Sarah Helm

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

  Although Vera would always keep to herself much of what Kieffer had told her, she was determined to make public some of the evidence she had drawn from him. While burying the mistakes of SOE, Vera was just as eager to promote its successes. Kieffer's evidence had, above all else, proven the extraordinary bravery of Nora Inayat Khan. When Vera got home from Germany in early February 1947, she therefore had one more task to perform before finally leaving “this game of war crimes.” She was determined to put Nora up for a George Cross.

  Three years after the end of the war it was not easy to persuade the powers that be that Nora's recommendation for a gallantry award should be rewritten for a fourth time. First she was proposed for a George Medal, then for a member of the Order of the British Empire, and then for a Mention in Dispatches; now that the truth about her courage appeared to have emerged, she was to be put forward for the highest award for bravery anyone could receive. The correspondence between Vera and Eileen Lancey of the Honours and Awards Office showed Vera endlessly battling to prove that this time she had got the facts for the citation for Nora right. First Miss Lancey seemed to doubt the evidence that Nora had really been held in chains in Pforzheim. Then there was doubt about how she could have communicated via the prison mugs. “How they exchanged mugs I cannot say, but that they did is proved by the fact that Mlle Lagrave was in possession of Madeleine's names and address and many other details concerning her,” wrote Vera in an exasperated reply to the official. In the end it was Kieffer's evidence of Nora's escape, and of her absolute refusal to give any information, which counted more than anything towards her award. Although Kieffer's evidence was not available to convict Déricourt, it was crucial in securing Nora her George Cross. Vera quoted Kieffer as the source for the fact that the escape with Starr and Faye was “Madeleine's idea.”

  Nora's George Cross was finally made public in 1949. “G/C for Braver Than They Thought Girl,” said one newspaper headline. And it was under this headline that Vera revealed how Kieffer cried when he heard of Nora's death at Dachau.

  In London yesterday a woman executive of the Top Secret Department described Nora's heroism and said: “Since the war I have seen Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer, Gestapo chief at Avenue Foch, Paris. It was he who sent her on her way, describing her as intractable and highly dangerous. Bully and hard man though he was, the reminder of her courage and patriotism caused him to break down and weep bitterly.”

  After concluding her interrogation of Kieffer in January 1947, Vera had nearly completed all she had returned to Germany to do: she had assisted the prosecution at the Ravensbrück trial, established where Nora died, and interviewed the man who captured her agents. Before she returned to England, however, she went briefly to Hamburg, where sentences were about to be passed on the sixteen defendants.

  By the time the former Ravensbrück guards were brought into the dock for the verdicts, Vera had resumed her seat on the prosecution bench. As the sixteen lined up, she took a small scrap of paper and down the left-hand side, in tiny black writing, she wrote the number of each defendant, one to sixteen, with a full stop after each. As the sentences were read out she noted them down. Against the number of the five defendants who received a prison sentence, she wrote the number of years each was to serve in jail. Against the number of each of the eleven defendants sentenced to death she marked a tiny black cross.

  PART IV

  ENGLAND

  24.

  Conspiracies

  Any history of SOE would seem to be in the nature of self-vindication which as a secret service is in my opinion undesir-. able and unnecessary. That other people will seek to claim the honour and glory should, I think, leave us unmoved,” wrote Leslie Humphreys in September 1945, when SOE was considering how its work should be recorded, once the organisation had been closed down.

  The Whitehall establishment was content to bury all memory of SOE after the end of the war. MI6 could not snuff out its awkward wartime rival fast enough, and the Foreign Office was delighted to see an end to the organisation that had interfered so much with quiet diplomacy, particularly in France, where Buckmaster's celebratory tours—his so-called Judex Mission—had led to vitriolic attacks on him in the French press. As one diplomat put it: “To a certain extent Buckmaster is himself to blame. He has courted postwar popularity in France and has enjoyed the floral tributes of a resistance hero. Now that spirit has changed he is getting the rotten eggs.”

