Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (57 page)

Nevertheless, despite the stress of getting ready for the trial, Vera found that the atmosphere in Hamburg was not altogether bleak. Though the central station had been obliterated, the station hotel was still standing and served as a comfortable base for the prosecution team. The chief prosecutor, Stephen Stewart, and John da Cunha, his junior, both good friends of Vera's from Bad Oeynhausen, were at the Hotel Bahnhof, as were a team of secretaries, including Vera's close Norwegian friend from Bad Oeynhausen, Sara Jensen.

Vera was allotted Room 50, on the fifth floor, and close by, in Room 56, was Odette Sansom. Odette, who six months previously had become the first woman ever to be awarded a George Cross and was already a household name at home, was to be the prosecution's star witness. And also here in Hamburg, arriving with extra duffel coats and whisky for Vera and her colleagues, was Jerrard Tickell, Odette's biographer, who, when he wasn't researching his book, kept the “chaps and chapesses,” as he called the prosecution team, perpetually entertained. Vera he cheered along at every opportunity with witty notes. “Riddle of the Girl ‘Vera'— Nobody Knew Her” was a newspaper headline he brought out to Hamburg for her. The cutting had nothing to do with Vera Atkins, but underneath Tickell had written: “and I thought to myself how true and how sad.”

Finding time to scribble a postcard to her mother on the eve of the trial, Vera wrote: “Have had a very lively two days as people are arriving every few minutes and as we get nearer to the opening date (tomorrow morning) so tempers get short and the excitement increases. It is no mean thing to have 20 highly strung women waiting about with nothing to do. I shall be glad when we start to get going.”

“May it please the court,” began Major Stewart, starting his opening speech in calm and almost conversational tones. Born Stefan Strauss in Vienna, Stephen Stewart fled Austria in 1938, just after the Anschluss, when he discovered his name was on a Nazi hit list, and was later called to the Bar in London. “In Mecklenburg, about fifty miles north of Berlin, there is a group of lakes to which the gentry of that once great capital used to go for their weekends. One of these lakes, probably because of its rather swampy, marshy lands, did not seem to attract too many visitors, and it was there on the shore of Lake Fürstenberg where, shortly after the outbreak of war, a concentration camp for women was sited, and for the first time in 1939 figures on the official papers of the SS show a recognised concentration camp named Ravensbrück.”

At one end of the court sat the judges. The president was an English major-general in full uniform with a king's counsel in wig and gown at his side, and five other uniformed military judges on the bench, including one Frenchman and one Pole. Directly in front of the judges were the sixteen defendants, each wearing a black number on a square of white cardboard on their chest.

All pleaded not guilty to charges of committing war crimes involving the ill treatment and killing of Allied nationals. Seated in front of the defendants were their lawyers, eleven robed German doctors of law.

The witnesses, waiting to be called, largely former women prisoners, were from France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Britain. In the centre of the courtroom was a table for the interpreters and shorthand writer. The press bench was on one side, and the prosecution bench on the other. Vera sat just behind Stewart and da Cunha. Her presence attracted the interest of
the journalists opposite, but they were not told her name. Vera at the trial was later described by Tickell as “a smooth, utterly impersonal figure in WAAF uniform.” There was little or no heating in court. Vera wore her thickest uniform, and two of the defendants, Carmen Mory and Vera Salvequart, wore fur coats.

Stephen Stewart proceeded to give the court an overview of the evidence. Ravensbrück camp, he said, was built in 1939 for six thousand prisoners, but the population had reached forty thousand by January 1945. In those years 120,000 women had passed through the camp, of whom 92,000 had died. The first women to be brought to the camp were Germans and Austrians; then followed Czechs, Dutch, Poles, Danes, and French; and soon Russians began to arrive en masse. Many prominent women passed through the camp, including Geneviève de Gaulle, General de Gaulle's niece, who had worked with the French resistance. There were writers, doctors, scientists, artists, mothers, peasants, Gypsies, and prostitutes. There were many women who had never been identified at all. And all the prisoners were divided into categories; among them were political prisoners, Jews, and “asocials,” who included lesbians, prostitutes, and Gypsies. The staff were drawn from numerous other concentration camps, but Ravensbrück was primarily known as a training camp for SS women guards. Himmler visited the camp often.

