There was still resistance to circulating names of women, because, said senior SOE staff, “the including of such names would defeat the desire for normality for the rest of the list.”
Buckmaster, however, made sure that the names of the women were now included. He told officials he would rather rescue an agent “even though that agent were blown to the Russians than to leave him to die or rot in a Russian prison.”
And Vera had another good reason for hope. By the end of April none of the missing women had been found in the western camps liberated by the Americans and British, apart from Yvonne Rudellat, last seen at Belsen. For Vera no news of the other women was good news. There was strong evidence that they too had also been taken east, probably to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, which would be reached by the Russians any day. In the confusion that was bound to accompany the Russians' arrival, these women might also start the tramp east. Or they might be released in the prisoner exchanges that were suddenly happening. Exchanges administered by the Red Cross were due to start at Ravensbrück in the last days of April, ahead of the Russian liberation.
Vera could not conceal her optimism from Mrs. Rowden, writing on May 1 to Diana's mother: “I am sorry that we are still without news of your daughter. I can tell you however quite definitely that she has not been in any of the camps so far overrun. We have reason to believe that she may be in a camp which is about to be overrun by the Russians and therefore we are hoping for news shortly.”
Vera very soon had cause to believe her optimism justified. On May 3 a telegram came in from the British mission at Malmö saying a young British woman had turned up with a Swedish Red Cross convoy bringing prisoners out of Ravensbrück. Vera recognised the description, and plans were made to fly the woman to Scotland so that she could catch the overnight train to London. Vera arranged to meet her.
7.
Euston Station
Euston Station was almost deserted. The clock said eight, and the night train from Glasgow was pulling in. Doors swung open, and • figures stepped down hauling baggage, then dispersed. A single female figure was left on the platform; she appeared to be waiting for somebody.
The woman was carrying just a brown paper bag. She wore a thick woollen coat that hung loosely from her shoulders and that looked far too heavy for the time of year. She looked uncomfortable and nervous. Two weeks earlier Yvonne Baseden had been in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Yvonne was one of about fifty women who were released to the Swedish Red Cross on the eve of the camp's liberation in April 1945. The women were driven in coaches across the ruins of Germany to the Danish border and then on to Sweden. On the docks at Malmö, the women, many fainting with weakness, were herded into steam-filled tents for cleaning and delousing. Then they were housed in hospitals or tents; Yvonne's first nights of freedom were spent on a mattress on the floor of Malmö's Museum of Prehistory, sleeping under the skeletons of dinosaurs. She was then flown to Scotland and put on the train to Euston. She had been told there would be somebody to meet her. But it was now eight-fifteen a.m. and nobody was here.
“I saw a telephone, and I decided to call the Air Ministry,” Yvonne told me. “I had a number on a piece of paper, but it was Sunday morning and I wasn't expecting anyone to be there. And I didn't know what to say, you see, so I said: ‘I'm sorry, but I am a WAAF officer and I have just come from Germany and I am at Euston and I don't know what to do.' A voice—I suppose it must have been a duty officer—said: ‘Don't move. Hold on a moment.' Then a few moments later the voice said: ‘Miss Atkins is on her way.'
“I waited on the platform, and then after a while Vera suddenly appeared. I think she was wearing a suit and looked just the same. She probably signalled to me, and I walked over to join her. I was quite weak. There was no emotion. I was quite confused, you see, and just pleased to see a face I knew.”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, very little at first. Just pleasantries. I think she may have asked about the journey and apologised for keeping me waiting. She was quite distant—cold almost, at first. Suspicious even. On reflection I realised what it was. You see, she had reason to be quite suspicious of me.”
“Why?”
“Well, I think she must have thought—you know—why had I been released? What had I done to be released and not the others? I think that must have been why she was a little wary of me.
“Then she took me to a waiting car. When I asked where we were going, she said, ‘I am taking you home to your father.' You see, my father lived quite close by, in Brockwell Park, and he had been told, of course, that I was coming back.
“Then, as soon as we were in the car, I remember the first thing she said to me was: ‘What do you know of any others?'
“Who did she mean?”
“Well, I thought she must mean the others who were in Ravensbrück with me—Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch. So I told her the whole story: how I saw them first at Saarbrücken on the way to Germany. I was taken in a convoy from Dijon, and we stopped first at Saarbrücken, which was like a big base—a kind of holding camp for all the prisoners going east, with lots of sheds. And I was taken into one of these sheds, and there they were in this shed.”
“What was it like?”
“I am trying to visualise that hut, which was quite dark and full of women. Packed with beds. I looked round and began to see these faces that I knew, and I thought, My God, the whole of Baker Street is here! I expected to see more.”
“How did they seem?”
