Sarah Helm

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

  Sitting in the kitchen of his Somerset house, he had spread out his old war crimes papers on the table. He told me he was nearly physically sick when he opened his first Ravensbrück file. He had never spoken of his war crimes work to his family.

  Clipped to the papers with rusty pins, photographs fell out showing women in skirts and jackets with their hair pinned up, hanging limp from a crude wooden gallows. “I don't want to shock you,” he said. I asked if Vera ever seemed shocked at Bad Oeynhausen. “No,” he said. “Vera was always composed.”

  I looked through Vera's own accounts, written later in life, for a sense of what she felt behind that composed facade. I was disappointed; her attention seemed focused only on the procedure of a particular crime, rather than on the human beings involved.

  Occasionally, however, Vera's writing caused an unexpectedly violent shock. It was precisely her attention to technical detail, her concentration on how something had happened, that sometimes made her—accidentally almost—draw the reader face to face with the horror of the situation. On one occasion Vera assisted at the interrogation of a man named Gustav Moll, who was in charge of the gassing operation at Auschwitz. The interrogation came during preparation of a British case against the German industrialist Bruno Tesch, who made a “killing solid” in the form of a solidified poisonous gas for the gas chambers. Recalling the occasion many years later, Vera wrote:

  The gas chambers were built of cement with long pipes, rather like those in a wash house, running along the low ceiling. In these pipes were sprinklers, not unlike those in a harmless watering can. The tins of crystallised gas supplied by Tesch were rammed into the apertures in the roof where they fitted exactly. A plunger then punctured them so that the gas was released. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the warmth and heat of the packed human beings below gasified the killing solid.

  I had to read the sentence twice to understand that the packed human beings were mentioned in this sentence only in a passive sense—in order to explain the process of killing. “The procedure took just over twenty minutes and after a safe interval the doors could be opened and the bodies removed to the crematorium.”

  At other times Vera recounted her war crimes work in a tone designed to convey the ordinariness of it all, even when the circumstances had been as extraordinary as the interrogation of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. In an interview she gave in 1986 for the Imperial War Museum's sound archives, Vera told the dramatic tale of how one day Höss was arrested by Gerald Draper after a tipoff was given to a Haystack investigator that he was working on a farm. Precise details of Höss's arrest and interrogation are much disputed, but according to the story Vera told, he was picked up overnight on the pretence that he was suspected of stealing a bicycle, and taken to the British prison Tomato.

  One morning I came into the office, late as usual, and Group Captain Somerhough said to me: “You've kept us all waiting.” I was rather surprised, and he said: “Well, we thought it'd be nice for you to interview Rudolf Höss with Gerald Draper and act as his interpreter.”

  I said, “Delighted.” So I went off with Gerald to our little jail in Minden. And there was this little room, which had a window on to a small interior courtyard and they brought in Rudolf Höss, who was in a normal sort of suit, had great white moustaches and was very relaxed.

  Gerald started off by saying, “Your name is so-and-so,” using his false name—and he said: “Yes.” “And you lived at this farm?” said Gerald, naming the farm where Höss had been picked up.

  “Yes.”

  “And you did an absolutely dastardly thing, you stole a bicycle from a poor Polish foreign worker?” And he said: “No. I never did such a thing. Oh, no, that's a mistake. That was nothing to do with me.” Gerald Draper then said: “We think you are Rudolf Höss, ex-camp commandant of Auschwitz.” Well, this knocked him back a little, and he denied this. So we said: “Well, all right, think about it,” and we pressed the bell for a sergeant to come in. Gerald said: “Remove this gentleman's moustaches.” And he was taken into the courtyard—and I'll never forget this, because it was such an incredible scene. We all knew who he was and the sergeant held him gently by the nose, and removed his moustaches and brought him back.

  You know, you often hear of people's knees knocking, but it is the only time when in actual fact I've seen a man with his knees knocking. That was the great Rudolf Höss.

