Sarah Helm

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

  After arriving back in London from her four-day trip, Vera lobbied to return to Germany on a long-term basis, but many obstacles remained. As anticipated, SOE was to be closed for good at the end of the year, and no government department would henceforth have any responsibility at all for SOE affairs. Officials pointed out therefore that even if Vera's mission were deemed worthwhile, there was nobody to “carry” her—in other words, to pay for her mission. And there was considerable objection still to the very principle of a woman carrying out such a task. But then the evidence of a young intelligence officer named Prince Yurka Galitzine swiftly changed minds.

  Just as signals intelligence had, from the start of the war, uncovered far more about Nazi atrocities than anyone had been told, so much intelligence about war crimes gathered after D-Day was also kept secret. As Allied armies began to push through France in August 1944, SHAEF had sent specialist officers to gather “political intelligence” about the German occupation of France and in particular about war crimes. One of these officers was Yurka Galitzine, a twenty-five-year-old captain, son of a former military attaché at the Imperial Russian embassy in London and his English wife.

  Appalled by much of what he found as he progressed through France, Galitzine was most horrified by the ghastly remains of the little concentration camp of Natzweiler, hidden away among the spectacular Vosges Mountains in Alsace.

  Natzweiler, as Galitzine discovered, was specifically designated as a camp for prisoners who were to disappear under the Nacht und Nebel order. Galitzine immediately sent an official report on Natzweiler to SHAEF, anticipating an outcry. He expected an outraged reaction in London in particular, because his report had uncovered the death of at least one British woman at the camp. He had few details, but he had gathered enough evidence to write that “one day three women spies were brought to the camp and shot in the sandpit. They were described as being one Englishwoman and two Frenchwomen.”

  But Galitzine's report was buried. Outraged by the official silence, Galitzine, a former journalist on the Daily Express, leaked the story. By autumn 1945 word of his findings reached a charismatic young SAS intelligence officer named Major Eric “Bill” Barkworth, who had men missing after two operations in the Vosges in September 1944. Armed with Galitzine's report, Barkworth immediately set off for Germany with a team of investigators. He promised to signal any findings to Galitzine's office in Eaton Square, London, where, under the eaves, Galitzine had installed signallers, including a man named Freddie Oakes, to receive Barkworth's reports.

  In a letter to Vera in 1985, Oakes said he had never been able to forget taking those signals. He had kept a diary, which his son, William Oakes, showed me:

  We established ourselves in an attic room and ran an aerial between some chimneys. The traffic we handled was quite traumatic. In one incident eight members of the SAS regiment, who had been held and interrogated for several months, were manacled and driven in a lorry into a large wood. Here a hole had been scraped—not more than a couple of feet deep. One at a time they were unchained, stripped, taken to the edge of the hole, and shot in the back of the head. After the first one had been shot, subsequent victims could see the bodies of their friends for a moment before they too were shot. The German driver of the lorry stated that none of the men showed any fear, and none trembled even though it was a cold day in October. None spoke except the last man—a signaller I knew—who told the SS squad they were “bastards” and would be hounded down for what they were doing.

  Oakes also recalled receiving the signal about the women who died at Natzweiler. “Evidence showed,” he wrote, “that one of the women woke up as she was about to be put in the oven and scratched the face of the camp doctor who was carrying out the murders.”

  One day in early December 1945 Vera paid a visit to Yurka Galitzine. She found a striking figure, at least six feet four inches tall, with dark good looks and impeccable English public school manners. Galitzine was surprised to discover a WAAF officer knocking at his door. She did not say how she had heard about him, but he thought she might have seen a story about his report on Natzweiler in the Daily Express. She asked directly about the report. “I believe you have evidence of the death of young women at Natzweiler?” Galitzine could help her little with identities except to say he had heard the women might have been brought to Natzweiler from Karlsruhe.

