Sarah Helm

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

  Under international law the Germans had a duty to notify the Red Cross if any names on its missing lists were found in their hands—dead or alive. But as no SOE name had been posted, none would be notified, even if they had managed to get into a POW camp.

  If, after liberation, Allied forces found British agents alive among the mass of displaced people who would by then be flooding across Europe, they would have every reason not to believe their stories, as they would not be on their lists. And the agents would not be entitled to repatriation or welfare of any kind. Once again the FANYs would have the greatest difficulty of all in convincing British or Allied military of their bona fides. Despite this, Senter was still refusing publication of their names because “security” might be jeopardised.

  By early February 1945 Vera's case for publishing names became daily more urgent. Russian forces were advancing fast, and vast numbers of prisoners who had been held in eastern camps were being marched west by the Germans before the Russians' arrival. Meanwhile Allied prisoners in camps liberated by the Russians, fearful of heading west into German lines, were reportedly making their way east and turning up in places such as Lublin in liberated Poland and Odessa on the Black Sea. Vera hoped her people might be among them. The fortress of Ravitsch, near Breslau, was liberated by the Russians in mid-January. Vera knew that several SOE agents were prisoners there, among them France An-telme and Gilbert Norman.

  The Ravitsch prisoners might even now be making their way home. “Given the Russian advance… special attention should be given to the problem of ensuring that our prisoners shall be identified and released as quickly as possible following the liberation of their area,” she wrote, requesting that the British embassy in Moscow and British diplomats in Lublin and at a military mission in Odessa be given the agents' names.

  In February the entire government bureaucracy seemed paralysed by the enormity of the POW catastrophe now unfolding in mainland Europe. Perhaps as many as two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth prisoners were among more than two million Allied nationals (including Russians) now believed to be held in more than two hundred German POW camps, and rumours were rife that all might perish on Hitler's orders.

  In these circumstances nobody had time to pay attention to the fate of a few missing secret agents. But Vera was asserting, more forcefully than ever, that they should be given special attention. The Red Cross was pushing hard for access to concentration camps and trying to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Vera argued that it should keep “a special look out” for SOE prisoners and should give them priority on release and repatriation, but it must be given lists of names. “This is not an unreasonable request given the special hardships they have undergone and the special risks they have taken in preparing for an Allied landing,” she wrote.

  Then, just as agreement neared on publishing names, the bureaucrats started quibbling over what to call them. “Which of the secret agents' many names—real and false—should be published?” asked one. Buck-master, at last back from his celebratory tour of France, opined at length on how to classify an F Section casualty, only to conclude that in any event “we have every reason to believe that they will be recovered at the cessation of hostilities.”

  By early March, Vera had new cause to worry that her men and women might never be recovered. The French had found an inscription on prison charts kept by the Germans at Fresnes, and it was passed to her. The inscription referred to a man named John Hopper, who had been captured as a spy and imprisoned in Fresnes before being transferred to Germany. “Hopper. John. Cell No. 288,” it said, and in a remarks column were the notes “N+N” and “Ständig gefesselt” (permanently chained). Hopper, it seemed, had been singled out for special treatment. He had been chained, and when Vera asked her sources about the meaning of N+N, she discovered that it referred to a category of prisoner to be dealt with under the Nacht und Nebel order. Issued by the Reich towards the end of 1942, this order ruled that resisters and spies should be categorised “N+N” Nobody—family, fellow resisters, or anybody else— should ever know what became of them. It would be as if they had disappeared in the “night and fog.”

  Another inscription had also been found in Fresnes prison: “Frank Pickersgill, Canadian Army Officer 26.6.43.” Pickersgill's little scratches confirmed that he was taken there soon after his arrest. But what Vera so desperately needed was a clue as to where he was now. She knew Pickers-gill had once been in Ravitsch. Perhaps he was marching east.

  Even more tantalising were letters from her agent Ange Defendini. The letters had been written by the Corsican while he too was held at Fresnes and were apparently smuggled out to a friend, who had passed them to the French police, but the French could make neither head nor tail of them.

  Written in a complex code based on a film of the novel Le Fantôme de I' Opéra, the letters had flummoxed everyone except Vera, who succeeded in deciphering them and found they contained a daring plan for escape: “Get for me two small revolvers with ammunition, some cyanide or mercury poison, and four small metal saws.” But the letters contained no clues about where Defendini was eventually taken. The only clue they did contain was a warning about Déricourt. “I have confirmation here from my mistress that Gilbert is a swine.” The word “mistress” was code for Defendini's Gestapo captors.

  By March families of the missing were clamouring for news. The destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers had exacerbated fears that Hitler would take revenge at the eleventh hour by slaughtering all prisoners held in the camps.

  Vera invited those relatives who requested meetings to see her in a hotel just off Trafalgar Square. The Victoria Hotel, in Northumberland Avenue, had been requisitioned by the War Office at the outbreak of war. SOE candidates were sometimes interviewed in Room 238, and it was here that Vera now met their next of kin. Sitting at a small wooden table in what was once a single bedroom, she tried to assure the relatives, as she had in letters, that when hostilities were over, there was every reason to hope the missing would be found. But few who came here believed the reassurances of the elegant officer in her brand-new powder-blue uniform. Vera had at last secured her commission. She was now a flight officer in the WAAF; the higher rank of squadron officer had been refused.

