Sarah Helm

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

  22.

  “A Very Fine Manner”

  When Johan Schwarzhuber had completed his evidence at the Ravensbrück trial, in mid-January 1947, Vera disappeared from court for several days. She told colleagues she had to clear up “loose ends” in Bad Oeynhausen. In fact, as colleagues began closing speeches in the Ravensbrück case, Vera was on her way to reopen her investigation into what had happened to Nora Inayat Khan.

  Vera also had a second, related mission, which she hoped to accomplish in her break from the Ravensbrück trial. News had reached her from Bill Barkworth that Hans Kieffer had finally been run to ground and was being held in prison in Wuppertal. The development was timely, and Barkworth agreed that Vera could interrogate him there in a few days' time.

  It was now nine months since Vera had closed the investigation into Nora's case. She had concluded that Nora was taken to Natzweiler concentration camp, where she was killed on July 6, 1944, by lethal injection and her body cremated. Nora's family had been given this version of events. Nora's murder had been part of the case made against the Natzweiler camp staff at their trial. And this story had formed part of the citation that had recently secured for Nora a mention in dispatches. But Vera had never found it easy to fit the pieces of Nora's story together, and the single letter from Yolande Lagrave showed her that the story she had so painstakingly constructed about Nora's death was wrong.

  I knew by now the trouble Vera would take to ensure nobody ever knew she was wrong. On one occasion in her later years she gave a lengthy talk to a group of FANY officers about her war crimes investigation, which was taped. Afterwards she realised that in her talk she had mistaken the name of an SS officer. She then insisted that a FANY officer should go to her home with the tape and tape recorder, and together, over many hours, they replayed the tape and located each mention of the misnamed officer, so that the error could be erased. Then, speaking into the microphone at precisely the right moment, Vera stated the correct name.

  Vera appeared to have gone to even more extraordinary lengths to ensure that nobody thought she was wrong about Nora. According to the published official record of the Natzweiler trial, held in May 1946, Vera was not wrong about the identities of the dead women when she gave evidence to the court on oath. In this “official verbatim record” of the trial, edited by a leading barrister for publication as a book in 1949, Vera told the court: “During the course of investigations in Karlsruhe I was able to establish that the four who left [Karlsruhe] were Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and a fourth woman whose identity I was and am unable to ascertain.” I knew this “official verbatim record” could not be right because other evidence showed quite clearly that Vera had told the court that the fourth woman was Nora, and at the time she firmly believed this to be correct.

  Then a specialist researcher, burrowing in the National Archives at Kew, found a second “official verbatim record” of the same trial. This second document was made public only in 1976 and was the original contemporaneous transcript of the trial, unedited and with no commentary. It told a different story. Here Vera said on oath: “During the course of investigations in Karlsruhe I was able to establish that the four who left [Karlsruhe] were Denise [sic] Borrel, Nora Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh, and Diana Rowden.”

  The 1949 version had obviously been changed to remove all mention of Nora's name. As the publisher had ceased to exist and the editor was dead, it was impossible to know exactly how the rewriting of the “verbatim record” had been arranged. But there could be little doubt that in order to hide her mistake Vera herself had found a way to ensure history was rewritten, scotching from the records what she had said on oath.

  The atmosphere in Bad Oeynhausen in January 1947 was very different from when Vera had first arrived a year before. The victorious powers were by now more interested in rebuilding Germany than in punishing war crimes. The U.S. target was to complete all war crimes trials by the end of that year. It was evident to Vera that, in this climate, new evidence about what happened to Nora would be harder to find and might soon be buried for good. Criminals would from now on find it easier than ever to slip through the net and would be less willing to talk about the past.

  Yet snippets of Nora's story were now suddenly emerging on several fronts. Others as well as Vera had been uncovering new evidence. In January 1947 Nora's brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, had also received a letter from Yolande Lagrave, the prisoner who had known “Nora Baker” at Pforzheim. Nora had evidently managed to pass to Madame Lagrave not only the Taviton Street address but also the address of a friend in Paris, through whom Madame Lagrave had passed a letter to Vilayat. And Vilayat had also heard about Nora from a second, entirely new witness who had taken pity on an English parachutist at Pforzheim. Vilayat wrote to Norman Mott in London:

  I have received corroborative accounts from two different sources relating to the presence of my late sister, Miss N. Inayat Khan— sometimes known as Miss Nora Baker—in the local jail at Pforzheim in the winter of 1944.

