Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (45 page)

Vera at memorial service at Ravensbrück concentration camp, Germany, 1993. [Atkins Papers]

17.
The Villa Degler

T
he Villa Degler in Gaggenau, a small town near Karlsruhe, on the edge of the Black Forest, was an unlikely place to interrogate war criminals. The stylish house caught the eye of the young SAS intelligence officer Major Eric “Bill” Barkworth when he drove through the wreckage of Gaggenau in the summer of 1945. He was looking for a base from which to search for missing SAS soldiers.

A centre of the brewing industry, the town had also been home to an important Mercedes-Benz factory, and in 1944 RAF bombers growled down the river valley here, depositing their loads on the factory. But many of the bombs missed their target, flattening seventy percent of the town. The Villa Degler, however, remained intact, for it was sturdily built in the Bauhaus style and set back far enough from the river to escape the bombs.

When Barkworth's jeep pulled up outside the villa, he found it occupied by Herr Herman Degler, owner of one of the biggest breweries in the area. The brewer and his family were turfed out in under an hour, and Barkworth, with about twelve NCOs, moved in. Frau Degler and her daughter were asked to come by each day to cook and clean for Bark-worth's men.

Gaggenau was exactly where Barkworth needed to be to scour the countryside for SAS soldiers who had gone missing on operations. More than twenty SAS men were believed to have been captured after being
dropped behind enemy lines just after D-Day. Yurka Galitzine's 1944 investigation into Natzweiler concentration camp had provided Barkworth with his first important clues as to the whereabouts of his missing soldiers.

By early 1946 Barkworth had rounded up and interrogated many of the Natzweiler camp staff, including the crematorium stoker, Franz Berg. Vera came to Gaggenau to interrogate Berg in early April. The statement taken from Berg had already proved vital to her research, first by alerting her to the possibility that some of her women died at Natzweiler. It was Berg who had claimed that the women might still have been alive when they were burned. And crucially for Vera, it was Berg who, by studying photographs, had first identified Nora as one of the women.

The trial of the Natzweiler staff had been set for the end of May, just weeks away, and Vera wanted to be certain of her evidence in good time. Her strong view now was that Nora must have been “No. 2,” but doubts had been awakened once again by a further letter from Lisa Graf. After examining the photographs Vera sent her, Lisa wrote back: “The only one I have difficulty recognising is the one you call Nora and I called Dany because when I saw her she had very long hair—more blonde.” Berg was to be a vital witness at the trial, and Vera now wanted to see him for herself to judge if he was credible.

Berg was brought up from the cellar of the villa by one of Bark-worth's team. The cellar had been converted into makeshift cells by Barkworth, who often got his prisoners to help a little around the house by serving drinks or shining shoes. Barkworth spoke fluent German and even hired a German secretary from Karlsruhe, whom he later married.

Vera was already seated in what had once been the Deglers' dining room when Berg was led in. Next to her was a row of shelves containing a cut-glass bowl and an ornamental clock, left behind by the Deglers. Through the glass doors dividing the dining room from the living area came the sound of male voices as Barkworth's team played cards. On the table in front of Vera lay Berg's deposition, Yurka Galitzine's report on Natzweiler, a pen, and two blank sheets of paper.

By now Vera knew Berg's background. A common criminal, he had
made himself useful to the SS and been given a comfortable job in return: stoking the crematorium oven at Natzweiler. He had also become the head prisoner, or Kapo, of the Zellenbau, the prison block. Unlike most Kapos, Berg was not detested. He was the camp gossip, the prisoners' eyes and ears, as well as the SS's dogsbody. Everybody knew Kapo Berg, which was why Barkworth's men had found him easy to trace. After the war he had simply made his way home to Mannheim.

Vera explained to Berg, a small, dark-haired man with a broad, square jaw, that she wanted him to describe in more detail what he had already explained to Major Barkworth.

“You started work in the crematorium, you say, in February 1943. What was your job exactly?”

“Burning bodies.”

“Bodies that had been executed?”

“Yes. Or bodies which had died by other means.”

“By injection?”

“No,” he said. He had never burned a body that had died by injection, though others had. “I mean, I burned the bodies who had just died in the camp. You know, in the quarry and other places.”

Vera knew all about the “bodies” in the quarry from Galitzine's evidence. Men were sent to the quarry to be worked to death. The prisoners returning to the camp each night carried the bloody and emaciated corpses of those who did not survive the day. And she had familiarised herself with the names of the sadists who flogged the prisoners to death—Zeuss, Nietsch, Ermenstraub—all of them listed in Galitzine's report.

“And the executed ones,” Berg elaborated. “The shot or the hanged ones.”

Vera knew all about these dead bodies too. Shot bodies were stacked roof high in the cellar, awash with blood, below the furnace room. And the hangings she had heard about in person from the executioner, Peter Straub. Some weeks previously she had interrogated Straub. Berg and others had said that he was the person who had pushed the four women into the ovens. And people had said that one of the women had revived on being pushed into the oven and lashed out, scratching Straub's face.