  Officially, Humphreys s view that SOE should rest in silence prevailed. (Humphreys himself had soon retired from intelligence to become a schoolmaster at Stonyhurst.) The Special Forces Club was formed in 1946 to keep SOE memories alive and to provide a network for job hunters, but all members were instructed never to speak again of their wartime work. The best of the SOE rump were offered work in MI6 or other departments, but Vera was offered no such position. After she failed “by one place” to achieve her MBE in the 1946 Birthday Honours, a further attempt to secure her an honour, in recognition of her war crimes work, was unsuccessful. Although she received a Croix de Guerre from the French in 1948, Vera was, as she put it, “undecorated” by Britain. When she arrived back from Germany in early 1947, she was also unemployed.

  Sometime in early 1947, probably soon after returning from Germany, Vera wrote again to Dick Ketton-Cremer's brother, Wyndham, asking if he had any more news. She received this reply:

  Dear Miss Atkins, I was so glad to hear from you again and to know your address though I am afraid I have no good news to tell you about Dick. There can now be no doubt that he was killed in Crete on or about 23 May 1941, during the German attack on Maleme airfield, where he was stationed. We heard from a man in the squadron to which he was unfortunately attached in Crete, who found him badly wounded and practically unconscious during the fighting. He thought he had very little time to live and could do nothing to help him. We know no more, and have heard nothing at all about his grave.

  It is unbearable to think of this even now, and I am afraid it will grieve you very much.

  While he was in the Western Desert in 1940, he made a codicil to his will with various bequests to his friends. Among those bequests was one to you, and I shall send you a cheque for the amount as soon as we have settled his affairs.

  The news that Dick died at Maleme must already have reached Vera, through her contacts with the RAF and the Red Cross. But the finality— “There can now be no doubt—” of Wyndham's brief account must have compounded Vera's grief. And what she would not have known until now was that she had been mentioned in Dick's last will.

  In his fourth and final letter to Vera, Wyndham Ketton-Cremer sent a cheque “which represents Dick's legacy to you, plus interest but less tax.” He added: “I did so much appreciate your letter about Dick. As you say, the whole story is just heartbreaking.”

  I obtained a copy of Dick's will, hoping it might contain further clues about his intentions towards Vera.

  The codicil began as follows:

  “I Richard Thomas Wyndham Ketton-Cremer of Felbrigg Hall Roughton Norfolk England on this date 5 July 1940 at Maaton Baguish Western Desert Egypt make the following bequests and legacies extra and above those previously made.

  “I HEREBY BEQUEATH the sum of £1000 (One thousand pounds) to”—and here the page turned—“Mrs. Billie Pelmyra Gordon née Rhoads, American citizen, present address c/o American Consulate Fun-chal Madeira or might be traced at St. Cloud Florida USA with much love and in memory of an association no less delightful because it could not be final I hereby bequeath to Miss Vera Atkins of “Magazine” Winchelsea Sussex (Rumanian citizen) the sum of 500 pounds with love & in memory of a delightful friendship I hereby bequeath to Mrs. Theodora Greaves now of 4 Walsingham Terrace, Hove, Sussex the sum of £300 with love and in gratitude for much friendship and worldly advice …” and so on.

  The will contained sparse punctuation, and it was hard to say, at first, if the phrase “with much love and in memory of an association no less delightful because it coul
d not be final” applied to Billie or to Vera. At first I liked to think it applied to Vera, but on reflection I decided, reluctantly, that it belonged with the £1000 Dick left to Billie. Vera got the lesser sum of £500 and “love and memory of a delightful friendship.”

  I read on through the rest of the codicil, which included a series of bequests: Dick left his horse Jester to the local rector; his autocycle to the Felbrigg chauffeur; a sum to the Norfolk and Norwich Aeronautical Club; and his Ford car, Fluff, to a friend.

  The document was witnessed by Pilot Officer John Ward of 113 Squadron RAF and was signed on July 10, 1940.

  The will was a further indication that Vera was important to Dick. But precisely how important she was remained ambiguous.

