Rena Stewart, who has died aged 100, worked at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre during the second world war and subsequently helped to interrogate German intelligence officers. She also translated Adolf Hitler’s will, before going on to become a pioneering female journalist with the BBC.
Stewart studied French and German at the University of St Andrews before joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female equivalent of the army, and in early 1944 she was posted to Bletchley Park. Her fluency in German led to her being put to work in a small sub-section of Bletchley’s book room, where deciphered German army and air force messages were collated in book form to provide reference documents for long-term intelligence analysis.
