Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (49 page)

All the witnesses were agreed that, once undressed, the women were dragged along the remaining length of the corridor to the oven. They were then placed inside it. The usual practice was to place a body on a transporter and then push it into the oven. Normally bodies were laid out alternately: the first went in feet first and the next head first.

More than one witness talked of a struggle when the fourth woman was shoved into the fire. According to Brüttel: “As the last body was being placed in the oven, a mistake appeared to have occurred, since the body threatened to slide out of the oven again. The possibility of death not having occurred appears completely out of the question.” He said that as far as he could tell, “after the injections, death occurred within five seconds with the accompaniment of twitching.”

Schultz's account of what Straub told him was as follows: “When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled. As there were sufficient men there, they were able to push her into the oven, but not before she had resisted and scratched Straub's face. Straub also said she had shouted: ‘Vive la France.' ” Emile Hoffmann, the military musician from Luxembourg,
heard the same cry. And the prisoner Rauson said the whole camp was listening and watching, peeping through gaps in curtains, as these things were happening. “That evening we were listening carefully as we suspected foul play. I myself heard some screams, and I now suppose that the women, still unconscious from the injection but alive, when put in the oven must have recovered consciousness and screamed.”

In any event, the bodies were burned, as all the camp witnessed. They could see the flames rising from the chimney. Guérisse said: “It should be stated that whenever the oven doors of the crematorium were opened, an increased draught caused the flames to come out of the top of the chimney, and this was clearly visible to the whole camp. It was common knowledge in the camp that whenever flames were seen to come out of the top of the chimney, a body had been put into the crematorium. On this particular night, at intervals of about fifteen minutes, I observed the flames coming out of the top of the chimney on four different occasions.”

The next day Walter Schultz was in the camp's political office at work and noticed that Magnus Wochner, the political officer, seemed very shocked by what had happened the night before. Peter Straub, however, was still drunk the next morning as the officers and doctors had drunk until late at Dr. Plaza's leaving party in the officers' mess.

Schultz said: “Straub told me: ‘I have been in Auschwitz for a long time, in my time about four million people have gone up the chimney, but I have never experienced anything like this before. I am finished.' And I noticed that Straub's face had been severely scratched.” The next day Van Lanschot remarked to Berg that there were four fewer portions of food, and Berg said that four prisoners had been burned that night in the crematorium.

Emil Brüttel was sitting at his desk in Dr. Plaza's room the next morning when a man came over from the Kommandantur and handed the doctor an envelope marked “secret.” Dr. Plaza opened it and found that it contained the execution protocols for the four women. Stonehouse said that a few days later he saw Fernandel “walking up the steps in the middle of the camp, carrying a fur coat.”

19.
“Freely on Foot”

V
era had learned a lot in recent months about the men who gathered at Zum Goldenen Kreuz, the noisy bar on the corner of Karlsruhe's central square. Close to the town hall and the Nazi party offices, it was a favourite haunt of the city's Gestapo men, who came here to pick up gossip from the many bureaucrats and politicians in town.

There was, for example, Otto Preis, who was one of the landlord's closest friends. Preis's job with the Gestapo was to watch over foreign workers brought to Karlsruhe as forced labourers. He saw to it that they were horsewhipped for laziness and killed for any more serious misdemeanour. Preis was also called on when any “dirty work” was needed, any quick killing—of a spy, an escaping airman, a Jew. His speciality was the Genickschuss, a shot from a 7.65mm pistol to the base of the skull, followed by a shot to the heart. In Zum Goldenen Kreuz they heard Preis boast about his prowess with the pistol.

Vera had also learned about Hermann Rösner. His department of the Gestapo picked up escaped prisoners heading for the French border close by, or hunted down infiltrators, commandos, or parachutists. His boast at the bar was that he once took a tank into the Warsaw Ghetto at the height of the uprising.

Having cleared up the case at Natzweiler, Vera was now concentrating all her energies on tracing the second group of women, who left
Karlsruhe prison in September 1944. Vera had learned that this group were picked up from the jail by the Karlsruhe Gestapo. She was looking in particular for Preis and Rösner, who might know where they went.

