1. Gabrielle Alina Eugenia Maria Petit was a Belgian spy who worked for the British Secret Service in German-occupied Belgium during World War I She was executed in 1916, and was widely celebrated as a Belgian national heroine after the war's end.
11 Facts About Gabrielle Petit
1. 2.
Gabrielle Petit was raised in a Catholic boarding school in Brugelette following her mother's early death.
3.
Gabrielle Petit immediately volunteered to serve with the Belgian Red Cross.
4.
Gabrielle Petit passed along to British Intelligence information about the Imperial German Army acquired during the trip.
5.
Gabrielle Petit proceeded to collect information about enemy troop movements using a number of false identities.
6.
Gabrielle Petit was an active distributor of the clandestine newspaper La Libre Belgique and assisted the underground mail service "Mot du Soldat".
7.
Gabrielle Petit helped several more young men across the Dutch border.
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Walter Nicolai 8.
Gabrielle Petit was ultimately befriended and exposed by a German agent for Colonel Walter Nicolai and the Abteilung III b counterintelligence service, who had posed as Dutch.
9.
Gabrielle Petit was arrested by the German military police in February 1916.
10.
On 1 April 1916, Gabrielle Petit was, at the insistence of German military, shot by a firing squad at the Tir national execution field in Schaerbeek.
11.
Gabrielle Petit's story remained unknown until after the war, when she began to be seen as a martyr for the nation.