STRIPPED of all dignity, her execution was brutal and without ceremony.

Barely able to walk, Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Violette Szabo was frogmarched along with two fellow agents to an alleyway and forced to kneel before being shot in the neck - at the direct orders of Hitler himself.

Her body, along with those of agents Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe, was reduced to ashes in the concentration camp crematorium only yards away and her remains thrown into a nearby lake.

In a bid to afford some honour to the site, a North-East academic has visited the scene, to pay a fitting tribute to this quintessential British heroine - by laying red roses.

For Geoff Pattison, the pilgrimage to Ravensbruck concentration camp, near Berlin, was the completion of a personal quest, as well as a symbolic act carried out on behalf of the Violette Szabo Society.

Mr Pattison, a Northumbria University lecturer in popular culture who has made a study of her life, said: "I felt it personally important to find where she was executed, to pay her homage and restore some degree of honour and dignity to her.

"And it had to be with red roses, which I ordered specially for my arrival there.

"I laid three red roses against the wall in the alleyway - one for each of the agents shot - and three in the lake where the ashes were scattered.

"It was a moving experience. Violette was only 24 and had a daughter barely over two who was waiting for her in England."

Mr Pattison added: "Violette's story had all the elements. There was her sheer beauty contrasted with the beast that was Nazi Germany. It was a tale of true heroism and terrible tragedy."

One of a handful of female holders of the George Cross - presented to her daughter Tania - Violette had married a Hungarian who was killed at Al Alamein.

She decided to use her linguistic skills and, against the advice of friends and unknown to her parents, joined the SOE.

Assigned to the F section, tasked with preventing German troops from supporting their coastal defences of France once the D-Day landings had begun, the former perfume department assistant was trained in silent killing, field craft and sabotage.

During her first mission behind enemy lines the she walked boldly into a couturier in Paris to buy dresses for herself and her daughter.

It was during her second operation that disaster struck. Stopped at a roadblock, Violette managed to hold off a strong force of German soldiers with a sten gun for long enough to allow her fellow agents to escape, before she ran out of ammunition and was captured.

The story of her life and execution on January 28, 1945, was immortalised in the film Carve Her Name with Pride, starring Virginia McKenna.

Mr Pattison, of Stanley, County Durham, who has met the actress, as well as Violette's fellow agent Bob Maloubier and her daughter Tania, said: "I hope that in my simple act, the beauty and strength of the red roses will symbolically prevail over the brutality and barbarity of Ravensbruck."