Sarah Helm

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

  Evidence from the newly opened files showed that at the end of the war as many as one-third of F Section circuits were penetrated as a result of radio deception alone. But the actual penetration of F Section was, of course, far wider, thanks to Henri Déricourt. A total of fifty-four British agents who landed in France passed through his hands. All were potentially contaminated, as were any other agents they contacted, as each one of them could have been trailed. The true extent of the penetration of F Section circuits on the eve of D-Day was therefore incalculable and clearly concerned MI5's counterintelligence experts when they considered the disaster after the war.

  MI5's own T. A. Robertson, known as TAR, who helped run the much-acclaimed British double-cross system, under which German agents captured in Britain were “turned,” commented in August 1945 on how SOE had failed to use properly “wireless finger printing,” whereby the agents' messages could be checked against an electronic trace. Had they done so, he said, “they would surely have been able to discover that their own agents were not operating the sets.”

  After Christmas Dr. Goetz was worried that London had not been taken in by his reply to the Christmas questions over Nora's radio. “At this time my own impression was that although London were answering my messages they were not really deceived. At one reception for example we had asked for twelve containers but only one was dropped. This strengthened my view that they had guessed.”

  Then London seemed convinced again. “At the next reception for which we asked for 500,000 francs we received precisely this amount. I therefore changed my opinion and continued to work the set and ask for large receptions. In the early months of 1944 we received not only a great deal of material but also agents.” He remembered arranging over Nora's radio for three agents to drop in February; among them came France Antelme, as well as a woman. Antelme was in a “towering rage” when he realised what had happened, but Kieffer was very excited when Antelme landed, as he knew he was an important agent, not least because Dr. Goetz received a message, meant for Antelme, congratulating him on his OBE. Kieffer even hoped he would know the date of D-Day. Antelme, however, gave nothing away. To prevent London guessing from Antelme's silence that he had been caught, thereby throwing suspicion on Madeleine's radio, Dr. Goetz then had to construct a cover story about his capture. He devised a series of complicated medical reports about an “accident” on landing.

  By March 1944 Kieffer was obviously revelling in his conjuring trick and began to think that he might match the success of his Abwehr colleague, Hermann Giskes, in Holland.

  The extent to which F Section was deceived by Kieffer and his radio mastermind was best illustrated by two further pieces of paper I found in Nora's personal file. Many months before the end of the war in France, Buckmaster and Vera had been busy preparing citations for gallantry awards for more than two hundred F Section agents. On February 24, 1944, Buckmaster submitted a citation for Nora Inayat Khan to receive a George Medal, a gallantry award granted to civilians.

  In the citation Buckmaster wrote that as a result of Nora's bravery, the Prosper group had been “reinforced and reconstructed and today is in perfect order.” Apparently convinced that Nora was still free and operating, he wrote: “It is unique in the annals of this organisation for a circuit to be so completely disintegrated and yet to be rebuilt because, regardless of personal danger, this young woman remained on her post, at times alone, and always under threat of arrest.” In fact, at the time he wrote this, Nora had been in German hands for at least three months and the Prosper circuit had been largely destroyed.

  Perhaps Buckmaster believed much of what he said in this absurd document. Or perhaps it was written by others and handed to him to sign. One element, though, he must have simply fabricated. Nora, he said, “has also been instrumental in facilitating the escape of thirty Allied airmen shot down in France.” Such an escape never happened.

  Another apparent fabrication also crept into the citation. Buckmaster claimed that Nora had been “instructed” to return home after the collapse of the Prosper network in July 1943 “because of the dangers she faced.” He said she “pleaded” to remain and was therefore allowed to do so. He wrote “subsequently events have fully justified this course of action.”

  It was quite possible that Nora was offered the chance to return home, and it was quite possible that she preferred to stay, as she appeared to have been exhilarated by her work. But there was no evidence that Nora was ever “instructed” to return. Had she been instructed, she would have been obliged to obey. Buckmaster needed a radio link between Paris and London, and she was more than willing to fulfil the role. Now he was attempting to justify his decision to leave her in the field.