  “There may have been a basin in the room. I think there was a gas fire. It was a horrible little room,” said Helen Oliver, sister of Lilian Rolfe. Lilian had been landed by Lysander near Bléré in May 1944, and her family had heard almost nothing from the War Office since.

  “What did Vera say?” I asked Helen.

  “I can't remember. I think she may have told me about how Lilian had been captured—how brave she had been. She could tell me nothing about what had happened to Lilian—that's all I remember. But I already knew Lilian was dead.”

  “How?”

  “I had had a dream about her,” said Helen, who explained that she and Lilian were mirror twins and often had premonitions about each other. “My crown went one way and Lilian's the other. She played the piano beautifully, and I played the violin. We were very similar. But Lilian was not as strong as me. She nearly died of rheumatic fever before the war. Our mother nursed her back to health.”

  I asked what happened in the dream.

  “I saw Lilian. She came to me. She was crying. She was dressed in brown. She was in terrible distress. Just crying. I knew something awful had happened to her.”

  “When was the dream?”

  “It was on February 11, 1945—not long before I saw Vera Atkins. I now know that was the night she died, although Vera Atkins gave a different date later, but I know she was wrong.”

  Was there anything else that Helen could recall about Vera at the meeting in the Victoria Hotel?

  She thought about this. “I remember I disliked her. She smelled.”

  After every meeting with the families Vera took the chance to update the next-of-kin register, annotating her personal copy with details so it read like a personal inventory of the F Section family. Here were bro
thers, sisters, husbands—estranged or otherwise—stepfathers, daughters, illegitimate children, lovers. Vera had learned of all of them and recorded them here for future reference. Yvonne Rudellat, she had noted, was estranged from her husband, and first contact should be with her twenty-two-year-old daughter. Violette Szabo “leaves a small girl in the care of a guardian whose name I do not know. She also has a father who is a very bad type, and she wishes at all costs to prevent that any money of hers should fall into his hands or that he should have any say in the guardianship of her daughter.”

  Madeleine Damerment's next of kin was listed simply as “Mother Superior, St. Mary's Convent, Hitchin.” In another case a stepbrother had been in touch “but is not known to our friend.”

  In a cupboard in Room 238 Vera was also guarding the scaffolding of the agents' lives: in boxes were rental agreements for temporary housing, bank details, copies of wills, club membership cards, and odd photographs. There were little personal notes about what should be done if such and such should happen and whether a mother could be telephoned on her birthday or a suit collected from a tailor's. And Vera's job was to ensure that the pay of the missing, including allowances for dependents, was sent to bank accounts.

  And then there were the physical remnants of the missing, which had also been left under Vera's supervision: a vanity case, cravats, gramophone records—all these things were left behind in the rush as they departed. Violette Szabo left a camel-hair coat wrapped in a brown paper bag; Diana Rowden a diary, a map, and a pair of plimsolls; Andrée Borrel a large blue suitcase containing another smaller brown suitcase. Vera knew exactly what was here, and if the items were not noted, they were all filed in her head, along with the aliases and cover stories, the last-known colour of hair—all of which would enable her, and her alone, to trace her agents.

  By early March 1945 the Allies had crossed the Rhine, and the final collapse of Germany was expected at any time. Vera was scanning telegrams and telexes, monitoring the flow of paper from every possible source, so that no detail, however small, that might identify somebody could possibly slip by.

  Papers were flying from Vera's office to Buckmaster, to Senter's men in Paris, and to officials in the War Office, as everyone suddenly seemed acutely conscious of the need to get ready for the moment when liberation would happen—though nobody knew what to expect.

  Lists and more lists of the missing, with aliases and details of next of kin, were passed around and checked and double-checked. Vera was arranging for enlargements of photographs of all the agents to be sent to Paris, where some of the first returnees were expected to arrive.

  “Is the list of FANYs enclosed a complete one: Beekman, Bloch, Borrel, Damerment, Inayat Khan, Lefort, Leigh, Nearne, Sansom, Plewman, Rowden, Szabo, Baseden, Rolfe?” asked a note from FANY HQ in Vera's file.

  Even before the Allies reached the first camps in Germany, prisoners had started to trickle back across frontiers. Some were escaping, and others were at last being exchanged.

  The first traces of F Section names came in, often picked up from interviews with early returnees and then passed on. Vera's advice was swiftly sought. “Top Secret. Is Celestin Rept. Celestin. Brian Stone-house?” said a signal from Paris, clearly referring to the agent Brian Stonehouse but saying nothing about where or how he was. Vera replied: “Our operator Celestin is Brian Stonehouse arrested approx Oct 22. If any interesting information comes in, I am sure you will let us have it.”

  And another signal from Senter's men in Paris gave news of Yvonne Rudellat but nothing definite. “Top secret. Yvonne Rudellat. Only meagre particulars available… Now believed prisoner in Germany. She is down in the Kardex as a FANY and French by birth, which presumably means she is British by nationality. Is she also British by upbringing and education?” Again the question was referred to Vera, who alone could supply the answer.