  And he very quickly admitted it because we had photographs of him and everything that was necessary for proof. And so he spoke very freely, really, of his tenure there. We weren't going into great details, but we were concerned with the number of people gassed during his period, and as usual you prepare yourself for this kind of thing by trying to keep a record of the convoys who went there and so forth.

  We reckoned that it was probably in the region of about one and a half million people, and we put it to him and he said, “Oh, no, 2,345,000,” or whatever it was, and corrected it upwards to an alarming degree. And I remember at this point Gerald looking at him and saying: “There is no reason really to boast, you have no cause to boast. In any case, you are by far and away the greatest murderer, including Nero of antique fame. So why do you say this number?”

  He replied: “Because when I took over the number was so-and-so, and when I left the number was so-and-so. So I know.” And Gerald said: “Well, you are prepared for this statement to be taken down?” And he said, “Yes,” and we wrote it down and he signed it.

  After a short pause, and the inevitable inhalation of smoke, Vera added: “All between breakfast and lunch.”

  On March 11, 1946, Vera walked into her office in Bad Oeynhausen to be told by Somerhough that an SS man named Johann Schwarzhuber had been brought in and was being held at Tomato. Vera took a car out to the prison. She knew Schwarzhuber from the Ravensbrück lists: he was the camp overseer and was more likely than anyone, other than Suhren, to know the fate of her three girls.

  When Vera arrived at Tomato, Schwarzhuber was marched into the small interview room and immediately declared he was ready to talk. Within minutes he had positively identified two of the three girls as Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch. He not only recognised the third girl from the photograph but also remembered that “she had the name of Violette.”

  After just a few brief questions from Vera, he recalled all the details of the deaths of these three British agents. Vera had no cause whatsoever to doubt the SS man's evidence. He had been there when it happened, he said. “All three were taken to the crematorium building of the camp, and one by one they were shot.”

  On returning to Bad Oeynhausen, Vera immediately wrote out a detailed report to Norman Mott in London.

  Today I have heard the full story from one of the few eye witnesses, SS Obersturmbannführer J. Schwarzhuber, who held the post of Schutzhaftlagerführer [camp overseer] in Ravensbrück and who is now under arrest. I attach three copies of the translation of a statement which I took from him, which will enable you to obtain death certificates. In short, he states that the girls' names figured on a list drawn up by the Gestapo in Berlin of persons to be executed. They were recalled from the work camp to the main camp and shot one evening under arrangements made by the Camp Commandant Suhren. Their bodies were cremated.

  Vera added, “No doubt you will take immediate casualty action,” and she listed precise file references containing details of next of kin for each of the dead girls.

  With the Ravensbrück case closed, Vera knew she must turn back immediately to the question of the Karlsruhe women. By mid-March 1946, new letters had arrived from Hedwig Müller, the German nurse who had been imprisoned in Karlsruhe.

  Müller's first letter, six pages of closely typed script, provided more details of daily life in Karlsruhe, which Vera scrutinised for new information. “On the first day I could not eat the prison food. It was impossible. Martine said: ‘You will eat when you are hungry.' Her prophecy became true. In the first days Martine was somewhat mistrustful of me. But as I ex
plained to her why I was in prison she began to trust me. We knocked on the walls in conversation with the girls in the other cells. Other cell inmates watched in guard to make sure the warders did not come. We transferred letters. We were all a conspiratorial society.”

  Martine became anaemic, said Müller, but got no medicine and became quite fat. “Dear kind lady, It would make me happy if I could receive a piece of news from you.” Vera noted that Martine had put on weight and replied to Müller with more specific questions, such as: “Are you sure of the colour of Yolande's hair?”

  Then, soon after the correspondence from Hedwig Müller, came the letter Vera had been hoping for, from Lisa Graf in Paris. Lisa was the French political prisoner, held in Karlsruhe, mentioned by Müller. At first Lisa also seemed to have information only about Martine and the second group. But when Vera read on she found new details about the first group of girls.

