George was unaware of the stir his lecture was causing. “The next I heard was late one evening when I had a phone call saying Colonel Buckmaster wanted to see me immediately and I was to bring Annette [Yvonne Cormeau] with me.” He and Cormeau visited Buckmaster, who asked about torture in the maquis. The questions outraged George, but his venom was not directed at Buckmaster: “I can remember my immediate reaction was that Colette [Anne-Marie Walters] had said something against me. I said to myself it was a frame-up by her, as when I had got back to England she had made a scene, said her father was influential, she had friends and would get me.”
In November, George and Cormeau flew to France to assist Buckmaster on the Judex Mission to find and help those who had worked for SOE during the German occupation. They met old friends and attended a formal military parade on November 29. Their battlefield comrade Colonel Henri Monnet presented the Croix de Guerre to both George and Cormeau in the name of George’s antagonist, General Charles de Gaulle.
When they returned to England, George discovered that the case against him was gathering momentum. Buckmaster, who refused to believe that George could torture anyone, urged him to spend the Christmas holiday with his parents in the north of England. “Anyway, I’d spend Christmas at home,” George said. “That was important.” Morose that Pilar and the children were trapped in Spain, he went north to Newcastle-under-Lyme on Christmas Eve. “It was my daughter’s [eighth] birthday,” he said. “That’s when I arrived home.” To his astonishment, Pilar, Georgina, and Alfred were there. Buckmaster and the British Consulate in Barcelona had arranged their Spanish exit visas. George’s happiness had a tinge of melancholy as he reflected, “They didn’t know me. Five years. That ached.” His son, Alfred, at the age of six was seeing his father for the first time in five years. “The thin man with the moustache did scare us kids,” he remembered. “In Manresa, we had one photo of father clean-shaven and slightly better nourished. It was years before I really got to know him.”
While the Starrs celebrated Christmas, the bureaucracy of military justice ground on in London. On December 28, Buckmaster rose to George’s defense in a memo to Colonel Woolrych:
I have formed the impression that the work of WHEELWRIGHT’s circuit was only possible thanks to his infinite capacity for taking pains and his very great diplomacy and ready wit. He was easily one of the three most popular Organisers we had.
Woolrych and his staff remained indignant that a Beaulieu-trained officer would order or condone torture. Torture was the policy of the Nazis, whom the Allies planned to prosecute for it after the war. Added to Anne-Marie Walters’s accusations (“It was also quite wrong in my opinion to lower ourselves to the standards of the Gestapo . . .”) on her return from Algiers, George’s Beaulieu lecture generated demands for an official investigation. Buckmaster stepped up his defense of George, writing on December 30 to SOE operations chief Brigadier E. E. Mockler-Ferryman that he had “carefully investigated the charges against Lt. Col. G. R. Starr in connection with the incident of alleged torture of German officers and find quite definitely that the charge is totally unsubstantiated.” He added that it was “a travesty of the facts to impute sadism to Col. Starr.”
When Walters reported three months earlier that George was responsible for torturing prisoners, F-Section officers decided there was no case to answer. The Beaulieu incident forced their hand. SOE director Major General Colin Gubbins wrote to Mockler-Ferryman on January 5, 1945, that “fairness to Colonel Starr” required SOE to question Anne-Marie Walters, George’s accusers from Beaulieu, and George himself. He added, “Unless this is done I cannot regard Colonel Starr as being clear of these allegations which would naturally have an effect upon our putting him forward for any further employment.”
Three days later, Buckmaster wrote another memo to Mockler-Ferryman in which he referred to Walters as “an unreliable witness because she suffered from the deluded idea that every man she came across fell in love with her and she bore a grudge against Starr because he did not comply.” This did not spare George further scrutiny. On January 20, Woolrych provided investigators the names of the fourteen officers who heard George speak about torture on October 30. Most of them would be available to testify.
