Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  Interviewed many years later by the Imperial War Museum, Vera Atkins remembered the flood of information that came to her after the concentration camps were opened:

  ‘After 8 May people started streaming back from concentration camps. You’d get their stories and it was from them that you’d hear what had happened to those who had not returned. When a person was arrested, you did not know what happened to them subsequently – therefore the information brought by the returning agents was more than interesting and more than harrowing.’

  Vera continued to hope that Yvonne Rudellat might be found alive among the survivors at Belsen, but she was not. It later turned out she had died some days after the camp was liberated. In early July 1946 Vera Atkins took a statement from Renne Rosier, who had been a political prisoner in Ravensbrück where she met Yvonne Rudellat (known to her as Jacqueline Gauthier). The two of them left Ravensbrück on 28 February 1945 on a transport to Belsen. She said that at that time ‘Mrs Ruddelat [sic] was not in bad health, she suffered occasionally from loss of memory, but she remained of good morale and she looked neither particularly drawn nor aged.’ When they arrived at Belsen, Yvonne Rudellat contracted typhus and dysentery – there was a typhus epidemic at Belsen in January 1945 – and became ‘very weak’. According to Mlle Rosier, Yvonne Rudellat was still alive when the camp was liberated, although ‘very tired and ill’ but ‘she died either on the 23rd or 24th April 1945 from exhaustion and general weakness.’ She was buried in a communal grave. The War Office issued a formal death certificate on 9 August 1946. It stated that ‘having regard to such information as is available concerning Ensign Yvonne Claire Ruddelat [sic] Field Ambulance Nursing Yeomanry, it has been recorded by the War Office that Ensign Ruddelat [sic] died from exhaustion in the camp of Bergen-Belsen Germany on the 23rd or 24th day of April 1945.’

  Ravensbrück

  Liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 30 April 1945, Ravensbrück was a concentration camp in eastern Germany that had been built specifically for women. Intended initially to hold maybe 1,000-1,500 women, at different times during its notorious history it held 15,000-30,000 women. In all approximately 130,000 female prisoners were sent to Ravensbrück, many of them Jewish. As in all the concentration camps, conditions were abysmal: women were humiliated, starved, worked to death and executed; some were experimented on and sterilized. In May 1945 Vera Atkins received news that three of her female agents had survived Ravensbrück and were coming home. The women were Yvonne Baseden who came out of Ravensbrück with the Swedish Red Cross when the camp was liberated, Eileen Nearne, who managed to escape and Odette Sansom. Each of them had information about other women agents. Yvonne Baseden told Vera Atkins that she had been taken to Ravensbrück from a prison in Dijon but on the way they had stopped at a ‘holding camp’ where she saw Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, who had been brought from Paris. The three women were sent to Ravensbrück; she was sent there a few days later and never saw them again but heard news of them. Eileen Nearne confirmed that she had been on the same work detail as the three women but was later transferred to a munitions factory and then to forced labour on the roads near Leipzig, from where she managed to escape.

  Vera Atkins also met with Odette Sansom, who told her of the conditions at Ravensbrück and how she had managed to escape but she also told her that when she was removed from the prison at Fresnes, she was taken to a civilian prison in Karlsruhe, on the French-German border, where she was kept for two months before being sent to Ravensbrück. She told Vera Atkins that she was taken to Karlsruhe with seven other SOE women; from photographs she identified six of them: Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Yolande Beekman, Andrée Borrel and Eliane Plewman. Odette Sansom was unable to identify the seventh woman.

  From other sources Vera had been able to acquire information about another one of her agents – Cecily Lefort, who had also been in Ravensbrück. A keen sportswoman, Cecily Lefort was married to a French doctor. In 1941 she had joined the WAAF and was recruited by SOE in 1943 as a courier to work with the Francis Cammaerts’ Jockey circuit. She was captured by the Gestapo in September 1943 and, having been held at the Avenue Foch, was sent to Ravensbrück. According to witnesses, she became gravely ill and was given a ‘pink card’ declaring her unfit to work. She was probably gassed in about February 1945.