  This information does not tally with the official announcement that you gave of her death at Natzweiler on 6 July 1944, and I wonder if the evidence could not be examined officially on its merits.

  One of my informers is a French girl who served a sentence at Pforzheim and has since returned: they exchanged addresses on their mugs without giving names, and she traced the family. Therefore I cannot see a priori why I should mistrust this information.

  The girl states that my sister left Pforzheim in September 1944 for an unknown destination. In November 1944 the internees were massacred and my informant managed to get away.

  Vilayat went on to say that his second informant was a German woman who had worked at the jail and had managed to get information out quite recently through a United Nations representative in Pforzheim.

  The information forthcoming from this source states that one morning at the time when Strasbourg was taken by the Allies (I cannot place the date very accurately but this could be determined) all the internees were taken by the Germans to be executed, and subsequently my sister was buried in the local cemetery. The jail keeper who is said to have beaten up my sister has been maintained in his post as jail keeper to this day.

  I am giving you, sir, this information on its face value hoping that it will help piece up what is, I imagine, a difficult reconstruction of an obscure past where information, often unreliable, is knit together piecemeal for want of more data, and hope it might help to sort out other interrelated problems in retracing missing personnel.

  Finally he said: “May I ask you to be so kind, Sir, as to communicate with me, and not my mother, who becomes hysterical at the mention of my sister's name. She has been so deeply grieved.”

  As well as the information that had fallen into the hands of Vilayat, Vera knew that other evidence had also emerged about Nora, quite independently of her own enquiries.

  A war crimes lawyer named Alexander Nicolson had been assigned to take over investigating the Karlsruhe Gestapo case, with a view to preparing it for trial, after Vera had left Bad Oeynhausen the previous summer. In early November 1946, when Vera was back in England, Nicolson had come across the case of Nora Baker. He had never heard the name before and had opened a file on the case. “In the course of interrogations at Karlsruhe about another British subject, Nora Baker has been ascertained as a victim. She was detained at Pforzheim from 27 November 1943. It appears that Squadron Officer Atkins did not investigate this case,” he noted at the time. Nicolson, the son of a German historian who had emigrated to England before the war and changed his name from Karl Nowack, had been assiduous in his investigation. Dissatisfied with all the depositions Vera had taken, he had reinterrogated several suspects himself. It was when he reinterrogated a Karlsruhe Gestapo officer named Alfred Lehmann that he first heard about “eine Engländerin”—an Englishwoman—sent to Germany from Paris in late 1943 but apparently still unidentified in November 1946. Lehmann had been interrogated by Vera the previous summer and ha
d told her he remembered the case of the French girl Lisa Graf. But according to the statement Vera took from Lehmann, he remembered nothing about any Englishwoman. In talking to Nicolson, however, Lehmann found his memory dramatically improved. He remembered particularly the arrival from Paris of a single Englishwoman in November 1943 because he had been told she was “extremely dangerous” and was to be treated as “a most important case.”

  He recalled: “The Englishwoman had made two attempts to escape in Paris, and during the second attempt she was caught but only at the last moment. “On security grounds, therefore, shackling had been ordered. Further questioning by Nicolson had elicited the fact that this woman was sent to Pforzheim prison.

  Nicolson then went to Pforzheim and found the prison governor, a man of seventy-four named William Krauss, who had worked there for thirty years. Krauss had retired since the war but remembered the English girl well because she had to be kept in solitary confinement and was shackled in chains and kept on the lowest of rations. He had been ordered to detain her under the Nacht und Nebel order; he too was told she was very dangerous. Krauss told Nicolson he had taken pity on the girl. She was called Nora Baker.

