Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Pierre Raynaud's version of events was not supported by any records that the British released. After the war he claimed that SOE records were destroyed to save reputations. But France itself had a great deal to hide. The comte de Marenches, who served with Alix d'Unienville at de Gaulle's intelligence center in London, wrote of returning to France just after D-day to find “forty-two million people had fought for the Resistance!” He called those who joined the Resistance at the last minute naphtalines or mothballs. One hundred eighteen thousand prosecutions for collaboration were announced. Fewer than fifty thousand of the accused went on trial; 791 were executed. French archives have since recorded that one in two French women agents were executed by the Germans. The SD interrogation files in Paris listed informers drawn from criminal elements in Paris like the notorious Bony-Lafont gang. Pro-Nazi Pierre Bony worked for German counterintelligence with a criminal he had once hunted, Henri Lafont. Bony-Lafont and other gangsters were used by Goetz's SD colleagues to watch Noor and her companions. Bony told Vera that Noor escaped a third time, and was in an apartment when she was caught again.

  Another four women agents were murdered even while de Gaulle was preparing his triumphal walk through Paris. One was Squadron Leader Diana Rowden, whose free spirit impressed the disfigured RAF fighter pilot, Bill Simpson. Another was Andrée Borrel, sent in September 1942 to liaise with the betrayed Prosper network. A third was Sonia Olschanezky, barely twenty years old and living at 72 rue du Faubourg Poissonière in Paris when she became a courier in March 1942. She had evaded discovery until late January 1944. The fourth was Vera Leigh, a dress designer who had helped downed Allied airmen escape before she herself escaped from France in 1942. After three months of SOE training she returned and became a friend of Julienne Aisner, ex-mistress of Henri Dericourt, the air movements officer in France.

  Dericourt's questioning had been left to Harry Sporborg, adviser on SOE affairs to Lord Selborne. Vera wondered why the SIS deputy chief “Uncle Claude” Dansey intruded and insisted that Dericourt was “clean.” Was Uncle Claude using Dericourt to extract information from within the German secret services? The agent Vera Leigh had herself suggested that Dericourt colluded to get rid of a Gestapo agent disliked by the rival Abwehr. Just before her arrest in October 1943, French agents had said Vera Leigh was in danger for saying Dericourt served his own interests. Was Dericourt protected at high levels in games of deception? To the extent that Vera Leigh was a sacrificial lamb?3

  Vera Atkins reconstructed the fate of Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky, Andrée Borrel, and Diana Hope Rowden, all of whom were held at Karlsruhe with common criminals. Noor was imprisoned separately, hands and feet manacled, in November 1943. A woman jailkeeper objected that the four other girls had not been brought before a court, and were held as convicts when they were clearly spies. SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, later hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg, agreed with the busybody jailkeeper, and in July 1944 he dispatched the four girls to a German death camp on French soil, Natzweiler-Struthof, near Strasbourg in Alsace, just west of the Rhine.

  If de Gaulle had been less preoccupied in Paris with asserting his supreme authority, Free French paratroopers could have seized Struthof-Natzweiler. Instead, this camp, now within French jurisdiction, continued to go about its ghastly duties. The staff found time to inflict upon the four girls the worst of many crimes recorded by Maurice Southgate, the twenty-year-old artist whose SOE circuit was taken over by Pearl Witherington. A prisoner himself at Natzweiler, he recognized Diana Hope Rowden when she was brought in. He survived to sketch for Vera the faces of all the women he saw at Natzweiler in July 1944. Southgate also wrote for Vera a formal accusation that girls like Diana were trained by incompetent instructors or used as decoys. Bureaucrats in London said his long incarceration had unbalanced his mind. When Vera found him, she invited him to his first home-cooked meal. Southgate fled, sickened by the smell of roasting flesh.

