The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish

by Noreen Riols

  Yvonne Rudellat, who also perished in a concentration camp, was the oldest F Section woman agent. She was forty-five and a grandmother when she was infiltrated into France by felucca, with two male agents, Henri Frager and Harry Despaigne, landing between Cannes and Juan-les-Pins, very close to the villa where the Duke of Windsor used to stay. Yvonne was divorced from her English husband, and her daughter was a twenty-one-year-old mother at the time and in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service). But even at twenty-one, it is good to have family to turn to, a mother to give a listening ear or to welcome one home on leave. A grandmother to coo over and babysit her child. In their circumstances I don’t think I could have volunteered to train as a secret agent and be infiltrated behind the lines into enemy-occupied territory. I wonder what motivated them? I know that in Violette’s case anger at her husband’s death and desire for revenge on the people whom she considered responsible were the driving force. But in the end I wonder whether she thought it had been worth it. As for the others, I have no idea.

  There were several couples who met while in training and married. But they were never allowed to work together or to be sent to a réseau anywhere near where the other was operating, resulting in some very heartrending goodbyes. Guy and Sonia d’Artois parted almost immediately after their honeymoon. Sonia was dropped into France first and Guy parachuted soon afterwards, but to a different réseau in another part of the country. Their story had a happy ending. They were reunited at the end of the war, and Guy took his wife back home with him, to Canada.

  Yolande Beekman was in the same position. Sadly, her honeymoon was the only glimpse she had of married life. After saying goodbye to Jan when it ended, she was dropped into France as a radio operator to work for ‘Guy’, Gustave Bieler, organizer of the Musician réseau near St-Quentin. ‘Guy’ was a Canadian who had left a wife and two young children behind when he sailed for England to enlist in the British Army. He wasn’t obliged to enlist. The war was being waged in a country he hardly knew, many miles away across an enormous ocean. What motivated him? Four months later both he and Yolande were arrested and brutally tortured: but neither spoke. In September 1944 ‘Guy’ was shot at Flossenbürg, and Yolande (codename ‘Yvonne’) shot at Dachau. Other agents never had a chance, or the time, to get married before leaving.

  Eliane Plewman was one of these. She was already married to a British Army officer not connected to SOE but, while in training, she met and fell desperately in love with a Corsican student, Eric Cauchi. They became lovers and were inseparable. During the weeks while they were waiting to leave, their love became even more intense and passionate as they realized that time was running out and they would soon be parted. For how long? Neither of them knew. After two abortive attempts to leap into the dark sky over occupied France, she to join the Monk réseau in Marseilles, and he the Stockbroker réseau in the Jura, having faced heart-rending goodbyes on the airstrip, they found themselves sitting opposite each other at the breakfast table the following morning: the flight had been cancelled at the last moment. But in August 1943, at the third attempt, they finally left. Once again, Eliane and Eric, the man who would have become her husband had she not been executed at Dachau the following March, just one month after he had been shot and killed in a brawl in a bar in the Doubs, clung to each other, unable to say goodbye, while two planes hummed on the airstrip waiting to take each one to France – but to different destinations.

  Chapter 7

  There were nine women agents belonging to RF Section operating in France during the war. Out of the thirty F Section women agents infiltrated into France, fifteen never returned, twelve having been brutally executed in various concentration camps, many in Ravensbrück. Four women agents were cremated alive at Natzweiler, also known as Struthof, camp, in Alsace. They were given an injection of phenol, which they were told was an anti-tetanus jab. Being suspicious, they resisted, but to no avail. The injection paralysed them. They were then heaved, helpless into the furnace. The last one to be incinerated was coming round from the injection when her executioner tilted the stretcher before tipping her into the flames. She sat up and, in an attempt to save herself from such a terrible fate, viciously scratched his face. Sadly, her attempt was unsuccessful. She was burnt alive like her three companions before her. Their four scorched and blackened corpses were removed from the incinerator the following morning.