Straub, however, had denied all involvement with the killings, saying he was away from the camp that day.

Just as Vera's accounts of her investigations, written years later, were dry and distant, so the depositions she took at the time were mostly devoid of interesting detail. Her casual jotted notes were much more revealing, but in the formal statements she took, her subjects disappeared off the page as she honed their words. It was as if she wanted to draw inside herself any emotion or texture in what was said and not communicate it. The statement Vera took from Peter Straub was only five lines long.

I had, however, found another account of the interrogation of Straub. Gerald Draper, the war crimes lawyer, was with Vera at the time and remembered the occasion well. Like others, Draper considered Vera “unflappable.” He said she was “a quiet person who conveyed great reserves of mental energy and purpose.” But during the Straub interrogation, her behaviour was a little different.

Draper said it had been of importance to Vera to establish from Straub what exactly had happened to her girls: “whether they had been injected before they were thrown in the furnace or not at all.” Then, after efforts to secure an admission from Straub in relation to the girls had failed, the questions moved on to other executions he had carried out, by hanging. “We discussed the height of the stool on which the wretched victim stood before it was kicked away,” said Draper. “And he was not sufficiently intelligent, this man, to realise the drift of my questioning until he realised that I was establishing that he had let them die by slow strangulation as opposed to a prolonged drop to break the neck. At the end of this interview, he referred to the number of ‘pieces' he had disposed of in a day, and with that I said: ‘You leave this room on your hands and knees like an animal.' At that stage, I seem to recall, was the first and only and last time I ever saw Vera Atkins show the slightest form of distress.”

Vera took Berg through the early part of the evidence he had given to Barkworth, then asked about the others he had worked with. At first, he
said, he had worked with a man named Jehle, who was arrested for black-marketeering. Then he worked with Fuhrmann. “But Fuhrmann caught an infection of the arm from one of the bodies being cut up in the mortuary, so he was replaced by Ziegler and a Gypsy named Mettback. Peter Straub was in charge of the crematorium. He counted the bodies.”

Vera then asked Berg for every detail he could recall about her girls, from the moment they arrived at the camp.

“They were carrying suitcases and coats over their arms, and I think one had a travelling rug. At first I thought it was a party inspecting the camp,” he said.

“Where were the women when you saw them?”

“On the Lagerstrasse,” he replied, then explained that this was the path that ran from the top to the bottom of the camp.

Vera asked Berg to explain the camp layout, and as he talked, she drew a rough sketch.

The camp was built in a clearing at the top of the mountain, he explained, at about three thousand metres. It consisted of fifteen barrack huts built in three rows of five on terraces cut out of the mountain. At the very bottom of the terraces was the Zellenbau, along with the disin-festation hut and the crematorium. Vera sketched the terraces and the huts and the steep path down which the girls would have walked.

At first the women were placed all together in a single cell in the Zel-lenbau, and one of the women asked for a pillow, Berg said. “When was that?” asked Vera. “Sometime after seven p.m.” And later they were placed in solitary confinement.

Berg kept talking, and Vera jotted scraps of what he said: “9.30 Berg still stoking the oven. Straub: ‘Everything all right?' Answer, ‘Yes.' The doctor from Auschwitz told him to ‘disappear.' Went to cell.”

Vera now pulled out another piece of paper and asked Berg to draw a plan of the crematorium building.

When he had completed his sketch and his account, Vera pulled out a separate piece of paper to summarise her notes. She then asked him to describe in detail each of the women he had seen. She wrote down something but crossed it out. Then she wrote something else and crossed that out too. She could not make sense of the words she was writing.

Then on another page, in clearer words, she wrote:
First, dark blond hair. 1.64 m abt 30/32.
All killed. Undressed. Clothes and bags put into cell 11. They were in cells 11, 12, 13, 14 in Zellenbau.
Vera Leigh. Quite certain spoke about pillow.
Second, slim. Believed to be Nora.
Two dark, two fair. One dark and stouter.
Clothes later placed in Dienststelle [office] until evacuation. Seen by Berg shortly before evacuation Sept 44.
Untersturmführer Otto later Adjutant in Dachau and Nietsch locked clothes up. Doctor small, dark, slim in civilian clothes.

Berg seemed to think that Vera Leigh, “the stout one who asked for the pillow,” was the woman who resisted. And he believed the second, who was “slim,” was Nora. He had not changed his story about the girls being burned alive. He had not changed his identification of Nora Inayat Khan and Vera Leigh. He was consistent and credible. At last Vera could make up her mind that Nora was Stonehouse's No. 2. After Barkworth's men had taken Berg away, Vera drafted a note for Norman Mott: “It has now been definitely established that the above mentioned women (Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Nora Inayat Khan) were killed in the camp of Natzweiler on 6 July 1944. It appears that at least one of them was still alive when she was pushed in the furnace.” On April 15, 1946, the note was sent to Mott, along with draft letters for the women's next of kin.