It had taken Vera several further interrogations in Karlsruhe itself to establish for sure that it was the local Gestapo who took away Madeleine Damerment, Yolande Beekman, and Eliane Plewman. Her first clues had come from Else Sauer, Hedwig Müller's friend, who had shared a cell with Madeleine Damerment in Hedwig s final days in the Karlsruhe jail. Else had given Vera a detailed account of Madeleine's departure.

During the daytime on September 11 Madeleine had been taken by Fräulein Becker to collect a little case containing her belongings, which had been taken from her on arrival. Then Madeleine was returned to the cell. In the small hours of the next morning Else, Madeleine, and a third cellmate, Frau Wipfler, heard a man's footsteps stop outside cell sixteen. Else recalled: “ ‘Get up, Plewman,' said a voice. Then a knock came to our door and a man opened the hatch. ‘Get up, Dussautoy.' Then the footsteps disappeared along the corridor in the direction of cell twenty-five, where Yolande was. The man came back and called out: ‘Get out, Plewman.' Then he came to our door. He opened the door, and I could see through a crack a girl whom I recognised to be Eliane Plewman. He called out, ‘Get out, Dussautoy' Frau Wipfler then said, ‘Wie spät ist es, Herr Spät?' (What time is it, Mr. Spät?) and he answered, ‘One-thirty'

Frau Wipfler had recognised the man as an official from the male prison, “small, shrunken and grey-looking.” The group then left. “Frau Wipfler and I were listening carefully and heard the heavy footsteps of Spät echo down the corridor,” said Else. “Suddenly there was complete silence, we both said that it was as if the earth had swallowed them up.”

Else's evidence had led Vera to Herr Spät, an elderly night-watchman, who revealed that three Karlsruhe Gestapo men had taken the women away. He didn't know who the men were, but with Spät's help Vera established whose orders they were under. Gestapo cases were always “special cases,” said Spät, which meant the destination of departing prisoners could not be recorded in the register. Sometimes the Gestapo just ordered the gatekeepers to write “Einem KZ.” But often the words written were deliberately meaningless. A man named Hermann Rösner
always told the jailers to write in the register “fr Fuss.” As Vera knew now from the records that she had inspected at Gaggenau, the words fr Fuss were used to describe the manner in which these three women left the prison, and this link led her to suspect the order was from Rösner.

Vera's suspicion that Otto Preis was also involved was purely instinctive. After months of fruitless enquiries in Poland, Russia, and throughout Germany, she began to suspect that these three women were never taken east, as witnesses had first suggested, but were killed very close to Karlsruhe. In this case Preis was the most likely executioner; he had carried out scores of executions, including that of an escaped British airman whose case Vera had helped with. The airman, who had been impossible to identify, was being taken to Natzweiler for execution, but Preis finished him off with a Genickschuss on the way. It happened on the edge of a wood, and afterwards Preis wrapped the body in a piece of canvas and dumped it outside the crematorium, stopping only to give the camp office the Sonderbefehl, or order for “special” treatment.

“I think Otto Preis was the professional bumper-off and may have been involved in the killing of the three women whose fate is still unknown,” Vera wrote in a note at the time.

Finding Gestapo officers, however, was not easy. At its height the Karlsruhe Gestapo numbered 350 men. Run by a committed Nazi ideologue, Joseph Gmeiner, it was such an efficient operation that early in the war the Karlsruhe region was declared the first to have cleansed itself of Jews. Just days before the city of Karlsruhe was taken by the Allies, the lower ranks of the Karlsruhe Gestapo were ordered to form into a Wer-wolfgruppe, retreating to a camp deep in the Black Forest. More senior men transferred to new offices further behind the lines, at Freiburg, Offenburg, Rosenfeld, and Moosbach. When defeat looked certain, these senior officers went to ground, usually in the American zone—in rural areas or in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. If they were to be caught, they wanted to be sure to fall into American hands and not into the vengeful hands of the French.

Vera hoped eventually that the top men who issued the orders would be brought to book, but her enquiries could not wait for them to be found. Their foot soldiers, who carried out those orders, she hoped would
be quicker to trace. In March her three-month stint in Germany had been extended for another three months. She had been given until June to solve this case, but it was already the middle of May.

