Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (61 page)

23.
Kieffer

V
era had almost given up hope of meeting Hans Kieffer. At first she thought he would turn up in an internment camp or be picked up at a border. But he had been too clever for that. Each time she had circulated his name to the Americans' rogues' gallery, the reply came back “rogue not met.”

A great deal of information about Kieffer had by now been passed to Vera from her own people who had been imprisoned by him at Avenue Foch. She had heard how he kept his prize agents on the fifth floor; how he had befriended Bob Starr, who even drew his portrait; and how his “favourites” would sometimes be called down to his office for a meal or a chat. In the eyes of some of Vera s agents, Kieffer appeared almost to have won a certain respect. And he clearly commanded respect among his own men, as she had discovered more recently when his staff had finally been run to ground and interrogated.

One of the reasons Kieffer had been so difficult to find was the intense loyalty he appeared to have inspired among most of his closest colleagues, who had refused to say, even under interrogation, precisely where he was. And his men rarely tried to shift blame for what had happened onto their boss. Rather, they tried to protect him, saying they were sure Kieffer had no idea that agents were sent to concentration camps. They were sure he expected all agents to be given a trial. And they doubted very much that any torture ever took place with his authority.

Vera, however, had never been deceived by Kieffer, and she was certainly under no illusion about what he really knew. He had sent scores of her people to concentration camps, albeit on orders from above. And of course, he knew what a concentration camp was—no SS officer of his rank could not have known. She was also under no illusion about what “treatments” he authorised for his own prisoners. Agents living under Kieffer's roof were fed and nurtured and generally encouraged to feel “at home.” One agent, Maurice Southgate, had even been allowed to order accountancy books so that he could study the subject while he was locked up at Avenue Foch.

Torture, though, while not condoned at Avenue Foch, was quite clearly authorised at the “house prison,” as Kieffer called it, at Place des Etats-Unis. Josef Stork, Kieffer's driver, had been placed in charge of the prison and had confessed under interrogation to several “cures” and “treatments,” as he called the torture there. A favourite at the prison was to submerge victims in ice-cold water until they decided to talk. In one case, Stork had confessed, a prisoner drowned while undergoing the water “cure.” And Kieffer employed a fellow known only as “Peter Pierre,” a kind of special protégé, who liked to use a riding whip on prisoners.

Kieffer was always astonishingly well informed about what happened within his department, largely because Stork, as well as being his enforcer, was also his “eyes and ears.” But he never “knew” about the torture and was never present when the torture took place. For Kieffer, therefore, the torture was always deniable.

In the end, though, Kieffer had committed a crime he had been unable to deny. Despite the fact that his prime enemy throughout the war had been SOE, the one atrocity that he was accused of when finally captured was not committed against any SOE agents. He had ordered the murder of five SAS paratroopers. And the person who had finally secured the capture of Kieffer was Bill Barkworth, because it was Barkworth's people who had been killed.

Kieffer's crime was committed in the very last days of the German occupation of Paris. A few weeks after D-Day, at the beginning of July 1944, a group of twelve uniformed SAS soldiers were dropped by parachute to carry out sabotage operations but fell straight into the
arms of Kieffer's men, who knew about their arrival through a radio playback.

In the ensuing firefight five of the SAS men were taken prisoner, three were wounded, and four were killed. When he sought instructions from Berlin about what to do with the prisoners, Kieffer was told to keep them in his “house prison,” but this was very overcrowded, so he asked Berlin for further instructions. After some delay he eventually received orders from Berlin to shoot the SAS men. It was all to be done in strictest secrecy. Even Berlin recognised that shooting uniformed prisoners was illegal under the Führer's own Commando Order, so Kieffer was ordered to remove their uniforms and dress them in civilian clothes before the shooting.

After some hesitation Kieffer had obeyed Berlin and instructed his men to dress the SAS soldiers in civilian clothes and shoot them. The five uninjured prisoners were driven to woods near Noailles, given sandwiches on the way, then lined up to be shot. Two men escaped, one by opening his handcuffs with a watch spring at the very last minute and running off into the trees. The remaining five were murdered. Kieffer told Barkworth he had tried his best not to implement the order. He had refused to shoot the wounded SAS men, whom he had been told to kill too. But in the end he had no choice but to kill the others. He would have been shot himself had he refused, he claimed, insisting that after the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944, any German officer who refused to obey an order was executed.

And now here was Kieffer at last, standing before Vera in his cell at Wuppertal. He had finally been picked up by Bill Barkworth's men at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, following a tip given to Vera from one of his captured colleagues, Karl Haug. Kieffer had been living quite openly in Garmisch, working as a caretaker in a hotel. He had even registered with the town hall and had not changed his name except to remove one f to make “Kiefer.” Even during the war Kieffer did not use aliases.

At the age of forty-seven Hans Josef Kieffer was a good-looking man who seemed taller than he was, owing to a thick mop of wavy black hair. He was stocky and muscular with an almost boyish face, a small, slightly
upturned nose, deep-set eyes, and thick black eyebrows. He appeared relatively relaxed in the circumstances and not much like a man who had been on the run or had a great deal to fear. His conditions were good here, he said. And Vera observed that he had a small desk, with pen and ink. Pinned to the wall was a single photograph of a young girl—chubby-cheeked with fair, thick, wavy hair and wearing a floral dress. She was quite obviously a daughter. Kieffer said he had been allowed to invite his daughter here over Christmas. Major Barkworth had allowed her to stay in his cell.