  •

  Shortly after Vera returned from Germany for the last time, she disappeared on her own to Wales for many weeks. She went to stay in a remote cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast and saw nobody there apart from a local farmer who helped her carry her suitcase up a track to the house. “I always thought she had gone there to be alone after all that happened, and to mourn,” said Mary Williams, Guy's girlfriend, who remembered his sister's disappearance at that time. There were suddenly so many for Vera to mourn.

  Then, in May, Vera's mother died. It had not been expected. Hilda Atkins was cremated and then interned at a small family ceremony in the Jewish cemetery at Golders Green, north London. Ralph, in a letter to his “dear baby sister” on June 8, 1947, said: “It is frightful to think that our dear mother is no more, she was our rallying point and stand-by in our troubles. I always had the feeling that she sensed if one of us had something on his mind without even telling her about it … It doesn't seem so very long since we were all at Crasna. What a lot of things have happened since then.”

  Whatever yearnings Vera or her brothers still had for their childhood home, Crasna—along with all of Romania and eastern Europe—were now disappearing behind the Iron Curtain. A friend who had lived with the Rosenbergs at Crasna wrote to Vera from Australia after the war saying the news from Crasna was “very sad” and that he was sending food parcels to “the Flondors,” the Rosenbergs' former neighbours there.

  Ralph was himself nearly stranded behind the Iron Curtain. The letter he wrote to Vera about their mother's death was sent from Bucharest, where he had returned in 1946 in the hope of working normally again in the oil business. Now the Communist clampdown was beginning to tighten, and he was desperate to get out. Exit permits were already hard to come by, and he had not even been able to leave to attend his mother's funeral.

  After her stay in Pembrokeshire Vera returned to London, where she eventually found work in one of the many new postwar bodies set up to foster international understanding, established by UNESCO, the United Nations' education and culture body. Her new employer, the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, arranged student exchanges throughout the world. The post of office manager, which Vera took up in October 1948, was secured for her by Francis Cammaerts, the former Jockey circuit organiser, who became the bureau's first director. The post was perhaps not the topflight one Vera might have hoped for after the war, but she was soon promoted and became head of the organisation in 1952 when Cammaerts left. And Vera still had a time-consuming job to do for SOE.

  Whatever Leslie Humphreys might have ruled, Vera, along with Maurice Buckmaster, had already begun to claim “the honour and glory” for F Section, and they had no intention of ceasing now. Their promotion drive had started well before the end of the war, when Buckmaster began composing citations for as many F Section agents as possible. Then, no sooner were surviving agents back from the field in 1945 than they were persuaded by Vera and “Buck,” as so many now called him, to go immediately on lecture tours, even to the United States.

  The fact that by 1946 SOE had been shut down and its files closed was no impediment to Vera and Buckmaster s publicity efforts. Vera carried all the information needed (and more than was in the files) in her head. Authors, screenplay writers, and later TV producers contacted Buckmaster first about their projects, and Buckmaster then passed enquiries on to Vera. “Miss Atkins's memory is so much better than mine,” he always said.

  Stories about glamorous SOE agents were therefore rarely out of the newspapers in the immediate postwar years, and Vera and Buckmaster worked as a duo, just as they had during the war. Their success was measured in the cuttings that I found spilling out of Vera's files.

  Odette Sansom, the tortured heroine, who had escaped from Ravens-brück and become the first woman to receive a George Cross, was the darling of the press, along with Peter Churchill, her organiser, who was arrested with her. When, in 1947, Odette left her first husband and married Churchill, a media fairy tale came true. The biography of Odette by Jerrard Tickell was published in 1949 and was publicised by a series of sensational articles about SOE in the Sunday Express entitled “Set Europe Ablaze.”

  ‘I am not sure,' said a German spy chief, ‘whom we shall hang first when we get to London. Winston Churchill or Colonel Buckmaster,' read a caption on a picture of Buckmaster.

  Vera's personal copy of Tickell's book contained the author's handwritten inscription, acknowledging just how much he owed to his prime source of information. “For Vera Atkins”:

  “Onlie begetter,” midwife, vamp.

