Sarah Helm

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

  “The four prisoners met for the first time again in the reception room and said that they had now been in solitary confinement for nine months.

  When they greeted one another they were delighted and surprised by how well they looked.”

  Vera then read about how Ott had handcuffed the prisoners together. “It was mentioned that the greatest care would have to be taken with this transport,” he said, and a colleague named Kriminal Sekretär Wassmer was placed in charge. Vera carefully underlined the name Wassmer. As she had suspected, Wassmer had supervised the second transport as well as the transport to Natzweiler.

  Allied bombing had already disturbed railway traffic, said Ott, so it was agreed that the prisoners should be taken by car from Karlsruhe to Bruchsal, where they would catch the train south. This arrangement suited Wassmer because his family lived in Bruchsal. He took the opportunity to leave the office the previous day in order to see his family, then met up with the group at Bruchsal station at two-thirty a.m., when they all caught the train to Stuttgart.

  As planned, Wassmer arrived at the station and had already bought the tickets, stated Ott. “At Stuttgart we had about one hour's wait. We got out and remained on the platform until we continued the journey. The prisoners stood a little aside and chatted together.”

  Waiting on the station platform, Ott expressed surprise to Wassmer that women were being sent to Dachau. He understood that Dachau was a camp for men only. He asked Wassmer “several times” whether Dachau was now taking women. “Wassmer, at last tired of my repeated question, showed me a telegram from the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), Berlin, and told me to read it.”

  The telegram Ott read said the women were to be “executed at Dachau” and was signed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA.

  Ott said he recalled that Wassmer had told him “this must be an important case since the telegram had been signed personally by ‘Ernst'— that is to say, Dr. Kaltenbrunner.” At this point Ott claimed he had begun to regret coming on the transport “as the four prisoners had made a good impression on me and I regretted their fate.”

  Vera then read how Ott had chatted to the girls on the next stage of the journey. He spoke in particular to the Englishwoman who spoke a little German.

  I did not tell them of the fate in store for them, on the contrary I tried to keep them in a happy mood. They wanted to know where they were being taken. Wassmer told them that they were being taken to a camp where much farming was done. They were not told that they were going to Dachau.

  The Englishwoman told me that all four were officers in the women's auxiliary forces. She said she had the rank of major and that one of her companions was a captain and two were lieutenants. On closer questioning she told me that she had been dropped by parachute in France and had worked in the secret service. One or two of them had been caught as they jumped in France for the third time. In France she said they had only spoken French in order not to be recognised as English.

  The train arrived in Munich, and from Munich they travelled on to Dachau, arriving after dark, at about ten p.m. “We then walked to the camp of Dachau and handed in the prisoners. After about fifteen minutes the prisoners were taken over by the camp officials.” Their possessions were handed over again, this time to the SS. There were comments, Ott recalled, about “pretty watches and jewellery, rings with sapphire stones and gold bangles.” This was the last that Ott saw of the women. He slept in the building above the camp gate, and when he awoke, Wassmer had already left and gone into the camp. When Wassmer returned, he told Ott he had seen the commandant and that the execution would take place at nine a.m. It was then about eight-thirty a.m. “Wassmer then left again as he had to report to the Kommandant once more. At about 10.30 am Wassmer returned again and said everything was finished. The four prisoners had been shot. He himself had read the death sentence to the prisoners.” Ott's statement continued:

  About the shooting itself Wassmer said the following: “The four prisoners had come from the barrack in the camp, where they had spent the night, into the yard where the shooting was to be done. Here he [Wassmer] had announced the death sentence to them.

  Only the Lagerkommandant and two SS men had been present. The German-speaking Englishwoman (the major) had told her companion of this death sentence. All four had grown very pale and wept; the major asked whether they could protest against the sentence. The Kommandant declared that no protest could be made against the sentence. The major had then asked to see a priest. The camp Kommandant refused this on the grounds that there was no priest in the camp.

  The four prisoners now had to kneel down with their heads towards a small mound of earth and were killed by the two SS, one after another by a shot through the back of the neck. During the shooting the two Englishwomen held hands and the two Frenchwomen likewise. For three of the prisoners the first shot caused death, but for the German-speaking Englishwoman a second shot had to be fired as she still showed signs of life after the first shot.

  After the shooting of these prisoners the Lagerkommandant said to the two SS men that he took a personal interest in the jewellery of the women and that this should be taken into his office.

  Vera then read that four prisoners had loaded the bodies onto a handcart. “Wassmer could not say what happened further with these bodies, but he thought that they had most probably been burned.” This was the end of Wassmer's account of the deaths, as reported by Ott, who went on to say that he had noted down the details of each woman on the back of an envelope that he kept for a long time with the intention of notifying their next of kin, but he had later destroyed it “as I myself was not very certain of the Gestapo.” He remembered the German-speaking Englishwoman well enough to describe her: she was about thirty-two with a full figure (she herself said she had gained thirty pounds in prison) with a pale, round face, full lips, and dark hair. He was describing Madeleine Damerment.

