Sarah Helm

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

  “What of the other Englishwomen?” asked Vera. Müller said she had heard there had been others—she thought seven in total at one time— but she could not name any more, except Odette Churchill. Odette had left alone. The rest left in two different groups. One group left in July, soon after she herself arrived, and the second in September.

  Müller's recollection that after Odette's departure the other women left in two separate groups contradicted what the chief wardress had said. Fräulein Becker insisted that the remaining seven girls left in one group. Müller's evidence fitted, though, with Brian Stonehouse's recollection that three women only arrived at Natzweiler sometime in July.

  It was now imperative that Vera learn which three women left Karlsruhe in the first group, in July. They must have been Stonehouse's Nos. 1, 2, and 3, whom he had seen walking to the Natzweiler crematorium.

  In the first group, said Müller, there had been a girl called Diana. She had only heard the name. And there was another, “a dark southerner,” who had left in the first group, and there was also an older woman. The older woman was more stocky in appearance, she thought, and now she recalled that she was named Simone. Vera Leigh's alias was Simone, so Müller was probably talking of her. Berg, the crematorium stoker, had identified Vera Leigh at Natzweiler from a photograph.

  After this first interrogation of Hedwig Müller, Vera felt close to identifying No. 1 and No. 3 of the Natzweiler dead. No. 2, however— Müller's “dark southerner”—remained a mystery. And then Müller suddenly complicated the picture by saying there might have been a fourth. But she could not identify the fourth in any way at all.

  Vera now tried to solve the problem in a different way. She asked Müller which of the seven women stayed behind after July. Müller said she herself had left the prison by the time the second group departed, in September. But she knew from a friend, another political prisoner, Fräulein Else Sauer, who stayed on longer, that Martine and Eliane had left in the second group for sure. And then suddenly she remembered another girl whom she had known in the prison named Yvonne. Yvonne did not leave her cell much because she suffered badly with her legs, Müller said. But she did see Yvonne from time to time and remembered that she was blonde. Yolande Beekman's alias was Yvonne.

  “Was her hair dyed blonde or naturally blonde?” came Vera's question. Stonehouse had said that No. 2 at Natzweiler had dyed blonde hair. From photographs Yolande had been identified by Stonehouse—along with Nora—as one of the two possible matches for No. 2. Perhaps Müller was now going to confirm that No. 2 was therefore Yolande and not Nora, after all. “It was dyed blonde,” she said with certainty. But then she added that she didn't think Yvonne left in the first group. Was she sure? Vera insisted. Hedwig was not sure. She would check with her friend Else Sauer.

  By the time Vera wrote up her notes on her interrogation of Hedwig Müller, she had gathered a few more details from the young nurse and, as a result, had formed the firm view that Yolande (Yvonne) had indeed stayed behind in the jail until September and therefore she could not have been No. 2 in Stonehouse s drawings. By a process of elimination, Müller's evidence had, in Vera's opinion, added strength to the case for saying Nora must indeed have been No. 2.

  But the story was still confused, and by the time Vera wrote to Lisa Graf, the French political prisoner in cell eighteen, she was once again seeking confirmation of No. 2's identity.

  And now she was also considering the identity of a fourth girl who might have gone to Natzweiler. She asked Lisa Graf: “Have you heard the name Andrée—or Denise—Borrel?” She stressed: “The smallest details would be of interest to me and could prove vital, for example descriptions of clothes, of hair, and approximate dates of various little events that might have taken place.”

  Before Vera left Karlsruhe, she tried to find one more witness. Hedwig Müller had given her the name and address of Elise Johe, the Jehovah's Witness, who had shared a cell with Yolande Beekman. But when Vera and Corporal Trenter found the house, it had been destroyed by a bomb.

