Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (18 page)

I asked what happened in the dream.

“I saw Lilian. She came to me. She was crying. She was dressed in brown. She was in terrible distress. Just crying. I knew something awful had happened to her.”

“When was the dream?”

“It was on February 11, 1945—not long before I saw Vera Atkins. I now know that was the night she died, although Vera Atkins gave a different date later, but I know she was wrong.”

Was there anything else that Helen could recall about Vera at the meeting in the Victoria Hotel?

She thought about this. “I remember I disliked her. She smelled.”

After every meeting with the families Vera took the chance to update the next-of-kin register, annotating her personal copy with details so it read like a personal inventory of the F Section family. Here were brothers, sisters, husbands—estranged or otherwise—stepfathers, daughters, illegitimate children, lovers. Vera had learned of all of them and recorded them here for future reference. Yvonne Rudellat, she had noted, was estranged from her husband, and first contact should be with her twenty-two-year-old daughter. Violette Szabo “leaves a small girl in the care of a guardian whose name I do not know. She also has a father who is a very bad type, and she wishes at all costs to prevent that any money of hers should fall into his hands or that he should have any say in the guardianship of her daughter.”

Madeleine Damerment's next of kin was listed simply as “Mother Superior, St. Mary's Convent, Hitchin.” In another case a stepbrother had been in touch “but is not known to our friend.”

In a cupboard in Room 238 Vera was also guarding the scaffolding of the agents' lives: in boxes were rental agreements for temporary housing, bank details, copies of wills, club membership cards, and odd photographs. There were little personal notes about what should be done if such and such should happen and whether a mother could be telephoned on her birthday or a suit collected from a tailor's. And Vera's job was to
ensure that the pay of the missing, including allowances for dependents, was sent to bank accounts.

And then there were the physical remnants of the missing, which had also been left under Vera's supervision: a vanity case, cravats, gramophone records—all these things were left behind in the rush as they departed. Violette Szabo left a camel-hair coat wrapped in a brown paper bag; Diana Rowden a diary, a map, and a pair of plimsolls; Andrée Borrel a large blue suitcase containing another smaller brown suitcase. Vera knew exactly what was here, and if the items were not noted, they were all filed in her head, along with the aliases and cover stories, the last-known colour of hair—all of which would enable her, and her alone, to trace her agents.

By early March 1945 the Allies had crossed the Rhine, and the final collapse of Germany was expected at any time. Vera was scanning telegrams and telexes, monitoring the flow of paper from every possible source, so that no detail, however small, that might identify somebody could possibly slip by.

Papers were flying from Vera's office to Buckmaster, to Senter's men in Paris, and to officials in the War Office, as everyone suddenly seemed acutely conscious of the need to get ready for the moment when liberation would happen—though nobody knew what to expect.

Lists and more lists of the missing, with aliases and details of next of kin, were passed around and checked and double-checked. Vera was arranging for enlargements of photographs of all the agents to be sent to Paris, where some of the first returnees were expected to arrive.

“Is the list of FANYs enclosed a complete one: Beekman, Bloch, Borrel, Damerment, Inayat Khan, Lefort, Leigh, Nearne, Sansom, Plewman, Rowden, Szabo, Baseden, Rolfe?” asked a note from FANY HQ in Vera's file.

Even before the Allies reached the first camps in Germany, prisoners had started to trickle back across frontiers. Some were escaping, and others were at last being exchanged.

The first traces of F Section names came in, often picked up from
interviews with early returnees and then passed on. Vera's advice was swiftly sought. “Top Secret. Is Celestin Rept. Celestin. Brian Stone-house?” said a signal from Paris, clearly referring to the agent Brian Stonehouse but saying nothing about where or how he was. Vera replied: “Our operator Celestin is Brian Stonehouse arrested approx Oct 22. If any interesting information comes in, I am sure you will let us have it.”

And another signal from Senter's men in Paris gave news of Yvonne Rudellat but nothing definite. “Top secret. Yvonne Rudellat. Only meagre particulars available… Now believed prisoner in Germany. She is down in the Kardex as a FANY and French by birth, which presumably means she is British by nationality. Is she also British by upbringing and education?” Again the question was referred to Vera, who alone could supply the answer.

Pouring in over the wires and filling newspapers were ever more horrific stories of atrocity, and in response politicians were suddenly preparing the ground for the possibility of war crimes trials. SOE received a memorandum from the newly formed War Crimes Commission saying that evidence of war crimes should be gathered wherever possible from any returning agent. A note from a senior Foreign Office diplomat suggested that the fate of SOE agents had suddenly drawn attention: “Anticipating that in the near future Allied armies will overrun some of the camps in which these officers are held it is now desired to institute some procedure whereby the welfare of the officers can be cared for.”

On April 4 Vera remarked that “at last” the head of SOE's security directorate had sanctioned that short particulars of SOE agents should be published in the POW casualty lists, “to ensure that they get into the P/W stream.” Vera stressed: “We are anxious to get on with the job as quickly as possible.” And also, at long last, somebody somewhere had decided she had been right after all and that it was now “in the best interests of our officers if we supply to casualties branch a list of all who have been arrested or who are missing.” Vera sent a memo to a liaison officer in Whitehall: “Herewith ten copies of our casualty lists which please forward
MOST URGENTLY
to the War Office Casualties Branch … I have heard that it is most important that we get this documentation out since those returning are most handicapped by not being identifiable.” Somebody
in the SOE hierarchy was even now suggesting sending officers to Germany with advancing troops to look for missing SOE agents, but the plan was dismissed by others as “impracticable” in view of the pace of the war. Vera now sent a new internal memo arguing that lists of agents should be provided to the displaced persons branch of the Allied Control Commission, which was preparing to take over the administration of Germany. Senter objected.