  Galitzine had heard of at least two British men who had been imprisoned at Natzweiler, one of whom, rumour had it, had drawn sketches of inmates. The sketches were signed “J.B. Stonehouse.” Galitzine had no idea who J. B. Stonehouse was, but Vera most certainly did. Her own agent Brian Stonehouse had been in Natzweiler and in civilian life had been a graphic artist for Vogue. But Stonehouse had certainly never spoken about women arriving at the camp. Perhaps he had suppressed the entire episode.

  Vera now wrote to Stonehouse, asking him to think back to Natzweiler and enclosing photographs of her missing girls to jog his memory. She also arranged for photos of her missing women to be sent to Bill Barkworth in Germany so that the SAS major could show them to any witnesses from Natzweiler he might trace. Before the end of December Galitzine was back in touch with Vera to say Barkworth had signalled from Germany that he had tracked down an important witness to the women's deaths at Natzweiler. The witness was a man named Franz Berg, who had worked in the camp. Galitzine already had a summary of Berg's statement, which had been signalled to Eaton Square; the full text was delivered by courier a little later.

  I Franz Berg of Block 1.7 No. 29, 3rd Floor, Mannheim, Germany, make oath and say as follows: I am a waiter by trade living in Mannheim. During my life I have received so far as I can remember twenty-two sentences of imprisonment. I cannot remember what they were all for but I can recall two cases of theft, several of obstructing the police and of causing bodily injury, and the last sentence of two years which I received for procuration.

  Berg went on to state that he had been transferred from prison to prison and found himself sent to work in the quarry at Natzweiler in 1942. The following year he was given a job as a stoker in the camp crematorium, which had just been built.

  “The first crematorium outside the camp used to work on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but when the new crematorium was opened we used to burn bodies about three times a week. Peter Straub was in charge of the crematorium.”

  He then described an incident in which women were killed at the camp:

  In June 1943 I can remember having been told by an Unterschar-fiihrer that four Jewesses had been given injections by the SS medical orderly of the SS camp hospital.

  Peter Straub was present as he was at all executions that took place at Natzweiler.

  Next morning in the course of my duties I had to clear the ashes out of the crematorium oven. I found a pink woman's stocking garter on the floor near the oven.

  Berg then stated that nearby he had also found empty glass ampoules of a drug called Evipan on top of a pile of coffins.

  Vera read on as Berg described the arrival of four women at Natzweiler in July 1944.

  The next women to be killed by injection as opposed to gassing were two English and two French women. These were brought to the cells in the crematorium building one afternoon in July 1944.

  Peter Straub told me about six o'clock on the evening of the day on which these women arrived to have the crematorium oven heated to its maximum by nine-thirty p.m. and then to disappear. He told me also that the doctor was going to come down and give some injections. I knew what this meant.

  Berg then went to his cell, which, his statement suggested, was actually inside the crematorium building. He and the other two men— Alex, a Russian from Leningrad, and a prisoner named Georg Fuhrmann— all heard what happened. And Fuhrmann even managed to catch glimpses.

  Fuhrmann, who occupied the highest bunk, was able to look through the fanlight without standing up. He whispered to me that “they” were bringing a woman along the corridor. We heard low voices in the next room and then the noise o
f a body being dragged along the floor, and Fuhrmann whispered to me that he could see people dragging something on the floor, which was below his angle of vision through the fanlight.

  At the same time that this body was brought past, we heard the noise of heavy breathing and low groaning combined.

  The next two women were also seen by Fuhrmann, and again we heard the same noises and regular groans as insensible women were dragged away.

  The fourth, however, resisted in the corridor. I heard her say: “Pourquoi?”

  Berg said he then heard a voice, which he recognised as that of one of the camp doctors, say: “Pour typhus.”

  “We then heard the noise of a struggle and muffled cries of the woman. I assumed that somebody held a hand over her mouth. I heard this woman being dragged away too. She was groaning louder than the others.”

  Berg's cell was close enough to the oven room to allow him to hear the oven doors being closed. “From the noise of the crematorium oven doors which I heard, I can state definitely that in each case the groaning women were placed immediately in the crematorium oven.”