Stewart went on to outline the way the inmates lived, sleeping 250 to a hut, three to a bed, lining up for hours a day in the freezing cold for parades, feeding on watery soup and boiled potatoes and shuffling through stinking excreta in the most primitive of sanitary huts. Those fit enough were forced to carry out backbreaking labour in quarries, factories, or fields, while others took jobs in the camp itself as prisoner-guards. Stewart outlined how they died, often at night in bed, simply of starvation or ill health or of one of many epidemics. The living lay alongside a corpse, even if it was in the same bed, until morning, when a barrow would come round the blocks collecting bodies to burn in the crematorium.

If a woman died at work, her body would also be wheeled off in a barrow to the crematorium. Many died in the punishment block, which consisted of seventy-eight cells, each 2 metres wide by 2.5 metres long,
where prisoners were locked for days and taken out from time to time for “punishment”—whipping or beating on naked buttocks. Most passed out after ten strokes and many died, but a doctor was on hand to take the pulse of the victims, and if they revived, they were given the full twenty-five-stroke punishment.

Prisoners died also during or after medical experiments in Block 17 or during abortions or sterilisation. Many prisoners lost their minds and were held in a special block for “lunatics”—Block 10—where the defendant Carmen Mory strapped and shackled them until, as she had testified in one statement, “foam came from the ears and nose.”

In the early days those selected for extermination—by reason of age or ill health—were shot or hanged and their bodies thrown into the crematorium, although sometimes they were transported to Auschwitz. In the autumn of 1944 a gas chamber was built in which seventeen hundred women were murdered in the single month of November. Between January and April 1945 the killings were accelerated, and 6,993 women, girls, and children—the majority Jews—were gassed.

Witnesses were then invited by the court to tell their own stories. First to speak was Sylvia Salvesen, wife of the physician to the Norwegian king and a prominent figure in the Norwegian resistance, who told the court what had happened to her from the moment she entered the gates.

“When you enter something, you only enter it through a door, and we entered it through a big porch, and we saw that this was in a wall and there was a big fence. Later we learned it was an electric fence. We had to wait a few hours before we were let into what we later learned was called a bath. There was a room about as big as this courtroom, and there were no baths in it, but there were a few openings in the roof, and from these came water; but we had to wait naked at least two hours before any water came. When you think of it, we had been eighteen days on the road and we were longing for water, but we had to be four under every one of these showers, and the water only ran for moments. We got a little bit of soap in our hands and what they would call perhaps a towel, but it was no bigger than a handkerchief. When that was finished, I am sorry to say most of us had lost the small piece of soap because the water came so quickly, and we lost it between the ribs and the floor. Then we had to
wait. I do not know how long because time runs so slowly when you are naked for the first time in your life with a lot of unknown people, and then something happened which gave us the biggest shock, the first big shock in Ravensbrück. There entered two men dressed in uniforms. Later we were to hear that one was a doctor and the other a dentist. We were then put in rows, and then, still naked, we had to pass them, and they looked, as far as I can remember, only at our teeth and our hands. I am afraid we had the feeling of shame because we had not yet learned that shame was not ours but theirs. We had a feeling that they were selecting us for something. We were very naive. We thought we should get our dresses again, and we were shown a lump of clothes and we had to grab something—some sort of dress, sort of underwear, stolen from other prisoners. We got some wooden shoes.”

