Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (48 page)

Emile Hoffmann, a Luxembourger and a military musician, was in Guérisse's barrack and remembered that as soon as Guérisse heard the women were English, he was determined to make contact and “took a great risk” to get close to the prison block. He had to scramble through two barracks and across the gap between them to reach Boogaerts in the hospital block.

Guérisse's account of what happened next was as follows:
Boogaerts came to see me after he had first made contact with the women, saying he had managed to get them some cigarettes and he suggested that I should come to his block at seven p.m. in order to talk to them and find out who they were, from the window of his block, which was within speaking distance.
And I went to his block and by looking through the window and whistling I could see the head and shoulders of a woman appear in the window of the cell opposite in the prison block, and I noticed that she had dark hair but it was not possible to observe more.

He said he had started shouting in English: “Hello, hello, are you English girls?” And all of a sudden a girl's face appeared behind the bars. “Yes, we are English and French,” a voice said. “Well, why are you here?” asked Guérisse, and then the face disappeared, but he managed to shout back: “I am a British officer.” Vera asked if Guérisse had managed to identify the girls in any way. At first he said he had not, and that this was the last sight he had of them. Later, in other interviews, he said that he had recognised the girl with dark hair as Andrée Borrel. Guérisse had known Andrée Borrel in France early in the war. Before escaping to England and joining SOE, Andrée had worked on the Pat line in France. Everyone who had worked with Andrée had been impressed by her steely nerve, including Guérisse, who had relied on her on many occasions as Allied airmen were hidden in safe houses and moved to safety.

Talking to Vera at this stage, however, Guérisse did not recall that the girl was Andrée. He recalled only that, whoever she was, he had been
unable to help her escape or help any of them in any way at all. This was because, as soon as he had made the contact, a warning was whispered down the barracks that the SS were present. Guérisse had to give up. As he told Vera, he would have been shot on sight if overheard. There was nothing more he could do. There was nothing anyone in the camp could do. He was entirely impotent; but he had done his best. “As I well knew, any conversation with people in the prison cells would lead to the most serious consequences. I was obliged to desist.”

The timing of what happened from then on was also easy to verify because, soon after Guérisse s conversation with the girls, the prisoners were all given strict orders to be in their barracks early that evening, which made an impression on all of them, as it had never happened before. They were told to stay indoors, close the shutters and curtains, and not look out. They were told they would be shot immediately if they looked out.

“I remember that on the evening of this day prisoners had to be inside their barracks by eight p.m. This was unusual because generally the prisoners were allowed to be outside until eight-thirty p.m. and need not close their windows or draw their curtains,” said Marcel Rauson, the Lux-embourger. At the same time another rumour went around the barracks that the women were from the prison in Fresnes, near Paris.

As Dr. Boogaerts told Vera, the curfew order did nothing to hide what was about to take place. From the hospital, so close to the crematorium, it became particularly obvious: “Towards the evening we all observed the usual preparation for an execution, that is to say—much coming and going among the SS and the lighting of the crematorium furnace.”

Standing in front of the little red-brick prison block now, Vera further refined her sketch. She scribbled “25 metres” above an arrow from Guérisse's Barrack 7 to the hospital block—the distance Guérisse had had to scramble to reach Boogaerts's window without detection. And she scribbled “10 metres” on the arrow from the hospital to the prison cells, showing the distance their voices had to carry to be heard by the girls.

It was Berg who had first sketched for Vera the layout inside the
prison block, when he was telling her how it was that he had brought four portions of food—thin soup and bread—for the women's last meal, down from the kitchen at the top of the camp. The other prisoners saw Berg do this. Major Van Lanschot had told Vera: “The Kapo of the bunker, his name was Berg, if I remember well, was the one who was to fetch personally food for the people he had in his bunker. So we always knew by him if there were people to be executed.” But on this occasion Berg was not allowed inside the cell to distribute the food; this was done, according to Berg, by the senior Blockfiihrer, Nietsch. Entering the prison block through the back, Vera could easily identify which cell the girls had been in at this stage, as there was only one room large enough to hold all four.

