Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  Senter's men, however, did not at first believe what Guillot said. They were sceptical partly because they had never considered that Britons might be taken to a concentration camp. And like most other British officials at their level, these officers considered that Nazi atrocity stories were largely propaganda. So Senter marked Guillot's report “secret” while he checked its accuracy.

  An inner circle of senior British officers and politicians had been keeping secret what they had known about the concentration camps and death camps since the start of the war. From as early as 1939 SS signals encoded by German Enigma machines had been intercepted and decoded by cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. The resulting decrypts, known as ULTRA, revealed early evidence of a Nazi extermination programme, but for security reasons nobody outside the inner circle—which included the prime minister—was allowed to know. The fear was, or so it was said later, that if information from ULTRA were to spread, the Germans would guess that the Enigma code had been broken and would change the codes.

  Vera made an effort to inform herself about concentration camps from other sources, but most of her colleagues did not. A mere SOE staff officer had no access to ULTRA traffic. Those who briefed SOE agents had made a point of setting out the risks they faced if captured, but concentration camps were never mentioned.

  The “secret” stamp on Guillot's report proved a futile gesture. A few days later, on April 11, 1945, the U.S. Third Army, commanded by General George Patton, stumbled onto Buchenwald, eight miles north of Weimar. It was the first concentration camp liberated by Western troops. General Patton himself now decided that there should be no more secrets about concentration camps and called for photographers and reporters “to get the horrid details.”

  Vera read on, now making notes from Guillot's report. Here was Ange Defendini, the author of those desperate letters from prison to his “mistress”—hanged at Buchenwald. Here too were Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister—also hanged. Also on the list was Henri Frager. Guil-lot passed on comments made by Frager as he went to his death: “Louba [Frager] said that a double agent called Gilbert was responsible for his arrest.” Vera had dearly hoped to talk to Frager about Déricourt (Gilbert). There were many other F Section men here too, all correctly identified, and all shot or hanged.

  Guillot's story had begun with a description of a transport leaving Paris by train for Germany on August 7, 1944, four months later than the transport described by Marcel Rousset. And Guillot's transport had headed farther south than Rousset s. “The men were handcuffed two by two. In addition to the men, there was a party of twenty-five women who left at the same time.” Vera underlined this last sentence. Guillot continued that as there had been a bombardment, the line was broken and the train stopped for a day then reversed. At a small station they were put into two requisitioned French lorries—one for the men and one for the women—and took the road to Châlons-sur-Marne. There they changed lorries and went on to Verdun, where they slept the night, leaving again the next morning for Metz. There they remained for four hours at the Gestapo HQ, and here Guillot saw the women again. Out of the photographs shown him, he was able to recognise only Denise Bloch. He thought he recognised one other but said he had spent so little time with the women he hardly remembered them. After Metz they lost sight of the women.

  Vera made a note on Denise Bloch's card. A Jewish Frenchwoman, Denise had been reported captured just before D-Day, and nothing had been heard of her since. If she was among this group of prisoners, others captured at about the same time might have been with her. On a piece of scrap paper Vera now jotted the names of Violette Szabo, Eileen Nearne, and Yvonne Baseden.

  Leaving the women behind at Metz, Guillot s convoy of men moved on. They were taken by lorry to Saarbrücken, where they spent four days.

  They were chained together in fives by their feet and were made to run round and round in small circles so that obviously they kept falling down. On the fourth day they were put in a voiture cellulaire [secure carriage] at Saarbrücken station, and taken by train to Weimar, passing through Frankfurt and Kassel. They arrived at Buchenwald camp near Weimar at midnight on 16/17 August 1944. They were at first told they were to be put in a gas chamber but this did not happen. Instead they were robbed of everything they possessed, their hair was cut off and they were disinfected. They were then taken to Block 17. At 1:30 on 9 September a list was brought round from the SS Direction with about fourteen names. These men were immediately taken to the prison in the interior of the camp where they were shut in cells. During the night of 11–12 September they were all hanged in the cellars of the crematorium and burned immediately. On 5 October another special bulletin was issued and the named men were called to present themselves and were shot at 3 in the afternoon. These men were shot two by two at two stakes and their bodies burned immediately afterwards.