  There is some confusion as to which one of them it actually was who fought so savagely to save her life. Some reports say Vera Leigh, others Andrée Borrel. But does it really matter? Knowing doesn’t lessen the horror of this horrendous massacre. And perhaps for the families left behind – three of them had mothers alive at the time – it was better not to know. The knowledge of their daughter’s fate must already have been a terrible enough memory to carry with them for the rest of their lives, a wound which I am sure would never heal. One can only hope that they imagined that besides being paralysed by the injection, their daughters were also unconscious, and that the flames consumed them before they revived and realized what was happening.

  I knew Vera Leigh’s mother and her younger sister, Frances, very well. They were personal friends, living very near me. Vera’s mother never forgot her daughter’s excruciating death. How could she? And she never forgave. She had a plaque put on the wall of Holy Trinity Anglican church in Maisons-Laffitte, which the family had always attended. It read: ‘In memory of Ensign Vera Leigh, foully murdered by the Germans.’

  Vera’s mother was a formidable old lady. She died at over ninety and, as the years passed and wartime memories faded, she was asked more than once to remove the plaque, which had become offensive to some people in that multi-national congregation. Regular attenders included a German lady married to a Japanese, and in the summer there were often German tourists visiting the church. But she always refused, stating categorically, leaving no room for argument or discussion: ‘My daughter was foully murdered by the Germans. Full stop.’ But after her death Vera’s sister, Frances, had it modified. It now reads: ‘In memory of Ensign Vera Leigh, who died for her country.’ The message doesn’t convey the same meaning, but it doesn’t offend anybody.

  The soldier responsible for heaving these four woman into the incinerator was brought to trial after the war, where he told the story of their final moments, his face still bearing the scars of the last agent’s fingernails; scars which he carried with him for the rest of his life. He pleaded that he was merely a soldier carrying out orders. But what orders! He was a private or corporal, I believe, so perhaps he was terrified of disobeying, and of the subsequent dire punishment disobedience of the Reich would incur. But apart from the scar on his face, what a ‘scar’ to have to carry on his conscience till the end of his days.

  Every June there is a ceremony at Natzweiler, attended by dignitaries from many countries, and also the descendants of those who perished: now only ageing cousins, nephews and nieces, or great-nephews and -nieces of those prisoners who died in that infamous camp. How many of them in the same way? That also is something we shall never know.

  Recently I received a telephone call from an elderly lady, a relative of Diana Rowden, one of the four women incinerated at Natzweiler. She wanted to know whether I could tell her where Diana was buried. I thought at first it was Diana’s mother; mercifully I remembered that she had died some years ago. But I was left with the painful task of telling this lady that there was no grave and in the end, at her insistence, revealing how she had died. I imagine the circumstances of her daughter’s execution had been so painful that Diana’s mother had not been able to share even with her relatives exactly what had happened.

  The fate of these four women agents might never have been known had it not been for another F Section agent, Brian Stonehouse, who was himself a prisoner at the Natzweiler camp when the four arrived. They had been transferred from another camp, Ravensbrück I believe, where they had been condemned to death by hanging. But at the last minute, for reasons unknown, the decision was o
verturned, and they were hastily transferred to Natzweiler. Natzweiler was a men’s camp, so the arrival one afternoon of four young women did not go unnoticed. The men were intrigued because, before the four girls arrived, they were ordered to stop working and return to their huts, where the windows and shutters were all tightly fastened and the curtains closed. But Brian, and I imagine others also, managed to peep through a crack in the shutters and saw the four women cross the campus and enter the crematorium block, never to be seen again. After the war Stonehouse, a well-known artist and portrait painter in civilian life, drew and painted from memory a picture of their arrival. It hangs today on the wall of the staircase at the Special Forces Club in London, an incredible likeness of each one of them.