  Vera Atkins now had some information on nearly all of her missing women agents and had also acquired a lot of detail about the men. One name was proving elusive – that of Noor Inayat Khan; apart from her name on a wall at the Avenue Foch, there were no other tangible facts about what had happened to her.

  Towards the end of 1945 Vera Atkins went to Germany to gather more information. She was by now a commissioned officer in the WAAF. It had taken a long time for her to get permission to make the trip but evidence of the atrocities that had taken place in the concentration camp and the scale of the Holocaust had led to the setting up of war crime trials at Nuremberg so that the chief architects of the Holocaust could be tried for crimes against humanity. Nazi leaders and those who had run or worked at concentration camps were now in prison, which would give Vera Atkins the opportunity to gather precise information about her agents. Families of agents were also pressing for answers; they felt they had waited much too long. Violette Szabo’s father was raising the matter with his MP and other families were beginning their own enquiries. In addition, Vera had acquired very disturbing details about three or four women who had been killed and burned, possibly whilst they were still alive, in the crematorium at a concentration camp called Natzweiler. With SOE due to close down at the end of 1945, it was essential for Vera Atkins to go to Germany. Format letters were sent to agents’ families telling them that SOE was due to close and that they should contact the War Office for further information.

  Vera Atkins made an initial trip to Germany in December 1945 but it was unsuccessful. She went back in January 1946, this time funded by MI6 and attached to the war crimes unit. She had to produce a monthly report for Major Norman Mott who had formerly been part of SOE’s security section and was now handling SOE matters while the office was closing down. She was given three months to carry out her investigation; it was later extended to six months. During her time in Germany, she travelled extensively and interviewed a considerable number of people, including prison and concentration camp guards in her efforts to establish once and for all what had happened to the still-missing agents. In March 1946 she was finally able to establish the fate of the three women agents last seen at Ravensbrück. The camp commandant, an SS man called Johann Schwarzhuber, was being held in custody, and Vera Atkins interviewed him: he confirmed that Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch had been taken away from the work camp at Königsberg, to the main camp at Ravensbrück where they were shot and their bodies cremated. According to the statement given to Vera Atkins, their names were among a list of names drawn up by the Gestapo in Berlin for execution. Vera passed the information to Mott and told him where he would find the next-of-kin information for the dead women. In her report to the families, Vera Atkins stressed that the women had remained cheerful to the end and had gone bravely to their deaths. There is no doubt the women had died bravely but accounts later given to the war crimes trial at Ravensbrück exposed the dreadful conditions that inmates had experienced. Among these were eyewitness accounts of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, who were described as being weak, emaciated and very ill before going to their deaths.

  Natzweiler

  One of Vera Atkins’ priorities was to discover what had happened to the women allegedly burned alive at Natzweiler and she travelled widely in her search for information, effectively establishing and tracing the route they must have taken from imprisonment in Paris to their end in the concentration camp. The concentration camp at Natzweiler was situated in a lonely area in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, the only concentration camp to be built on French soil. It was, until 1944, one of the Nazis’ best-kept secrets. Natzweiler
was built to house male prisoners only and was used mainly to incarcerate members of Resistance groups from all over Europe and others actively working to overthrow the Nazi state. Prisoners were treated brutally: worked to death, abused, shot, hanged and starved. The aim was that these men should be made to ‘disappear’ under Hitler’s 1941 Nacht und Nebel decree: there should be no record of the person, nor the way they were treated, nor how they were killed; they should literally disappear into the ‘night and fog’ without trace.

  Following the Normandy landings in June 1944 and as Allied troops approached, the SS cleared the camp, sending the surviving prisoners on a death march to Dachau. French forces liberated the camp in November 1944 and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) sent a fact-finding team to the camp. One member of the team was Yurka Galitzine, a British officer of Russian origin. Despite the secrecy surrounding Natzweiler there were records and he put together a report listing the beatings, shootings, hangings and sadistic cruelty carried out on prisoners. He heard that British men had been in the camp, and that some women, who were described as well-dressed spies, had been taken to the camp, and presumably killed. His report was suppressed, but the following month, New York Times journalist Milton Bracker went to the camp and published an article about it. Galitzine also publicized his findings through the Daily Express.

