Sarah Helm

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

  “I think Otto Preis was the professional bumper-off and may have been involved in the killing of the three women whose fate is still unknown,” Vera wrote in a note at the time.

  Finding Gestapo officers, however, was not easy. At its height the Karlsruhe Gestapo numbered 350 men. Run by a committed Nazi ideologue, Joseph Gmeiner, it was such an efficient operation that early in the war the Karlsruhe region was declared the first to have cleansed itself of Jews. Just days before the city of Karlsruhe was taken by the Allies, the lower ranks of the Karlsruhe Gestapo were ordered to form into a Wer-wolfgruppe, retreating to a camp deep in the Black Forest. More senior men transferred to new offices further behind the lines, at Freiburg, Offenburg, Rosenfeld, and Moosbach. When defeat looked certain, these senior officers went to ground, usually in the American zone—in rural areas or in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. If they were to be caught, they wanted to be sure to fall into American hands and not into the vengeful hands of the French.

  Vera hoped eventually that the top men who issued the orders would be brought to book, but her enquiries could not wait for them to be found. Their foot soldiers, who carried out those orders, she hoped would be quicker to trace. In March her three-month stint in Germany had been extended for another three months. She had been given until June to solve this case, but it was already the middle of May.

  Five months after her arrival in Germany, Vera had achieved a great deal. As well as gathering evidence for trials at Flossenburg, where fifteen F Section men were now known to have died, and Mauthausen, where nine were killed, she had cleared up the deaths at Ravensbrück, and preparations for the Natzweiler trial were now well advanced. In London Vera's work had been winning high praise. As Norman Mott wrote in a letter, her results had been most satisfactory, especially given the “skimpy catch as you can conditions” in which she was operating. Even the head of SOE, Colin Gubbins, now a major-general, had written an effusive testimonial, and thanks to a further testimonial from Tony Somerhough, Mott had let Vera know unofficially that she was more than likely to secure an OBE.

  Within Whitehall there was also satisfaction that Vera's results were defusing criticism about missing women agents. As Mott wrote to her, there had been “a fair amount of stir in the press recently, mainly arising out of Szabo's case and apparently engineered by her father. This has led to enquiries in some quarters about what action had been taken and we have luckily been in a position to make an effective reply.”

  There was, nevertheless, much still to do. Vera was battling not only with bureaucracy in the Allied zones but with British bureaucracy too. A frustrating task was clearing up the affairs of the dead and in particular producing evidence for death certificates for the FANY women. Because they had no military status, they had to be certified dead under civilian rules, requiring independent witnesses of death, which in these cases were hard to come by. In the case of the Natzweiler girls Vera had even had to ask Dr. Rohde, the camp doctor who had administered lethal injections, to sign death certificates before he was hanged. Had the girls had any military status, such regulations would have been overridden, as they always were for service personnel in time of war. Such matters, as Vera complained to Mott, were “taking a considerable amount of time.” Meanwhile there were no new leads on the Karlsruhe Gestapo.

  Then, at last, came a breakthrough. Haystack reported that the French had picked up a Gestapo man named Helmuth Späth, a character “of the worst possible kind,” according to the liaison officer, Peter Davies. A veteran of the Einsatzgruppen, the elite Nazi murder squads who had swept east with the invasion of Russia in June 1941, Späth was said to have the blood of at least two hundred Jews on his hands, all killed at Rawa Rusha in Ukraine. Charles Kaiser, the Haystack man, had already been up to Reutlingen to interrogate Späth, and the SS officer was talking.

  Späth knew nothing himself about the Englishwomen, but he knew who did, and Haystack were already acting on his leads. One senior Karlsruhe Gestapo officer had been traced to his home, but his wife had not seen him for six months, although she had heard from neighbours that he had been arrested on the Danish border. Her neighbours heard the news listening to a German radio broadcast giving locations and fates of German POWs. Another Gestapo man had disappeared after “seeking employment with the Americans,” according to one of his friends. And several names given to the Americans for checking against their rogues' gallery had come back “rogues not met.”