Shortly after their meal the women were moved into the single cells, so it must have been just before this, when they were still all together, that Berg was asked for a pillow by one of them. This, as he told Vera, he had provided, and he was sure the request had come from Vera Leigh. By the time Walter Schultz arrived in the bunker, the women had been moved into separate cells—small airless cubes with low ceilings where it was impossible to stand. Schultz, who had first seen the women sitting quietly in the political office on their arrival, now wanted a second glimpse of them. A Russian speaker, he had been called to the prison block to speak to a Russian prisoner, and as he walked down the prison block corridor, he opened the traps to get a glimpse of the women inside the cells. Straub, who was there at the time, said to Schultz: “Pretty things, aren't they?” Schultz soon left, and by nine-thirty the only movement inside the crematorium came from Berg, who was stoking the oven.

To see the exact position of Berg's room, Vera had to enter the crematorium building, and she went in as the girls had done, through the door at the rear. Thanks to Berg's earlier description, Vera felt well prepared to find her way about, although there was very little light inside the first room and it was not clear to her at first that the squat, black iron structure, consisting of a large cylinder about seven feet long and two feet in diameter with pipes running from the top and sides, was the oven.

She looked to her right and saw the various tools: shovels and pans and long forks and a stretcher, shaped just like a hospital stretcher but made of iron (Berg had called it a “transporter”) leaning up against a
wall. Beside it was a pulley mechanism fixed above a trap door. Looking ahead again, as her eyes adjusted to the light she could see that the metal structure was indeed the oven. Its round door at the front end of the cylinder was clamped shut.

Moving to the other side of the room and turning again to face the metal structure, she saw that attached to the other side of the oven cylinder was the furnace, which was connected to the ceiling by a chimney. Stepping back a little towards the tiny window and still looking upwards, she saw a line of large metal hooks.

Pipes led from the furnace to the room on her left. These apparently fed hot water to what Berg had said was the bathroom, used by camp staff. The corridor leading off the room to her right was the way to Berg's cell. At the end of the corridor Vera could now see, through an open door, the corner of a gleaming white ceramic slab. She was looking into the dissecting room at the end of the corridor; it was lighter than anywhere else in the building. Passing on down that way, she looked into a small room on the right where lines of small ochre clay urns were lined up on dusty wooden shelves extending from floor to ceiling. Berg's cell, as he had described it, lay just along the corridor from here, but it was hard to judge exactly which it was from his description as there were more small rooms than he had mentioned and the distances seemed much less than he had led Vera to believe.

Although the camp was silent by the time dusk fell, every prisoner in the barracks outside was straining to look through curtains and shutters to see what would happen next. Sometime just before nine p.m., and certainly before it was completely dark, the medical orderlies, Emil Brüttel and Eugen Forster, received an order telling them to walk up the Lager-strasse to just outside the camp gates, where they were to meet up with other staff who would be coming from the officers' mess in the trees beyond. Brüttel described to Vera what had happened: “I took the phenol with me, about which I knew nothing. It was contained in a dark brown bottle with a glass stopper. Forster took charge of the syringe and needles, and then we reported to the place to which we had been ordered.

There we met Dr. Plaza, Dr. Rohde, the adjutant Obersturmbannfiihrer, Ganninger, and some Blockfiihrer, among them Nietsch and Ermen-straub. Ganninger insisted on speed, and the whole party entered the camp and the gate was shut behind us.”

The party then began their procession down the Lagerstrasse to the bottom of the camp. “One of the Blockfiihrer went in front with the oil lantern, which was normally banned for safety reasons,” said Brüttel. “I had the impression that the doctors did not wish to carry the necessary material themselves to the place of execution, and that they wished, by the presence of the greater number of staff, to increase their courage and self-confidence for an action which was obviously extremely unpleasant for them. It was apparent for those reasons we had all to go with them.” He added: “There was no way for Forster and me to turn back since we had no safety lamp with which to walk through the darkened camp, and to walk without a lamp would have been the same as suicide since the sentries would have fired immediately.”