George was seeking work with MI5, but the allegations against him were delaying his appointment. As certain of his innocence as Walters and Woolrych were of his guilt, he could clear his name only in a court of inquiry. He said later:
Well, I asked for it. Walters had started it. So after France, I sent her home. Of course, she never forgave me when she got back. That got to my ears when I was back in London, so I said, “Okay, bastards, we’ll have a court of enquiry.”
The court was a gamble. It could restore his reputation or lead to dishonorable discharge and prison. The inquiry commenced on January 26, 1945. The president of the court was Lieutenant Colonel J. W. Munn of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, and its members were Lieutenant Colonel John M. Gray and Major Frank Soskice. A court document stated its terms of reference were to “investigate the conduct and activities of Lieut/Colonel G.R. Starr . . . towards any enemy prisoners that may at any time during the course of the said Mission have been under his control or under control of troops or resistance forces under his immediate command or control.” It would also determine whether George “permitted or connived with BURESIE or other persons under the immediate command or control of Lieut/Colonel G.R. Starr, the torture of two German Gestapo agents, namely a man and woman who were proceeding from FRANCE to SPAIN.”
At ten o’clock on Monday morning, February 5, 1945, the court convened in the boardroom at SOE headquarters in Norgeby House, Baker Street, London. Although entitled to legal representation, George said, “I opted not to have a defending officer. I can defend myself.”
The first witness was Colonel Woolrych, who was sworn in and testified that he had been present at George’s talk on October 30. Colonel Starr, he said, had
told us that on one occasion after D-Day he was out in a car with his Russian bodyguard—the man’s name is Buresie—and they met a large German car going southwards. Believing it to contain Germans, they chased it for a number of miles and finally forced it into a ditch. . . . He handed them [the man and woman] over to Buresie for the exaction of torture. . . . The girl, Colonel Starr said, “spoilt it all” by breaking down in the end and asking that her life be spared if not for her sake, then for the child’s. The request was refused. The girl said to Colonel Starr, “I thought British officers were gentlemen.” He replied, “Well, you have met one who is not.”
Woolrych added that the torture involved inserting a pin into the man’s penis and hanging him upside down, brutality that outraged Beaulieu’s officers. Court member Lieutenant Colonel John Gray asked a question that was not recorded, to which Woolrych answered, “I got the impression from what he said that torture was not repugnant to him.”
George, acting as his own counsel, leaped into the cross-examination: “Is it the case that since I had spoken no English for over two years, I used turns of phrase which might have given rise to misunderstanding?” Woolrych replied, “I think it is very unlikely you were misunderstood. Most of my instructors are French-speaking.” George’s next question was “Is it not the case that my nervous smile, even when recounting unpleasant detail, might have given the impression that I treated these matters lightly?” Woolrych answered, “Yes.”
Captain Rhodes, the first to raise concerns about George’s speech, was next in the witness box. He repeated Woolrych’s account of the evening and added details about the Gestapo couple, “He [Starr] said that as they refused to talk he had them shot and that just prior to being shot the woman appealed to him for mercy on account of her unborn child.” Rhodes echoed Woolrych’s contention that George’s reply to her statement that British officers were gentlemen was “You have met one who is not.” Rhodes said George also told them about Buresie “putting a man’s legs into a
fire and burning them off up to the knees.”
These damning indictments from two officers strengthened the case against George. Rhodes took the testimony further, saying, “From the expression of his [Starr’s] face, I gather he rather enjoyed it.” George cross-examined him, and Rhodes repeated the accusation: “If I had not seen the leering expression on your face, I should not have thought you had taken pleasure in the torture.” Sadism was a serious charge. It was bad enough to permit torture in the heat of war, when obtaining information from suspects might have an operational rationale. But perpetrating it for pleasure lacked even a prima facie justification. No one who worked with George in France had ever hinted that he was sadistic, but the judges knew only what was presented in the confines of the court.
George posed a question whose relevance was not obvious to the court but was crucial to his defense: “Didn’t I say that at that time I had no uniform?” Rhodes: “I don’t remember your doing so.”