  But thanks to Kaiser's interrogations of Späth, Vera secured vital descriptions, including one for Hermann Rösner, who had a broad face with bulging eyes and was aged about forty-five. A check with the search bureau suggested he might be in U.S. Camp 75, but the central locator of Camp 75 came back “no trace.” Vera had a description for Preis too: he was said to look like a butcher and speak the regional dialect.

  At the end of the month Vera had made significant progress, and ten suspects were to be extradited from the U.S. zone.

  Thanks to Späth, Vera also now had her first significant clue as to the whereabouts of Hans Kieffer, of the Sicherheitsdienst in Paris, whom she very much wanted to interrogate. Kieffer, as she had by now established, had himself been a member of the Karlsruhe Gestapo before he moved to Paris. His connections with Karlsruhe obviously explained the curious decision to send the SOE women to a prison in that city. Presumably the arrangement suited Kieffer simply because he could easily reinterrogate them on visits home.

  Späth, who had known Kieffer, said he had probably retreated to Offenburg and might now be in the Bodensee area, but he refused to say more. Vera put an urgent new search order out for a Hans Josef Kieffer. The accompanying description stated that he was thought to have a roundish face and dark curly hair. He sometimes wore glasses and was of medium height and athletic build. He had two daughters and a son, also called Hans Kieffer, serving in the Waffen-SS, and a search order was also put out for his son.

  Hildegard Kieffer told me that in the summer of 1946 her father was hiding out in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps.

  It had taken me more than a year to track down Hans, Gretel, and Hildegard Kieffer. Had I not found their names and dates of birth in the Karlsruhe archives, they would have been impossible to locate.

  Hildegard, the youngest daughter, now aged seventy-one, explained that after the German retreat from Paris, in August 1944, Hans Kieffer first stayed briefly in Strasbourg, then moved back across the German border to Offenburg, and in early 1945 he set up an office in Rosenfeld, in southern Baden. The Kieffers' family home in Karlsruhe had been destroyed by a bomb, so they went to Rosenfeld to join their father. His wife, Margarete, was dying of cancer. Then when the German collapse was imminent, Kieffer retreated further. “He just came to us one day to say goodbye,” said Hildegard. “We didn't know where he was going. It was, of course, a painful goodbye.” Hildegard, though, was determined to find out where her father was and heard a few months later that he was in hiding in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with a colleague, Karl Haug. Kieffer and Haug had been members of the same gymnastics club as boys, and Haug had worked for Kieffer in Paris.

  “I hitched a lift to Garmisch with the Americans. I found him working in a hotel as a cleaner and stayed with him for two weeks. I think he expected to be caught by then. He was a little worried because his friend, Karl Haug, had left to go home.” Hildegard explained that Haug, who was her godfather, had five children and felt he must get back to them. “I know my father was worried that Haug would be caught, and then perhaps he would be made to talk.”

  Many of the Gestapo men now being rounded up were found in Karlsruhe itself. Local men, they had been drawn home to their families, hoping that with the swollen population they would not be noticed. All had said they had been acting on orders, and by meticulously piecing together their stories, Vera now understood the complex Gestapo command structure right up to the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin. Orders, even for everyday matters, always came direct from Berlin and were then marke
d for the appropriate department: foreign workers; Marxist and reactionary groups; Jews; or counterespionage. Any orders concerning spies came from the desk in Berlin of a man named Horst Kopkow. It was Kopkow, Vera learned, who ordered every Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” and who signed every protective custody order used for spies. Kopkow was fastidious and always required “receipts” for bodies when executions had taken place, except when the cases were N+N, in which case special secret procedures were enforced. Even the smallest decisions appeared to spring from Kopkow in Berlin—for example, whether a prisoner should be given a “harsh interrogation.” This, as ordered by Kopkow, meant twelve strokes with a horsewhip, which, as one captive put it, “naturally referred to the number of strokes which could be given in succession and not their repetition.” Vera also learned that Kopkow s department had a secret Nachrichtendienst, or news section, which handled matters about which nobody was to know.

