The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish

by Noreen Riols

  Vera terrified me. I suppose it was because I was young, twenty years her junior. She was so icy, so poised, so very . . . sophisticated! She smoked Balkan Sobranie cigarettes attached to a long cigarette holder, her bright blue eyes piercing whoever she was interviewing through a haze of smoke. Some of the agents nicknamed her ‘Madonna’, others ‘Marlene Dietrich’. She was certainly no madonna: there was nothing gentle, meek and mild about Vera; a rod of steel would have described her more accurately. I imagine that she could be a wonderful friend, but a formidable enemy. Perhaps the beautiful, aloof Marlene Dietrich was the better nickname. Or perhaps she was a strange mixture of the two.

  Her elegance and her ‘English’ reserve combined meant that I was very much in awe of her and avoided her as much as possible. If I needed anything I always crawled round the corner to her assistant, who was much more approachable. In fact, I was seventy years of age before I dared address her as anything other than ‘Miss Atkins’; and then it was only when she insisted that I stop this nonsense and call her Vera. Her real name was Rosenberg, but she had adopted Atkins, an anglicized version of her mother’s maiden name, Aitken or Etkin, when they arrived in England. I don’t think she was ashamed of her origins, but she knew that if they were revealed, she would immediately be removed from the job she loved and sent to the Isle of Man, where countless other ‘enemy aliens’ were kicking their heels in exile.

  Vera was devoted to the agents, especially the women. It was thanks to her efforts that after the war the fate of many of those women agents who had disappeared was discovered. In 1946 she persuaded, or bullied, the British government into allowing her to go to Germany to trace the fate of the missing women agents. They reluctantly agreed, gave her a car and a driver and granted her a temporary commission in the WAAF. As a squadron leader, she had access to accommodation in the officers’ quarters of the numerous British military bases in Germany, and doors which would have been closed to a civilian were opened to her.

  Vera did a titanic job. She travelled tirelessly the length and breadth of Europe, but she especially scoured Germany, visiting prisons and concentration camps and interviewing former prison warders and camp guards, both male and female, in fact any person who could possibly have had contact with the missing women agents, winkling them out if they were no longer in active service, and no doubt bullying and threatening them if they were unwilling to talk. She apparently reduced Kieffer, the former number one at 84 avenue Foch, to tears, though his emotion aroused no sympathy in her. He was later hung by the French. She even managed, in her high-handed manner, to gain access to cells where convicted war criminals were awaiting execution.

  She also entered the cell of one notorious German war criminal whose name I unfortunately cannot remember. He is reported to have said that on entering his cell she sat down, lit a cigarette, but didn’t offer him one, then sat back on the hard wooden chair and looked him up and down. ‘I am not leaving this cell,’ she announced, ‘until you tell me what happened to . . .’ and read out the list of names of the women whose fate she was trying to trace. Since he was doomed, condemned to be hung a few days later, he saw no reason not to give her the information she demanded, which is how she came to piece together the fate of many of the women whose disappearance she was seeking to unravel. He said afterwards that her interrogation of him was far worse than the interrogations he had endured at his Nuremburg trial!

  She also interviewed Rudolf Hoess, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. When he was led into the room where she was waiting to interrogate him Vera said he was ‘a miserable little heap of humanity, his knees literally knocking together with fear’. But when the Army officer who had accompanied her accused him of murdering one and a half million people in the camp his terrified, subservient attitude abruptly changed. He leapt to his feet, an angry, defiant light in his eyes, banged his fist on the table and shouted: ‘I didn’t murder one and a half million people. I murdered two million, three hundred and forty-five thousand!’ This statement was put in writing, which Hoess signed. (Some accounts say two million people murdered by him, and he rectified it to four million. But I think the first account is the more accurate.) Shortly afterwards he was taken back to Auschwitz and hanged on one of the line of gallows which he had had erected.

  Vera was also greatly helped by the fact that the Germans kept very strict records of prisoners, the concentration camps and prisons they were sent to, and their fate. And many of these records still existed at the time. But she had to find them. And she did find them. Did Vera perhaps remember how she had, knowingly or unknowingly, deceived the families by with-holding news of their relatives’ disappearance and allowed them to believe and hope that they would see them again, when their dear ones had long since been reduced to a pile of ashes outside a crematorium? Was it her conscience which forced her to work so tirelessly on their behalf once the war was over?

  How can one illustrate or even try to explain what actually happened in these terrible concentration camps – whether it be Dachau, Belsen, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen or the even more appalling, if that is possible, extermination camps, like Mittelbau-Dora or Flossenbürg? Only, I imagine, by actually talking to those who lived and survived such unbelievable experiences. Only they can lift the veil and show us what life was really like in those camps. Sometimes their stories are so horrendous one can scarcely believe that human beings could behave in such a way, inflicting such cold-blooded torture on other human beings. The officers and guards at Flossenbürg lived in pleasant houses adjoining the camp, some even inside the camp. They committed atrocities during the day then went home in the evening to read bedtime stories to their children, have a cosy dinner with their wives and often end the evening weeping sentimentally as they listened to a Beethoven symphony. Yet only a few hours before they had mercilessly beaten starving prisoners who were trying to scavenge a few potato peelings from the kitchen dustbins, or programmed a flogging and execution ceremony for these same starving prisoners for dawn the following morning. This schizophrenic attitude, this dichotomy in their minds, is almost unbelievable.

