Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (58 page)

Sylvia Salvesen had seen Cicely Lefort just before she was gassed and described how, while she was in the main camp, Cicely had become very ill and could not tolerate standing for roll calls so she had volunteered to go to the newly opened Jugendlager, believing there was no roll call there and that conditions were better. But prisoners in the subcamp had to
stand for seven hours for roll call, starting at three a.m. Everyone had dysentery. Fifty died each day from exhaustion. At least one hundred women were taken away each day from the Jugendlager and never seen again. So sick was she by then that Cicely was picked out for extermination almost as soon as she reached the Jugendlager.

Another witness told the court: “The women were put on one side and a few hours later taken away in motor lorries. I was told a few days later they had been taken to the railway siding in the village, put in a van, and gassed.”

Several witnesses remembered the strength and cheerfulness of Vio-lette. One woman recalled her talking incessantly about “my baby, my baby.” A woman who saw Violette, Lilian, and Denise in the punishment block before they were taken away to be shot described all three as emaciated, dirty, and weak; so weak was Lilian, said the witness, that she had to be carried to the place where she was shot.

Sitting in court, it was impossible for Vera to overlook even the smallest detail as every word of every witness was meticulously translated over and over again into various languages, in at least three of which Vera was fluent. And the way the story was presented here—from beginning to end—gave Vera a perspective she had not had before. Sitting on the prosecution bench, she was for the first time able to view the fate of her girls in the context of the camp as a whole, which until now she had had little time to consider. For the past year she had been so busy hunting down evidence and trying to understand the technical aspects of the case that when the court proceedings in Hamburg began, she suddenly found she had time to reflect.

I hoped that in her letters home Vera might at last feel freer to say what she thought now that the case was under way, but they were as bland as always. “Dearest Ma, We were a bit cold at times and also furiously busy with one thing and another. It is really a most interesting case,” she wrote from Hamburg in January 1947, signing off by thanking her mother for a hairbrush she had posted to her.

“In court I think Vera saw it partly as her job to keep emotions— others' as well as her own—under control,” said John da Cunha. “And at the time, you know, we all adjusted to it. You do, I'm afraid. You get hardened to it. You almost become coarsened by it.”

Had Vera become hardened?

“She must have been, of course. But it was so much more difficult for her. She knew many of the victims. It was much more personal for Vera.”

“Do you think she was feeling emotion?”

“I am sure she was. I have no doubt at all,” da Cunha said. “One could tell. She was always exhausted by it. I think it all totally drained her. I used to go up to her room at the end of each day to talk over the evidence and prepare for what was coming next. When I went in, she would be sitting at a table with her hair down, holding her hairbrush. It was the only time I saw her with her hair down. And as we talked she would start brushing her hair, and she brushed it over and over again. I always thought it was probably her way of releasing tension.”

Da Cunha said that when it was all over, the press had clamoured at her door, and he was posted outside her room to keep them away. “She just wanted to be alone at that time. Some on the prosecution side wanted to celebrate; it had been a long, hard trial. But Vera never wanted to celebrate in any way. She certainly showed no sign of feeling any anger towards these people. Like the rest of us, I think she just felt a mixture of disgust and pity.

“And Schwarzhuber was very important to Vera. He was her most important witness. I remember he said how impressed he had been with the bearing of Vera's girls when they were executed. Perhaps that was some consolation to her.”

On day thirteen Johann Schwarzhuber, the camp overseer, took the stand. Vera had taken his statement about the deaths of Violette, Lilian, and Denise nine months previously. Had it not been for his capture, she might never have learned of their fate. As on that occasion, Schwarzhuber once again seemed ready to talk and give the court all the information that he could. Unlike other witnesses, he at no stage sought to deny
his role in events. He even seemed to try, from time to time, to catch the eye of prosecution lawyers.

A father of three children, born in Bavaria, Schwarzhuber told the court he was a printer by profession. He said he had worked as an SS guard in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück in January 1945. He had a remarkable memory for detail, telling the court that from January to February thirty to thirty-five women died every day, but from February to the middle of March sixty to seventy died each day, purely as a result of illnesses. At the end of February, he said, he had been called to see the commandant, Fritz Suhren, and was told to organise the mass gassing of prisoners because the killing was not going fast enough. He was reluctant to do this: “I had done it at Auschwitz and did not want to do it a second time.”

The gassing nevertheless went ahead. “I attended one gassing in which 150 women were forced into the gas chamber. They were ordered to be undressed as if to be deloused and taken into the gas chamber. Then the door was locked. A male prisoner with a gas mask then climbed onto the roof and threw a gas container into the room through a window, which he closed. I heard groaning and whimpering in the room. After two or three minutes it grew quiet. Whether the women were dead or just senseless I cannot say.”