  Vera now selected seventeen cards from her index and on each one she noted: “Believed executed at Buchenwald.” She also wrote a note to Buckmaster saying that Guillot's report suggested the executions were probably the result of a specific order from on high. Vera had by now seen intelligence on Hitler's Führerbefehl, or Commando Order, issued on October 18, 1942, which stated that “all terrorist and sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices who do not act like soldiers but rather like bandits will be treated as such by the German troops and will be ruthlessly eliminated in battle wherever they appear.”

  Those “bandits” who were arrested by police were to be handed over to the SS for execution. The Buchenwald deaths suggested that SOE agents arrested in France fell into the second category of the Commando Order. They had been systematically executed.

  Fast on Guillot's story came another report from Buchenwald by Professor Serge Balachowsky, one of Prosper's people. Balachowsky, the biologist who had worked at the agricultural college at Grignon, corroborated Guillot's story and added new detail, picked up from prisoner-guards. The first group, he said, was hanged at five-thirty in the afternoon and were first beaten “as was customary.” He added: “They were simply hung by a rope on hooks a few metres from the ground so that they died of strangulation and not by breaking the spinal cord, thus taking 5–10 minutes to die. The bodies were burned but traces of blood were found on the floor.” Balachowsky said Hubbles notebook had been passed to him after it fell from the SOE man's body as he was hanged.

  Now everyone expected the remainder of the group to be executed, and Balachowsky, who had friends among them, devised an escape plan. He was working in the typhus laboratory, part of the medical experimentation block, and arranged for dead bodies of typhus victims to be exchanged for the condemned prisoners and then smuggled out. For help he first approached leaders of the camp's German Communist clique, but they did not wish to save those who were not in their group. Then he approached the head of the typhus laboratory, an SS officer “who had shown a good deal of pessimism about Germany's fate in the war” and who was persuaded to help if his own life would be spared by the Allies.

  The plan was for three men to be saved at first. The first two were already chosen, but there was debate about whether the third should be a Free French agent named Stéphane Hessel or the SOE agent Henri Frager; “after hesitation” Hessel was chosen. As the escapes were being planned, quite suddenly another list of names was published, and the men were ordered to be shaved. This was on October 4, and the following day, at four p.m., all, including Henri Frager, were executed. “They were all supremely brave and nobody showed any weakness,” said Bala-chowsky. Frager had negotiated with the Germans that this time the men be shot, not hanged.

  Vera passed on what she was learning to colleagues who she felt might need to know. “The attached document shows people it is intended to make disappear,” she wrote in a note referring to a paper brought back by “one of the Buchenwald boys.” She stated: “I believe the cross shows they are dead and those underlined that they are pending execution. I have spare copies should anyone require them.”


  She had also started settling the affairs of the dead. Casualty reports were filled out. A uniform draft letter to the next of kin was composed with blanks for the appropriate names. The letter was then sent to a junior officer to sign. Personal effects were also now returned. “Thank you for your note concerning Mrs Macalister. Her husband's kit is being dispatched today,” wrote Flight Officer Atkins. Hubbles notebook was sent to his family.

  The bureaucrats who had argued earlier about how to classify the missing were now wrangling about how to classify the dead. The War Office insisted that SOE dead should be classified “died as prisoners of war,” but Vera was determined they should be “killed in action.” She wrote: “It was one of the peculiar risks of SOE work that being in civilian clothing they were liable to be executed by the enemy… their execution was caused directly by their work for us. It is felt strongly that next of kin of these officers should be treated quite as generously as had their husbands fallen in battle.”

  Vera was also pushing finance officers regarding the status of FANY women and, in particular, asking who would pay for “possible claims arising from disabilities as a direct result of their treatment in enemy camps.”