  By May 1944 Dr. Goetz realised that London really was suspicious of his transmissions as supplies of arms and men slowed down. As Vera knew, Gerry Morel, the operations officer, had decided to test out the Archdeacon circuit by arranging to talk to Frank Pickersgill by S phone from the air.

  When London proposed talking to Pickersgill by this means, Kieffer had a dilemma, said Dr. Goetz. If a German tried to imitate Pickersgill's voice to a London desk officer, the deception would be exposed. So with the permission of Horst Kopkow at head office in Berlin, Kieffer brought Pickersgill back from his jail at Ravitsch with the intention of forcing him to talk. Pickersgill, however, refused to cooperate. And as Vera had heard, he tried to escape from the Gestapo prison in Place des Etats-Unis and was shot and badly injured. Eventually he was sent back to Germany. Vera had established Pickersgill's fate: he was hanged at Buchenwald.

  Dr. Goetz said Kieffer then asked Bob Starr, still based in Avenue Foch and still favoured by Kieffer, to do the talking for him. Starr at first agreed and Kieffer was happy. But at the last minute, Starr changed his mind, perhaps because he realised that by refusing so late, he would cause Kieffer the greatest difficulty. Kieffer would now have no choice but to use one of his own people even though a German accent would be noticed. This was clearly what happened, said Dr. Goetz, because the plane quickly flew away.

  Dr. Goetz's “radio game” was then effectively over. On D-Day the Führer himself had the idea of sending a message thanking London for all the agents and the arms. “I thought this unnecessary and argued against it but Hitler was determined. He thought it would frighten you and would damage morale. So I arranged for the message to be sent. He then changed his mind. But it was too late.”

  Finally, Vera asked Dr. Goetz where she would find Kieffer. Only Kieffer would know about the capture of Francis Suttill. And only Kieffer would be able to confirm, once and for all, whether Henri Déricourt was a traitor. Dr. Goetz said he had last heard that Kieffer “was moving towards Munich.”

  21.

  Ravensbrück

  When Vera returned to London in November 1946 after interrogating Dr. Goetz, she had expected to spend a few days closing down her affairs before resuming a civilian life. Her allotted time on the war crimes investigation was about to expire for good, and she had no desire to remain under military orders.

  A letter, addressed to a Labour peer named Lord Walkden and redirected to Vera, persuaded her to change her plans. The letter was signed by Yolande Lagrave—a name that meant nothing to Vera.

  Monsieur, I don't know if you remember me and Monsieur Dujour who organised an excursion to St Emilion in August 1933. I worked as a secretary at the information bureau in the city. I found your letter and the photo taken of that trip along with your kind words.

  Alas 13 years has passed, and what tragic events have taken place. Mr Dujour and I were arrested by the Gestapo—he in February 1943 and me four months after, that is to say in June 1943. He was part of the resistance. I helped him, but it will take too long to explain all of that. The result was that he is dead. He was deported and sent to Natzweiler Struthof and then to Dachau, where he died after torture.

  As for me: I was deported to Pforzheim prison and I was lucky to get back. I was the only returnee of my group. Everyone else in
the prison with me was massacred. It is in relation to all of this, Monsieur, that I ask you to remember me, and I ask you to come to my assistance. At Pforzheim, where I was imprisoned in a cell, I was able to correspond with an English parachutist who was locked up there also. She was very unhappy. Her hands and feet were chained, and she was never allowed out. I heard the blows which she received from prison guards.

  She was taken away from Pforzheim in September 1944. Before she left she had been able to send me—not her name because it was too dangerous—but her alias and she also wrote down her address for me. It was this: Nora Baker, Radio Centre Officers Service RAF, 4 Taviston [sic] Street, London. I kept the address on a paper sewn into my hem.

  I wrote to this address, but the letter came back “not known at this address.”

  I was astonished that the Service RAF Radio Centre Officers [sic] was unknown and couldn't believe that the postal service could not find a way to find them.

