Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (46 page)

Among Vera's papers I had found a diary of sorts. Notes of events during one week of her investigation were jotted on a single page that had been torn out of—or become detached from—the whole. “Friday. Charles to Wiesbaden. I to Gaggenau in 4×4. Lunch at Gaggenau and then Karlsruhe. Get dossiers on girls. Inspect prison. Return to Gaggenau with papers. Merc towed in. (Galitzine).”

Events recorded were mostly mundane. One day she went to a “Belgian
horse show;” on another the “Merc disintegrated.” But “Get dossiers on girls” was interesting. Theresia Becker had said the prison records were all destroyed. Eventually, piecing together the sequence of events mentioned during the week, I established the date when Vera must have got the dossiers on her girls. I then took the diary to show Yurka Gal-itzine in his Chelsea flat. According to Vera's diary, Galitzine was there in Gaggenau the day they acquired the dossiers.

Galitzine was frail, his voice so weak that a tape recorder hardly picked it up. Slowly, though, he was able to explain. First, he said, I had to understand about Bill Barkworth, who was “totally driven… totally dedicated to finding his men.” Vera was similar, and they understood each other very well—as hunters they were perhaps even rivals. But Barkworth was “almost a mystic in a way,” said Galitzine. “He played planchette to find his men.” One night when Galitzine was at the Villa Degler, Barkworth seemed at a loss as to where to look next for his bodies. The men were sitting around as usual playing cards. Suddenly Barkworth had the idea of a séance—of calling up the spirits of the dead so they could say for themselves where their corpses lay. Galitzine, Barkworth, and four others set up a Ouija board in the living room. They placed an upturned glass in the middle of the table and laid out pieces of paper with numbers on them and others with letters of the alphabet and a “yes” and a “no.” Each man then placed a finger on the glass, and as they began to ask questions, the glass moved and spelled out numbers and names and places. The glass spelled out a name nobody knew and then gave the man's rank and number and the number of his Lancaster bomber, which had crashed. The glass spelled out: “Killed at Cirey in the Vosges.”

Barkworth and his men jumped into jeeps and in the early hours went to Cirey, on the other side of the Rhine. They found three unmarked graves in a churchyard and over the next few days pieced together the story of the crash, in which three airmen had died.

Galitzine said that something of the same mystic sense caused Barkworth suddenly to charge off one day to hunt for the prison records relating to Vera's girls. Vera was cock-a-hoop at finding them, he recalled.

A fortnight after her interrogation of Berg, Vera was back at the Villa Degler. It was Friday, April 27, 1946, and Yurka Galitzine had come to Gaggenau to brief Barkworth and Vera on preparations for the Natz-weiler trial, to begin on May 29. They assembled in the dining room to talk. Galitzine explained that there was now great pressure from the War Office to expedite all war crimes investigations, and so the Natzweiler trial was being rushed through even though not all the accused had yet been traced. A young trainee solicitor, Major Anthony Hunt, had been appointed to prosecute the case.

Vera asked about tactics. The women, she said, could be rightly classified as “spies” since there was “no other category for military persons operating in civilian clothes in enemy occupied territory.” But she was determined that the defence should not therefore claim lawful execution.

It was her firm view that the trial should be kept out of the papers. If this was not possible, the names of victims should be suppressed.

Galitzine asked Vera and Barkworth about the state of the prosecution evidence. Was Vera quite satisfied that the identities of the victims were finalised? The defence was sure to seize on any weakness in identification to undermine the prosecution's case. Vera admitted there had been doubts about the identity of one of the girls, but she was now satisfied that it was Nora Inayat Khan. There was, unfortunately, still no documentary evidence. The chief wardress at Karlsruhe had claimed that women's prison records had been destroyed, although, Vera said, she wasn't to be trusted.