  When all the senior camp staff had gone away and the building was quiet again, Berg, Alex, and Fuhrmann came out of their cell. “We went to the crematorium oven, opened the door, and saw that there were four blackened bodies within.”

  The statement ended:

  From the photographs shown to me I can state with the utmost certainty that one of the women who I saw when brought to the camp in the afternoon at 3.30 as I have described was the same as that shown to me whose photograph is marked Vera Leigh. I believe that another was the same as that whose photograph has been shown to me marked Inayat Khan. I remember also that a third was dark-haired and fatter than the others.

  Vera took Berg's statement to her superiors, who needed no more convincing that her search in Germany must begin immediately. If this evidence that British women agents had been burned alive in a concentration camp turned out to be true, it would be impossible to keep quiet. Somebody, it was agreed, should be given the task of finding out exactly who these blackened bodies were. The person chosen should be competent but, above all, discreet.

  Within days of the arrival of the new evidence, it was agreed that Vera should return to Germany, funded by MI6. Once in post she should write a monthly report to Major Norman Mott, formerly of SOE's security directorate and now appointed to handle any residual SOE affairs while the office was closing down. For operational purposes, however, Vera would be attached in Germany to the war crimes unit of the judge advocate general's department at the British Army HQ in Bad Oeyn-hausen, under Group Captain Tony Somerhough. Within a few days it was also agreed that Vera should be promoted from flight officer to squadron officer to give her the extra authority she would need to get things done in the occupied zones.

  Before leaving London, Vera handed over all her F Section files containing details of next of kin to Norman Mott's staff. Every family now received a terse round-robin informing them that “the office” was “ceasing to exist” and giving a new War Office address for enquiries. Vera found time to write a more personal letter to the families of the Karlsruhe girls, saying they were last seen alive at the jail but giving little more information and not mentioning that she was investigating whether any of them might have died at a camp named Natzweiler. She then emptied her store cupboard, sending photographs and other personal items of the agents to their families. A brown-paper parcel containing Violette's camel-hair coat was sent to her mother, Mrs. Bushell, along with a brief note from Vera saying: “We are unfortunately still without further news.” Vera left Baker Street for the last time on January 8, 1946, with a list of fifty-two missing SOE agents, of which most were from F Section. Twelve of the F Section agents still missing were women. She had been given three months in which to discover their fate.

  15.

  Following Tracks

  United States War Crimes Liaison Detachment. Headquarters British Army of the Rhine. European Theater. The following British Military personnel is proceeding to Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Karlsruhe, Baden Baden (French Zone), and Munich on an important mission in connection with war crimes.

  “Squadron Officer V M Atkins 9913. On completion of your mission you will proceed to your proper station. No per diem is authorised.”

  Whether she liked it or not, Vera's life was now to be governed by movement orders. Pieces of paper allowed her to cross between zones, to enter the internment camps, and to speak to CROWCASS. Signed chits even granted access to billets or a meal—important if, as in Vera's case, orders excluded a per diem.

  On January 9, 1946, when Vera arrived in Bad Oeynhausen to take up her post, she was shown to her billet, a bare and extremely cold room in a villa, and then to her office in a similar house nearby. The office had a chair and a desk, on which were an Anglepoise lamp and an upturned foil tin for an ashtray. On the wall was a large map of Germany. The ration cigarettes on offer were not to Vera's taste (she smoked Senior Service), and she had brought too few warm clothes. But at last she was in the place she needed to be for her investigation.

  Vera spent her first few days becoming acquainted with the war crimes legal staff and the all-important Haystack men. Haystack was the name of a group of highly motivated Nazi hunters, mostly volunteer German or Austrian exiles, usually Jewish, who were capable of “finding a needle in a haystack” by tracking Nazi war crimes suspects hiding out in the German hills or mountains or, just as likely, amid the rubble of bombed cities.

