Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (21 page)

Ravensbrück, she had learned from one French prisoner, was built on Himmler's own estate, near a large lake north of Berlin. The SS guards were housed in villas dotted around the woods. The camp was surrounded by walls and electrified fences, and machine guns were trained on the prisoners from pillboxes. The camp was mined. One French returnee had described how commando parties (i.e., work parties) of women were marched to the lakeside to unload coal barges. Others were sent to factories. Another returnee described how pink cards were given to those women not fit for work. They were put in a subcamp called the Jugendlager, once a youth camp but now a place where the sick and aged waited to be selected for death. Parties of women were taken from this
subcamp, placed on lorries in nothing but chemises and coats, and never seen again.

Picking over these reports, Vera hunted always for any sighting of her girls. In January 1945 three women parachutists were hanged at the camp. The reason given was “false identity,” but no names were known. There were French women survivors here who had evidently worked with Prosper. One woman reported that a fellow prisoner told her, before being sent to the gas chamber, that “Gilbert nous a trahies” (Gilbert has betrayed us), another reference, it seemed, to Henri Déricourt.

The women returnees had been shown photographs of all the missing SOE women. One returnee, an actress in private life who left on a commando party in summer 1944, thought she recognised a picture of Eileen Nearne.

Several witnesses identified Cicely Lefort, the courier with the Jockey circuit, who had arrived at Ravensbrück as early as autumn 1943. She quickly became critically ill and was issued a pink card. Witnesses said she had been gassed. There had been one possible sighting of Odette San-som. Of all the others, though, there was no firm news. Nobody could tell Vera more about Violette, Lilian, and Denise. And on her own missing list she wrote “no trace” against the names of Andrée Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, Nora Inayat Khan, Diana Rowden, Eliane Plew-man, Yolande Beekman, and Vera Leigh.

But then on May 6 there was more good news, from the HQ of the United States First Army in Allied-occupied Germany:

Subject: Nearne, Eileen, alias Duterte, Jacqueline, alias Wood, Alice, alias ROSE.
Subject claims to work for an intelligence organisation run by a Colonel “Max Baxter.” Subject stated she was flown to a field near ORLEANS. Subject encoded messages and signed them ROSE but claims she has forgotten her agent's number. In July 1944 Subject's transmitter was detected and Subject was arrested by the Gestapo. She claims that despite being tortured she did not reveal any information detrimental to the British intelligence service or its agents.

On 15 August Subject was sent to the extermination [sic] camp of Ravensbrück, where she stayed for two weeks, then to a camp near Leipzig. From that last camp, Subject claims, she managed to escape on 13 April 1945. Subject creates a very unbalanced impression. She often is unable to answer the simplest of questions, as though she were impersonating somebody else. Her account of what happened to her after her landing near ORLEANS is held to be invented. It is recommended that Subject be put at the disposal of the British Authorities for further investigation and disposition.
SECRET.

As Vera saw in a flash, nothing in Eileen Nearne's story was “invented.” On Eileen's return home she made a statement for Vera describing how on arrival at Ravensbrück she had been sent on the same work commando as Violette, Denise, and Lilian. They all worked in the fields for two months, near the town of Torgau, 120 miles south of Ravensbrück, before Eileen was moved to work in a munitions factory. At the factory she heard a rumour that two English girls had escaped from Torgau, but she did not know if it was true. Eileen was then sent to work near Leipzig, labouring twelve hours a day on the roads.

One day in early April they told us we would be leaving this camp for a place 80 kilometres away. Two French girls and I decided to escape and while we were passing a forest I spotted a tree and hid there and then joined the French girls in the forest. We stayed in a bombed house for two nights and the next morning walked through Markkleeberg and slept in the woods. We were arrested by the SS, who asked us for papers. We told them a story and they let us go. We arrived at Leipzig and at a church a priest helped us and kept us there for three nights and the next morning we saw white flags and the first Americans arriving and when I said that I was English they put us in a camp.

Then another message came in from the U.S. First Army HQ, dated

May 7:

FLASH/PRIORITY EMERGENCY STOP ODETTE SANSON [
SIC
] RPT SAN-SON F SEC AGENT AND WIFE OF PETER CHURCHILL RPT CHURCHILL NOW 20 KEFFERSTEIN STRASSE LUNEBERG STOP PLEASE ARRANGE COLLECT AND REPATRIATE UK SOONEST.