The picture pinned to the wall in Kieffer's cell was of Hildegard, his youngest daughter, then aged nineteen. When he wrote to her from prison, he began, “Meine Hebe Moggele” (My dear squirrel), using her pet name. Hildegard showed me the letters her father wrote, and she picked out little phrases. “Look, here he says, ‘In the end it [the arrest] all happened quite suddenly' But I don't think he was surprised to have been arrested.”

Hildegard said that her father had been picked up, as he feared he would be, just a few weeks after his old friend Karl Haug had left Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Vera herself had interrogated Haug, who fell into British hands—again, just as Kieffer predicted. I showed Hildegard Haug's deposition. “I last saw Kieffer in Garmisch. He may have stayed there,” were Haug's words to Vera, which Hildegard was now reading from the statement.

“This is very interesting,” said Hildegard, and she signalled to her brother, Hans, and sister, Gretel, to come and read the document. “You see, we always thought it must have been Haug who talked. But until now we never had proof.”

When the Kieffer family first agreed to help me, they said it was because they wanted to give an “objective” view of their father to his grandchildren. Hans Kieffer, the son of a barrel maker, had followed an elder brother into the police. His skill at getting information out of people without threats or violence was spotted, and he was quickly moved into
intelligence work. “As a father he was like that too,” said his son, Hans. “He was not intimidating or frightening—but I just remember this feeling that I could never lie to him.”

When war broke out, Kieffer was transferred to the Gestapo, to the investigation department at Karlsruhe. “Was he in the Nazi Party?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” said Hans.

“But if you ask if he was interested in politics, I would say no. He was interested in his profession. In being a policeman.”

And were they—Hans, Gretel, and Hildegard—in the Nazi Party at the start of the war? They looked around at one another. “Yes, of course,” said Hans. “Look, from 1933 we were all young Nazis. It looked different then. Our parents were in the party, and we children were in the Jungvolk. We enjoyed it. We went singing and talked about our heroes of the First World War. Everybody did it.”

I asked if their father visited them all in Karlsruhe when he was working in Paris. They said he used to come from time to time with his driver, Stork, because he had business still in Karlsruhe. But he never talked about his work. Did he talk about the British agents he captured? “No,” they answered, although they all remembered “Bob,” who gave evidence in Kieffer's defence at the trial. “And Peter Churchill,” said Hans, suddenly remembering another name. “I have a knife of Peter Churchill,” and he looked at me with a grin. Hans explained that his father had given him the knife as a trophy sometime in 1943. It was a hunting knife with PC engraved upon it.

I asked Hildegard how her father seemed when she visited him in prison. “He didn't want me to visit him in the beginning because he was uncertain about how things would turn out,” she said. He had many other worries too: his wife, Margarete, had died of stomach cancer the previous year, and he had also lost two brothers in the war. But by the time she did visit, at Christmas, his mood had improved. And with the English officers they had had quite a Christmas party.

Did Hildegard remember anything about a woman WAAF officer visiting her father in January? Her father never spoke of her, she said. But she remembered a Major Blackwood or Backwood. I suggested that perhaps
it was Major Barkworth, and she thought it probably was. He had been kind and reassuring.

By mid-January her father was feeling quite confident, said Hilde-gard. “He did not think he had done anything wrong. Look here,” she said, pulling out another letter written to her in January. “He is just concerned that he won't have his suit in time for the trial. I don't think he ever thought at that time that he would be hanged.”

Vera had not come to interrogate Kieffer in a formal manner. She certainly wanted to hear what he had to say on a number of important matters. On the question of Déricourt, for example, Kieffer was to be Vera's prime witness, for only he would know the true extent of this man's treachery. And Kieffer was also the only person who would know the answer to the Prosper conundrum. He would be able to tell Vera once and for all if there had been a pact with Prosper.

But Vera approached this meeting more as a chance to have a long and private chat. Though at the end she would ask Kieffer to sign a deposition, she wanted first to talk things over, to settle in her own mind— more than for the public record—questions that she knew only he could answer. More than anything, she wanted to know which of her people had helped Kieffer and which had not.

Vera introduced herself as the intelligence officer from the French Section in London, and Kieffer immediately responded with respect for her and for her section. Her name was known to him, as were most names of F Section's London staff. He told her that he had always had the greatest concern for her agents and admiration for many of them too.

“Berlin attached extraordinary importance to the French Section,” said Kieffer, and he explained that his chief in Berlin, Horst Kopkow, and his department worked on all the French Section cases. All instructions concerning captured British officers came from Kopkow or even from Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller himself, the head of Department IV of the RSHA. The Führer also took a personal interest in the French Section, as did the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. Berlin had “again and again” shown an interest only in French Section matters. As a result
he had been obliged to neglect other resistance circuits. “Berlin considered the French Section particularly dangerous.”