Klementyna Mańkowska (born Klementyna Czarkowska-Golejewska on 1 August 1910; died 4 January 2003 in the Château Sermoise, Nevers) was a Polish aristocrat, who was a member of the Polish resistance and agent of Polish and British intelligence services during World War II.Clémentine Mankowska: Espionne malgré moi, Editions du Rocher, Monaco 1994, z. B. p. 52ff.
Life Provenance and early years Klementyna Maria Czarkowska-Golejewska was born into a local land owning family in Wysuczka, a small settlement between Lviv and Ternopil in Galicia. This is where she grew up on her father's family estate, which she later described as "a paradise". Since 1945 the region has been part of Western Ukraine, but at the time of her birth it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During the interwar period it was part of Poland which had been restored to independence after the First World War. Klementyna was the second daughter of Cyryl Czarkowski-Golejewski (1885–1940) by his marriage to Izabela Jaxa-Małachowska (1885–1958). She herself married at the start of 1933. She and her husband were both 23 when they married, and her husband, Count Andrzej Mańkowski (1910–2001) was still completing his university studies of law and economics at the nearby university. For Klementyna the marriage meant moving away from her own family, to live in the western part of Poland. Andrzej was content to entrust the management of the Mańkowski family estate at Winna Góra near Poznań to his young wife. By 1939 they were living there with their two sons. The family were well connected both in Poland and internationally. Andrzej Mańkowski had attended the international Benedictine school at Bruges in Belgium between 1922 and 1928, and the staff on the family estate included a German nanny called Teta who took care of the boys.
War Early in September 1939 war arrived from the west and, sixteen days later, from the east. An early taste of war came to Winna Góra later that month when Lieutenant Andrzej Mańkowski (as her husband had by now become) was seriously shot and for the time being immobilised by his own subordinates because he had angrily upbraided a group of Polish soldiers for mistreating a captured German officer in ways that would have offended his own conscience and breached the Geneva Conventions. The German prisoner had been stabbed in the eye with a bayonet. At this stage they were playing host to two "old school" German officers who had arrived on a couple of motor bikes six days after the launch of the German invasion, and who were surprised to find Klementyna Mańkowska and her children ensconced in the castle. Others, elsewhere in the area, had already fled. Beyond the estate, the village was deserted. The officers assured the Mańkowskis they would need only one of the three floors of the castle, modestly furnished. There are powerful indications of a brief but intense romance involving one of them. A month later the Gestapo arrived and the family were thrown out of their home at Winna Góra. The castle had been selected as a present/trophy for Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.
One of the German officers, Harold von Hoepfner, proposed a joint trip to Italy in order to protect Klementyna. However, her husband had been badly injured when shot by a Polish soldier under his command, and was still critically ill, by now in a hospital somewhere near Kutno. She turned down von Hoepfner's invitation: "I do not think the Wehrmacht officer would want me to give up, for him, a man who stood up heroically in defence of the German soldier". Klementyna had resolved to stay with Andrzej, but there was no longer any place for them in their home, so they moved with their children to Warsaw where they stayed with the ballerina Olga Sławska, a family friend. In early October 1939, the Germans captured Warsaw and the Mańkowskis moved on to stay with a cousin, Teresa Łubieńska whose spacious apartment home at "ulicy 6 sierpnia" ("6 Sierpnia Street") in the city centre, close to Zbawiciela Square, had become a refuge for well-connected Poles dispossessed by the war. It pulsated with social gatherings. But it quickly became clear that the men who arrived at Cousin Teresa's apartment several evenings each week were not simply party goers. They were members of a newly formed anti-Nazi grouping known as the "Muszkieterowie" ("Musketeers"), identified variously as a "resistance group" ("Widerstandsgruppe ") or as an "intelligence organisation" ("Nachrichtendienstorganisation").
