They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France

by Charles Glass

  The court went further and condemned George’s accusers for slandering him. Of Anne-Marie Walters’s statements, it said, “The Court finds that each and every one of these detrimental allegations are wholly and utterly unfounded and false.” It criticized Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych for making “serious charges against another officer in unqualified terms encouraging the impression that there was no room for doubt or mistake, when he (as he admits) had made no enquiry of Lieutenant Colonel STARR or anyone else.”

  The court’s decision and robust condemnation of George’s accusers amounted not only to his acquittal but to the vilification of everyone who had testified against him. MI5, however, did not hire him as an agent. Its reasons for withholding the appointment went unrecorded, but rumors reaching London about his brother’s conduct at 84 avenue Foch may have played a part.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Nazis commenced the mass executions at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in January 1945. Among the victims of the elimination program were John Starr’s Norwegian friends from Strafe Block, who were hanged on February 5. John was the only member of the Strafe Kommando to survive, because he was not living in their blockhouse when the warders came for them. A German kapo named Jakob, who had served more than ten years in the camp, warned John that the authorities planned to kill him next. His only chance was to leave with French inmates the Germans were evacuating to camps farther east.

  As the French prisoners marched through the gates, Jakob advised him, “Slip yourself into that column. This place is no good to you.” John smuggled himself into the line of men and onto a waiting train. Squalid boxcars carried 2,500 prisoners for three days, while overcrowding, lack of air, and dehydration killed 800 of them. On February 17, 1,700 men stumbled out of the train at Mauthausen in Austria. Guards whipped them through heavy snow toward the forced labor camp, while Mauthausen’s citizens looked away in shame and, John said, “openly wept.”

  The motto over the camp’s entrance left prisoners in no doubt about their fate: Du Kommst, Niemals Raus. “You arrive, but never leave.” The regime at Mauthausen made Sachsenhausen’s barbarity seem mild. John recalled:

  On arriving at the camp, those who were ill were lined up separately and made to undress. It was very cold and they were kept in a state of complete nudity for the whole day. Towards the evening, they were forced, by brutal beatings of truncheons, into the shower baths, where they were made to take a hot shower. After that they were forced in the same way, out into the open again and kept there until well in the night, still without any clothes. In the early hours of the morning, they were thrust down to the showers again and then made to take a cold shower, which lasted for about half an hour. Again they were brutally urged out into the open, and only a mere handful survived the treatment. The other prisoners, in the meantime, after much brutal handling, were made to take a shower and given a pair of underpants and a vest . . . As befits such a place, all the members of the staff, without exception, were absolute brutes.

  John was housed with a thousand other prisoners in one of Number 3 Camp’s timber huts. His bed was a plank in the mud floor. Breakfast was warm water, lunch a kind of soup. John, like all his fellow inmates, endured beatings and inhuman abuse. Guards executed prisoners who collapsed on labor details or were too weak to stand at morning roll call. They murdered others for no reason at all.

  The killing intensified as winter snows thawed, turning the camp’s walkways from ice to mud. With the Third Reich disintegrating, the authorities sought to leave no witnesses to their crimes. In April, however, negotiations involving the Swiss Red Cross, Swedish intermediaries, and Nazi officials led to evacuations of prisoners from many of the camps. At Mauthausen, the Swiss Red Cross took female inmates away in white buses. French and Belgian male prisoners were scheduled to follow. John, as a Briton of American origin, did not qualify for the humanitarian rescue. A French prisoner came to his aid by tearing up his British identity card and replacing it with a forgery stating he was French.

  On the day of the French and Belgian evacuation, an SS warder who had been at Sachsenhausen recognized John and said, “But you’re not a Frenchman.” John replied, “Yes, but in a very short while now the war will be over, and you can help yourself best by saying nothing, and maybe I could put in a good word for you.” The guard said nothing. John fell in with the French and Belgian detainees who were boarding a convoy of trucks, and they rolled through the gates. Free at last of their German tormentors, the men sang La Marseillaise under the spring sky. Along their route through Austria, villagers offered food to the starving evacuees.

  The Red Cross convoy crossed the Swiss border three days later. The men waited in Switzerland for five days until a train came to take them to France. In the first village over the French border, the inhabitants swamped the evacuees with all the wine and food they could spare.

  The next day, John staggered off a train in Paris and returned to his apartment in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The concierge let him into the empty flat he had last seen while collecting paintbrushes for his portrait of Major Kieffer. Home at last, he lay on his bed, emaciated, exhausted, and alone.

  In the morning, he called on his prewar workmates at the Agence Yves Alexandre Publicité. They barely recognized the haggard figure who had somehow survived the camps from which most did not return. John then walked to the military attaché’s office at the British Embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The attaché was out, and an embassy official told him to try the Hotel Bristol a short walk away. In the Bristol bar, British officers gathered around their traumatized comrade. His skeletal frame was enough to tell them where he had been. The Intelligence Corps issued him cash and some coupons for a new uniform. John stepped outside into the warming air of a bright spring morning. On his promenade toward the Champs-Élysées, he saw thousands of Parisians waving flags and singing as they streamed through the avenues and boulevards toward the Arc de Triomphe.