  •

  On April 15, 1945, British forces reached the concentration camp at Belsen, north of Hanover, and soon hundreds of thousands of witnesses to atrocity were streaming over European borders. Senter's men in Paris were overwhelmed: “Warden to Senter,” signalled one. “Greatest possible confusion concerning repatriates from Germany. Stop. Some individuals interviewed by all and sundry including local press and others not seen at all and disappear into various parts of France, many in too sick condition for interviews. Stop. On constant lookout for people who may have news of our agents but no controlling body with whom we can work. Stop.”

  VICTIMS STACKED IN HEAPS AT BELSEN, headlines declared, but Vera had moved on to trace Belsen's living, and among the survivors was a Polish woman who had known a British prisoner there called Jacqueline Gauthier. Vera knew Jacqueline Gauthier to be Yvonne Rudellat, one of the first SOE women sent to France, who worked with Prosper. The Polish woman said “Jacqueline” had been marched to Belsen from Ravens-brück and when last seen was in an “awful condition” and suffering loss of memory. “She had arrived morally strong but became very ill, and by 10 April she knew she was dying,” wrote the woman. “I do hope she lived to know the camp was liberated so she rested quietly knowing her work had been of use and rewarded.” Vera urgently sought information on Rudellat from the Red Cross and from British forces now scouring the camp. Locating her was urgent, “not least because she is an important witness to the Prosper collapse.”

  For all the horror now emerging, Vera still clung to hope wherever she could. There had already been miraculous escapes. “Southgate, possibly alive,” Bernard Guillot had said, and not long afterwards came news that Maurice Southgate had indeed walked alive from Buchenwald. Yeo-Thomas, first reported dead at Buchenwald, had survived thanks to another Balachowsky escape plan, along with Harry Peulevé, one of F Section's best men. And then from Belsen Vera received copies of detailed camp records, including meticulously produced “nominal rolls” of inmates. On one list she found the name Jacqueline Gauthier. The record said she had still been at the camp four days after the liberation. Vera wrote: “I cannot believe that anyone can die or disappear without trace after the liberation.”

  A man believed to be the F Section agent Robert Sheppard was reported by a Frenchman early in April to have been seen at Dachau concentration camp. “His morale was wonderful,” said the returning prisoner. And when Dachau was liberated by the Americans on April 29, amid the thousands of corpses of people who had died the previous week were thirty-three thousand survivors, including Sheppard and his friend Brian Stonehouse. A few days later the two men stepped onto the tarmac at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, wearing American boots with their trousers tucked into them and decked out in yards of blue silk dotted with white wound around them as scarves. They had found the silk in the Industriehof, the workshop attached to the camp at Dachau. Vera was on the tarmac to meet them.

  “Close-shaven heads, hollow cheeked, very bright eyed. Both of them tall, needless to say, slim, Brian very dark brown eyes, long sensitive face. Bob, fair, blue-eyed, round amused robust face. With these two no emotion other than joy” was how Vera remembered their arrival fifty years later.

  “Smart in her uniform. Standing by a car. I think Buck was there too. Vera—obviously pleased to see us. Welcome home, boys. No emotion,” was how Robert Sheppard remembered Vera.

  “Did she ask you questions?” I asked him.

  “Not as I remember, no. And we would not have been able to tell her much at that time,” he said. “Suddenly we had come back to the normal world. The abnormal world was in the past—gone—and everything with it.”

  “When did you leave the normal world?”

  “We left the normal world in Paris. Even Paris with the Gestapo had been the normal world. Things happened there that were not nice. Often they were brutal. But relatively speaking, they had been normal. Then when the train went off to Germany, we had no idea what was going to happen. I had never heard of concentration camps. We travelled all night and next morning we stopped at Saarbrücken. And suddenly we entered Neuengamme. We realised at once we had left a normal world for another one where there were entirely different rules, a new mentality, another way of living—even between the prisoners; this was something new. The first morning they asked me to beat a prisoner in front of the others. He was a Russian. And I refused. And the SS officer, he took the stick and he went and he did it. And we had to adjust, but many didn't. I saw people who died within three or four days because they stopped believing. People committed a kind of suicide because they could not believe this world.