Mass killing had become a routine, daily event, but for reasons he was never asked to explain, Schwarzhuber still recalled in detail the particular deaths of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch. After they reached the punishment block in early January, nobody had known what happened to them because they could not be seen or contacted by other prisoners. But Schwarzhuber was able to tell the court—as he had first told Vera, but in more detail now—what happened next. “One evening towards 1900 hours they were called out [of the punishment block] and taken to the courtyard by the crematorium. Camp Commandant Suhren made these arrangements. He read out the order for their shooting in the presence of the chief camp doctor, Dr. Trommer, SS Sergeant Zappe, SS Lance Corporal Schult, SS Corporal Schenk, and the dentist Dr. Hellinger. I myself was present.”

Schwarzhuber continued: “I accompanied the three women to the
crematorium yard. A female camp overseer was also present and sent back when we reached the crematorium. Zappe stood guard over them while they were waiting to be shot.

“All three were very brave, and I was deeply moved. Suhren was also impressed by the bearing of these women. He was annoyed that the Gestapo did not themselves carry out these shootings.”

The shooting was done by SS Lance Corporal Schult with a small-calibre gun fired through the back of the neck. “They were brought forward singly by Corporal Schenk. Death was certified by Dr. Trommer. The corpses were removed singly by the internees who were employed in the crematorium and burned. The clothes were burned with the bodies.”

22.
“A Very Fine Manner”

W
hen Johan Schwarzhuber had completed his evidence at the Ravensbrück trial, in mid-January 1947, Vera disappeared from court for several days. She told colleagues she had to clear up “loose ends” in Bad Oeynhausen. In fact, as colleagues began closing speeches in the Ravensbrück case, Vera was on her way to reopen her investigation into what had happened to Nora Inayat Khan.

Vera also had a second, related mission, which she hoped to accomplish in her break from the Ravensbrück trial. News had reached her from Bill Barkworth that Hans Kieffer had finally been run to ground and was being held in prison in Wuppertal. The development was timely, and Barkworth agreed that Vera could interrogate him there in a few days' time.

It was now nine months since Vera had closed the investigation into Nora's case. She had concluded that Nora was taken to Natzweiler concentration camp, where she was killed on July 6, 1944, by lethal injection and her body cremated. Nora's family had been given this version of events. Nora's murder had been part of the case made against the Natzweiler camp staff at their trial. And this story had formed part of the citation that had recently secured for Nora a mention in dispatches. But Vera had never found it easy to fit the pieces of Nora's story together, and the single letter from Yolande Lagrave showed her that the story she had so painstakingly constructed about Nora's death was wrong.

I knew by now the trouble Vera would take to ensure nobody ever knew she was wrong. On one occasion in her later years she gave a lengthy talk to a group of FANY officers about her war crimes investigation, which was taped. Afterwards she realised that in her talk she had mistaken the name of an SS officer. She then insisted that a FANY officer should go to her home with the tape and tape recorder, and together, over many hours, they replayed the tape and located each mention of the misnamed officer, so that the error could be erased. Then, speaking into the microphone at precisely the right moment, Vera stated the correct name.

Vera appeared to have gone to even more extraordinary lengths to ensure that nobody thought she was wrong about Nora. According to the published official record of the Natzweiler trial, held in May 1946, Vera was not wrong about the identities of the dead women when she gave evidence to the court on oath. In this “official verbatim record” of the trial, edited by a leading barrister for publication as a book in 1949, Vera told the court: “During the course of investigations in Karlsruhe I was able to establish that the four who left [Karlsruhe] were Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and a fourth woman whose identity I was and am unable to ascertain.” I knew this “official verbatim record” could not be right because other evidence showed quite clearly that Vera had told the court that the fourth woman was Nora, and at the time she firmly believed this to be correct.

Then a specialist researcher, burrowing in the National Archives at Kew, found a second “official verbatim record” of the same trial. This second document was made public only in 1976 and was the original contemporaneous transcript of the trial, unedited and with no commentary. It told a different story. Here Vera said on oath: “During the course of investigations in Karlsruhe I was able to establish that the four who left [Karlsruhe] were Denise [sic] Borrel, Nora Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh, and Diana Rowden.”

The 1949 version had obviously been changed to remove all mention of Nora's name. As the publisher had ceased to exist and the editor was dead, it was impossible to know exactly how the rewriting of the “verbatim
record” had been arranged. But there could be little doubt that in order to hide her mistake Vera herself had found a way to ensure history was rewritten, scotching from the records what she had said on oath.