  Doubling Will Hews with Mrs. Gamp,

  Invisible as Mrs Harris,

  In Baker Street, Berlin and Paris,

  For each part, in each latitude,

  Accept an author's gratitude.

  There were many SOE stories to be told. The Daily Herald ran a series called “The Commando Girls” that told of Pearl Witherington's “adventures with the maquis.” The poignant tragedy of Violette Szabo's daughter, little Tania, continued to capture imaginations. In another article in the Sunday Express, Violette's last escorting officer was quoted as saying that, as Violette departed from the field: “She zipped up her flying suit, adjusted her parachute, shook her hair loose and climbed laughing into the aircraft.” The quote obviously came from Vera.

  Vera had cut out numerous pictures of Violette's daughter, whose little dresses were weighed down by more and more of her mother's medals as the years went on.

  From Vera's letters it was clear that some of those projected into the limelight did not always welcome it. Yvonne Baseden received a call from Vera one day in the mid-1950s asking if she would agree to appear on This Is Your Life with Eamonn Andrews. Yvonne, who had not yet fully recovered from the trauma of her imprisonment at Ravensbrück, detested the very idea but was persuaded by Vera.

  Pearl Witherington at first declined to go on a lecture tour that Vera had organised. “Only if you absolutely insist, Vera, will I go,” she wrote. Pearl had already been embroiled in controversy over her civilian MBE. The FANYs who survived the war found they were caught in yet another legal loophole. Having agreed to join a civilian organisation, to get around the bar on women in the military bearing arms, these same women were now told that as mere FANYs they could receive only civilian awards. “There was nothing civil about what I did,” protested Pearl, who in the weeks before D-Day had taken command of a group of at least a thousand resistance fighters. She sent her civilian award straight back.

  These were busy times for Vera. Soon promoted within the bureau, she also moved from Nell Gwynne House, where she had lived since 1940, to a small but airy new apartment on the top floor of a stucco-fronted terrace in Rutland Gate, just off Knightsbridge, which was convenient to the Special Forces Club, as well as Harrods.

  After the book about Odette came the film, with Anna Neagle as Odette, Trevor Howard as Peter Churchill, Marius Goring as their captor Hugo Bleicher, and Maurice Buckmaster as himself. Vera now found herself rushing up and down to Ealing film studios with Buckmaster for rehearsals, checking screenplays, and briefing reporters. In her files was a letter to Vera from J. Arthur Rank saying photographs were enclosed, and here they were: Vera standing in a svelte suit with the fil
m's stars. Vera had also preserved a note to “My dear Vera” from Neagle herself.

  The film, Odette, opened amid great acclaim in 1950, with the king and queen, as well as Vera and Buck, in the audience. “The Queen and the Heroine,” said one headline describing how Odette arrived at the opening “wearing evening crinoline of black lace and champagne lace underskirt.” “I'm quite ordinary,” said Odette as she faced the press.

  Buckmaster by now had also published his own book on SOE, Specially Employed, and later came They Fought Alone. If more proof were needed that SOE's most important country section had been headed by a man who struggled to distinguish fact from fantasy, these books provided it. As Buckmaster himself candidly admitted inside Vera's personal copy: “Dedicated to Vera who knows more accurately than I do how, when and why these events occurred (I might also add ‘whether').”

  Then the publicity started to backfire. On August 3, 1949, Vera had received to her flat a petite young woman with short, cropped auburn hair and a plain but pleasant face. Jean Overton Fuller wanted to research the life of Nora Inayat Khan. From the moment Jean began writing, Vera lost control over the SOE story.

  During the war Jean had lived in Bloomsbury a few doors away from where Nora's family had then lived, and the two young women became closely acquainted. One day in May 1943 Nora told Jean she was “going on foreign service” and then vanished. Nora's brother Vilayat never seemed to have been told for sure what had happened. Jean read the citation for Nora's George Cross in the newspapers in 1949 and decided to find out more. She had never heard of SOE but was referred through the War Office to a Colonel Buckmaster, who said he was not sure he could remember Nora and referred Jean straight to “Miss Atkins.”