“They were in quite a good state at that time—particularly Violette. They were sitting on beds. But there were a lot of people around, and we could not speak easily. And they were very wary of me—suspicious really—because they would have thought, What is she doing here arriving on another convoy? And you see, they would not have known the circumstances of my arrest, so they would have been wary of me. And I don't even know if we spoke English. I doubt it because I didn't want people to know I was English. You see, as far as the Germans knew, I was just a French woman with the resistance. That is how I survived. They never knew I was a British agent, but the other girls had been through some sort of process. They had already been put in a different category. They went on in a different transport to Ravensbrück from me. They left before I left, and thank goodness for me, I did not go with them.”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“We had no idea. I had just come from the prison in Dijon in solitary confinement. The others had come from Paris. They seemed quite confident, particularly Violette. Lilian and Denise seemed more subdued, but I remember Violette was sitting quite casually, and she had obviously made an effort to get whatever clothes she was wearing clean. She had taken her shirt off and had washed it. She had lost none of her vivacity— or else she had been in prison longer than the others and had got used to the atmosphere.
“But later it occurred to me they had been constrained in some way as a group, and I have an idea they had chains on their feet. I sensed it afterwards.
“Then they all left for Ravensbrück, and I went on there a few days later. But I didn't see them again, so I could not tell Vera much, except that I heard they had been sent out on a work commando to a factory. They were gone for many weeks. I told Vera that I had heard one day they had been brought back from the factory to Ravensbrück. I didn't see them when they came back. All I had heard was that they had then been taken off again, and we didn't see them anymore. I heard that their clothes had been suddenly handed back to one of the block guards, but nobody knew for sure what had happened to them. I think Vera had hoped I would be able to tell her more.”
“Did Vera ask you about the camp, about what it was like?” “Oh, no,” said Yvonne. “We reached my father's house, and then she left me.”
Nobody—not even Vera until recently—had suspected there was such a thing as a concentration camp for women. Despite the concerns that SOE women would not be covered by the rules o
f war, it had been tacitly understood that women prisoners—simply because they were women— would receive better treatment than men. Now Vera was learning fast about Himmler's purpose-built women's concentration camp. By the time Yvonne arrived back in Britain, Vera had already studied the reports from Paris of scores of other women detainees at Ravensbrück, mostly French, who had been released to other Red Cross convoys.
Ravensbrück, she had learned from one French prisoner, was built on Himmler's own estate, near a large lake north of Berlin. The SS guards were housed in villas dotted around the woods. The camp was surrounded by walls and electrified fences, and machine guns were trained on the prisoners from pillboxes. The camp was mined. One French returnee had described how commando parties (i.e., work parties) of women were marched to the lakeside to unload coal barges. Others were sent to factories. Another returnee described how pink cards were given to those women not fit for work. They were put in a subcamp called the Jugendlager, once a youth camp but now a place where the sick and aged waited to be selected for death. Parties of women were taken from this subcamp, placed on lorries in nothing but chemises and coats, and never seen again.
Picking over these reports, Vera hunted always for any sighting of her girls. In January 1945 three women parachutists were hanged at the camp. The reason given was “false identity,” but no names were known. There were French women survivors here who had evidently worked with Prosper. One woman reported that a fellow prisoner told her, before being sent to the gas chamber, that “Gilbert nous a trahies” (Gilbert has betrayed us), another reference, it seemed, to Henri Déricourt.
The women returnees had been shown photographs of all the missing SOE women. One returnee, an actress in private life who left on a commando party in summer 1944, thought she recognised a picture of Eileen Nearne.
Several witnesses identified Cicely Lefort, the courier with the Jockey circuit, who had arrived at Ravensbrück as early as autumn 1943. She quickly became critically ill and was issued a pink card. Witnesses said she had been gassed. There had been one possible sighting of Odette San-som. Of all the others, though, there was no firm news. Nobody could tell Vera more about Violette, Lilian, and Denise. And on her own missing list she wrote “no trace” against the names of Andrée Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, Nora Inayat Khan, Diana Rowden, Eliane Plew-man, Yolande Beekman, and Vera Leigh.
But then on May 6 there was more good news, from the HQ of the United States First Army in Allied-occupied Germany:
Subject: Nearne, Eileen, alias Duterte, Jacqueline, alias Wood, Alice, alias ROSE.
Subject claims to work for an intelligence organisation run by a Colonel “Max Baxter.” Subject stated she was flown to a field near ORLEANS. Subject encoded messages and signed them ROSE but claims she has forgotten her agent's number. In July 1944 Subject's transmitter was detected and Subject was arrested by the Gestapo. She claims that despite being tortured she did not reveal any information detrimental to the British intelligence service or its agents.
On 15 August Subject was sent to the extermination [sic] camp of Ravensbrück, where she stayed for two weeks, then to a camp near Leipzig. From that last camp, Subject claims, she managed to escape on 13 April 1945. Subject creates a very unbalanced impression. She often is unable to answer the simplest of questions, as though she were impersonating somebody else. Her account of what happened to her after her landing near ORLEANS is held to be invented. It is recommended that Subject be put at the disposal of the British Authorities for further investigation and disposition.
SECRET.
As Vera saw in a flash, nothing in Eileen Nearne's story was “invented.” On Eileen's return home she made a statement for Vera describing how on arrival at Ravensbrück she had been sent on the same work commando as Violette, Denise, and Lilian. They all worked in the fields for two months, near the town of Torgau, 120 miles south of Ravensbrück, before Eileen was moved to work in a munitions factory. At the factory she heard a rumour that two English girls had escaped from Torgau, but she did not know if it was true. Eileen was then sent to work near Leipzig, labouring twelve hours a day on the roads.