  “I came to know Martine Dussautoy in Karlsruhe prison,” wrote Lisa Graf. “Her cell was next to mine, and we spoke to each other in Morse through walls during the night. She described her other companions to me, whom I was then able to recognise in the corridor or the courtyard and with whom I exchanged a few words. I had the chance to speak to Madame Odette Churchill and to Eliane, Yvonne, and Denise [all four names were underlined] and others whose names I no longer remember.” The mention of Denise was clearly a reference to Andrée Borrel, and the first sighting of her from any of the Karlsruhe witnesses.

  “Towards July 5 [1944] four of them left in the morning in a transport for an unknown destination.” Lisa underlined “four” and, like Stone-house, numbered the women. There were no drawings this time, but the descriptions were even more acute. Lisa's No. 2 was almost identical to Stonehouse's No. 2, and Lisa's No. 3 was again Diana Rowden. Lisa wrote:

  They were

  Denise, a young woman with black hair, blue eyes, pale skin, wearing a grey coat and short blue socks, with navy-blue shoes that had rubber soles.

  A young pretty blonde woman, with black eyes who people said was a Jewish dancer. If my memory is right people called her Dany. She was wearing a dark green, stripy dress and white es-padrilles and must have been about 20 years old.

  A young woman about 30 years old, fair, with blue eyes, dressed in beige and in her hair she wore a little green ribbon.

  Somebody aged about 25 with blond-red hair and grey eyes and she was wearing a grey coat with white espadrilles. Those who stayed behind were Odette Churchill, Martine Dussautoy, Eliane and Yvonne, who suffered with her legs.

  P.S. Before I left the prison Martine gave me a picture of a saint on which she wrote a sweet dedication.

  Taking what Lisa had said with the other evidence, Vera was now in no doubt that four, not three, women left together in a group in July and that it was these four who arrived at Natzweiler.

  Vera wrote back to Lisa and this time sent her photographs of each of the girls, trying to pin down Nora's identity by making sure beyond doubt that she could not have been confused after all with Yolande.

  “If,” wrote Vera, thinking aloud, “Eliane, Martine and Yvonne stayed, those who must have gone were Denise (Andrée Borrel), Simone (Vera Leigh), Diana Rowden and Nora—alias Madeleine.

  “Nora, alias Madeleine, had chestnut hair (if she did not dye it) and very fine features. You could have thought her a Jew although she was not. You have fairly well described her ‘en disant Dany' but she was certainly not blonde.”

  And then she implored Lisa to examine the enclosed photographs with care: “It is therefore important to know first if you are absolutely sure that Yvonne was with Eliane and Martine. I must be able to identify these women definitively and without any doubt.”

  Then Vera decided to return to Karlsruhe. If Nora had really been held in Karlsruhe, somebody there must remember her. Vera was determined now to interrogate more prison staff. And she would reinterrogate Fräulein Becker, who so obviously had lied.

  Franz Becker told me he remembered listening to his aunt, Theresia Becker, chatting to his father about the war. Theresia—a devout Catholic and not a Quaker—had started out in life in her father's tailoring and laundry business, which handled all the Karlsruhe prison's laundry and mending. “Sometimes prisoners helped with sewing and ironing. They got privileges for this,” said Franz, adding that he himself had some handkerchiefs that had been beautifully embroidered by a prisoner. Yolande Beekman did beautiful embroidery, I told him, and I asked if I could see his handkerchiefs, but he looked embarrassed, saying he didn't know where they were.

  I spoke to Franz Becker at his home in the village of Untergrombach, near Karlsruhe, as we sat in a conservatory surrounded by tropical plants. One story used to come up regularly when his aunt and father talked of the war, and it had stuck in his mind. “I remember the story about the girls who had gone up the chimney,” he said.

  “What was the story?”

  “Well, it began with my aunt saying that one day these girls, who were spies, were brought to the prison. Then they were suddenly taken away from the prison and had left behind clothes and some other little personal possessions. My aunt always kept the prisoners' personal possessions in her office on the women's wing. It was routine in the prison that everything was written down: when given and when given back. Well, in the case of these girls, lots of possessions were left behind. She was worried about what should be done with them. She liked to do things by the book. She wanted to send the things on to the girls, but she didn't know where they had been taken. So she called up the chief and said these things should be sent on to the girls. But she was told it was no good. They had gone up the chimney.”