  Few of the young officers Vera met at Bad Oeynhausen knew much about her secret mission, and fewer had heard of SOE. Some were put out that a woman had arrived to pull rank, while others were simply bemused by the sudden appearance in their midst of this self-assured, mysterious WAAF officer.

  Then, as soon as Vera had secured the paperwork to enter the U.S. zone, she acquired a driver and car from the pool and headed south. She spent a day in the visitors' gallery of the Nürnberg courthouse and took a tour of Dachau concentration camp, which had already been converted by the Americans into a museum with waxwork figures for SS guards. Vera was now eager to start work. She asked her driver, Corporal Job Trenter, to press on to Karlsruhe. It was snowing.

  After she had read the evidence of Franz Berg, Vera's priority on arriving in Germany had never been in question: it was to find out which, if any, of her girls might have been among those murdered in the crematorium at Natzweiler. She had known since May 1945 that several SOE women had travelled from Paris to Germany on May 11, 1944, and were first interned in Karlsruhe. Odette Sansom, who had been on the transport and was the only one to make it home, had identified Andrée Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Eliane Plewman, Diana Rowden, Yvonne Beekman, and one other female agent. Although Odette had failed to identify the seventh woman, Vera had come to believe that she could have been Nora Inayat Khan. According to Odette, some of these women were, like her, then taken east, possibly even to Poland or Russia. Vera believed that if this was true, those women might still be alive. Before leaving for Germany, however, she had received her long-awaited reply from Brian Stonehouse, which contained startling new information on the women held at Natzweiler.

  Brian Stonehouse had survived four concentration camps: Neuen-gamme, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, and Dachau. This in itself was remarkable, but given that he was a Jew, his survival was astonishing. Since his return in May 1945, Stonehouse had passed much useful information on to Vera. He had told her, for example, about a dead British airman whose body he saw one day lying naked outside the crematorium, apparently brought into the camp in an SS car and dumped. Stonehouse decided to draw the body before it was burned. He had subsequently lost the sketch, but he described the dead man to Vera—typical English face, fair hair, and small nose—and she had passed the information to the Air Ministry.

  Now, only after Vera's urgent prompting, did he at last recall that he had also seen some English girls—three, he thought—enter the camp in July 1944 and walk righ
t past him on the way to the crematorium. Not only had Stonehouse suddenly dug up this long-buried memory but he had managed to summon up what they looked like, and out of the same letter had tumbled two artist's sketches—one of a girl whom Vera recognised and one of a girl she did not.

  Posted in Belgium, where he was now working with the Allied Control Commission, Stonehouse's letter began: “Dear Vera, My sincerest apologies for this shocking delay but since my return from Brussels I have been laid up in bed with flu (who?), you know, GRIPPE! Anyway Vera a Happy and Prosperous Year.” He went on: “I have been thinking hard about your corpses … I have been jogging my memory to try and picture your missing girls.”

  He then gave descriptions of two he remembered and matched the descriptions to the two drawings.

  “No. 1,” he wrote on the top left-hand corner of the first sketch and underlined it. The girl in the drawing looked conventionally English. A schoolteacher, perhaps, or a secretary, she was smart and had a purposeful, leggy stride with head held high. She was carrying a suitcase and had a distinctive bow in her hair at the back. Vera knew immediately who it was. She had last seen Diana Rowden on June 13, 1943, when she took her to Tangmere airfield with Nora. She had last heard from her just before she was captured at Clairvaux in November of that year.

  Without ever naming her—because he had never met any of these girls and knew none of their real names—Stonehouse had also described Diana to perfection.

  No. 1 was middle height, a little older I should say than I was then (25) with short blonde mousy hair tied with what I took to be a piece of Scottish tartan silk ribbon, wearing a light grey flannel suit—the coat a shortish swagger model—obviously English, as was her face with a good humoured, kindly expression and a defiant look, which included that pathetic piece of gay silk in her hair—she had obviously been in jail quite a while—as she had no lipstick— and her face was rather pale.