One day in early April they told us we would be leaving this camp for a place 80 kilometres away. Two French girls and I decided to escape and while we were passing a forest I spotted a tree and hid there and then joined the French girls in the forest. We stayed in a bombed house for two nights and the next morning walked through Markkleeberg and slept in the woods. We were arrested by the SS, who asked us for papers. We told them a story and they let us go. We arrived at Leipzig and at a church a priest helped us and kept us there for three nights and the next morning we saw white flags and the first Americans arriving and when I said that I was English they put us in a camp.
Then another message came in from the U.S. First Army HQ, dated
May 7:
FLASH/PRIORITY EMERGENCY STOP ODETTE SANSON [SIC] RPT SAN-SON F SEC AGENT AND WIFE OF PETER CHURCHILL RPT CHURCHILL NOW 20 KEFFERSTEIN STRASSE LUNEBERG STOP PLEASE ARRANGE COLLECT AND REPATRIATE UK SOONEST.
Odette Sansom, also imprisoned in Ravensbrück, was the third of Vera's girls from the camp to be heading home. Her escape from Ravensbrück was no less extraordinary than Eileen Nearne's. Odette, aged thirty-two, born in Picardy, and married to an Englishman, was marked out early in her SOE career as a “shrewd cookie.” When captured with her organiser, Peter Churchill, in 1943, she was clever enough to call herself “Mrs. Churchill,” believing that the name might help her.
At first Odette received no favours. She told Vera on arriving home how, in prison in Fresnes, her toenails were extracted and she was burned on the back by an iron bar, but she gave nothing away.
She was sent in May 1944 on a transport with other SOE women to a civilian prison in Karlsruhe, where she stayed for at least two months. Odette was then separated from the other Karlsruhe prisoners and taken on her own to Ravensbrück. There, although she was kept in solitary confinement, she was favoured by the camp's commandant, Fritz Suhren, who kept her alive. When the Russians were about to seize the camp, Suhren packed a small bag, put it in a car, and brought Odette from her cell, telling her she was going to leave Ravensbrück with him. Together they drove towards the American lines, where Suhren hoped that Odette would attest to how well she had been treated, thereby sparing his life. Odette did nothing of the sort. Instead she told the Americans exactly who Suhren was and then asked to be taken home, taking with her the commandant's bag. When she met up with Vera, Odette was able to display the contents of the bag, including Suhren's personal pistol, a writing case, and a pair of pyjamas.
Though intrigued by Odette's escape, Vera was far more interested in her journey to Karlsruhe, and she particularly wanted to know the identities of those women who went with Odette. Karlsruhe, close to the French-German border, seemed an unlikely place for any prisoners to have been taken, and Vera had known nothing until now of any transport of women there. Odette said she travelled to Karlsruhe with seven other SOE women. She didn't know the women, but after looking through photographs and jogging her memory for names, she confidently identified six of the seven. They were: Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Yolande Beekman, Andrée Borrel, and Eliane Plewman. Where these women had been taken after leaving Karlsruhe, Odette had no idea, though she had heard reports that Andrée and two others may have been moved to Poland in mid-July.
Odette was sure the staff at the prison would know where the women went, and she gave Vera the name of a “Fräulein Beger,” the chief wardress, who was about sixty, “a Quaker and very correct.”
With Odette's evidence Vera now had traces of almost all of the twelve missing women. Cicely Lefort was the only one of the group who Vera felt sure was dead, but in all the other cases she was still holding out hope. Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch were last seen at Ravensbrück, and Eileen Nearne, who had escaped, heard rumours that at least two of those three might also have escaped. Hope had not been abandoned for Yvonn
e Rudellat, last known to be at Belsen, and now Odette had named the other six untraced women, all last seen alive and well at a correctly run civilian prison in Karlsruhe.
There was one woman, though, of whom Vera still had found no trace at all in Germany. She had expected Odette to identify Nora as the seventh woman on the Karlsruhe transport. But as Vera noted at the time: “There was also one other woman whom Mrs. Sansom described as somewhat Jewish looking, small, slight. I have been unable to identify her. It is not Nora Inayat Khan.”
8.
“Gestapo Boys”
The grandeur of Avenue Foch was favoured by Himmler's security chiefs for their Paris headquarters. The magnificent nineteenth-century villas, set back from the vast boulevard, offered seclusion, yet were only a short distance from the restaurants of L'Etoile and Place des Ternes. It was here that, in the last year of the occupation, the Nazi Party security service apparatus, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, had its headquarters for the whole of France. The SD was often seen as synonymous with the Gestapo, the secret state police. Indeed, Vera and SOE agents always referred to the Germans of Avenue Foch as “Gestapo,” when, in fact the SD was a separate intelligence organisation. At 84 Avenue Foch Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer, of the Sicherheitsdienst, was in charge of hunting down spies, terrorists, and commandos sent to France to aid the resistance.
Sarah Helm Page 14