  “My mother talked a lot about Yolande when she came out of jail,” Erich Johe, Elise's son, told me. “There were four in the cell, which was made for one. My mother was the eldest. There was a German woman named Anie Hagen, who was jailed for selling food on the black market. And Clara Frank, who had slaughtered a cow on the family farm. And Yolande told the others that she was with an English circuit in France. She was transmitting by wireless from a farmhouse when the Germans found her. My mother loved Yolande. She was very young, and my mother took pity on her. Yolande was very scared, especially during the bombing when they could not go to the shelters. She said Yolande cried a lot all the time. My mother used to ask: “Are they going to execute me?” She thought they probably were because she knew about many Jehovah's Witnesses who were executed. She tried to comfort Yolande but I think she knew Yolande would probably die.”

  As we spoke in Erich's flat, his wife served tea and raspberry cakes with dollops of whipped cream. “They got very little food in prison and were always hungry,” he told me. “They made jokes about what they would like to eat if they were back at home. My mother said Yolande loved to embroider and to draw. She lay on her bed embroidering for the chief wardress, and sometimes she would take a needle out and prick a finger until blood came out, and then she used the blood to draw little sketches on the toilet paper—because she had no pencils and no paper.

  “Once she drew a picture of the cell. It showed all four of them, and another showed a plate of food. They were all imagining something nice to eat, and words described what they were thinking of. She gave the pictures to my mother on the day my mother left the prison.”

  I asked what happened to the pictures, and Erich said he had them right there. He reached up to the table from where he was sitting and passed two flimsy pieces of paper to me.

  On one paper was what appeared to be a sketch in brown ink, which was obviously the blood. At first it was hard to make out what it showed, but then I saw the outline of the cell with the window high up the wall and an iron bed underneath it. On a bed a girl was lying and there was a name: Yolande. Three more figures were sketched in, and in the middle of the cell was what looked like a plate piled high with grapes, joints of meat, and bread. The names of the prisoners were written here, also in Yolande s blood: Clara, Elise, Anie, and Yolande.

  I said I was surprised I had not found any statements from Elise in Vera's papers. Did Erich know if his mother had been interviewed by Vera about Yolande? He didn't know, but as soon as his mother had been released in September 1944, the family house was hit by a bomb and they had to move away. His mother always talked of Yolande and never learned what became of her, though she tried to find out.

  After we had finished talking, Erich said he wanted to show me where his mother had been imprisoned. He walked me to Rief-stahlstrasse, and I realised I had earlier been looking for the wrong prison entirely. This was a massive jail constructed in granite around a central courtyard. I rang at the gate, and eventually a youngish man came to the door. He was friendly enough but said I was in the wrong place. There had never been women in the jail. This was a high-security jail and had recently held a number of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.

  I pulled out some old prison records with the words “Gefängnis 11” written on them. The records were copies of the original prison records and gave the list of names of prisoners admitted to Prison No. 11 in May 1944 and the dates when they left. “Well, yes,” he said, “we are Gefängnis 11.” Now he remembered there had once been a women's wing, a long time ago. I also showed him a deposition, made by Ida Hager, the deputy chief wardress, giving a detailed description of the prison in 1944. He said not much had changed. Would I like to look around? He was called Heinrich Graf.

  We mounted stone steps to the right of the gatehouse to reach a first-floor corridor. The women's wing, said my guide, had been on the east side of the courtyard, but to reach it we had to walk anticlockwise around the three sides of
the rectangle, past all the first-floor male cells. This had always been the case, he said, and the women would have walked this way in the past. I mentioned points of interest from the 1946 deposition. The cells with their tiny portals were still here; they closed with little shutters and had tiny shelves for putting a cup on. And the floors were original, my guide said, as his feet clicked on the brown and black tiles. The prison was full of echoes—banging doors, shouting male voices, keys clanging. There was a smell of disinfectant and stale food.

  When we had walked the full three sides, Ida Hager's description said we would arrive at a big white gate outside cell twenty-six. And here it was. Herr Graf now showed me a room that was still used as a warders' office, and then we peered into cell twenty-five. The door was so low we had to stoop.

  The cell was exactly as Yolande had drawn it, with a tiny meshed window very high up under a sloping buttress so that all you could see without climbing up was the sky. I showed Herr Graf the picture, and he was intrigued and asked if he could have a copy for the files.

