She Was Hitler’s Favorite Opera Singer—And a Priceless Allied Spy

4 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:During the period leading up to World War II, English opera singer Margery Booth had become famous in Germany and won the admiration of Hitler and his top henchmen. Margery used this to her advantage, gathering intelligence at secret meetings and passing it on to British intelligence.Despite risking her life to find out what the Germans were planning, Margery was given hardly any recognition after the war, with requests for honors emerging only after her death. English mezzo-soprano Margery Booth had risen to the pinnacle of opera when she was invited to sing at the Bayreuth Festival in Bavaria in the summer of 1933, and was given the honor of carrying the Holy Grail in Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Not long after the curtain closed, however, a bouquet of crimson roses arrived in her dressing room, tied with a red sash and emblazoned with a swastika.Adolf Hitler—who had come into power as Chancellor of Germany that same year—was a known classical music aficionado who felt the works of Richard Wagner (whose compositions were celebrated annually at the Bayreuth Festival) exemplified the beliefs of the Nazi party, and attended the festival to take in the music. Booth soon became one of his favorite opera singers.As she became renowned in Germany, Booth received preferential treatment from Hitler. When she was hospitalized after singing Parsifal and Götterdämmerung in the following year’s festival, Hitler ordered staff to never let her out of their sight, while his henchmen Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels sent their sympathies. She eventually landed a contract with the Berlin Opera in 1936, and married German academic Egon Strohm the same year.While her career soared, Germany was overcast with the dark clouds of Nazism, and the country had fully fallen to fascism by the time she returned from an English tour in 1938. Around the same time, Strohm started working as a commentator for a Nazi national radio network commanded by Goebbels.By the time invaded Britain declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Booth had become a naturalized German citizen through her husband. But she was devastated by the disease of war spreading through Europe. Back in England, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave orders to bomb the Berlin Opera House, where she would sing in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) one last time before Goebbels shut it down. The Bayreuth Festival was also twisted by the regime—relegated to putting on operas for wounded soldiers who were required by Hitler to sit through lectures on Wagner and his interpreted links to Nazism before every performance.As Booth watched bombs fall on her homeland, she could no longer stand by. She sang for Allied prisoners of war trapped in Stalags and Oflags, and despite her natrualization, her loyalties remained with Britain. Eventually, she decided to use her high-ranking connections to the Allies’ advantage.Booth became a crucial spy for England, slipping messages with sensitive information about the next Axis moves in her underwear, which later earned her the name “Knicker Spy.” Wearing a flowing dress covered in poppies for one performance in a POW camp—where she sang patriotic British songs to her captive audience—she caught the eye of imprisoned British Army officer John Brown, who instantly recognized her and thought the Allied forces could use a spy who was able to so flamboyantly hide in plain sight. Eventually, Brown and Booth decided to hold meetings with other Allied spies, under the guise of dinner parties, at Booth’s apartment, where gathered military men revealed Hitler’s next moves.When surveillance tightened following the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, Booth crept to the palace grounds of Cecilienhof after nightfall to bury a stack of Brown’s documents. Later, an invitation to Hitler’s birthday celebration gave her the opportunity to see the unveiling of the Tiger Tank, Germany’s latest and most intimidating military technology. She memorizing its technical specifications by mentally turning them into music, and was able to pass the sensitive information to Brown, who encoded it and sent it to British intelligence. And through it all, she hid a Jewish woman in her rooms, and used her space to help others escape the country.Leading a double life of performance and espionage almost ended Booth. She was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo at the beginning of 1945under suspicion of colluding with the British, but was released due to lack of evidence. But despite subsequently being required to submit to interrogation twice a month at Gestapo headquarters under threat of being shipped off to a concentration camp, Booth refused to flinch, and continued feeding information to the British. After the Allied bombing raid that ended the war, Booth found shelter in a displaced persons camp before moving back to Britain and testifying against defectors, who were later convicted of high treason and hanged.Unfortunately, her courage in aiding the Allies unintentionally hampered Booth’s singing career. Mistaken assumptions that she had been fraternizing with the Germans—even as she betrayed their military secrets—meant nobody wanted to cast her after the war. She eventually succumbed to terminal cancer in 1952 after traveling to New York for a chance at performing again, and she received no recognition for her service to the British, despite requests for posthumous honors. Margery Booth spent her post-war years waiting in the wings to take the stage and is still waiting decades after her death, despite being most deserving of the spotlight.Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.