  I think the present generation of Germans, many of whom were born after the war, are carrying a heavy load of guilt for the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers, in some cases great-grandfathers, crimes for which they were in no way responsible.

  I witnessed this in 2008 when a plaque was unveiled in memory of fifteen F Section agents executed at Flossenbürg, only one of Hitler’s terrible extermination camps. Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (‘Night and Fog’) directive gave instructions that certain inmates and every SOE agent held in the camp, many having been transferred there from neighbouring Dachau with express orders to annihilate them, were to disappear without trace, which most of them did. Hitler wanted all evidence of his barbarity to be crushed, annihilated, the destiny of those agents never to be revealed. He added in his orders to Himmler that no SOE agent was to survive. But that none was to be allowed to die before he had been tortured till every ‘secret’ had been squeezed out of him.

  I was asked to lay the wreath at the unveiling. There were very few direct family members of those who perished present to mourn. Jacqueline, the daughter of ‘Guy’, Major Gustave Bieler, the Canadian who was shot, together with two other F Section agents, at Flossenbürg in September 1944, had travelled from Montreal to lay a wreath in memory of her father. The Canadian military attaché came from the embassy in Berlin to accompany her. Although Jacqueline was too young when her father left for England to remember him, it was nevertheless a very emotional moment for her. Other relatives, now mainly only nieces and nephews or grandchildren of the victims, were also present. They knew that one afternoon in March 1945, a few days before the Americans liberated the camp, in order to wipe out all trace of them, the remaining twelve F Section agents were viciously flogged then hung, side by side, three at a time, with piano wire attached to a meat hook and suspended from the wall where the pl
aque was unveiled.

  This was a favourite form of execution practised at Flossenbürg, and in other concentration camps. It was particularly barbaric, since it took the victims twenty minutes to die by slow strangulation. The youngest of the F Section agents to be executed that afternoon was nineteen; the oldest thirty-six. These executions usually took place very early in the morning, and all the prisoners in the camp were assembled to watch before they dragged themselves off to work in the nearby granite mines. Often the guards chose members of the same nationality to flog their compatriots before they mounted the scaffold, and should the selected prisoner not flog hard enough – the condemned man could have been his best friend – he was replaced. He then joined the line of those awaiting flogging and execution.

  Jack Agazarian, one of the last of the twelve agents to be led to the slaughter that afternoon, managed to smuggle out a note for his wife. He told her what was happening and wrote; ‘I am in the last cell so they will be coming for me very soon. I just want to thank you for everything and tell you that I love you.’ I don’t know how the note got to Francine Agazarian, but she did finally receive it. Although only in her twenties when she was widowed, Francine never remarried. I don’t think she ever recovered from her husband’s death. She used to go every year to Flossenbürg to commemorate the massacre there, but sadly she died shortly before the unveiling of the plaque honouring her husband and his comrades. There has since been some speculation, and indeed controversy, especially since suspicion about Bodington’s loyalty has been voiced, about why Jack Agazarian was sent to France on that second mission at all. Both he and Francine were agents. Like most of the women agents Francine was very pretty, but she was not only pretty, she also had a very sweet face. She had returned from her mission shortly before her husband arrived back in London from his. He was exhausted, and they left on leave for a well-deserved rest. But before their leave had really started he was recalled to accompany Bodington on a short mission into France to contact a high-up Abwehr officer Bodington had known in Paris before the war. No one knew why Bodington had insisted that he must have Agazarian as his radio operator. Any other available radio operator could easily have gone in his place. When Agazarian protested that he was on leave Bodington assured him that it was only for a few days, and then he could rejoin his wife. Jack never returned. Although he had gone officially as Bodington’s radio operator and contact with London, when they arrived Bodington sent Agazarian to the rendezvous. But as soon as he arrived in the café where he was to meet his contact, he was arrested by the Gestapo. Bodington said afterwards that they had tossed for it and Agazarian had lost. But why? Agazarian didn’t know the Abwehr officer he was to meet. It was Bodington, as a former friend, who had been sent to contact him. It has also been rumoured that Bodington knowingly sent Jack to his death because he believed that Jack had discovered the truth about Déricourt and intended to reveal his treachery to the authorities. On the face of it there doesn’t appear to be any other explanation.

  I was conducted to a reserved seat in the front row, and before the ceremony started the organizer came to me, accompanied by two German teenagers, a boy and a girl. ‘Your wreath is the middle one against the wall opposite the plaque,’ he explained. ‘When it is time for you to place it, these two young people will collect the wreath, come over to you, walk one on each side of you to the plaque and hand you the wreath. Then they will accompany you back to your seat.’ We smiled at each other and at those two young people. It was all we could do. They spoke no English, and I hadn’t spoken German for over fifty years so, apart from a few basic phrases, it was non-existent. But smiles are universal and can convey a wealth of meaning. That beautiful gesture by people for whom the war and its horrors were merely a page of history was, I felt, a living illustration of how the present generation of Germans was attempting to make amends, to say sorry for what their forebears did.