  He showed Vera the camp after its staff had melted away. It stood at the end of what was called the Road of Despair by prisoners forced to build it. In August 1943 eighty-seven Jewish men and women had been dragged to an adjoining facility for “medical experiments.” Competitors were invited from German industry to build “processing units.” The contract for disposing of two thousand bodies every twelve hours went to Topt & Company of Thuringia. The German Armaments Corporation put in the winning bid to produce “corpse cellars and gas-proof doors with rubber surround and observation post of double 8-millimetre glass, type 100/192.” Manicured lawns covered the cellars, and “sanitary orderlies” dropped Zyklon-B crystal-blue crystals down shafts under concrete mushrooms in a gardenlike setting. The bodies, preserved in tanks, were sent to Strasbourg University's Institute of Anatomy.4

  After the four SOE women arrived, other prisoners were confined to quarters. Southgate at first thought the four were given injections “against typhus.” To save money, it had become customary to use only enough of the expensive gas to stun victims. This time, injections were used. He said, “I think they were alive when thrown into the ovens.”5

  Noor and three other missing SOE women agents were in a German military train from Karlsruhe in the Rhine Valley. Vera had supposed that they had perished at Natzweiler, but found to her horror that they, too, might have been condemned to death at another camp. On September 12, 1944, U.S. and British war planners, at a second Quebec conference, agreed that they should concentrate on Japan because Germany's defeat was certain. Noor's group was passing through the Swabian mountains on a death-train.

  The countryside was ablaze with autumnal colors. Two of the girls were FANYs, two were WAAFs. Their instructors had said that, if they were caught, they should try and hold out for forty-eight hours, giving their associates time to scatter. Noor had been offered the usual cyanide capsule provided for departing agents. Vera had told her, “It must be quickly crushed between the teeth and swallowed. The smell is known to German interrogators. They'll try to make you vomit.” Noor had refused to take the L-pill. The others would have long since disposed of the pills, knowing possession identified them as spies to the Gestapo. They must have been dazzled by the autumnal sunshine after so long a confinement in dank cells. Each girl was trained to seize and use a German weapon separately, but would they know how to act in concert against their three armed but dozing Gestapo escorts? Probably it had seemed wiser to assume that, as officers, they would be treated as POWs. They were so close to freedom.

  Vera imagined the train puffing serenely along what could have been some local line in England. Three of the agents had been in school when the war began. Eliane Plewman, née Browne-Bartrolli, was a strikingly beautiful girl whose brother was also a secret agent. After parachuting into the Jura on the night of August 13–14, 1943, she had worked with a small circuit around Marseilles. Her training in sabotage helped close the main railway to Toulon. She showed her French comrades how to block tunnels by derailing trains, then destroying the trains that piled up behind. By early March 1944 her group had damaged sixty locomotives, putting most of them out of commission. A German “mousetrap” caught her, and the bait was said to have been Jack Sinclair, aged twenty-two, who joined her on March 6–7, 1944. French Resistance investigators would later say that incriminating documents were planted on him. The official Whitehall response was that he had been wrongly dispatched because of a “staff muddle.” The details were conveniently “lost.”

  Another of the four girls, Madeleine Damerment, had parachuted in late February 1944, straight into the hands of a Gestapo reception committee imitating all the correct signals. This sort of thing had happened to eighteen agents in her section. None survived.

  The third on the train, Yolande Beekman, came from neutral Switzerland. Moral convictions had made her volunteer.

  Noor and her companions arrived at a railroad station near Munich and with their guards stumbled through the midnight darkness to a camp with a name they did not recognize: Dachau. After that one splendid day
of sunshine, a Stygian gloom descended. They were locked in cells without food or water and taken next morning into a yard where they were lined up before a drab brick wall.

  Noor reached out to touch another hand. Soon all the girls were holding hands. It was the last autumn of World War II. No guard bothered to stop Noor when she began the linking of hands. The gesture made the task easier. Each girl received a bullet in the back of the head. The sudden pistol shot was not the first Noor had heard at close quarters. Years before, during her training, an SOE instructor was so alarmed by Noor's dreamlike reaction to his gunshot that he had told Vera the girl was too emotional for fieldwork. Now, before the wall, she withdrew into a state of meditation. A British War Office report in June 1947 described the executions. Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross for conspicuous courage, moral and physical, during prolonged clandestine operations.

  Of such as these, Churchill spoke in Westminster Abbey: “Nothing of which we have any knowledge or record has ever been done by mortal men which surpasses the splendour and daring of their feats of arms.” His tribute was delayed until May 21, 1948. Secrecy still prevailed.

