Gold and codes

I was going to use this entry to talk about Violette Summer's brief and tragic life. But after the first post went live I've had so many emails about the magic words 'unsolved codes' and 'Nazi gold' that the plan's changed. Whether you're a newbie who's never heard the story of Violette Summer, or an existing fan who was asking about my take on the subject, here you go. And yeah, this is a subject I'll be returning to in later posts.

The coded message. Violette's last three transmissions from occupied France have never been decoded. We're not even sure how they were encoded: it looks like it was a poem-code, but Leo Marks of SOE had developed a system of disguising messages encoded with Worked-Out Keys to look like poem-codes ('Operation Gift Horse'), to waste the time of the German code-crackers. (His book Between Silk and Cyanide is terrific, even if he was with SOE). And the messages are only about 100 characters each, which is the right length for WOK: poem-codes were usually twice as long,

Secondly, nobody really knows what Violette Summer's last mission was. The Nova 5 records room was destroyed by a bomb in 1945, and nobody who knew her has ever given away her secrets. But there are stories that it had something – no, a lot – to do with finding out what the Nazis were doing with the gold that they'd looted. Many tonnes of that gold are still missing, unaccounted for.

Then add that agents were trained to set up caches, buried treasure-troves of emergency equipment, identity documents, money and, yes, gold. They'd return to these and dig them up if they had to drop their cover-identity and flee. One of Violette's unused caches from an earlier mission was found in the 1960s. So people think there may be more, and they may either contain gold or may point the way to the missing Nazi loot.

And thirdly, there's the question of what happened to Violette Summer. Nobody knows. She sent her three last messages and — just disappeared. The Germans were meticulous about recording every agent they captured but there's no arrest records, no last sightings by comrades in the resistance. Nothing. Nobody knows what happened to Violette Summer.

Like I said, I'll come back to this in future posts, and I'll also be telling you about the game and how it's going. But right now I need to work. Later!