The third witness was Captain F. Lofts, whose revulsion had compelled him to walk out of George’s talk. His testimony supported Woolrych and Rhodes on George’s response to the Gestapo woman’s plea, adding, “At that stage, I left the mess and heard no more.” To a question from court member Major Soskice, Rhodes answered, “My disgust with regard to the story of the woman was only in the fact that she had been shot in spite of her appeal to Colonel Starr for the sake of her unborn child.”
Lofts’s appearance concluded the first day’s proceedings. What happened in the days following is a matter of conjecture. The handwritten record kept by lawyer Sam Silkin, who would later become Britain’s attorney general, stopped on page 17 with Lofts’s testimony. Pages 18 to 172 went missing from government files. Seven crucial days, from February 6 to 9 and February 12 to 14, included evidence from George’s radio operators, Yvonne Cormeau and Lieutenant Dennis Parsons, and New Zealand flight sergeant Leslie Brown. All three had fought beside George during the Battle of Castelnau on June 21. Given the esteem in which they held their former commander, it is likely that their evidence was in his favor.
The surviving transcript resumes at page 173 with the session of Thursday, February 15. Anne-Marie Walters was delivering her concluding remarks, undoubtedly after cross-examination by George. His subsequent statement hinted that his questions were hostile: “Mary [sic] Walters came, and I tied her up in bloody knots. I knew that a defending officer wouldn’t know. [Walters said] I’d been torturing people and Christ-what-have-you. It’s not in my nature to hurt anybody.” His disregard for her was absolute. In the same interview, he called her “unscrupulous” and said, “She was the stupidest bitch, and bitch is the word.”
The prosecution was unraveling. Walters’s answer to an unspecified question from court member Lieutenant Colonel Gray undermined the case against George:
I didn’t write my report [of September 18, 1944] with any intention of making an accusation against Hilaire. I did not know he was not head of the Maquis, in spite of the fact that I was his personal courier. I therefore considered him responsible for allowing these tortures. . . . I did mean to say that Hilaire was responsible for not trying to stop the tortures. I wish to stress that I thought he was head of the Maquis. . . . I agree that what I said might easily be construed as an accusation against Hilaire. I feel I ought to have been told that Hilaire was not head of the Maquis and about administrative changes.
A decisive element in George’s defense was that he was no longer in command when the crimes took place. He did not order torture, because he could not order anything. He had ceased to command when the Castelnau and Panjas formations united as the Armagnac Battalion under Parisot. As Parisot’s adviser and arms supplier, George had influence but not authority.
Walters stepped down, and George took the stand. He swore to tell the truth. Over three grueling days, he presented his statement and answered the court’s questions. His testimony covered more than thirty pages of Silkin’s handwritten notes. It was, in essence, the report on his thirty-four months in the field that he had declined to provide Colonel Buckmaster. George’s tour d’horizon took the court through his life in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, organizing clandestine cells, comrades in arms, intrigues, sabotage, and battles. His thorough abhorrence of torture and mob rule emerged from his many interventions, not to harm people, but to spare them. He mentioned two local miliciens, sons of men he knew, named Caille and Rizon:
Fearing that summary justice or lynch law would be applied to these men, I had them arrested for their own safety, taking the view that neither the maquis nor the FFI had any right to mete out summary justice. . . . I myself interviewed alone the fils Rizon. I said to him, “You need not be afraid. I am not here to judge or to punish. I am pointing out to you that you have been misled by Pétain and his propaganda. The real duty of a Frenchman is to fight for his country against our common enemy. . . . I will give you time to think it over. If you are willing to fight and prove yourself a good Frenchman, I will give you the chance to prove you are a good Frenchman and you can join us.” . . . After that, I saw Caille, to whom I said exactly the same thing. That night, i.e., 7/8 June, we had a visit from a party belonging to an FTP maquis of Lot-et-Garonne (of which I of course had no authority, having never worked for the FTP).