  It was only his artistic talents which had saved him, a radio operator, the most vulnerable and most hated by the Gestapo of all SOE agents, from execution. Brian was incarcerated in four different concentration camps. After his initial arrest and imprisonment, he happened to have a pencil and a pad in his pocket and sketched an extremely good likeness of his guard. The delighted guard spread the news of this new prisoner’s talents, which information reached the ears of the commandant of the camp he had been sent to. He summoned Brian and ordered him to draw his likeness, which Stonehouse did. The commandant was equally delighted with the finished sketch and did not issue the order for his execution, or even obey such an order, had it been issued. When Stonehouse arrived at Natzweiler, his fourth and last concentration camp, as in the previous ones, his talent saved him. He returned unscathed after the war.

  Without his artistic talent, we might never have known the fate of these four women, which, I imagine, is what the Germans intended to happen. They would have been just four more agents who had disappeared without trace. Would it have been a fate easier to bear for their grieving families? That is something else we shall never know.

  Quite by chance, I recently heard the story of one such family.

  I had arranged to meet a friend at the Special Forces Club for lunch. When I arrived my friend was waiting in the bar, together with an elderly lady. The moment this lady turned round and smiled, I recognized her. It was Helen Oliver. I had known her for years without actually knowing a great deal about her except that her twin sister, Liliane Rolfe, had been an agent who had not returned. We went into lunch and were chatting amicably, when suddenly she began to talk about her sister, something she had never done before, certainly not with either of us.

  ‘Liliane and I were twins,’ she mused. ‘Mirror twins.’

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I had never heard of mirror twins.

  ‘There was no “telepathy” between us as there often is with twins, but we mirrored each other. I am right-handed and my sister was left-handed. We were the opposite sides of the same coin.’ She paused and seemed to be looking into the distance at something far away that we could not see. ‘During the war, I didn’t know what Liliane was doing,’ she went on. ‘No one in the family did. But I guessed it was something clandestine, since we had no news from her, only an official notification every so often telling us that she was alive and well.’

  She paused again, as if not sure she wanted to go on. ‘It was strange,’ she continued quietly. ‘I remember it so clearly, even after all these years. One night, not long before the war in Europe ended, I was fast asleep when, just before dawn, I was suddenly awakened by an overwhelming foreboding. A dread . . . an awful fear that something terrible was about to happen. I didn’t know what it was, but I was trembling, and very frightened. I couldn’t shake it off.’ She paused again. ‘It was so vivid, that impression of disaster, that I was unable to go back to sleep. I told myself it was a nightmare, although I hadn’t been dreaming. I knew, I felt, that something evil had crept all over me.’

  She folded her napkin and pushed her plate away. ‘They always give one too much here,’ she smiled, as if wanting to change the subject, dismiss the terrifying thoughts from her mind. But she went on all the same. ‘That sensation was so vivid,’ she continued, as if impelled by some force outside herself to share her fears, ‘that I wrote about it in my diary the next day.’ She looked out of the window and down into the square below. ‘I learned later that it was at that precise moment that Liliane had been executed and then thrown into – was it the gas chamber or the incinerator? I don’t remember, it was so long ago.’

  I don’t know whether Helen ever learned the details of her sister’s mission, or of her last months – and her death; but I hope not. Liliane, codenamed ‘Nadine’, was parachuted as a radio operator to organizer George Wilkinson’s (‘Etienne’) Historian réseau near Orleans in April 1944. A few months later she was arrested, tortured, imprisoned and sent to various concentration camps, enduring hard labour, starvation and degradation. She ended up at Ravensbrück, where, in a murderous spate of killings, she was executed together with Violette Szabo and Denise Bloch.

  We have heard that Liliane was so weak from torture, beatings, malnutrition and probably rape, since, in the prisons run by the Nazis, after being tortured the women prisoners were routinely gang-raped, she could hardly stand: she had to be helped to her execution by Violette Szabo, who died with her. They were most probably shot in the back of the head, but there was a rumour that they were hung. We shall never know the truth. Whatever it was, it was grim and doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Violette could hardly drag herself along since she was pregnant as a result of one of the rapes, and her legs were covered with ulcers, making it difficult for her to walk. Denise Bloch, the third F Section woman agent to die that dawn, was not in a better state. The three of them supported each other as they staggered to their deaths.