  Pouring in over the wires and filling newspapers were ever more horrific stories of atrocity, and in response politicians were suddenly preparing the ground for the possibility of war crimes trials. SOE received a memorandum from the newly formed War Crimes Commission saying that evidence of war crimes should be gathered wherever possible from any returning agent. A note from a senior Foreign Office diplomat suggested that the fate of SOE agents had suddenly drawn attention: “Anticipating that in the near future Allied armies will overrun some of the camps in which these officers are held it is now desired to institute some procedure whereby the welfare of the officers can be cared for.”

  On April 4 Vera remarked that “at last” the head of SOE's security directorate had sanctioned that short particulars of SOE agents should be published in the POW casualty lists, “to ensure that they get into the P/W stream.” Vera stressed: “We are anxious to get on with the job as quickly as possible.” And also, at long last, somebody somewhere had decided she had been right after all and that it was now “in the best interests of our officers if we supply to casualties branch a list of all who have been arrested or who are missing.” Vera sent a memo to a liaison officer in Whitehall: “Herewith ten copies of our casualty lists which please forward MOST URGENTLY to the War Office Casualties Branch … I have heard that it is most important that we get this documentation out since those returning are most handicapped by not being identifiable.” Somebody in the SOE hierarchy was even now suggesting sending officers to Germany with advancing troops to look for missing SOE agents, but the plan was dismissed by others as “impracticable” in view of the pace of the war. Vera now sent a new internal memo arguing that lists of agents should be provided to the displaced persons branch of the Allied Control Commission, which was preparing to take over the administration of Germany. Senter objected.

  By the first week of April a tidal wave of returnees from Nazi Germany was already swamping France, and POWs were reaching England by the thousands. Senter's men in Paris were overwhelmed trying to keep track of reports of missing agents and interrogating those with news. Asked by Senter to explain why his interrogations were taking so long to process, a Major Wells replied that a “mountain” of paperwork had been produced by one interrogation. “I cannot tell you the size of it in pages and words, but it is written on very thin paper and I weighed the whole bundle on the kitchen scales it is just short of 4 kilos.”

  Vera, meanwhile, kept only mental notes, so that when a colleague complained of a failure of communication with London, another commented: “The reason for the failure is that the information is in Miss Atkins's head and not elsewhere.” On another question of identity an official in Paris commented: “Suggest you irritate F/O Atkins.”

  Names of more and more concentration camps were now cropping up in Red Cross intelligence reports. On April 8 Vera finally had a reply to her request of weeks earlier for more information from the Foreign Office.

  With reference to your enquiry about the Ravensbrück and Buchen-wald [concentration] camps we have just received the following information from the War Office on the subject:

  “Ravensbrück camp as such is comparatively unknown to us, and we have no record of any British civilian internees being in Brandenburg now. Recently, however, our Embassy in Paris informed us that women returned from that internment camp said it had been transferred to Weimar, and we are making further enquiries.

  “With regard to Buchenwald—no further information is forthcoming other than that given in March—i.e. that it is a concentration camp for German nationals, although a certain number of Poles and Czechs have been reported there. The War Office telegraphed Bern again on 6th of this month asking for a report on the present position.”

  Then at precisely 11:55 a.m. on April 13, 1945, a teleprinter in a Bayswater office shook suddenly into life and started spilling out the truth about Weimar concentration camp, which, from that moment on, the world would know as Buchenwald:

  Most Immediate. Rpt Most Immediate. Top Secret. Rept Top Secret. To Senter from Delaforce.

  Have interrogated French Officer deported with number of ou
r male agents to WEIMAR concentration camp.

  On 11 September 1944: ALLARD BENOIST DEFENDILI[sic], DETAL HUBBLE? LECCIA MAYER MACALISTER PICKERSGILL RECHENNMANN

  SABOURIN STEELE: Executed by hanging.

  On 5 October: FRAGER MULSANT WILKINSON: Executed by shooting.

  On 21 October: YEO THOMAS: Executed by shooting.

  October (date uncertain)

  BARRETT: Executed by shooting.

  October (date uncertain)

  4. SOUTHGATE: Possibly still Alive

  5. Full report follows this afternoon. Contents this message NOT repeat NOT communicated to anyone except A.M. [above mentioned].

  A man with white hair was standing by the teleprinter tearing off the piece of paper. He then called SOE's signals room to make sure the teleprint was marked “secret” and circulated to nobody else. He wrote: “In particular it must not be seen by the country section.” John Senter meant that the information about the F Section dead at Buchenwald should not be seen by Vera Atkins.

  6.

  “Buchenwald Boys”

  Despite the “secret” stamp on Guillot's report from Buchenwald, Vera was soon able to read its contents. Scanning the names of the dead listed here, she ticked off her “boys.” The Free French agent Bernard Guillot had escaped from Buchenwald a few days before the liberation. When he arrived in Paris on April 7, 1945, Guillot reported to Senter's men revealing the names of all the British agents who had died at the concentration camp. Guillot was one of the first to give eyewitness testimony of Buchenwald's horror.