  From these latest interrogations Vera heard several times that the Karlsruhe Gestapo always handled women's cases with “special care.” If women were to be sent anywhere, the chief, Joseph Gmeiner, would send one of his women office staff along on the transport, to deal with the female prisoners' “special needs.”

  Vera therefore arranged to see the Gestapo's women typists and clerks. Lili Simon, a Gestapo secretary, said she had indeed gone on such transports to care for the women, but not in September 1944. She had gone on an earlier journey with women prisoners to Natzweiler, with a colleague named Max Wassmer, who was in charge of transport. Quite unintentionally, therefore, Vera found herself returning to the Natzweiler story. She had never established how the four women had reached the camp, but now Lili Simon filled in this missing chapter.

  “I met the four prisoners and their luggage in the hall of the station in Karlsruhe. They were handcuffed two together. We took the express train as far as Strasbourg and then got a local train. During the journey the prisoners asked where they were going, and Wassmer said they were being taken to a camp and that they would be expected to work. They talked about how they would be glad to get away from peeling potatoes now they had left Karlsruhe prison. The surrounding country was lovely, and the women enjoyed it and looked forward to working.” Lili said she was ordered to leave the train at Schirmeck and return to Karlsruhe. “I did not know they were being taken to a camp in order to be executed.”

  Not only had Lili Simon described the journey to Natzweiler, she had also given Vera another lead in her hunt for the second group of women. If Max Wassmer accompanied the first group, perhaps he also accompanied the second group, whose destination was still unknown.

  Before Vera could follow any new leads, however, she had to take a complete break from her ongoing investigation to give evidence at the Natzweiler trial itself, which was to be held at the Zoological Gardens in Wuppertal, starting on May 29, 1946. On the eve of the trial Vera's anxiety about publicity was intense. Everything had been done in London to try to keep “this disgusting business,” as Norman Mott put it, out of the papers. Now it was up to Vera to dampen publicity once the trial had begun.

  Vera was the first witness to take the stand, and she named each of the four victims: Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel, and Nora Inayat Khan. But before she did so, she had secured the agreement of the court that the names of the dead be withheld from publication, on the grounds that this would spare the anguish of their next of kin. The claim that withholding names was to spare such feelings was, however, to say the least, disingenuous on Vera's part. The families themselves had no objection to publicising the names. Mrs. Rowden had written to say Diana's name could be publicised. “My pain is too deep and my loss too great to mind seeing it in print. I am convinced that the only possible further pain I could suffer would be if the camp officials are let off.” Vera Leigh's half brother had actually stated he thought it “preferable” for the full story to be published. Furthermore, suppressing names in news reports could not possibly spare the families pain, as each of them knew by now that their daughters, sisters, or fiancées had died at Natzweiler. The official letters they had received had glossed over the brutal facts, but when these facts appeared in newspaper reports and when they saw the camp named in the reports as Natzweiler, they knew only too well that it was their loved ones who were being referred to.

  The only real purpose served by suppressing names was to curb any detailed press interest in the cases of the individual women and thereby reduce the unwelcome questions about their recruitment and deployment by SOE. And from the point of view of the “old firm,” the publicity was not “too averse,” as Mott observed to Vera in a letter summarising the coverage.

  “British women burned alive” was a headline in the Daily Telegraph on May 30, 1946, but the story did not make front pages, and careful briefing of journalists, arranged by Vera at Wuppertal, meant SOE itself was not exposed to any close scrutiny as a result of the case.

  The German defence lawyer, Dr. Grobel, had, as anticipated, argued in court that international law allowed for the execution of irregular combatants, and he invited the court to “consider this case from the point of view that it was a normal and simple execution of spies.”

  Dr. Grobel's words, however, were barely reported in the press. Instead, a “WAAF officer” (Vera's name was also withheld) was quoted as saying “the women were not spies.”