  Mercifully at the time Liliane’s family was unaware of her activities.

  I don’t know why Liliane’s twin sister chose to share these memories with us that day. And I wonder if the agony they revived had not been too much for her. She rose to her feet, a small, fragile old woman, but still beautiful. I could imagine what the two of them must have been like when they were young, before Liliane was murdered. They had been brought up in Paris by an English father and an emigrée White Russian mother, and Helen, at ninety-seven, still had the beautiful high Slavic cheekbones and delicate bone structure. She looked like an ageing ballerina, with her slim figure, her grey hair swept back into a chignon. She smiled and excused herself, saying she had an appointment, and left the room, a slight, upright old lady who carried with her such tragic memories. And I couldn’t help wondering how many others carried the weight of a loved one’s sacrifice and would continue to carry it right to the grave. Such memories cannot be erased.

  It was terrible that many agents’ families were left in ignorance of their fate. It is true that in many cases no one knew what had happened to them. News had ceased to arrive, and the authorities could only surmise that they had perished in a concentration camp, since Hitler had ordered that all arrested or imprisoned SOE agents had to disappear, leaving no trace. Would it not have been kinder to inform the family or next of kin that HQ feared the agent might not return? Looking back, it seems almost unforgiveable that many families were given hope and went on hoping long after their husband or son or daughter had ceased to exist. And even long after the war had ended.

  What was particularly distressing was that the official monthly cards sent out by Buck’s assistant, Vera Atkins, announcing that she had received good news from their husband, son or daughter and that they were alive and well, were still being sent to their families months after the agents had perished. Did Vera do this deliberately, thinking to ease the blow once they finally learned that their son or daughter, husband or wife had not survived? Or did she honestly believe that these missing agents would return? Vera was no fool. I cannot think she would have been ignorant of the fact that, having disappeared, the agents were probably no longer alive.

  Vera was the perfect example of an aristocratic Englishwoman. She spoke with an upper-class accent and arrived for wor
k every morning at Baker Street in a taxi, always stylishly, but simply, and expensively dressed. And the same taxi collected her to take her back to her Chelsea flat at whatever time she finished in the evening.

  But Vera concealed her true identity almost until her death in 2000.

  There was in fact nothing English, or even British, about Vera. She was born in Bucharest, the daughter of a wealthy Romanian Jewish businessman, and had only arrived in England with her Jewish mother after her father’s death in 1933. Throughout the war she still had family, including two brothers and their wives, living in Romania. In enemy territory! Vera had many friends in high places. She had apparently been recruited as a spy in the early 1930s by the German ambassador to Romania, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, a family friend, who became one of her lovers – another surprising revelation, since she gave the impression of being cold and very strait-laced. No doubt all part of her cover-up. Vera was in secret contact with Count von der Schulenburg during the war – with or without Churchill’s knowledge? She knew the prime minister well, and he apparently trusted her judgement. Although high up in German diplomatic circles, the count was secretly anti-Nazi. After the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, along with hundreds of others suspected of being involved in the plot, he was executed in the same gruesome manner as the prisoners at Flossenbürg: hung with piano wire attached to a meat hook, suspended on a wall. The news of his execution apparently affected Vera deeply. But, true to character, outwardly she showed no emotion.

  I don’t know whether Buck knew of her origins. Certainly no one in F Section did. But I don’t think Buck could have known either, since, had they come to light, she would never have been recruited or, if discovered, allowed to remain in SOE, and certainly not in such a key position of authority. For a top-secret organization it would have been not only unthinkable, but highly dangerous to employ someone whose origins lay in a country which was now collaborating with the enemy. However did she manage to slip through the tight security net? The intrigues within SOE were almost as tangled as those on the outside!