  Vera had now come to Bad Oeynhausen to read the Nora Baker file before pursuing her own lines of enquiry. In particular she wanted to read the latest detailed testimony taken from Yolande Lagrave. Following up his own enquiries, Alexander Nicolson had recently sent a colleague to Bordeaux to see Madame Lagrave and to take a full statement from her about Pforzheim. The officer who carried out the interrogation, a young French-speaker, Lieutenant Basil Hargreaves of the Rifle Brigade, had just returned to Bad Oeynhausen.

  I the undersigned, Yvonne Yolande Lagrave, born on 27.12.02 at Mérignac (Gironde) of French nationality and by profession a shorthand secretary, declare the following facts on oath.

  A political deportee, I was arrested owing to denunciation along with a friend who died at Dachau on 16.6.43 by the Gestapo arriving eventually at Pforzheim on 25.1.44. I occupied cell Number 12 with two friends: this cell was on the ground floor and was at the corner of a little passage leading towards the door which gave access to the courtyard of the prison; our window gave a view over the courtyard which allowed us to watch the men during their walk.

  Nora Baker had cell No. 1; the cell which was opposite us was Number 2 cell. Number 1, then, being well apart from the other cells and on the other side of the little passage, which was bordered by two gratings which could be locked. So, as regards ours, Nora Baker's cell was after the second grating and almost opposite the office.

  This cell was always shut; when we went for our walk all the cells were open except for No. 1 and we often wondered what could be there.

  One day one of the people in my cell, Rosy Storck, began to say: “If we were to write on our mess tins to find out if there are other Frenchmen …” It is thus that she wrote on the bottom of the mess tin with a knitting needle: “Here are three Frenchwomen.” Our mess tins were taken away to be cleaned and replaced at 5pm. As soon as we received our own mess tins, our first thought was to see if a reply had been made to our message. In fact we saw this message. “You are not alone. You have a friend in cell 1.” This was the beginning of our correspondence.

  Madame Lagrave recalled that, near American Independence Day, the girl in cell one wrote, “Here's to the Fourth of July,” and on July 14 she wrote, “Long live free France, for that keeps us together,” and added two flags, one English and one French.

  Her statement continued: “In the course of our ‘correspondence' she let us know that she was unhappy, very unhappy, that she never went out, that her hands and feet were manacled, that except when they brought us soup or changed our water they never opened her cell door, or the small opening through which they made us pass our mess tins.”

  Yolande Lagrave said that when they asked the prisoner in cell one to give her name, she said at first she could not give it, but eventually she wrote out “Nora Baker” and gave two addresses—one in London and one in Paris, which Yolande had kept in the hem of her skirt.

  Vera had seen other evidence of the manacling of Nora. The governor of the prison had told Nicolson that he decided to remove the chains soon after Nora arrived, as she was so miserable. But he added that soon afterwards he was reprimanded for doing so by the Karlsruhe Gestapo and was forced to put them on again. Alfred Lehmann, the Gestapo officer, had told Nicolson that when Nora first arrived from Paris, he had also questioned whether it was necessary to have the girl chained while in prison but was told that Berlin had expressly required it. He also recalled that the prison governor at Pforzheim had telephoned the Karlsruhe Gestapo, shortly after she arrived, to ask for the shackles to be made looser.

  “The governor said he had spoken to the prisoner and was of the opinion that it would suffice if the prisoner was fettered on one hand and this was connected only loosely to the bed. I agreed so as to spare the prisoner pain, the chains should be loosened or even completely removed, as long as the governor could assure me that escape could be ruled out.”

  It was during the brief period when Nora was unfettered that Yolande Lagrave caught sight of her out in the courtyard. “On one occasion in the afternoon, we heard some footsteps in the courtyard. Immediately we thought it must be Nora Baker who was really going out. Rosy Storck, then Susan Chireiz and I in turn, climbed onto the bed to see her. We saw her, and she raised her eyes towards our cell and smiled at us. At that time she had not yet got her prison clothes.”