  Mott did, however, point out to Vera one piece of unfortunate coverage: a gossip columnist writing in the Star had reported comments of “your old friend Mr. Bushell.” Mott wrote: “The gist of which was that Mr. B noticed that the names of the four girls had not been published at the behest of ‘officialdom' which had felt that it would be distressing to the relatives. He went on to say that as father of Violette Szabo he was sure that this was not a correct decision and he felt that the utmost publicity should be given to those who carried out duties of this nature and whose sacrifices, as far as he could see, were not being recognised by the War Office.”

  The leniency of the sentences also caused a stir. Only the camp doctor, Werner Rohde, received a death sentence. Franz Berg was sentenced to five years in prison. Peter Straub, the executioner, was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Fritz Hartjenstein, the commandant, received a life sentence.

  On the sentencing, Vera pointed out to Mott: “I was at Wuppertal during the entire time of the trial, and I am satisfied that the sentences were perfectly fair. It should be borne in mind that the people in the dock were not all directly concerned with the killing and a number of those directly concerned with the killing were not in the dock.” Furthermore, many of the accused would be tried on other counts, when their sentences would almost certainly be death, she said—an observation that was soon borne out.

  On her return to Bad Oeynhausen Vera found more notes from Hed-wig Müller pleading for news of “her Martine” and enclosing little stencilled drawings and gifts, and a letter from Tom Plewman, Eliane's husband, asking if he should go to Poland in person to search for his wife. Vera also had to deal with an awkward letter from Cicely Lefort's husband. Witnesses had told Vera that Cicely had received a letter in Ravensbrück from her husband, seeking a divorce, just before she was gassed. Vera had made her views of Dr. Lefort's behaviour known to him, and now he was pleading for her understanding.

  Here also was a statement from American investigators, taken from a Karlsruhe Gestapo man named Christian Ott. In the very first lines of his statement Ott revealed where Madeleine Damerment, Yolande Beek-man, and Eliane Plewman were taken after they left Karlsruhe prison, and what he said was not at all what Vera had expected: “Statement of Christian Ott; born 23.10.1886 in Blaubeuren, living in Stuttgart: ‘It became known that a transport was to leave Karlsruhe for Dachau.'

  By mid-1946 each Nazi concentration camp had given its own version of horror. Dachau, opened in 1933, largely for German Communists, was the first such camp. As a prototype of barbarity, it had long held a special resonance; positioned on the edge of Munich
in the heart of Bavaria, not hidden away like Natzweiler, it was there for all to see.

  Vera had visited Dachau when she first arrived in Germany, when she found it had already been turned into a macabre waxwork museum, before its story had yet been told. Never had she imagined that she might return there to look for her girls. She had been mentally prepared to accept that Otto Preis's anonymous murder might have brought about their end. But she was not prepared for Dachau.

  And yet from the moment Vera started reading Ott's statement, her agonised speculation of recent weeks was suddenly all set aside. Packed with authentic detail that only an eyewitness could provide, Ott's evidence gave no reason to doubt what he was saying. Even the reason he gave for remembering what happened sounded authentic. He volunteered to accompany the transport to Dachau so that on the way back he could stop off at Stuttgart and visit his family.

  There was one detail in Ott's statement that jarred as Vera read it. Throughout his evidence he talked of transporting “four” prisoners, whereas Vera was concerned with only the three who had remained at Karlsruhe. Ott appeared to suggest that the fourth prisoner had been held at Pforzheim prison, close by, and had been brought to join the other three before the transport to Dachau. But this inconsistency did not, in Vera's view, lessen the overall credibility of his story, and she swiftly read on.

  “On 23.8.44 towards 2 o'clock in the morning I drove from my office, 28 Ritterstrasse, with a light van and two officials to the prison to fetch the four prisoners. The person on night duty brought the four prisoners into the reception room,” said Ott.

  “In the reception room of the prison I saw the four prisoners for the first time. They were four women in civilian clothes aged between 24 and 32 and all were well dressed.” He said he could not remember their names. Before departure they were given all their personal effects, and it became evident to Ott that “they must have come from better origin. One of the prisoners—the oldest—spoke good German. Through questioning them I came to know that two of the prisoners were English, a third was French born and a fourth [also French born] was Dutch through marriage.