  A strange grimace broke out on Franz Becker's face when he said “gone up the chimney.” I asked him if he thought this news had shocked his aunt. He considered for a moment. “I think it had an impact on her, yes. It was something, you could say, something she could not step over later in life. It was working in her mind all these years.”

  Had he heard that his aunt was interrogated by the British? He said he had heard something of it. I said it appeared she had not told the full story to Vera Atkins and perhaps this was because she feared she might be blamed in some way. “She certainly would not have liked any criticism,” Franz agreed. “And you see, it would have worried her that the correct procedure was not carried out in respect of the clothes. Everything was always handed over and carefully looked after and then ticked off when it was given back. She would have worried that if anyone found out this had not happened, she might be criticised.”

  Did he know what happened to the clothes that could not be returned? He did not remember.

  Back in Karlsruhe, Vera retraced much old ground, but she also collected several new statements. She spoke to the guards who booked in the prisoners, and she even memorised the shifts of night watchmen to find the guards who might have seen them leave. One guard thought he recalled the women leaving in a green car “that looked like a hearse.” It was dawn, he remembered, because he had just removed the prison blackout curtains. Vera spoke to the female guard who exercised the girls in the courtyard and to those who supervised their showers. She learned every detail of the prison routine and the layout with each cell's precise location.

  Vera also discovered that it was one of Theresia Becker's hallowed rules that men were never allowed into the women's wing of the prison; that only she and her deputy, Fräulein Hager, held the keys to the women's wing; and that nobody left unless accompanied by one of them.

  So when Vera arrived to be guided around the women's section in Riefstahlstrasse by Becker herself, the prison seemed quite familiar. From the gatehouse she knew that straight ahead was the courtyard where the girls exercised singly, by walking up and down. She knew that if she looked up to the left she would see the cell windows, high, barred, and covered with metal mesh.

  To reach the women's section, Becker led her up stone steps on the right of the gatehouse, then down a corridor and round three sides of the courtyar
d anticlockwise, passing line after line of male cells. The white gate leading into the women's section was just where she had been told it would be, by cell twenty-six, and there was the warder's office where Becker kept the prisoners' possessions. Vera looked in the empty lockers. She walked the corridor where Hedwig Müller had told her the girls lined up peeling potatoes. She saw the bathroom where, as Lisa Graf had told her, every three weeks the twelve women were escorted for showers. She inspected the cells, first entering cell seventeen, where Martine had played hairdresser, putting bright things in people's hair, while Yolande next door did darning, patching, and embroidery for Becker. And she saw where, during the bombing, Martine had stood in a corner holding her rosary, while Yolande, in the adjacent cell, cried. Lisa Graf had told her that sometime in July she had climbed up the sloping buttress to the window's edge and had seen Andrée Borrel in the courtyard below. An-drée had suddenly turned her face up towards Lisa's window and signalled “goodbye.”

  The walls between the cells were of solid granite one foot thick, as Vera could now see. Yet through these walls the women had “chatted” with their forks and spoons. The scratches where they had done this were still there on the whitewashed walls.

  Vera had learned how the girls had forged deep friendships in Becker's prison. Sometimes, perhaps, they had even felt safe under Becker's lock and key. But for all her new enquiries on her second trip to Karlsruhe, Vera learned nothing more to confirm who left when. There-sia Becker had stubbornly stuck to the same story she had always told.

  I asked Lisa Graf if the girls might have stayed safely in the jail until the end of the war had Becker not so rigorously observed the rules. “Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe not.” I had long been sure that Lisa must be dead. But I was sitting talking to her in Paris at a long table covered with Indian fabrics and pots stuffed with pencils, and papers everywhere. All around were artefacts—elephants and storks—and vases brimming with orchids.