  The White Rabbit had been caught yet again while trying to engineer the escape of a French colleague. At Buchenwald, he found a member of the German medical team administering “experimental” injections. Yeo-Thomas promised the man that if he cooperated, he could be saved from war-crime charges. Tommy was not sent to the crematorium. He broke out of the prison and made his way along the escape routes, but was caught, tortured, and slipped his captors again. He found his father in Paris on May 8, 1945, celebrating VE-day.

  Vera found in Yeo-Thomas the qualities of the naval pilot she had loved and lost, but she could never say so. Leo Marks adored Noor, but could never say so. Emotional entanglement with an agent endangered everyone. When Leo wrote code-poems, though, his feelings often shone through. He composed one for a member of a Jedburgh team parachuted near Dachau with the goal of breaking into the camp, but the team arrived just too late to save Noor and her companions. The OSS officer for whom the poem was written was dropped in September 1944, about the time Noor linked hands with the others. He was himself captured and executed.

  Leo's code-poem, given to the doomed American, was composed with Noor in mind:

  Want to say so

  Don't know how

  Want to hug you

  Don't know if I should

  Hope you understand

  I'd take your place if I could.

  39

  A Terrible Irony

  It seems appropriate that a special Jewish unit of that race which has suffered indescribable torments from the Nazis, should be represented as a distinct formation amongst the forces gathered for their overthrow.

  —Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament, September 1944

  “The Jews you wanted are finally yours,” Billy Stephenson wrote to Vera before he was dubbed Sir William for his work as Coordinator of British Security. “But it's almost five years late! Those with every motive to hit back at the enemy, who spoke the languages and had the skills, were locked away in camps.” Vera had been wise to shed her Jewish family name when she left Romania ahead of Heinrich Himmler's order to SS generals “to exterminate the Jewish race.”

  Twelve years later, as the Allies were closing in, Himmler told his Gauleiters, “I think we had better take this secret with us to our graves.”

  “Everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death,” Churchill promised Parliament on July 11, 1944. The secret was so well buried that few non-Jews responded. Within a year, he was ousted as prime minister. But he had launched the Jewish Fighting Brigade.

  No voice was raised for Diana Hope Rowden. No flag-draped coffin carried her body between honor guards. “Are Jews to vanish into the same silence?” Vera asked Chaim Weizmann as France spoke of the “Day of Liberation” and reports came in of twelve thousand Jews incinerated daily in Hungary alone. Weizmann gave the estimated figures to Churchill, who requested “action at any cost.” Nothing happened. His Foreign Office chief, Anthony Eden, was described by Eden's secretary: “A. E. loves Arabs and hates Jews.” A copy of the memo reached Vera. She told Stephenson, “There are towns in France yet to be liberated where Vichy officials obey German regulations, and exercise meticulous care in separating Jewish parents from their children so there's less to offend the public eye.”1

  President Roosevelt said that he did not want a flood of Jewish survivors entering the United States. Whitehall opposed Jewish “displaced persons” settling in Palestine, antagonizing Arabs, endangering Saudi oil interests, and, more importantly, the lifeline to half the empire, the Suez Canal, which ran through Egypt. Churchill described as a “gross breach of faith” the repudiation of the Balfour Declaration with its conditional recognition of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Many shared his feelings that the new Jewish Brigade Group had a moral right to use irregular warfare specialists trained by Orde Wingate. These included the Haganah underground and Irgun, organizations that were originally set up to resist the Arabs and now stood increasingly at odds with the local British army command.

  Edmund de Rothschild, whose family estates provided training facilities for SOE, was too well known to take command of the brigade. The War Office insisted that it “should not serve in Palestine or be sent there for disbandment or demobilization.” The order added that the Jewish Agency, representing Jews in Palestine, “have not been told of this nor is it intended they should be,” because the Agency was “using this opportunity to have their men trained in active operations at our expense.”