Odette Sansom, also imprisoned in Ravensbrück, was the third of Vera's girls from the camp to be heading home. Her escape from Ravensbrück was no less extraordinary than Eileen Nearne's. Odette, aged thirty-two, born in Picardy, and married to an Englishman, was marked out early in her SOE career as a “shrewd cookie.” When captured with her organiser, Peter Churchill, in 1943, she was clever enough to call herself “Mrs. Churchill,” believing that the name might help her.

At first Odette received no favours. She told Vera on arriving home how, in prison in Fresnes, her toenails were extracted and she was burned on the back by an iron bar, but she gave nothing away.

She was sent in May 1944 on a transport with other SOE women to a civilian prison in Karlsruhe, where she stayed for at least two months. Odette was then separated from the other Karlsruhe prisoners and taken on her own to Ravensbrück. There, although she was kept in solitary confinement, she was favoured by the camp's commandant, Fritz Suhren, who kept her alive. When the Russians were about to seize the camp, Suhren packed a small bag, put it in a car, and brought Odette from her cell, telling her she was going to leave Ravensbrück with him. Together they drove towards the American lines, where Suhren hoped that Odette would attest to how well she had been treated, thereby sparing his life. Odette did nothing of the sort. Instead she told the Americans exactly who Suhren was and then asked to be taken home, taking with her the commandant's bag. When she met up with Vera, Odette was able to display the contents of the bag, including Suhren's personal pistol, a writing case, and a pair of pyjamas.

Though intrigued by Odette's escape, Vera was far more interested in her journey to Karlsruhe, and she particularly wanted to know the identities of those women who went with Odette. Karlsruhe, close to the French-German border, seemed an unlikely place for any prisoners to have been taken, and Vera had known nothing until now of any transport
of women there. Odette said she travelled to Karlsruhe with seven other SOE women. She didn't know the women, but after looking through photographs and jogging her memory for names, she confidently identified six of the seven. They were: Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Yolande Beekman, Andrée Borrel, and Eliane Plewman. Where these women had been taken after leaving Karlsruhe, Odette had no idea, though she had heard reports that Andrée and two others may have been moved to Poland in mid-July.

Odette was sure the staff at the prison would know where the women went, and she gave Vera the name of a “Fräulein Beger,” the chief wardress, who was about sixty, “a Quaker and very correct.”

With Odette's evidence Vera now had traces of almost all of the twelve missing women. Cicely Lefort was the only one of the group who Vera felt sure was dead, but in all the other cases she was still holding out hope. Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch were last seen at Ravensbrück, and Eileen Nearne, who had escaped, heard rumours that at least two of those three might also have escaped. Hope had not been abandoned for Yvonne Rudellat, last known to be at Belsen, and now Odette had named the other six untraced women, all last seen alive and well at a correctly run civilian prison in Karlsruhe.

There was one woman, though, of whom Vera still had found no trace at all in Germany. She had expected Odette to identify Nora as the seventh woman on the Karlsruhe transport. But as Vera noted at the time: “There was also one other woman whom Mrs. Sansom described as somewhat Jewish looking, small, slight. I have been unable to identify her. It is not Nora Inayat Khan.”

8.
“Gestapo Boys”

T
he grandeur of Avenue Foch was favoured by Himmler's security chiefs for their Paris headquarters. The magnificent nineteenth-century villas, set back from the vast boulevard, offered seclusion, yet were only a short distance from the restaurants of L'Etoile and Place des Ternes. It was here that, in the last year of the occupation, the Nazi Party security service apparatus, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, had its headquarters for the whole of France. The SD was often seen as synonymous with the Gestapo, the secret state police. Indeed, Vera and SOE agents always referred to the Germans of Avenue Foch as “Gestapo,” when, in fact the SD was a separate intelligence organisation. At 84 Avenue Foch Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer, of the Sicherheitsdienst, was in charge of hunting down spies, terrorists, and commandos sent to France to aid the resistance.

A few months after the war Vera came to 84 Avenue Foch to look around, before the inscriptions on the walls of the cells were plastered over and any other traces of her people removed. She came also to learn more about Kieffer. She wanted to know how it was that he and his “Gestapo boys,” as one agent had described Kieffer's men, persuaded so many of her people that the game was up in the summer of 1943.