  We walked back to Herr Graf's office, and he laid Yolande Beekman's drawing of cell twenty-five on the desk. Would I mind if he scanned it into the prison computer? The drawing was private, and I was reluctant. But within moments the paper was being sucked into the scanner, which almost instantly began to read the picture of the four women. Herr Graf and all his office staff were leaning forward, staring at the machine as the images began to appear. “Super,” said Herr Graf, delighted with the results. The picture drawn in blood by Yolande in her cell across the courtyard had now been reproduced on the Karlsruhe prison computer screen.

  16.

  Into the Wilderness

  Known affectionately as “the Gruppenführer” to his war crimes staff at the British HQ at Bad Oeynhausen, Tony Somerhough, a barrister by training, was a big, jolly man with a razor-sharp intellect and a cynical wit. Formerly Deputy Judge Advocate General, RAF, in the Middle East, he was also something of a father figure to his team in Germany and thought nothing of getting up in the small hours to cook an omelette for a hungry investigator back late from an interrogation.

  After an exhausting time in Karlsruhe, Vera was content to be back at Bad Oeynhausen in the company of Somerhough and other new colleagues. In March 1946 time was already running out for her mission, and she still had much to do. She was pressing the Russians for information on the Ravitsch prisoners, who she now believed had been marched to Dresden. In addition she was busy interrogating new suspects, picked up by the Haystack men and held at a small British prison in the woods near Minden called Tomato, an anagram combining two investigators' names. Anton Kaindl, the commandant of Sachsenhausen, had been transferred to Tomato by February 1946, but he was still claiming to have no knowledge of any British prisoners. Investigations into the fate of Francis Suttill, last heard of at Sachsenhausen, therefore remained stalled.

  A handful of Somerhough's men, among them Gerald Draper, a qualified solicitor who was later to become a leading human rights jurist, had become hardened to war crimes by 1946, having already prosecuted the Belsen case. But most of the team were under twenty-five, had little knowledge of law, and probably had been seconded to war crimes work for no other reason than that they spoke a little German (although several did not) and were kicking their heels waiting to be demobbed. By contrast, Vera's maturity and aptitude for war crimes work deeply impressed Somerhough. Her task, he said, writing after the war, involved “negotiating with numerous different ministries of justice and police, military headquarters and governments” and called for “the highest qualities of tact, patient research, recording and cross referencing.” She was able to “evolve her own systems as she proceeded,” her judgements were “unbiased and detached,” and she “never flapped.” Somerhough also observed that Vera “could deal sympathetically with the most peculiar people, and was at her best with foreigners who happened to be a little odd.” Vera's young colleagues also observed in her an unusually steady nerve, and it wasn't long before she had won them over. At work they found her a calming influence. In the mess they discovered she was also excellent company. Not matronly, as she had seemed to begin with, Vera liked nothing more than to carouse until the small hours and even enjoyed playing the black market when the opportunity arose. She won over many of the women staff too, particularly a lively young Norwegian secretary named Sara Jensen, who quickly became a fast friend. One colleague wrote of Vera:

  Sitting in her office just above waist deep in files

  Midst Arribert and Stephen is our Vera, wreathed in smiles.

  In office hours she doesn't look as if she liked a frolic,

  But just sit next to her when she's a little alcoholic.

  On her return from Karlsruhe Vera also spent much time answering correspondence. Norman Mott, who was supervising affairs for her in London, wrote regularly with comments on her “peregrinations,” and she kept him up to date on her progress “tracing our chaps,” complaining that “one spends much time chasing around the countryside” and often asking him for news of “the old firm,” particularly with regard to honours and awards. Whatever bad news might be uncovered in Germany, Vera was keen that SOE's successes should be the main news back home.

  Many letters came from next of kin. In March, Christian Rowden wrote to say she had not given up hope and was starting her own search. “I should like to know what name Diana was going under as that may help my search for her. A friend of a cousin of mine, who went out with Mrs. Churchill to Russia, wanted to get information from Russia for me from either Stalin or Molotov, who she knew personally!”

