosed nothing about her relationship with Gagel, leading a British intelligence officer to conclude she was his mistress and “almost certainly” betrayed all her knowledge of the Resistance cell to the Germans.

In her memoirs, published in 1982, she revealed Gagel was only one of four men she got engaged to during the war – none of whom she married.

The daughter of Royal Artillery officer Brigadier Tristram Lyon-Smith and a Canadian mother, the English schoolgirl was staying with her cousin in Concarneau, Brittany, northern France, when the Second World War broke out.

In December 1940 German soldiers took her into custody, along with other Britons, and held her in an internment camp in Besancon, eastern France.