Five months after her arrival in Germany, Vera had achieved a great deal. As well as gathering evidence for trials at Flossenburg, where fifteen F Section men were now known to have died, and Mauthausen, where nine were killed, she had cleared up the deaths at Ravensbrück, and preparations for the Natzweiler trial were now well advanced. In London Vera's work had been winning high praise. As Norman Mott wrote in a letter, her results had been most satisfactory, especially given the “skimpy catch as you can conditions” in which she was operating. Even the head of SOE, Colin Gubbins, now a major-general, had written an effusive testimonial, and thanks to a further testimonial from Tony Somerhough, Mott had let Vera know unofficially that she was more than likely to secure an OBE.

Within Whitehall there was also satisfaction that Vera's results were defusing criticism about missing women agents. As Mott wrote to her, there had been “a fair amount of stir in the press recently, mainly arising out of Szabo's case and apparently engineered by her father. This has led to enquiries in some quarters about what action had been taken and we have luckily been in a position to make an effective reply.”

There was, nevertheless, much still to do. Vera was battling not only with bureaucracy in the Allied zones but with British bureaucracy too. A frustrating task was clearing up the affairs of the dead and in particular producing evidence for death certificates for the FANY women. Because they had no military status, they had to be certified dead under civilian rules, requiring independent witnesses of death, which in these cases were hard to come by. In the case of the Natzweiler girls Vera had even had to ask Dr. Rohde, the camp doctor who had administered lethal injections, to sign death certificates before he was hanged. Had the girls had any military status, such regulations would have been overridden, as they always were for service personnel in time of war. Such matters, as Vera complained to Mott, were “taking a considerable amount of time.” Meanwhile there were no new leads on the Karlsruhe Gestapo.

Then, at last, came a breakthrough. Haystack reported that the
French had picked up a Gestapo man named Helmuth Späth, a character “of the worst possible kind,” according to the liaison officer, Peter Davies. A veteran of the Einsatzgruppen, the elite Nazi murder squads who had swept east with the invasion of Russia in June 1941, Späth was said to have the blood of at least two hundred Jews on his hands, all killed at Rawa Rusha in Ukraine. Charles Kaiser, the Haystack man, had already been up to Reutlingen to interrogate Späth, and the SS officer was talking.

Späth knew nothing himself about the Englishwomen, but he knew who did, and Haystack were already acting on his leads. One senior Karlsruhe Gestapo officer had been traced to his home, but his wife had not seen him for six months, although she had heard from neighbours that he had been arrested on the Danish border. Her neighbours heard the news listening to a German radio broadcast giving locations and fates of German POWs. Another Gestapo man had disappeared after “seeking employment with the Americans,” according to one of his friends. And several names given to the Americans for checking against their rogues' gallery had come back “rogues not met.”

But thanks to Kaiser's interrogations of Späth, Vera secured vital descriptions, including one for Hermann Rösner, who had a broad face with bulging eyes and was aged about forty-five. A check with the search bureau suggested he might be in U.S. Camp 75, but the central locator of Camp 75 came back “no trace.” Vera had a description for Preis too: he was said to look like a butcher and speak the regional dialect.

At the end of the month Vera had made significant progress, and ten suspects were to be extradited from the U.S. zone.

Thanks to Späth, Vera also now had her first significant clue as to the whereabouts of Hans Kieffer, of the Sicherheitsdienst in Paris, whom she very much wanted to interrogate. Kieffer, as she had by now established, had himself been a member of the Karlsruhe Gestapo before he moved to Paris. His connections with Karlsruhe obviously explained the curious decision to send the SOE women to a prison in that city. Presumably the arrangement suited Kieffer simply because he could easily reinterrogate them on visits home.

Späth, who had known Kieffer, said he had probably retreated to
Offenburg and might now be in the Bodensee area, but he refused to say more. Vera put an urgent new search order out for a Hans Josef Kieffer. The accompanying description stated that he was thought to have a roundish face and dark curly hair. He sometimes wore glasses and was of medium height and athletic build. He had two daughters and a son, also called Hans Kieffer, serving in the Waffen-SS, and a search order was also put out for his son.