  Madeleine Damerment's mother had also written and thanked Vera for a photograph of her daughter. “It was with great pain that I found the face of my beloved Madeleine in these photographs you sent me. I don't believe any more in the return of my daughter Madeleine. Perhaps you know some details of the situation of Madeleine in England? In what condition did she come to France, and where was she? In fact I want to know so very many things—and I don't know who to ask.”

  There was also a letter from a FANY officer in London filling Vera in on the latest salvos from Violette Szabo's father, Charles Bushell, which had appeared in the Sunday newspapers. Mr. Bushell was now telling the papers that he “needed funds” to provide for Violette's baby, but Vera was told the baby, who was in the care of Violette's chosen guardian, had been visited and was “perfectly happy.” Vera was sent a newspaper cutting. “Wondering she gazes at a picture of her missing mother,” said a picture caption below a photograph of Tania, now aged three.

  Since interrogating Fritz Suhren, commandant of Ravensbrück, in December 1945, Vera had heard nothing definitive about the fate of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, or Denise Bloch, although in her hunt for them she had filled her files with descriptions of every imaginable atrocity.

  She had even hunted down a Polish survivor named Danuta Kowal-ewska, who, she had heard, had kept notes while in the camp. Kowalew-ska provided a wealth of new details about as-yet-unidentified prisoners, and Vera scanned this material for anything new, even spotting a reference to a “British major” in the small male subcamp of Ravensbrück, identified oddly as “Frank of Upway 282.” The “major” turned out to be Frank Chamier, one of Vera's “special cases,” who used the telephone number at his home near Weymouth as a kind of alias. Shortly before Vera had left for Germany, MI6 had suddenly decided she could search for their “bodies” too; among them was Chamier, the first British secret agent to be parachuted into Germany, where he went missing, presumed captured.

  While she was alerting colleagues to the Chamier lead, Vera's own attention still focused on her girls. What had happened to Violette, Denise, and Lilian after they returned to the main camp at Ravensbrück from a work commando in January 1945? Several witnesses had seen the three women when they returned from the commando. One said of Violette, “She always had such strength and never complained,” although Lilian was desperately ill. Others had passed on stories
about what happened next. One former prisoner said that on January 25, 1945, all U.S. and British prisoners had been summoned by Suhren, and it was thought they were going to be repatriated, but instead they were “all hanged.” Another woman said she too had heard that the three were hanged. But Vera rejected these stories out of hand as “too vague.” Other reports suggested Violette was seen alive in the camp as late as March. Nor had Vera forgotten the words of the Ravensbrück escapee Eileen Nearne, who said that two English girls were also rumoured to have escaped.

  Moreover, many prisoners had suffered memory loss and extreme psychological damage, and in the chaos of the liberation some had been mistakenly repatriated to the wrong country or had been so incapacitated they were unable to identify themselves to the authorities. Vera had even heard tantalising stories of a woman answering Violette's description being seen among repatriated women in France. So far she had failed to verify the story but had certainly not given up hope, even at this late stage, of finding one or other of the Ravensbrück girls alive.

  When arrests of Ravensbrück camp staff began, more information flowed in that Vera hoped would reveal what really happened; but it only added to her confusion. There appeared to have been in the camp two Szabos and three Blochs. In desperation, Vera sent out a ten-point “questionnaire” to all survivors she could trace in various countries, including survivors of the men's subcamp at Ravensbrück, asking them to recall details of any executions.

  The replies inundated Vera with more and more horrific stories: French priests were made to hang a fellow prisoner, wrote one survivor; other concentration camp inmates were forced to “eat their dysentery;” and sick women were cremated alive. But none of this information was of any use.

  “And you might be interviewing somebody and they may be telling you about a grotesque crime, but you are thinking I have heard this before, and what I want is for this woman to tell me something I have not heard,” said John da Cunha, one of Somerhough's war crimes staff. Now a retired circuit court judge, da Cunha was just twenty-three when he was seconded to Bad Oeynhausen.