  I cannot believe that the RAF would be indifferent to knowing the fate of a devoted officer, who had suffered as she had for her country and for the victory of the Allies. I know that intelligence services are very secret. I even tried myself to make contact at the British Embassy when last in Paris, but it was a Saturday and everything was closed—the English week!

  I hope, Monsieur, that you will be able to help, both as a favour to one of your compatriots and to somebody who knew you 13 years ago. Luckily I had kept your letter and photograph in my box of souvenirs.

  Lord Walkden passed the letter to the Air Ministry, which eventually passed it on to the office of Norman Mott, who was still handling SOE affairs, and he passed it to Vera. Though the letter had arrived in a roundabout way, its authenticity was evident. Nora Baker was obviously Nora Inayat Khan and 4 Taviton Street had once been her family's address in London, but since Nora's disappearance her mother had gone to stay with friends and the house had been rented out, which was why the letter had been returned to Bordeaux marked “not known.”

  The implications of the letter were far-reaching. Quite simply, if Nora was in Pforzheim prison in September 1944, as Yolande Lagrave said, she could not have died at Natzweiler three months earlier, as Vera had concluded in April the previous year. Vera's doubts about Nora's fate had already been reawakened by Dr. Goetz, who had told her that Madeleine left Paris in autumn of 1943, and not in May 1944 as she had thought. Now, with Yolande Lagrave's new evidence, the investigation into Nora's death would have to be reopened.

  Mott drafted a very carefully worded reply to the Air Ministry thanking them for “the sight” of the Nora Baker folder. “Nora Baker is one of our agents who was captured and incarcerated in various concentration camps… Enquiries have shown she is identical to Inayat Khan WAAF.”

  He did not draw the ministry's attention to the fact that this matter had been “cleared up” by Squadron Officer Atkins six months earlier.

  Vera's return to Germany, however, was by this time no simple matter. Her honorary commission in the WAAF had been resigned, so she could acquire none of the necessary “movement orders” for further travel. And her inability to travel was compounded by the fact that, despite her naturalisation nearly two years previously, the necessary time had still not elapsed for her to receive a British passport.

  Then Vera received a timely request from her own former war crimes colleagues asking her to return to Germany to join the prosecution team in the Ravensbrück trial, to be held in Hamburg in three weeks' time.

  Writing on behalf of his commanding officer, Captain Michael Raymond told Vera:

  Lt. Col. A.J.M. Harris has asked me to write to you to find out whether you would be prepared to arrive in Hamburg before the other witnesses who arrive on 28, 29, 30 November to act as a sort of marshal. The sudden arrival in Hamburg of about 16 women of about 10 nationalities will present many problems; it was thought that you, having met many of them and speaking their languages, would be able to deal with them more tactfully than anybody else. HQ Hamburg would be most grateful if you would help them in this way.

  Although Vera had not intended to attend the trial, it was entirely appropriate that she should be present at the Ravensbrück proceedings, not least because her early investigations had first exposed the truth about the camp. Vera had returned only recently from a tour of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway interviewing witnesses. It was also in large part due to the deaths at Ravensbrück of Vera's women agents that it fell to the British to investigate and try the case. Otherwise the case, Ravensbrück being in the Soviet zone, would have been tried by the Russians. As with the Sachsenhausen trial, the details might then never have been known.

  The request for Vera to join the prosecution team was therefore not unwelcome, and it also solved her travel problems. In view of the summons, the Air Ministry immediately agreed to extend Vera's honorary commission and gave her authority to return to Germany for the trial, during which time she hoped also to investigate the new leads about Nora's death. Her first obligation, however, was to the Ravensbrück case.