  Vera Atkins had already heard about Natzweiler before leaving for Germany and had met with Yurka Galitzine in England. He could not give her any names but he thought that the women had been brought from Karlsruhe to Natzweiler. He also knew that two British men had been in the camp and one of them, according to rumours, had sketched pictures of the women. The two British men were SOE agents, Robert Sheppard and Brian Stonehouse, who before the war had been a graphic designer for Vogue magazine. Both of the men had been captured in France and sent to Natzweiler. Amazingly they survived not only Natzweiler but also Dachau. Some days later, before leaving for Germany, Vera Atkins was sent the testimony of an eyewitness, a man called Franz Berg, who had worked in Natzweiler. It made harrowing reading. According to Berg’s statement, he had been a waiter and had been imprisoned on many occasions for various offences. By 1942 he was working in the quarry at Natzweiler and in 1943 was working as a stoker in the camp crematorium. The man in charge of the crematorium was called Peter Straub.

  In his testimony, Berg described that on one afternoon in July 1944 four women – two English and two French – were brought to the cells in the crematorium building. According to his account they ‘were carrying suitcases and coats over their arms and I think one had a travelling rug… They were all placed in the same cell, but about 8 o’clock that evening they were placed in solitary confinement, each in a separate cell.’ He was told to fire up the crematorium furnace to its maximum heat by 9.30 pm and then to disappear. ‘Peter Straub… told me also that the doctor was going to come down and give some injections. I knew what this meant… I was still stoking the fire of the crematorium oven when Peter Straub came in, followed by the SS doctor (a Hauptersumfuhrer… who had come… from Auschwitz). The doctor in uniform chased me out of the furnace room.’ Berg and his cellmates stayed in their cell but they could hear what was happening outside; one of the men, Georg Fuhrmann also caught glimpses of what was going on in the corridor outside. ‘He whispered to me that “they” were bringing a woman along the corridor. We heard low voices in the next room and then the noise of a body being dragged along the floor, and Fuhrmann whispered to me that he could see people dragging something on the floor… At the same time… we heard the noise of heavy breathing and low groaning… the next two women were also seen by Fuhrmann, and again we heard the same noises and regular groans as the insensible women were dragged away. The fourth, however, resisted in the corridor. I heard her say “Pourquoi” and I heard a voice which I recognized as that of the doctor who was in civilian clothes say “pour typhus”. We then heard the noise of a struggle and the muffled cries of the woman… I heard this woman being dragged away too… From the noise of the crematorium oven doors which I heard, I can state definitely that in each case the groaning women were placed immediately in the crematorium oven.’ When all was quiet, the men left their cell and looked inside the crematorium oven where they saw four blackened bodies.

  Berg was shown photographs: he recognized one of the women as Vera Leigh, who had been sent to France in 1943 as a courier with the Inventor circuit. He believed that one of the other women was Noor Inayat Khan. He said a third was dark haired and fatter than the others. Later, a prisoner who had managed to speak to the women told Berg they had come from Karlsruhe.

  Before leaving England, Vera Atkins also heard from Brian Stonehouse, who now remembered that while he was in Natzweiler he had seen some English ‘girls’ enter the camp in July 1944 and walk past him to the crematorium. He thought there were three women but not only had he seen them, he had also done quick sketches of two of them. Interviewed by the Imperial War Museum after the war, Brian Stonehouse said:

  ‘They were all rather pale, in civilian clothes. You never saw any women in the camp and I couldn’t understand what they were doing there. They hadn’t make-up on but you could tell they’d been in jail for several months. One of the girls had a ribbon in her hair, a sort of defiant gesture… One of the girls had a fur coat on her arm; later on, one of the SS guards walked back up the camp with the fur coat over his arm… From an inmate’s point of view they looked in good condition… They were executed that evening… I didn’t know any of them but I made a description of them as soon as I got back.’