  It was May 8, 1945. Germany had just surrendered.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day, John went to Paris’s Le Bourget Airport to fly to England. The plane was full, but the pilot offered to stow him in the cargo hold. John said he was too weak from Mauthausen to make it that way. Hearing “Mauthausen” and seeing John’s condition, the pilot seated him in the cockpit and gave him headphones so he could listen to the BBC. As Dover’s white cliffs loomed up from the English shore, the BBC played “God Save the King.” John could not stop himself from bursting into tears. The ordeal was over. Another was beginning.

  F-Section officers met him when he landed and drove him to Tyting House, known as STS 28, near Guildford, Surrey. The seventeenth-century farm was one of SOE’s debriefing centers for agents returning from the Continent. His handlers ordered him to write a full report about his experiences in France and Germany. He said he first wanted to see his wife, Michelle, their children, and his parents in Newcastle-under-Lyme. The officers insisted he complete the report before he went anywhere. Unlike his brother, George, he lacked the self-confident bravado to declare he did not write reports. He compromised by dictating a three-page “Rough Report.” The truncated account gave highlights of his time in the field and his captivity in Dijon, Paris, and Germany. “During my 11 months there [84 avenue Foch] I had either seen or heard all our agents who were arrested in France,” he said. “I am in a position also to relate how long, and how several circuits continued to work long after the arrest of our agents.” The suggestion that circuits went on working “after the arrest of our agents” was certain to cause controversy, especially among superior officers he held responsible for succumbing to German deception. He signed the typescript and wrote below his signature, “A full report with all details will take several weeks to write. I realise the necessity of such a report and am only too willing to write it. Nevertheless I do feel that above all, I would like to see my family if only for a f
ew hours first.”

  John did not leave an account of the family reunion at his parents’ house, but years later his daughter, Ethel, had not forgotten it. Her grandmother, also named Ethel, roasted a chicken for her favorite son’s return. Young Ethel said her father looked at the bird and, without pausing, ate the whole thing. He did not stay long. Ethel wrote that her father said, “I’m going to see Oncle George in London. I will be back soon.” The brothers met in London, but no record of the encounter survived. Each Starr had experienced a different war. George’s had been the excitement of field work and liberation. John’s was betrayal, torture, compromise, and isolation. John recounted in his postwar letters the brothers’ enduring friendship and mutual loyalty. Each always rose to the defense of the other.

  After seeing George in London, John returned to STS 28 in Surrey and wrote a lengthy document that he said included everything he knew about Germany’s penetration of F-Section and the sacrifice of agents parachuted into German hands. His candid account, as well as many subsequent debriefs, described his work for Major Kieffer and Ernest Vogt. He maintained that his cooperation had enabled him to learn everything that he nearly escaped with to London in November 1943.

  He submitted the report to the War Office, which claimed to be satisfied with it. SOE’s only comment came from F-Section’s formidable intelligence chief, Vera Atkins, when John called at her office in Orchard Court: “There were some quite amusing things in your report.” He waited to hear more, but it was as if he had never written it.

  Suspicion of John Starr was mounting within the halls of SOE. A “NOTE ON CAPTAIN J.A. STARR’S INTERROGATION” stated, “Certain rumours had been current with regard to his conduct which, if true, might justify his being classified as a renegade.” Other captured SOE agents who survived their detention were bringing stories back to England about “Bob” at avenue Foch, a man at ease in German company, enjoying privileges and wearing comfortable civilian dress.

  No one told John about the accusations until he chanced upon the brothers Alfred and Henry Newton in a Soho pub frequented by former agents. The Newtons had trained with him at Wanborough Manor and saw him at avenue Foch. Like John, they had endured the concentration camps and were lucky to survive. The brothers told him, “When we got back we were told that none of us was to speak to you if we met you.” John asked why, and they said they didn’t know. “But,” they added, “your word is good enough for us.”

  The Newton brothers, unknown to John, had been among his accusers. One SOE report stated that they were “extremely critical [of John], yet, on the other hand, agents of higher standing and experience, such as [Peter] Churchill and [Maurice] Southgate, saw nothing particular to criticise in STARR’s conduct and are unlikely to go further than to say he was not as clever as he thought he was.”

  Henry Newton’s statement to SOE implied that John had helped the Germans to deal with other prisoners. On May 2, he told a debriefer that John had said to him at avenue Foch, “Do not lead them up the gun. It is quite useless to do so. They know everything.” The debriefer acknowledged that neither of the Newtons believed John had betrayed them: “The brothers had been operating under the name of NORMAN, and so far as they are aware, STARR never gave away their real name, or said anything that he knew about them.”

  Peter Churchill defended his old comrade during questioning on May 21. Churchill, here called “source,” referred to John as “Emile,” his code name during their time together in Cannes:

  Asked his opinion about EMILE, source said that he thinks EMILE is perfectly innocent. So far as source knows he gave away no information about him (source) or his organisation. The explanation of EMILE’s presence at the Avenue Foch may well be the German vanity and love of having their portraits painted, and photographs taken. If EMILE, under interrogation, had said he was an artist, source thinks it quite likely that the Germans might have suggested to him that he should come and paint pictures of them at the Avenue Foch.