  “For me there was no doubt that Martine was already dead as soon as the war was over,” said Lisa Graf, at our meeting in her Paris flat. “Anyone who was not back by July 1945 was not coming back, that was certain. But you know, the curtain had come down on that period of my life. Those who did not close the curtain suffered badly.”

  I told Lisa how Vera kept hoping for several months after the end of the war. Lisa said Vera would not have hoped if she herself had been deported and seen the way things were.

  “But your Vera was Jewish, you say? Well, she went to look for them not because she had hope but because she wanted to see for herself how it had all happened and to understand. And when you are responsible like she was, you are responsible to yourself in front of yourself. She needed to know.”

  Then Lisa paused a moment. “But you see, I knew that Martine was dead way before the end of the war. If I tell you this, you will not believe it, but I knew even before she was dead. You know, when you are in prison, you are alone with your soul. So I made myself some playing cards out of old papers, and every Sunday I played them—to see what they might tell me. At first I saw nothing, and then I started to see things. I saw that I would leave the prison and go to a court and then, when Becker came to my cell and said, ‘You are leaving prison and going to a court,' I said, ‘I know.' She said, ‘How did you know?' So I said, ‘I know.' I was lucky. I had that guardian angel in the girl who looked like me.

  “Then, before I left, I wanted to play the cards for Martine. I did the cards, and I saw nothing. I played the cards again, and I saw something unclear. I played the cards a third time, and I saw this road and then death, and when I left Karlsruhe I cried as I knew I would never see her again.”

  What exactly did you see? I asked.

  “I saw a road and a death at the end.”

  “What was the death?”

  “The end. La noirceur—blackness. Horror. La chute. It was a road with a darkness and a hole at the end. Terminé. For me it was death—a terrible death. What it was I can't say, but in the end it was horrible.

  “I
saw that the day before I left Karlsruhe. We spoke through the wall. I said: ‘Je t'embrasse, je t'embrasse très fort.' I did not tell her, of course.

  Would it serve any purpose to tell her? You cannot tell somebody ‘You are going to die.' It is not possible.”

  Yolande Beekman's mother also knew that her daughter was dead, long before Vera ever told her. When I returned to London from Karlsruhe, I went to see Diana Farmiloe, Yolande s sister. She had promised to look for letters of Yolande s sent on to their mother by Vera, and I wanted to give Diana the picture drawn by Yolande in prison with her own blood.

  Diana's flat was in Kensington. It was a cold day, and Diana, at her front door, shivered and seemed anxious; builders had just discovered dry rot, she said, and she showed me where plaster had been removed in her living room to reveal underlying brickwork and timbers. She had had to cover everything with dust sheets, and she pulled back a cloth from a photograph of Yolande, with oval face, dark, shining eyes, and the palest complexion.

  I told Diana I had brought pictures drawn by Yolande for her to see. I explained that they had been drawn sometime early in 1944, when she was in prison in Karlsruhe. She had no ink. So she pricked her fingers and drew the pictures with her own blood.

  “Yolande loved to draw,” said Diana, and I put the picture down on the table next to Yolande's photograph while we began our search in Diana's bedroom for the letters.

  Using an aluminium stepladder, I reached up into a tiny cupboard full of Diana's possessions, all neatly packed and labelled “Stockings” and “Linen,” along with papers in bundles.

  “Something is stopping me finding these letters,” said Diana, and she then went to the other side of her bed and bent over, looking through some more promising plastic bags. Here she found Yolande s baptism papers. Yolande was baptised and married just before she went to France. Here were some old postcards. Diana showed me a photograph of herself and Yolande on a summer holiday at the YWCA on the Isle of Wight.

  Yolande s summer frock was nipped in around her tiny waist and had a sailor's collar. “Our mother sent us on our holidays to the YWCA because it was safe for girls,” Diana told me. “My mother was very protective of Yolande. She kept her working with her, making children's clothes. She embroidered beautifully. She was her first child. I think it was natural. It often happens that mothers of firstborn feel attached like that.” Her mother's protectiveness might have explained why Yolande didn't marry earlier, Diana said. Yolande met her husband, Jap Beekman, a Dutchman, at an SOE training school.

  I asked Diana what their mother thought when Yolande went to work with SOE.

  “We knew she had joined something she couldn't talk about, but we thought it was translation or something. My mother worried, but she was happy if Yolande was happy. That was the most important thing for her. Then Vera Atkins sent these letters on from Yolande saying she was happy and sending her love—that sort of thing.” Diana was thinking back. “I remember it was that word ‘shot' we could not take. That was the end, completely. So final.

  “And later, when eventually we worked it all out, I saw Vera Atkins, and I almost accused her. I said, ‘So you knew all along that she was captured and you sent these letters all that time.' She said, ‘Yes, but you must understand, I could not say' ” Diana looked up. “I always thought there was something in Vera Atkins—what it was I do not know— something that would not let out. And the terrible thing was that my mother always blamed herself for being too protective with Yolande when she was growing up. She said, ‘I wish I had not kept her so close.' My mother felt that if she had let her see more of the world, perhaps she would not have had the need to go off. Yolande so much wanted to do brave things.”