  When Vera arrived in Hamburg on November 21, 1946, her immediate task of marshalling witnesses was daunting. Temperatures in the city were −20 degrees, which made the logistics of shepherding witnesses all the harder. Finding suitable accommodation was itself not easy in a city that had been so badly flattened. Many witnesses arrived in a state of acute anxiety, knowing they would have to confront in the dock, among others, Dorothea Binz, the archsadist SS camp overseer, as well as Vera Salvequart, a prisoner “nurse” who sent her “patients” on their way to the gas chambers, and Carmen Mory, the Blockführer in charge of Ravensbrück's punishment block. The commandant himself, Fritz Suhren, would not, however, be on trial as he had escaped for a second time, this time from British custody.

  For all involved, the case was also one of vast complexity. The simple fact that Ravensbrück was a concentration camp for women had placed the trial in a category of its own. Many of the crimes committed here were crimes not so much against humanity as very specifically against women: gynaecological experiments, forced sterilisations, and forced abortions, to name but three. Moreover, as the court would hear, the whole concept of Ravensbrück was specifically designed by Nazi ideologues as a crime against women. Most of the women held at the camp were brought there not to answer for anything they had done but to punish the men and the families they had been taken from, in order to deter resisters to Nazi occupation. “All of these women were brought here,” the prosecution would declare, “as part of an organised attack on the life of womanhood to intimidate men.” And the fact that many of the accused from Ravensbrück were also women only contributed further to the macabre nature of the case.

  Nevertheless, despite the stress of getting ready for the trial, Vera found that the atmosphere in Hamburg was not altogether bleak. Though the central station had been obliterated, the station hotel was still standing and served as a comfortable base for the prosecution team. The chief prosecutor, Stephen Stewart, and John da Cunha, his junior, both good friends of Vera's from Bad Oeynhausen, were at the Hotel Bahnhof, as were a team of secretaries, including Vera's close Norwegian friend from Bad Oeynhausen, Sara Jensen.

  Vera was allotted Room 50, on the fifth floor, and close by, in Room 56, was Odette Sansom. Odette, who six months previously had become the first woman ever to be awarded a George Cross and was already a household name at home, was to be the prosecution's star witness. And also here in Hamburg, arriving with extra duffel coats and whisky for Vera and her colleagues, was Jerrard Tickell, Odette's biographer, who, when he wasn't researching his book, kept the “chaps and chapesses,” as he called the prosecution team, perpetually entertained. Vera he cheered along at every opportunity with witty notes. “Riddle of the Girl ‘Vera'— Nobody Knew Her” was a newspaper headline he brought out to Hamburg for her. The cutting had nothing to do with Vera Atkins, but underneath Tickell had written: “and I thought to myself how true and how sad.”

  Finding time to scribble a
postcard to her mother on the eve of the trial, Vera wrote: “Have had a very lively two days as people are arriving every few minutes and as we get nearer to the opening date (tomorrow morning) so tempers get short and the excitement increases. It is no mean thing to have 20 highly strung women waiting about with nothing to do. I shall be glad when we start to get going.”

  “May it please the court,” began Major Stewart, starting his opening speech in calm and almost conversational tones. Born Stefan Strauss in Vienna, Stephen Stewart fled Austria in 1938, just after the Anschluss, when he discovered his name was on a Nazi hit list, and was later called to the Bar in London. “In Mecklenburg, about fifty miles north of Berlin, there is a group of lakes to which the gentry of that once great capital used to go for their weekends. One of these lakes, probably because of its rather swampy, marshy lands, did not seem to attract too many visitors, and it was there on the shore of Lake Fürstenberg where, shortly after the outbreak of war, a concentration camp for women was sited, and for the first time in 1939 figures on the official papers of the SS show a recognised concentration camp named Ravensbrück.”

  At one end of the court sat the judges. The president was an English major-general in full uniform with a king's counsel in wig and gown at his side, and five other uniformed military judges on the bench, including one Frenchman and one Pole. Directly in front of the judges were the sixteen defendants, each wearing a black number on a square of white cardboard on their chest.

  All pleaded not guilty to charges of committing war crimes involving the ill treatment and killing of Allied nationals. Seated in front of the defendants were their lawyers, eleven robed German doctors of law.