On the evening George made his offer to Caille, June 7, he said that men of the communist FTP stayed overnight in Castelnau. In the morning, Mayor Larribeau told George they had broken into the church, attacked the prisoners, and loaded them onto a truck, “no doubt to do away with them.” George told the court:
I rushed out and after very heated arguments I persuaded the chief of this FTP party that he was wrong, and he gave me back the prisoners. I remember distinctly that I actually apologized to the prisoners for the treatment they had received. I think this is the incident to which Brown or Parsons referred [in the missing testimony].
He added that saving the miliciens had angered his maquisards, but they accepted his argument that their fate was a matter for the courts and not for rough justice. He sent Rizon and Caille, the two miliciens whose families he knew, to serve in another Resistance group, where they fought against the Germans. Friends in France told him later that a French court sentenced Caille to twenty years at hard labor for his earlier Milice service.
George turned to the Spanish contingent under Commander Camilo, whom he praised but who beat a prisoner they had captured. “The prisoner was literally gushing blood out of his nose,” George said.
I had a hell of a row with Camilo and told him that Spanish independence did not mean this sort of thing in my house. He promised he would not do it again. I would stress the great difficulty of maintaining discipline, because [there] was no means of punishment.
George continued his story from the Battle of Castelnau to his interrogation of the two Gestapo agents. “I wish to point out,” he said of the interrogation, “that I was dressed in my normal manner as a maquisard, that is, not in British uniform.” When the German woman said he was British, he feared that she recognized him from a description the Gestapo had of “Colonel Hilaire.” To her comment that she thought he was a British officer and a gentleman, he insisted his response was “You are mistaken for once. I am not a British officer and a gentleman.” That was significantly different from his telling her, as the officers from Beaulieu alleged, that he was a British officer who was not a gentleman.
Major Soskice interrupted to ask a question, to which George replied that the woman was about seven months pregnant. “The woman’s French was very good,” he added. “She said she was German. Her papers said so, and she spoke with a strong German accent.” He had heard that the man, but not the woman, had been tortured and both had been executed. He then told the court about the questioning of other German prisoners by Captain Gabriel Termignon. When Termignon battered them, George “went over to him and in front of everybody told him that that was not the way to treat prisoners of war who were soldiers a
nd were under orders whatever they had done.” Later, in liberated Toulouse, he said, he saw many prisoners in FFI custody.
In quite a few cases I intervened to have them released knowing perfectly well they were absolutely innocent and the victims of mass hysteria and vengeance. For example I caused to be released the director of the Puits de Petrole [oil wells] de Saint-Gaudens.
George turned to the talk at Beaulieu that had led his colleagues to accuse him. He felt they had misunderstood him. The exact words he exchanged with the Gestapo woman proved that he was hiding from her the fact he was a British officer rather than authorizing her mistreatment. His defense hinged on the fact that he was not in charge of the maquis when torture took place. When he was able, he had prevented torture. He produced documents proving that control of the maquis after the Battle of Castelnau had passed to Captain Parisot and Colonel Ravanel. His concluding words, however, were a defense of his friend Parisot:
I wish to say that Captain Parisot was not only a brave soldier, but a good man for whom I had great admiration. I feel that he would not have allowed any serious misdoings to go on in his maquis of which he had knowledge.
The court of inquiry adjourned on February 17 to consider its verdict. Deliberations lasted eleven days, while George Starr’s fate and reputation hovered between vindication and disgrace. At last, on February 28, the court announced its decision:
Undoubtedly, Lieutenant Colonel STARR was aware, as a matter of general knowledge, as were other organizers and resistance leaders, that on occasion enemy prisoners were ill-treated and even subjected to torture in various maquis. He himself, however, was never party to, nor did he authorize, approve or condone such ill-treatment or the inflicting of torture . . . there is no justification whatsoever for any imputation against Lieutenant Colonel STARR of inhumanity or cruel treatment to any enemy prisoner at any time under his control or under the control of troops or resistance forces under his immediate command or control.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 26
