Margery Myers Booth (1906-1952) was a well-known English-born opera singer who married a German and moved to Germany with him. As is well-known, Adolph Hitler, loved opera and definitely got some of his ideas by watching operas by Wagner which extolled the looks and characteristics of Scandinavian heroes and heroines from a far gone mythical time period. When Margery sang for him in Bayreuth in 1933 he was enthralled and gave her 200 roses, presumably wrapped in a swastika. What he didn't know was that this beautiful and very talented woman wasn't only an opera singer, but also a British spy who worked with Mi6 during WWII. At one point she also hid a Jewish woman in her flat in Berlin.
Her career as a singer blossomed in Germany. She had performances both at Bayreuth and with the Berlin State Opera, and Hitler was one of her most ardent admirers. Maybe that's why she was allowed to perform for British prisoners of war, which gave her the opportunity to smuggle out certain kinds of information, some of it hidden in her underwear. The Germans, on the other hand, hoped that they, by letting her sing for these British prisoners, might persuade some of them to switch sides and fight against the Soviet Union in a "Britischer Freikorps".
Her main contact from the camp seems to have been one of the prisoners, John Brown, who later told about her endeavors in his memoirs. He tried to give the Germans the impression that he might switch sides and become a soldier in their "Britischer
Freikorps", but he was found out. Both he and Margery were arrested and tortured, but she was released when they couldn't prove anything. She escaped Berlin during a bombing raid and then returned to Britain where she gave very valuable information and evidence in criminal cases against British traitors in Old Bailey.
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