  Brian Stonehouse also said that the young woman with a ribbon in her hair looked very English; Vera Atkins knew immediately that this had to be Diana Rowden, who always wore a ribbon in her hair and who although she had spent many years in France, and spoke French fluently, had a distinctively English appearance. Brian Stonehouse described the second woman, who was carrying the fur coat as smaller, with dyed blond hair through which dark roots could be seen, and Jewish in appearance. Vera Atkins did not recognize the description but began to convince herself that it may have been Noor Inayat Khan.

  Once Vera Atkins arrived in Germany, and armed with the information Odette Sansom had given her about the women she had seen, she went to Karlsruhe prison to clarify exactly which women had been held there, for how long, when they left and where they were sent. She interviewed the prison warder, Theresia Becker, who had been warder of the women’s prison for more than twenty years. She was shown photographs and stated that seven of them – Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Yolande Beekman, Andrée Borrel, Eliane Plewman and Odette Sansom – had arrived at Karlsruhe in about May 1944; they had been sent away in July 1944. The only name that she could remember was ‘Martine’, which was Madeleine Damerment’s alias. She also commented that ‘Martine’ had arrived carrying a New Testament; Madeleine Damerment was a very devout Catholic. Vera Atkins also interviewed a number of other witnesses, among them a young German woman, Hedwig Muller, who had also been in the prison and had become friendly with Madeleine Damerment, who she knew as ‘Martine’. She confirmed that Eliane Plewman was also at Karlsruhe. Subsequently Vera Atkins was able to confirm that Yolande Beekman was there too.

  By March 1946, having interviewed many witnesses and having amassed a considerable amount of details from various sources, Vera Atkins knew that eight women had been held at Karlsruhe and that they had left the prison in two separate transports, four of them in July 1944 and another four in September 1944. The first transport had been sent to Natzweiler: based on information she had received, Vera Atkins was certain that three of the women who went to Natzweiler were Vera Leigh, Andrée Borrel and Diana Rowden but she was still not certain about the identity of the fourth, who had been described as Jewish in appearance. By a process of elimination, she felt this had to have been Noor Inayat Khan but there were still doubts. In April 1946 she interviewed Franz Berg, who had stoked the crematorium at Natzweiler and took him i
n detail through the testimony he had already provided; he confirmed the fact that one woman had resisted and had been put alive into the crematorium. Following the interview, Vera Atkins was convinced that the fourth woman was Noor Inayat Khan. Accordingly she sent a report of her findings to Norman Mott in London, stating that as a result of her investigations she could confirm that on 6 July 1944 four of the SOE women had been executed by lethal injection at Natzweiler and their bodies cremated. She asked him to make arrangements to inform the next of kin so that the families of Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Noor Inayat Khan could be informed of their deaths. Obviously any suggestion that they had been alive when put into the crematorium furnace was omitted; families were told that the women had been injected with phenol and cremated.

  Two weeks later Vera Atkins attended the Natzweiler war crimes trial and gave evidence. She visited the camp and went into the crematorium, checking and confirming the details that she already had. During the trial, there was an attempt by senior SS staff to deny the fact that the four women had been in the camp on 6 July 1944 but, despite the secrecy which was supposed to surround Natzweiler, there were hundreds of witnesses who saw the women arrive. It was a men-only camp, so the arrival of four women was an exceptional circumstance. Hundreds of men saw them arrive and walk down a long slope that led from the barracks to the crematorium. A number of survivors gave evidence to that effect. Rumours had spread around the camp and two Belgian doctors, George Boogaerts and Albert Guérisse, who had been active in the Resistance, managed to exchange a few hasty words with the women. Guérisse had recognised Andrée Borrel from the Resistance. Evidence from survivors helped to establish the timing of events; men were told to go into their barracks at about 8.00 pm, which was unusually early, and to keep the windows closed and shuttered or curtained. Despite these precautions, all the men knew what was to happen and many said how helpless they felt. Evidence at the trial from Berg and medical orderlies confirmed the sequence of events: that the women had been brought out of their cells, that they had been injected with phenol and that they had been cremated. Evidence was also given that one woman had struggled and had scratched Peter Straub’s face. Straub stated that the woman had shouted ‘Vive la France’. Prisoners outside saw flames coming out of the crematorium chimney and knew the women had been executed. It was later believed that the woman who struggled was Andrée Borrel.