  Vera saw a mirror image of Whitehall's fear of SOE's unconventional methods. She also recognized that nothing would stop Jews now that, after years of silence, newspaper reports began to reveal the Holocaust. On July 8, 1944, the Times of London provided eyewitness accounts of sixty-two railway cars entering Auschwitz, each wagon crammed with children under eight. While investigating the fate of missing agents, Vera now had a new resource. She got little help from French collaborators. Decades would pass before the subtleties of behavior under enemy rule were fully explored. The opposition of Allied commanders to closework missions and the Jewish Brigade was hidden until January 1, 2005, when the British Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) became law. “But before this date,” said Richard Smith, the FOIA director assisting the deputy prime minister, “directives from secret departments were coming down to us to throw away certain papers.” The Campaign for Freedom of Information alleged the papers were destroyed “in anticipation of the Act coming into force.” Geoffrey Elliott, the banker who tried to unearth secrets about his father's service in SOE, wrote: “If files should miraculously surface, they'd bear the message seen on toilets in American motels: Sanitised For Your Protection.”2

  The only Jewish unit in Allied forces, the brigade both gave and received scraps of intelligence on the concentration camps, but there was no concerted Allied effort to investigate these. On Christmas Eve 1944, Krystyna, whose Jewish mother had vanished in Warsaw, was almost captured trying to learn the worst. She had sent a small special-operations team from Italy to Poland and was to follow by parachute. Before she could leave Bari, however, the team wirelessed: “Russians wiping out… all seen as subverting Stalin.” Her colleagues were arrested by Red Army intelligence and disappeared forever.

  Edmund de Rothschild, wounded in the May 1944 battle of Monte Cassino, transferred into the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group. On November 8, 1944, the chief rabbi of London wrote: “This would mean a great deal to Jews everywhere.” It would also mean a lot to Jews if Krystyna could execute another plan: parachuting agents into the concentration camps. She discussed logistics with the SOE controlling officer in Rome. He had heard so many stories about her—that she wore Leo Marks's coding silks around her neck like a scarf while scrutinized at a German checkpoint; that she silenced a Gestapo Alsatian “sniffer” by hugging the dog to death; that she held up her hands in mock surrender when co
nfronted by a trio of enemy soldiers, then disclosed a grenade in each hand and said if they shot her, they would all be blown away. “She's completely without nerves,” the rabbi wrote. “Once, she waited to jump, but the aircraft took so long surveying the dropping zone, she fell asleep.”

  Her agents, dressed as slave workers, were to be dropped near concentration camps to join the daily entry of foreign workers and help inmates break out while Allied planes strafed the area. Vera wanted no delay. She had heard of behavior among the exterminators that was “madly insane.” The wife of a German officer boarded a death train by mistake, saw the ovens when she arrived, and was cremated to stop her talking about them.

  Baron Philippe de Vomécourt proposed a similar scheme, but both he and Krystyna ran into fierce opposition. Some governments-in-exile were infected with the old anti-Semitism, and Whitehall was afraid of letting loose Jewish survivors in their liberated lands.3 In Washington, James Forrestal, the U.S. secretary of defense, said, “The Jewish lobby influences U.S. policy and endangers national security.” Oilman Max Thornburg of Caltex feared the U.S. would extinguish Arab faith in American ideals if it backed Palestine for the Jews.4

  As the Jews became a political time bomb, Vera watched SOE's fortunes decline. The Canadian Army's Brigadier Ernest Benjamin, with twenty-five years of military service, took command of the Jewish Brigade to meet the War Office requirement that whoever was appointed “should not have an aversion to Jews.” He was a Jew. He wanted to blow open a camp but Whitehall rejected the plan, recalling Himmler's endorsement in 1943 of His Eminence the Grossmufti, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a dedicated terrorist in Palestine, which led to irregular warfare between Arabs and Jews. “We could have done it,” Brigadier Benjamin told Vera. “Now I look the other way while my men do what they can.”

  Benjamin's 5,500 men wore the yellow Star of David on their battledress. “So many millions were condemned to death after being forced to wear it,” said one soldier, Maxim Kahan. Another, Ted Arison, said, “The first time we took German prisoners, it was unbelievable.” At Passover on March 26, 1945, refugees were astounded to see Jews bearing arms. Rothschild noted that camp survivors told him, “The message for us is: Don't go east, they don't like us. Don't go west, they don't like us. There's no place to go.”