The "Muszkieterowie" recruited mainly from the Polish nobility. Klementyna Mańkowska joined. She was a talented linguist and her activities were focused on "courier services": she smuggled documents, microfilms and messages concealed in rolls of toilet paper to France and Britain. However, that was very far from the full extent of her involvement. The "Muszkieterowie" were led by Stefan Witkowski an engineer-entrepreneur believed to have had long-standing connections with British intelligence. Details of his contacts are uncertain and remain, eighty years later, controversial: they were conducted independently of the (till June 1940 Paris based) Polish government in exile, and British public archives covering the relationship remain firmly closed to researchers.Clémentine Mankowska: Espionne malgré moi, Editions du Rocher, Monaco 1994, z. B. S. 52ff. Witkowski very soon recognised Mańkowska's potential and put her in touch with resistance activists Aleksander Wielkopolski and Karol Anders. After this she was included in discussions on the importance of surveillance and of setting up an espionage network. One incident, in particular, convinced Wielkopolski of Mańkowska's talent for espionage. The high-ranking German officer Harold von Hoepfner, returning from Milan, turned up unexpectedly in Warsaw to see Klementyna Mańkowska. He arrived, en route to Berlin, with flowers, wine, and cheesecake. Listening from an adjacent broom cupboard, Witkowski and Wielkopolski were amazed to hear the brazen combination of grace and charm that Mańkowska applied to extracting information from her German friend about an end to the "Sitzkrieg" in the west, and the forthcoming German invasion of France. (They may or may not have been aware already that von Hoepfner and Mańkowska had almost certainly, briefly, been lovers during the early weeks of the war.) The German officer's information had been precise in respect of dates, though he seems to have kept to himself any knowledge he might have had about strategic detailed planning for the invasion. Witkowski nevertheless took the decision to hand over the information he had on the German plans for the invasion of France to British intelligence.
Witkowski now embarked on a perilous and lengthy tour of western Europe, using the fake identity of a high-ranking SS-officer called August von Thierbach. His project was nothing less than the creation of an espionage network across Europe. He sent Klementyna Mańkowska to Brittany in north-western France. Her mandate was to take charge of communications in the event that the French government should be obliged to escape abroad - presumably to or via Britain. Andrzej and Klementyna Mańkowski, like many members of the Polish aristocracy at the time, were both completely fluent in French. Andrzej Mańkowski joined the Polish expatriate division in Marseille while the couple's two sons were placed in the care of Mańkowska's mother, at this stage still in eastern Poland.
Noirmoutier The Germans quickly overran northern France and Mańkowska found a job as a translator-interpreter with the mayor, under the new administration, at the prefecture on the strategically important Island of Noirmoutier off the Atlantic coast. She did nothing to conceal her Polish provenance, nor, indeed, that she was a Countess. The German's were impressed by her easy fluency in French and German, and by her commitment and diligence. Despite her gender, beauty and aristocratic bearing, she was very happy to travel to military bases in order to provide translation services. The Germans were unaware of the extent to which she remembered what she saw. She accompanied the German regional governor, Karl Maier, on a visit to Saint-Nazaire because there were "lots of French" there. She accompanied him into a large covered hangar containing two of the latest Type VII submarines. Later she had time to sit and wait in the car: using the backs table-napkins Mańkowska was able to sketch plans of the interior configurations and staircases of the submarines as well as the external doors. She was interrupted when Maier stuck his head through the car window to ask her "what is this fellow on about?". The fellow, a small Frenchman with a mustache, was venting his rage because his time off to be with his wife for the birth of their child had been cancelled. Maier puffed out his already puffy face and rolled his eyes deep into his skull. "This is war, boy", he sighed. There are reports that notes provided by Mańkowska ware later critical to the planning of a major allied raid on the Saint-Nazaire submarine base.
After a few months Klementyna Mańkowska applied to her German employers for permission to take a break, back in occupied Poland. She was keen to meet up with "Muszkieterowie" comrades. While she was awaiting a response to her application she spotted a large German car on Noirmoutier. Noirmoutier was then as now, for many purposes, something of a backwater, and the presence of two important German officers in the island's best restaurant, with their staff car waiting outside, was noteworthy. Through the window of the restaurant, she could see two German colonels were using very broken French to try and order their meal from a waiter, who was successfully understanding nothing. She entered and offered her services as translator. The officers were delighted by the timely if unexpected appearance of this helpful and beautiful Polish countess, who was able quickly to smooth out any misunderstandings with the waiter. They invited her to join them. As they ate, drank and chatted, Mańkowska worked her charms: she learned from her dinner companions that they were part of the German High Command. The officers also found out some things about the countess. She told them she was terrified of the end of the war, because she had no idea who would be around to look after her. A few letters of commendation from field commanders would be of limited usefulness. The men were sympathetic. Then one of them had an idea. He said he would issue her with a document, bearing the seal of the German High Command, attesting to her pro-German credentials and requesting "all military and civilian institutions to provide her with advice and assistance". Mańkowska gratefully accepted the offer. A genuine seal of the German High Command would be particularly useful to the "Muszkieterowie". It helped Stefan Witkowski create high quality fake seals of his own which he used for his clandestine missions in different parts of Europe.