Albert Guérisse, peering between curtains, observed the group carrying their torch on the way down, and among them he identified the two SS doctors—one in uniform and one in civilian clothes—and several other SS staff and officers.

The doctors' group now arrived inside the crematorium. Brüttel said that when he entered the crematorium building with them, the light in the furnace room was switched off, so that anyone who didn't know already would not be able to determine what the room was really for.

Berg was found still stoking the furnace and was ordered away a second time. According to Brüttel, the execution squad then went along the short corridor to a small room just before Berg's cell, where several beds were standing.

Here Ganninger addressed the execution squad and explained the plan. The two Blockfiihrer, Nietsch and Ermenstraub, were to be sent off to fetch the women, one at a time, from the Zellenbau, the prison block, adjacent to the hospital. The women would then be brought into this room, where they would be injected by the doctors.

The fetching of the women from the cells was witnessed by several prisoners. Maurice Bruyninckx, another Belgian prisoner, who was in
Barrack 15, had been “looking through a small peep-hole in the shutters” when he saw two SS men enter the prison block. “They came away with one of the four women I had previously seen on their arrival in the camp. These same two returned to fetch the second, third, and fourth at about fifteen-minute intervals to take them to the crematorium building.”

Guérisse had seen the same ritual through his curtains, picking out SS faces by torchlight.

It was important for Vera to understand precisely how the sequence of events then unfolded. Brüttel said that the plan had been that once a woman had been brought into the injection room, she would be made to lie on a bed, and a doctor would then administer an intravenous injection in her arm.

In each case 10cc of phenol was used. Brüttel said that it was Dr. Plaza who gave the injections, but others said it was Dr. Rohde. Dr. Rohde himself said that he did give the first injection but was so upset by having to perform the task that Dr. Plaza had to take over. Others said that Dr. Rohde gave two injections and Dr. Plaza the other two, to share the responsibility. Dr. Plaza was to be replaced as camp doctor by Dr. Rohde the following day, and there was some discussion about the fact that this would be his last duty in the camp.

Brüttel like Berg, also recalled that as the injecting began, one of the women asked “Pourquoi?” and was told “Pour typhus.”

After receiving an injection, each of the drugged women was then taken to the next room. According to Brüttel, they were carried, not dragged—by Nietsch or Ermenstraub—and there they were laid down and on the order of Otto “nearly completely undressed.” Brüttel also said that at this time he had heard the noise of speaking in a room where the “prisoner stokers” were locked.

According to Walter Schultz, the events unfolded slightly differently. He said that Straub told him the following day that what had happened was as follows. When the four women were brought from the cells, they were first made to sit on a bench in the corridor that led from the oven to the dissecting room. They were told by Ganninger, who spoke a little French, to undress for medical examination. This they refused to do unless a woman doctor was called. They were also told they would be
given injections against illness. The first woman was then taken by Straub into the room where the doctors were and injected in the upper arm. Straub then helped the first woman back to the bench, where she sat down next to the others who were still waiting. The same procedure was followed with the second woman. When Straub arrived back with the second woman after she had been injected, he found that the first was sitting “stiff and stupefied.” The process continued until all four had been injected and were sitting in a stupefied condition. It was then, according to Schultz, that they were taken to the room next to the crematorium. Here they were laid down, and their clothes were taken off by Nietsch and Ermenstraub.

Dr. Rohde had said that, after the injection, three of the women were easily undressed. However, the SS Scharfiihrer had difficulty undressing the fourth woman as rigor mortis had already set in. He was therefore unable to take off the pullover she was wearing and had to “tear it open.” Rohde said: “I then yelled at him and told him that the bodies would have to be undressed in a decent manner.”