  Then Diana pulled out an old discoloured exercise book with handwriting in ink. She started reading from it. “Ah, this is my mother's diary written from when Yolande went missing,” said Diana. “You are probably not interested in that.” She started reading it a little. “What's this?” she said …“ ‘Do not avenge me I will avenge myself…” She seemed to sigh, and her shoulders slumped.

  “It's in French,” she said. “Can you read French?”

  I took the diary and went to the living room, sitting next to the table where I had placed Yolande's drawing. I could still see Diana through the door, sitting on her bed with her back to me, moving things around in plastic bags.

  I started to read the diary. “In the spring of 1944 I dreamed that my dear Yolande was lying on a bed of iron, flat on her stomach and crying and writing painfully with a bleeding finger.” The words were written in an almost childlike hand across the squares of this old exercise book. “And on the wall under the small table was the word Maman, and a voice said: ‘Yes, there are those who write with their blood.'

  I read the paragraph again: “Yolande was lying on a bed of iron, flat on her stomach and crying and writing painfully with a bleeding finger.” I looked up to where Diana was sitting, still shuffling through papers, and I tried to say how extraordinary it was that their mother had dreamed about Yolande, lying on an iron bed, writing in blood at exactly the time that Yolande was writing in blood on her iron bed in her prison cell. The pictures that I had found by chance in an elderly man's home in Germany, only two weeks earlier, were now lying on the table next to me. But when I tried to speak to Diana, I found for a moment I couldn't. She turned and saw me and came over straight away and took the diary and read it herself and said: “Yes, my dear, I know it is so terrible, it is, I know, my dear. You see, I am so glad you see how terrible it all is.”

  And then for the first time Diana looked at Yolande's drawings. “But it is not possible my mother could have known that she was writing in blood at this time. It is not possible she could have known,” she said over and over again.

  We carried on reading the rest of the diary, which described more dreams. In September, the month that Yolande died, her mother wrote: “I dreamed that Yolande was in a camp and policemen were looking at her with their hands in their pockets, and she was sitting down and started putting on her stockings, and she told me: ‘Do not take revenge. I will avenge myself

  And there was a description of another dream: “Yolande is on a bed. She is very thin. She is crying and screaming. I am holding her very, very tight.”

  On another page she wrote: “The one who reads this do not laugh at me. I observe my dreams and I try to see what it means. Anyway I am very happy when I dream about my daughter each time I see she is happy.”

  As soon as Vera had finished reading the statement of Christian Ott, she intensified her hunt for Max Wassmer. She soon located him in an internment camp, and under interrogation, he confirmed most of Ott's story. Vera then wrote a report to Norman Mott saying the case had been “cleared up” and attaching, as always, draft letters to next of kin. The first paragraph of the letters was the same for all three girls, with blanks for names left for the London official to fill in.

  It is with deepest regret that I have to inform you that your ——— was killed in the early hours of 13 September 1944 in the Camp of Dachau. According to what is believed to be a reliable report she was shot through the back of the head and death was immediate. The body was cremated in the Camp Crematorium.

  The second paragraph of Vera's draft continued: “As we have already informed you ———was captured on or about ———at———after many months of success and very gallant work. On one of the letters Vera noted in brackets: “This passage will have to be modified in the case of Madeleine Damerment who unhappily was captured on landing.” Vera then devised a form of words to disguise the fact that Madeleine had been dropped by F Section directly into German hands. Instead of saying Madeleine was captured “after many months of success and very gallant work,” the Damerment letter should say she was captured “when she had volunteered to return to France on a special mission in the company of two British officers.”

  Then this letter would continue the same way as the others, concluding with the co
nsolation that “until the end they were cheerful and of good faith.”

  20.

  Dr. Goetz

  In early October 1946 Vera returned from Germany and was on the road to Colchester, in Essex. The bulk of her war crimes work concluded, she was glad to be back in England. Her honorary commission in the WAAF would expire at the end of November, and her mission in Germany could not be extended further.

  There were still unsolved cases, but they largely lay in the Russian zone, which by the autumn of 1946 had been almost entirely closed off to the Western Allies. Even Vera could not break through the new Iron Curtain.

  Francis Suttill's trail—along with those of the Ravitsch boys and the MI6 man Frank Chamier (Frank of Upway 282)—were among those Vera had been forced to abandon as the remaining evidence lay in the Russian zone. Before she left Germany she had found a Sachsenhausen orderly who said Francis Suttill was executed, but the witness had only glimpsed what happened through a chink in a cell door. Suttill was hanged, not shot, he said, but his only proof was that there was no blood on his clothes, which he had the job of collecting.

  The Russians were planning to hold a trial of the Sachsenhausen camp staff, but Vera had been unable to find out when, and she knew there was little hope that any news of the trial would reach the West.

  I discovered that Vera did, however, receive news of the Sachsenhausen trial shortly after it took place in October 1947, thanks only to a resourceful young Haystack investigator and a British journalist who defected to Moscow. The story was recounted to me by the Haystack man, Sacha Smith, now living in Devon. Smith worked for the British war crimes unit in Berlin as liaison officer with the Russians, although by 1947 almost no information was coming through from his Soviet counterparts.