  As the investigation into John’s conduct proceeded, testimony from French collaborators awaiting trial in France weighed against him. However, the statements of men and women in Parisian prisons contained too many mistakes to be reliable. One accuser was Pierre Bony, a former policeman who had worked with a criminal named Henri Lafont in the Bony Lafont Gang doing the Gestapo’s dirtiest work in Paris against Jews and résistants. He had never met John but claimed he was:

  Devoted to the German cause, his role consisted in taking morse messages from London and sending them out. . . . Gifted with prodigious memory, he was able to reproduce by pencil drawings, the portraits of English and French agent [sic] whom he knew, which enabled the person wanted to be identified at first sight.

  A note on Bony’s affidavit cautioned, “This statement was made by a man who was at the time on trial for his life, and therefore cannot be regarded as reliable. Source has since been executed.”

  Kieffer’s chauffeur and odd-job man, Michel Bouillon, also testified from a prison cell: “When he [John Starr] got to Paris, he told them all he knew, helped with the messages, identified agents, and in fact worked with them a great deal.” Bouillon claimed that he and John were “like brothers.” One incredible assertion was that he had assisted John’s escape, but the story did not stand up. Bouillon said John fled alone from avenue Foch, with no mention of Noor Inayat Khan and Léon Faye. “STARR was discovered on the roof,” he added, although the SD had captured John inside the mansion next door. Bouillon also claimed to have been waiting in Josef Placke’s car to drive John to Gibraltar. Like Pierre Bony, he was executed for treason soon after making his statement.

  The cleaner from avenue Foch, Rose Marie Holwedts, also testified from prison while awaiting trial. “She was particularly bitter about Bob STARR,” British lieutenant colonel Warden wrote from Paris. She claimed that John betrayed both Maurice Southgate and Noor Inayat Khan, although Southgate himself denied it and Noor’s attempt to escape with John demonstrated her trust in him.

  The prima facie evidence against John Starr grew, but it amounted to nothing. Lieutenant Colonel E.J.P. Cussen of MI5 wrote to Lieutenant Colonel T. G. Roche on July 4, 1945:

  Many thanks for your letter of June 13th, with which were enclosed in a folder STARR’s own report as to his activities on the Continent, your Department’s interrogation report, a note of your interrogator’s impressions and extracts from certain relevant interrogations of other of your agents. . . .

  You say: “I am doubtful whether any Court Martial would feel able to reach that degree of certainty necessary for conviction. . . .”

  I respectfully agree with the conclusion to which you have come. I note that you do not propose to advise your Department to initiate any action against STARR.

  It might be a very bad thing if it were to be thought among prospective agents that any efforts to double-cross the enemy after capture were tolerably likely to result in a trial by Court-Martial upon their return.

  F-Section intelligence officer Vera Atkins nonetheless insisted, “We feel he let the side down. And he was the only one who did.”

  John’s chance meeting in Soho with the Newton brothers led to a commercial partnership. The three men, having grown up with show business parents, opened a nightclub in Hanley, Staffordshire. The venture failed though, in no small part because the concentration camps had traumatized them all. Alfred Newton had, in the words of British MP Dennis Walters to Parliament, “suffered appalling treatment following their capture and he consequently receives a 100 per cent. disability pension and has received the maximum in compensation paid to any individual out of the fund for victims of Nazi persecution.”

  John Starr eventually moved with his wife and children back to Paris. They resettled in their Issy-les-Moulineaux flat, where John had rescued his wife’s pots and pans from the Germans. Resuming his career as a commercial artist with Agence Yves Alexandre Publicité, John sought nothing more than to leave
the war behind. It would not be easy.

  * * *

  • • •

  On July 19, 1945, Britain awarded Lieutenant Colonel George Starr the Distinguished Service Order to add to his Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. France, despite George’s confrontation with General de Gaulle, also conferred on him the Medal of the Resistance and the Legion of Honor. The United States granted him the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm. His war had ended with distinction, and he went on to rebuild some of what the war had destroyed by reorganizing the German coal industry in the British zone of occupation. As a former miner and mining engineer, he was the right man for the job.

  George took up residence outside Essen at Villa Hügel, the palatial country mansion of the German industrialist Krupp family, arms makers for all their country’s modern wars. Living with him in the villa’s nearly three hundred rooms above the River Ruhr were scores of other British male officers. The only woman on the staff was Yvonne Cormeau. Cormeau, recalled her daughter, “was responsible for running the domestic side of the house.”

  George was at Villa Hügel on August 15, V-J Day, when Japan surrendered. Unable to celebrate the end of the Second World War with Pilar and the children in England, he wrote a letter to his eight-year-old daughter, Georgina Ethel Margarita Starr:

  15.8.45

  My Dear Georgina,

  Your Daddy is thinking of you all the time, especially so on this great day in the History of the World. In your short life you have known only about war. Now it is over and God willing you will only know Peace for the rest of a very long and happy life.