  “And then we went to Mauthausen and then to Natzweiler and Dachau, and so many people died we took no notice. And in this abnormal world there was no human contact with the SS, you see. We had no idea what the SS guards' names were. And there were rules, but there were no rules. Why were those others from SOE killed, and why were Brian Stonehouse and I allowed to live? We don't know. There is no answer.

  “Then, when we came back from the camps, we had to be careful what we said. We could see very quickly nobody wanted to know about the abnormal world. It was a strange feeling: we were not proud at all of what we had been through.”

  “Did Vera understand?”

  “I think that Vera had this reaction—she had an intelligence to understand without trying to know why. I expect that Vera, on her own, must have thought and analysed many things. But she had the intelligence never to ask a question which could have put us back in that situation. It is difficult to analyse, always, with Vera.”

  “Why did she choose to go and find out about the ‘abnormal world?”

  “I am not sure she wanted to know too much about it. I think she went with a feeling of responsibility. She was reacting—she had a personal responsibility, having been what she was in SOE. You might ask why did she enter SOE, knowing what she was going to do and sending people she didn't know to their deaths.”

  Of SOE agents not yet traced, the strongest hope lay with those in camps taken or about to be taken by the Russians in their continuing westward advance. It was now three months since the fortress prison of Ravitsch, on the German-Polish border, had been liberated, and not a word had been heard of the twenty-five agents there. When the Russians took the camps, there was no system for prisoner repatriation, and evidence now suggested that any prisoners found there were often left to make their way to freedom as best they could. Prisoners still appeared to be heading east towards Odessa rather than west, where they feared they might run into German lines. By the end of April the British military mission in Odessa had reported many POWs turning up. Remarkably, information had also somehow reached the offices of solicitors acting for an agent named John Hamilton, one of the SOE Ravitsch prisoners, saying he was safe in ho
spital in Odessa. Such news naturally inspired optimism in Baker Street. Vera was trying to check the report on Hamilton and wrote: “I am hopeful that all those whom we believe to have been overrun by the Russians in January 1945 in the Fortress of Ravitsch may be somewhere in Russia.” Reports of the bravery of SOE agents as they went to their deaths were also giving cause for pride. One uncorroborated story alleged that the agent Guy Bieler had so impressed his captors at Flossen-burg concentration camp that he received an SS guard of honour as he was marched to execution.

  But nothing caused greater optimism than the unexpected news of Francis Suttill that was brought from the camps by a returnee called Wing Commander Harry Day. He was no ordinary returnee. “Wings” Day was one of the masterminds of the great escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. On recapture he had been sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from where he had also escaped in September 1944, only to be returned to Sachsenhausen's Xellenbau, or prison block. It was there, in late January or early February 1945, that he saw Suttill and another SOE man, a racing driver named Charles Grover-Williams. “They were both well. They were in solitary confinement but able to communicate with others, as usual. They were receiving reasonable basic rations but not parcels.” Vera now immediately wrote to Margaret Suttill: “I am pursuing this clue and will certainly keep you informed if it should give results. In any case it is good news that at that time he was well.”

  If Suttill and Grover-Williams had survived until the liberation, they too might also be making their way towards Odessa. So encouraged was Buckmaster by this prospect that he offered to go to the Black Sea port at once himself to repatriate survivors. Showing a sudden active interest in the missing, he wrote that an SOE presence in Odessa was “the only likely way of seeing our people again in the reasonably near future (if at all).” Buckmaster, now backing Vera's demand, also insisted that names of the F Section missing—to date totalling 118—should be circulated to every relevant authority in Russia.