  The women saw Nora Baker three times only and then never again. But she was still able to scratch messages on the back of her tin. “She wrote to us: ‘Think of me; I am very unhappy; give me some news if you hear of any,' and we told her all we could get to know. She asked us if we belonged to the Alliance [a French intelligence circuit] or to the French Section (I forget the exact title). Then she added never to tell her mother that she had been in prison.”

  After Nora was chained up again, the prisoners tried their best to keep up her spirits, Yolande Lagrave said. One day two friends in cell three tried to communicate with her and “sang” news to her. “Immediately we heard a warden named Trupp open the door of the cell and suddenly hit Nora, and he took her to the dungeon which was below ground. We heard cries, so clearly that all three of us were struck still. We said: ‘Poor Nora.'

  Yolande added: “Another time the chief warder, Guiller, saw that the judas [peephole in the door] was open. He went into Nora's cell, shouting, and then Nora replied with great dignity that it was not her who had raised the judas. According to my friend Rosy Storck, she spoke very good German and was holding her own with Guiller. We heard blows that Guiller gave her. Nora continued to reply. She had a very fine manner.”

  When the Allied forces began to advance towards Germany, Nora had been taken away.

  Eventually one day—the date escapes me but it was September or October 1944—the mess tin arrived with this message “I am going” written in a quick and nervous hand.

  Poor Nora. She was no longer with us. Where had she gone? Our grief was great. We thought that in view of the advance of the French, for people said they were at Saarbrücken, she had been sent to a camp. But we all knew the end was near now, and with Nora's address we hoped one day to celebrate victory with her. Then, on 30 November 1944, we were all woken at 5am to go to an unknown destination.

  Yolande Lagrave's fellow prisoners were then taken away, but at the last minute, for reasons she never learned, she was told that she alone was staying at the prison. She was repatriated on May 1, 1945, and a fortnight later she heard that a burial place had been discovered two kilometres from the Pforzheim prison and all her group had been massacred. She discovered the women in the group were all raped before being shot and thrown into a mass grave. “I have thought, had Nora on her departure been transferred elsewhere or been massacred like my unfortunate companions? I will never know. I could give you the names and addresses of all my companions, men and women who were de
tained with me, but alas they are dead.”

  The final piece of evidence in Nicolson's file on Nora Baker came from a man named Marcel Schubert, a prisoner who had become an interpreter at Pforzheim. He claimed to have witnessed several cases of maltreatment of prisoners, including the “sad case of a British woman parachutist whose hands and feet were bound at nearly all times even during meals for months on end.” He said: “The prisoners thought she was a Russian Countess, but she told me herself that she was British. She spoke French rather well.”

  Schubert had noticed that the British woman's name was never written in the prison register. “It seems to me that this was done on purpose for it to be easier to get rid of her. I don't know what happened to her, but my opinion is that she died there, the same way as so many others did.”

  By now Vera needed no more convincing that Nora had been at Pforzheim, and she already had her own ideas about what might have happened to her next. She also had her own ideas about who would know.

  Vera had never expected to return to Tomato, the little British prison near Minden where the previous year she had spent so much of her time interrogating suspects, but once again she was sitting in a Mercedes as it wound its way down the icy track leading to the jail. Tomato was fuller than ever, according to Tony Somerhough, although few of the prisoners there were now expected to face trial. German lawyers representing war criminals were gaining confidence, sending in letters protesting that their clients were being unfairly held without charge. The wife of one Karlsruhe Gestapo prisoner had written saying she could “scarcely imagine” why her husband was being held. German church leaders were also beginning to speak out for the first time since the end of the war, calling for a new period of healing.

  Elsewhere internment camps were increasingly impossible to police, complained Somerhough. “Bodies” were regularly mislaid in the system, and escapes were commonplace. One of two men Vera had been keen to reinterrogate for the new Nora Baker investigation had simply been “lost” by the Americans. She had asked for Christian Ott to be transferred to Tomato from the U.S. zone, but an entirely different Christian Ott had been handed over by mistake. The other “body” Vera was interested in reinterrogating—Max Wassmer—had, however, been found, and it was he that Vera had now come to see for a second time. She hoped that Wassmer would be able to confirm what she already believed had finally happened to Nora.