Marcelle Thiébaux began this project upon learning that some Germans and Americans were executed in Hitler's Germany by decapitation. Two Prussian baronesses, left destitute by the War of 1914-1918, were rewarded as the daughters of heroes with trusted secretarial jobs. They were paid less than men, naturally. Finding they could earn extra money selling drafts and carbons from the office wastebasket, even papers from the office safe, they became traitors to the Reich. For these women, their actions allowed a more genteel, less humiliating way of subsisting than prostitution, a desperate recourse for women of all social classes. They were naïve. A buyer of their secrets was an enterprising Polish spy, Jerzy Sosnowski. He lived in Berlin in the guise of a playboy, but trained by Warsaw.
A fictional plot presented itself to the writer: to bring in an American as the protagonist and to endanger the American. This innocent abroad became The American Girl, in homage to one of speaker Marcelle Thiébaux’s favorite novelists, Henry James, author of The American.
New York City, NY; NYC