At this moment Barkworth stood up and announced that the records had quite obviously not been destroyed. Vera was right: Theresia Becker had been lying, and the records must be hidden—perhaps in the women's prison itself in Akademiestrasse, or in the chief wardress's own house. What fools they had been not to look before! With that they all rose, and Barkworth ordered everyone to pile into the jeeps, then off they sped down the hill from the Villa Degler and across the river in their hunt for the records of the Karlsruhe women's prison.

Barkworth said he would start the search at Becker's house, and taking one of his men with him, he left Vera, Galitzine, and the others to search the prison. The prison was searched and all the staff lined up and
questioned, but nothing was found. Then Barkworth's jeep pulled up again outside the front of the building. The back of the vehicle was piled high with boxes—records for women prisoners for every year of the war, he announced. He was beaming. There was no sense in inspecting the papers there at the prison, under the eyes of its inquisitive staff, so the group hurried back to the villa.

The records were spread out on the dining table. Every entry and exit from the prison was marked here. Hunting for May 1944, the date of the girls' arrival at the prison, Vera saw five columns. In the first column were prisoners' numbers, then their names. Here was “Churchill, Odette,” and running a finger further down, Vera found “Plewman, Eliane,” “Leigh, Vera,” “Rowden, Diana,” and “Beekman, Yolande.” But then came a name she didn't know: “Olschanesky, Sonia.” Vera passed over this name and found two more she did know: “Borrel, Denise” and “Dussautoy, Martine.” Then the names of her agents ceased, and there were others she did not know. She turned the page, still looking for one more name. Nora was not here. After searching throughout the register for June, Vera went back to May, then to February and January 1944 and even December 1943. Then she went forward to July. There was no sign of Nora Inayat Khan or Nora Baker. Vera looked back at the entry for Sonia Olschanesky. Sonia had been admitted on exactly the same date as the other seven girls. She was obviously one of the group. Nora had changed her aliases several times. She might have given an alias to the prison, just as Madeleine Damerment had given “Martine Dussautoy.” Nora might well have chosen a Russian-sounding name: she was born in Moscow. “Sonia Olschanesky” could well have been an alias for Nora.

Now Vera looked for other registers, which would say where the girls were taken. She saw the column “taken to.” Against the name Diana Rowden, it said she had been taken to “einem KZ” shorthand for Konzen-trationslager. All the four girls, including Sonia Olschanesky, had been taken to “einem KZ.” That concentration camp, as everyone now knew, was Natzweiler.

Vera turned several pages and scanned the same register for the second group of women, who left on the night of September 11–12, 1944. If Yolande Beekman was here, this was Vera's final proof that Yolande
could not have been Stonehouse's No. 2 at Natzweiler. Here were the three names: Eliane Plewman left on September 11, 1944, as did Martine Dussautoy and Yolande Beekman. The record for these three gave no indication of where they had gone. Under “taken to” it said “abgeholt nach”: no destination. Under another entry was written “Fr Fuss,” meaning literally that they went “freely on foot,” or were set free.

Barkworth and his men were pulling out more and more files, containing various sorts of registers. There was one loose slip showing Diana Rowden's next of kin: “Mutter. Christian Rowden. Cornwall Mews West, London SW7.” Another slip showed Eliane Plewman had handed in no money on the day of her arrival and was given no money back. Eliane had signed the slip, as had Fräulein Becker. And here were records of clothes handed in. Eliane handed in one pair of shoes, one pair of stockings, one shirt, one pair of trousers, one winter coat, and three rings “of no value.” Again Theresia Becker had signed the form.

There were many more forms here, giving much the same information but in a different way.

Though it remained a mystery where the second group had gone, these records made it quite clear to Vera that, wherever it was, Yolande Beekman was with them and not with the first group that left for Natzweiler. So Nora must, as Vera had already concluded, have been Stonehouse's No. 2. Sonia Olschanesky was clearly an alias for Nora. There could be no other explanation, and Vera saw nothing in these records to make her change her conclusion, which had already been communicated to the War Office. And letters confirming the deaths of the girls at Natzweiler had already gone to next of kin, including Nora's mother.