By the first week of April a tidal wave of returnees from Nazi Germany was already swamping France, and POWs were reaching England by the thousands. Senter's men in Paris were overwhelmed trying to keep track of reports of missing agents and interrogating those with news. Asked by Senter to explain why his interrogations were taking so long to process, a Major Wells replied that a “mountain” of paperwork had been produced by one interrogation. “I cannot tell you the size of it in pages and words, but it is written on very thin paper and I weighed the whole bundle on the kitchen scales it is just short of 4 kilos.”

Vera, meanwhile, kept only mental notes, so that when a colleague complained of a failure of communication with London, another commented: “The reason for the failure is that the information is in Miss Atkins's head and not elsewhere.” On another question of identity an official in Paris commented: “Suggest you irritate F/O Atkins.”

Names of more and more concentration camps were now cropping up in Red Cross intelligence reports. On April 8 Vera finally had a reply to her request of weeks earlier for more information from the Foreign Office.

With reference to your enquiry about the Ravensbrück and Buchen-wald [concentration] camps we have just received the following information from the War Office on the subject:
“Ravensbrück camp as such is comparatively unknown to us, and we have no record of any British civilian internees being in Brandenburg now. Recently, however, our Embassy in Paris informed us that women returned from that internment camp said it had been transferred to Weimar, and we are making further enquiries.
“With regard to Buchenwald—no further information is forthcoming other than that given in March—i.e. that it is a concentration camp for German nationals, although a certain number of Poles and Czechs have been reported there. The War Office telegraphed Bern again on 6th of this month asking for a report on the present position.”

Then at precisely 11:55 a.m. on April 13, 1945, a teleprinter in a Bayswater office shook suddenly into life and started spilling out the truth about Weimar concentration camp, which, from that moment on, the world would know as Buchenwald:

Most Immediate. Rpt Most Immediate. Top Secret. Rept Top Secret. To Senter from Delaforce.
Have interrogated French Officer deported with number of our male agents to WEIMAR concentration camp.
On 11 September 1944: ALLARD BENOIST DEFENDILI[sic], DETAL HUBBLE? LECCIA MAYER MACALISTER PICKERSGILL RECHENNMANN
SABOURIN STEELE: Executed by hanging.

On 5 October: FRAGER MULSANT WILKINSON: Executed by shooting.
On 21 October: YEO THOMAS: Executed by shooting.
October (date uncertain)
BARRETT: Executed by shooting.

October (date uncertain)
4. SOUTHGATE: Possibly still Alive
5. Full report follows this afternoon. Contents this message NOT repeat NOT communicated to anyone except A.M. [above mentioned].

A man with white hair was standing by the teleprinter tearing off the piece of paper. He then called SOE's signals room to make sure the teleprint was marked “secret” and circulated to nobody else. He wrote: “In particular it must not be seen by the country section.” John Senter meant that the information about the F Section dead at Buchenwald should not be seen by Vera Atkins.

6.
“Buchenwald Boys”

D
espite the “secret” stamp on Guillot's report from Buchenwald, Vera was soon able to read its contents. Scanning the names of the dead listed here, she ticked off her “boys.” The Free French agent Bernard Guillot had escaped from Buchenwald a few days before the liberation. When he arrived in Paris on April 7, 1945, Guillot reported to Senter's men revealing the names of all the British agents who had died at the concentration camp. Guillot was one of the first to give eyewitness testimony of Buchenwald's horror.

Senter's men, however, did not at first believe what Guillot said. They were sceptical partly because they had never considered that Britons might be taken to a concentration camp. And like most other British officials at their level, these officers considered that Nazi atrocity stories were largely propaganda. So Senter marked Guillot's report “secret” while he checked its accuracy.

An inner circle of senior British officers and politicians had been keeping secret what they had known about the concentration camps and death camps since the start of the war. From as early as 1939 SS signals encoded by German Enigma machines had been intercepted and decoded by cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. The resulting decrypts, known as ULTRA, revealed early evidence of a Nazi extermination programme, but for security reasons nobody outside the inner circle—which included the prime minister—was allowed to know. The
fear was, or so it was said later, that if information from ULTRA were to spread, the Germans would guess that the Enigma code had been broken and would change the codes.

Vera made an effort to inform herself about concentration camps from other sources, but most of her colleagues did not. A mere SOE staff officer had no access to ULTRA traffic. Those who briefed SOE agents had made a point of setting out the risks they faced if captured, but concentration camps were never mentioned.

The “secret” stamp on Guillot's report proved a futile gesture. A few days later, on April 11, 1945, the U.S. Third Army, commanded by General George Patton, stumbled onto Buchenwald, eight miles north of Weimar. It was the first concentration camp liberated by Western troops. General Patton himself now decided that there should be no more secrets about concentration camps and called for photographers and reporters “to get the horrid details.”

Vera read on, now making notes from Guillot's report. Here was Ange Defendini, the author of those desperate letters from prison to his “mistress”—hanged at Buchenwald. Here too were Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister—also hanged. Also on the list was Henri Frager. Guil-lot passed on comments made by Frager as he went to his death: “Louba [Frager] said that a double agent called Gilbert was responsible for his arrest.” Vera had dearly hoped to talk to Frager about Déricourt (Gilbert). There were many other F Section men here too, all correctly identified, and all shot or hanged.