  That day, at the ceremony at Flossenbürg, there were still a few former prisoners who had survived. I spoke to some of them, and the stories they told were horrendous. But what struck me as incredible was their complete lack of bitterness. None of the guards at the camp had been brought to trial after the war. There was one woman guard, Gertrud something or other, who apparently was even more brutal than the men, if that was possible. She died peacefully in Berlin in the late 1980s. Yet not one of the survivors expressed anger or voiced recriminations. It seemed that their terrible experiences had lifted them onto another plane, one which we other human beings who have never descended to such depths of deprivation and despair have not achieved, and hopefully never will. They did not criticize their inhuman guards or seek revenge. It was almost as if they were living outside themselves, viewing what had happened to them dispassionately.

  I’ll never forget one old Jewish former prisoner who had been taken to Flossenbürg at the age of eleven and had lost his entire family in the camp. He had only been saved from execution – they were hanging boys of his age – because the other prisoners had hidden him in a tunnel and fed him what scraps of food they could scrounge, even though they themselves were starving. They subsisted on one bowl of watery soup a day plus any scraps of potato peel they managed to scrounge from the dustbins outside the kitchens – even though they were severely beaten if they were caught going through the dustbins. This young boy was in a very emaciated condition when the liberating army rescued him and took him to an American military hospital, where he was nursed back to health. He was later adopted by one of the soldiers who had found him, and taken back to the United States to be brought up as a typical North American boy. Being a very talented musician, he later became first violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. That afternoon, in front of the plaque at Flossenbürg, he asked if he might play a Jewish lament for his lost family. When he put down his bow there was a deathly silence. And not a dry eye in the assembled crowd. ‘We must turn the page and forgive,’ he said slowly. Then he paused and ended quietly. ‘But we must never, never, never, never forget.’

  He was a lovely old man. I will never forget him. But then all the survivors were unforgettable. When the ceremony was over we were taken behind the wall where the wreaths were gathered before the unveiling to the cell block. It was eerie to walk along that narrow passageway bordered by the high stone wall and see the row of now-empty cells. One could imagine what they had once been like: teeming with starving, frightened human beings, most of them knowing that they faced a gruesome death.

  Walking behind me was a tall man leaning on a stick. He tapped me on the shoulder. ‘That was my cell,’ he said simply. I turned to look at him, then back at the now empty cell, devoid of furniture except for one single iron bed. No covers. No mattress. Just the rusting springs.

  ‘It’s very small,’ I murmured.

  ‘There were three of us in it,’ he went on. ‘I’m a Dane. SOE Danish Section. There was another Dane and a Canadian in the cell with me.’ I looked up in surprise.

  ‘Wherever did they put three beds?’ I enquired naively. ‘There’s no room.’

  ‘There weren’t three beds,’ he explained. ‘That cell is just as it was in 1945. No furniture except the iron bed. We took it in turn to sleep on it. Otherwise we slept on the floor.’

  ‘You must have been cold,’ I sympathized, looking at the dirty cement floor, ‘especially in winter.’

  ‘Freezing,’ he agreed, ‘and damned hungry.’

  I glanced at the number above the door: 20.I knew that those in the first nineteen cells had been executed. He understood my glance without my having to voice any further questions.

  ‘When those in number 19 were taken out we began to be very worried. They were all Brits. I know because we used to tap messages through the walls of the cells and whisper into the air vents. That’s how we knew the Allies weren’t far away. Luckily the Americans arrived and liberated the camp before the guards had time to liberate us.’ He sighed. ‘But too late for the poor Brits.’

  He turned round t
o where a heavy book was open on a ledge.

  ‘Look,’ he said flipping through the pages. ‘‘This is the list of prisoners. There’s my name.’ He pointed to the page and then to the badge on his lapel.

  I meant to ask whether it wasn’t difficult to return to a place which held such painful memories, but we were being moved on to the crematorium and the large mound containing the remains of 500 prisoners, all shot at random in one afternoon, and the moving memorial huts each dedicated to the different groups represented in the camp. I found the Jewish hut the most affecting.

  I returned home from that trip a changed woman. So many things we think important and get into a fuss about now seemed so futile. When I arrived in Paris there was a woman waiting with me at the airport for the bus to take us into town. It was late arriving. Although the officials on duty apologized, she fussed and fumed and threatened every official in sight with dire consequences because she had been kept waiting. I thought perhaps she had a train or a plane from another airport to catch, but no, when I asked her she said she lived in Paris. But she wanted to get home! We all did. ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ she fumed. ‘It’s unpardonable. That bus should be here, waiting for us.’ She took a deep breath and cast a venomous glance at the poor official who had been the recipient of her anger. ‘The company will be hearing from my husband first thing in the morning,’ she threatened. ‘Then some heads will roll.’ The bus came to a standstill beside us at that minute. I let her get in first and took a seat as far away from her as possible. Perhaps a week earlier, I thought to myself, I would have agreed with her ‘principles’. But that evening, as we waited in the sunshine, I felt sorry for her. After what I had seen, I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so petty.