18.
Natzweiler

T
he road to Natzweiler took Vera deep into the Vosges Mountains, through the pretty, red-granite town of Schirmeck and on to the little village of Rothau. Sometime in early May 1946 she chose to visit Natzweiler concentration camp before the trial to be held at the end of the month.

The question of identity was now settled in Vera's mind, and the task of informing next of kin was complete. Christian Rowden, replying to the junior officer who had signed Vera's draft letter containing the news, said, “Mrs. Rowden thanks the Junior Commander Prudence Gwynne for her letter of 29 April telling her the grim details of her daughter's fate. She thanks her and her staff for the sympathy expressed and is trying to find consolation in what she has learned.”

Now Vera was focusing not on who died at Natzweiler but on how precisely the four women had met their deaths. She had travelled as far afield as Belgium and Luxembourg taking statements, in order to be sure whether all or some of the women had still been alive when they were burned. Before giving evidence, Vera now felt she needed to see the layout of the camp for herself.

Under the steep, forested slopes of Struthof Mountain, Vera's driver suddenly switched the jeep sharply left and seemed to head straight up through the trees. The mountain track was built by prisoners when the camp at the top first opened. German geologists came to Rothau in the
spring of 1941 prospecting for red Alsatian granite to face the party's buildings in Nürnberg. The stone was located on an upper ledge of the mountain behind Rothau, very near the Hotel Struthof, which had been a small skiing centre. When the desired granite was found, a local stonemason's firm was conscripted to work a quarry. Inhabitants of the area were turned out of their homes, SS staff moved in, and more and more prisoners were transported here, both as slave labour for the quarry and to build the concentration camp. Set above the tiny village of Natzweiler, in a clearing on the mountain's summit, it was to be the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil. Prisoners were brought by train to Rothau s small station, and villagers watched as they were marched eight kilometres up the hill.

Both Barkworth and Galitzine had spoken to the locals about the atrocities at the camp. Some evidently had openly collaborated with the Nazis, providing food or shelter. Others felt tarnished—even guilty— simply because they lived on the same mountain while the atrocities were taking place.

Now the jeep was moving up slowly through the foliage, revving hard. For about the first six kilometres the track ran almost straight up the hill. The jeep passed near the Hotel Struthof; alongside it stood the small brick structure that had served as the camp's gas chamber.

Near the summit a low wall appeared on the left-hand side, and behind it was a large house with a swimming pool—the SS officers' mess, as Berg had described. Then the road turned in a sharp dogleg to the left, and up ahead Vera was suddenly staring at bright, open skies. As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she saw, silhouetted against the white light, two massive wooden structures—giant watchtowers—and arching between them was an enormous sign over a gate smothered in thick razor wire. Black letters painted on white on the sign announced that this was the entrance to Konzentrationslager Natzweiler Struthof. The gate, at least twenty feet high, was what the prisoners called das Tor. As Vera's evidence now showed, four of her girls, Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and Nora Inayat Khan, had left Karlsruhe prison at dawn on the morning of July 6, 1944. How they travelled to Natzweiler, and with whom they travelled, was still unclear. But Vera knew for sure that at
about three p.m. on that afternoon they had passed through these vast and ugly gates.

The jeep emerged into the open, kicking up dust and stones behind it, and the noise of the engine was echoing right across the valley and then back across the empty wooden barracks of the deserted camp, which now lay at Vera's feet, here on the mountain's uppermost slope.

When the engine was turned off, there was silence, broken only by birdsong. The camp was overlooked by nothing except the wide, open sky in the daytime and the stars at night. Nobody passed by. Nobody came here, unless they had business with the camp. In summer the slopes were exposed to glaring heat. But in winter, three thousand metres up, the temperature sometimes dropped to −30 degrees centigrade, and the camp was almost always shrouded in freezing fog. What better place to make people disappear into Nacht und Nebel.