So much had Vera heard by now about Avenue Foch from returning agents that she almost knew her way around the building. She also already knew a lot about Kieffer. She had heard he was strongly built; he
was once a gymnast; he had dark, curly hair; he sometimes wore glasses. She had heard all about the sweets and biscuits he distributed to prisoners on Sunday mornings, the Louis XV furniture in his fourth-floor office, and his secretary, Katya, who was also said to be his mistress. Vera knew that Kieffer liked to bring his prize prisoners down to his rooms and chat about public schools and the English officer class. The SOE agent Brian Stonehouse was even asked on one occasion to explain who was the heir to the British throne. “And what does the English officer class think of Churchill?” Kieffer asked him.

Kieffer kept his most valued F Section prisoners on the fifth floor, in twelve attic rooms directly above his office. At one end of the corridor on the fifth floor was a bathroom, and at the other end was a guardroom with a small library of books. And Kieffer kept a large chart on a wall showing all the names of the SOE senior command and details of training schools, with Maurice Buckmaster's name at the top of an F Section family tree.

The evidence that Kieffer knew everything about F Section had come as something of a surprise in Baker Street. Section heads like Buckmas-ter had known in general terms about their German opposition; they knew that Amt (Department) IV of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), directed by Himmler, was concerned with counterintelligence operations against saboteurs and spies. This much information was given in lectures at the training schools.

But they devoted little time to understanding German counterintelligence methods. A man at the Beaulieu SOE training school in Hampshire used to dress up as a Gestapo chief, wake trainees with a rifle butt at night, and take them off for a mock interrogation. Nora Inayat Khan was terrified by the mock grilling, but most agents told the officer to “bugger off and let them get back to sleep. For the most part SOE agents adopted an attitude of contempt for their German enemy—and for the French police who collaborated with them—an attitude also displayed by SOE instructors, who had rarely been in the field.

And there had been little attempt inside SOE to find out about the individual Germans they were up against. In F Section they had heard Kieffer's name by the spring of 1944, but they thought it might be an
alias for Colonel Heinrich of the Abwehr, the armed forces intelligence, who had many aliases and was known by then to have caused F Section a great deal of trouble. But then it was decided that Heinrich and Kieffer could not be the same person because, according to one reliable report, “Kieffer bullies and shouts” while Heinrich had a reputation for being “extremely nice and polite.”

Then in June 1945, a month after the end of the war, the confusion between the two men was finally cleared up. Colonel Heinrich was arrested in Amsterdam and turned out to be the Abwehr's wily spy catcher Hugo Bleicher, who impressed his MI5 interrogators with his professionalism. For his part, Bleicher was impressed by “a very pretty young woman officer” who also interrogated him. “She turned out to have more aplomb than all the other officers put together,” he wrote of Vera in his memoirs. “She boxed me in with astonishing ease and consummate tactics. Luckily my memory is good or she might well have put me in an awkward position. She seemed also quite tireless in her questioning and if the conducting officer had not felt hungry at lunchtime and urged her to break off the interrogation, she would have kept me on tenterhooks for a good deal longer.” Bleicher, however, had few of the answers to Vera's most urgent questions. By the time of the Prosper collapse, in the summer of 1943, the Abwehr, along with Bleicher, was largely a spent force. By then the Sicherheitsdienst ran counterintelligence in France, and the man who launched the real war against F Section was Kieffer. It was he who had rounded up Prosper and many of Vera's other men and women. And for some time Kieffer had kept them here—in a certain style—at Avenue Foch.

The first people to describe the inner workings of Avenue Foch for the British were the French collaborators who were arrested after the end of the occupation. After long negotiation the French had finally allowed British investigators to interrogate these prisoners before they were executed. Vera had read every word they said, scanning the reports for any clue about agents held here—when they left or where they went. These collaborators included the notorious Bony-Lafont gang, whom Kieffer used as his bullyboys. There were also drivers, cleaners, bodyguards, and
interpreters, and all talked about their Nazi employers, among them “the Colonel.” Some talked of a “Dr. Goetz” and of “Ernest,” who looked like a boxer and had an American accent. There was a man named Placke who had the appearance of a “Boer.” The French collaborators talked of British agents arriving at landing fields, sometimes drunk, speaking such bad French that they could have been picked up just by opening their mouths. The British used cafés openly as letterboxes and meeting places, not thinking that they would be watched, but Kieffer had made sure he had a man in every bar in Paris. Agents could be spotted wearing brogue shoes of a style rarely seen in France or carrying obviously fake ration cards. And the British agents used wads of brand-new large-denomination notes to pay small bills, immediately drawing attention. Buckmaster, after reading some of these stories, wrote sarcastically on one report: “very interesting!”