She went on: “After we left the ‘bath,' we were to stand in rows of five outside the ‘baths' and again had to wait. This was perhaps my first real glimpse of the camp because standing the first few hours there we saw the other prisoners pass. This for me was looking at a picture of Hell. Why should I use that word? Because I had seen pictures by our best artists of how they supposed it would be in Hell. And that was not because I saw anything terrible happen but because I saw for the first time in my life human beings that I could not judge whether they were men or women. Their hair was shaved and they were thin, unhappy, and filthy. But that was not what struck me most. It was the expression of their eyes—they had what I would call ‘dead eyes.' ”

As witness followed witness, the court learned every detail of the layout of the camp, and every routine of the prisoners' day, and every characteristic of the tormentors in the dock. Dorothea Binz always had her hair well done, the court was told—undercurled and bobbed—and she always carried a whip and had a little English terrier with her. She often observed the beatings in the punishment block, standing hand in hand with her SS lover, Edmund Braenung, another guard.

They heard too that the Jugendlager, just outside the main perimeter, had been turned into an extermination annexe in January 1945, when the gassings increased. Here up to ten thousand women were packed together in conditions worse even than those in the main camp, so that
many died before their day came for extermination. Each prisoner in the Jugendlager had been issued a pink card, which meant they had been selected to die, because they were too ill to work or simply because they had grey hair. A pink card could be handed to a prisoner at any time of day or night. And in the Jugendlager parades were held randomly, so that all the inmates lived in constant fear that they could be selected. Those selected were often stripped in front of the block to see what clothing they had on, then were given back only their dresses before being taken away on a truck in the evening and were not seen again.

Girls between eight and eighteen were picked out for special “experiments” on their reproductive organs that involved injections into the uterus and Fallopian tubes. The girls were usually Gypsies, and many died of infections.

As the evidence poured out, occasionally there would be a release of tension—something small might happen that would suddenly make everyone laugh in a manner out of all proportion to the event. But mostly the horror was relentless. At any moment a witness might summon up a new and yet more ghastly image: rats eating the eyes and noses of the dead left lying near the “hospital,” the sight of bleeding dog bites running up a woman's legs.

From time to time Vera would write a note and pass it forward to Stewart or da Cunha. But mostly she kept quite still. After the day's proceedings she might relax by going to the state opera, revived among the rubble, with the interpreter, Peter Forrest, another Austrian and friend of Vera's. Or she might go for a drive with the deputy judge advocate general, Carl Stirling KC, who had taken a shine to her. In the evening Vera often found the company of Sara Jensen most relaxing. Sara took it upon herself to “shepherd” Vera, while Vera shepherded the witnesses.

Then the proceedings would begin again. Towards the end of the prosecution case came perhaps the cruellest evidence of all. In the winter of 1944 the birth of babies was allowed in Ravensbrück. Until then pregnant women underwent forced abortions, normally in the seventh or eighth month, or the babies were strangled at birth and one of the
prisoner-nurses then burned them in the boiler room. But in September 1944 the policy changed, and children were born, by then mostly to Polish political prisoners, who were arriving in various stages of pregnancy.

The first baby to be born was treated “like a prince in the camp,” said the Norwegian Sylvia Salvesen, who had tried to help care for the new-borns. All the women wanted to see this child, and news of the birth went round the blocks in a flash. And for reasons nobody ever understood, others were allowed to be born, and at first mothers were allowed to stay with their babies.

But soon the mothers were kicked back to slave work or to their dirty blocks, and the babies were left with no milk and bits of rag, and they started to die.

As Sylvia Salvesen described the first of the babies' deaths, the chief German defence lawyer, Dr. Von Metler, protested that the translator had wrongly stated that a particular group of babies had died because they had turned over and could not breathe, whereas in fact the witness had said that it was because no nurse was present. But as the evidence continued, it became quite clear that babies born in Ravensbrück died simply because they could not live. They were left alone without mothers, milk, or warmth. Of 120 babies born in January and February 1945, 80 died. And then the court heard that in March 130 babies and pregnant women were suddenly taken away to be gassed in a railway wagon.

As the testimony continued, a witness would from time to time mention one or more of Vera's dead girls—Cicely Lefort, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch, or Lilian Rolfe. Little of the evidence was new to Vera, and she rarely reacted to what she heard.

Even so, under questioning from a judge or a lawyer, or in conversation outside the court, a witness would remember something in a way that even Vera had not heard before.