They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France

by Charles Glass

The next morning, the five men who had received Yvonne Cormeau came to Pujols to offer her their services. Seeing them for the first time in the daylight, she sensed something strange about one of them: “I didn’t like the way he looked at me . . . [in] a very underhand way. I wouldn’t have trusted him with anything.” She suspected he was a traitor or a German in disguise.

  The son of Cormeau’s host in Pujols bicycled thirty miles to Montesquieu-Volvestre to tell George that his radio operator, Annette, had arrived. George arranged to meet her in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Cormeau provided several accounts about her encounter with George, including a 1945 SOE debrief and an interview with the Imperial War Museum in 1984. A Resistance liaison officer, said by George to be a sympathetic police inspector, brought her to where George was waiting.

  The policeman introduced them, but George interrupted, “I’ve known this lady for a long time, known her before she was married.” Cormeau’s description matched the impact George had on most who met him:

  Physically he was small, he was no taller than I am. Man who had celebrated his 40th birthday in the field. His main features were his eyes. He really hypnotized people into doing what he wanted by looking at them. Nothing disagreeable, but he sort of had a forceful way. . . . His main defect, if I can call it that way, he smoked too much, always had a cigarette.

  George remembered speaking with her in a café, but Cormeau said their conversation took place on a long walk. She handed him the envelope from Atkins. It contained a letter and a photograph of his wife, Pilar, with their young children, Georgina and Alfred, that Pilar had sent to the British Consulate in Barcelona. “She was given a letter and photographs of the children,” George recalled. “Of course, you’re supposed not to look at them, but being a bloody woman, she bloody looked. So she knew what she was doing.” Cormeau had not told Atkins that the Starrs and Cormeaus had been friends in Brussels, where George and her husband had played cricket together.

  George read Pilar’s letter and asked Cormeau, “By the way, what the hell are you doing here? Your husband has been killed. You’ve got a little girl. What’s she going to do without a mother or a father? Because I guarantee you’re never going to get out of here.” He added that she had arrived at a difficult time. Since Gaucher’s capture, the Gestapo were hunting him and had put a price of one million francs on his head.

  He asked her to return to the farm where she landed. “He thought it was a good spot for getting ready,” she said. She mentioned her suspicions about one of the men who had received her.

  I told him about this other chap and he said, “Well, you’ll only stay there three days and mention what you think. You have my permission to mention your feelings to the leader of the group.”

  Cormeau’s accounts of their conversation differ as to the duration, but after meeting with George, she boarded a train to Montréjeau. The 1945 debrief stated that “she stayed in a safe house” in Montréjeau, though in her 1984 interview she said she returned to the Bouchous’ farmhouse and hid her radio in a false-bottomed wine barrel. She made her first transmissions from the bedroom of the Bouchous’ teenage daughter.

  Cormeau’s instinct about one of the men who received her proved right. He was a traitor. The only name given for him in the records was “Rodolphe,” who was most likely to have been a double agent named Rodolphe Feyton. An SOE report on Cormeau’s activities in France commented:

  The owner of this house at Pujols and his family were soon afterwards arrested and taken to Germany through the same denunciation as caused his cousin’s arrest, and the man responsible for the blowing of the circuit was actually in charge of the reception committee to which informant landed, and was the first person on the field to greet her, so that within a few days of her arrival in the field, the Police were in possession of a very good description of her.

  A follow-up SOE report stated that another member of her reception committee was arrested, after which police searched the man’s house and found documents incriminating others: “As a result of this nine men were shot and four others tortured.” Among the names revealed during the torture sessions were Maurice Rouneau and Pierre Duffoir.

  Cormeau moved from one safe house to another every few days, until George retrieved her from Montréjeau on Monday, August 30, and brought her by train to Pujols. Thanks to him, she always stayed in the safest of safe houses. He advised her to hide the .22 revolver she had brought from England: “Look, if you are found carrying any weapon, that’s signing your death warrant.” His tenderness toward her did not go unnoticed, as she later recalled.

  Knowing that my husband had been killed, he looked after me extremely well indeed. And I am very grateful for all the work he did looking after me. And that’s why he wouldn’t let me have a pistol, and that’s why he gave me so many identity cards. That’s why he arranged houses very safely all the time.

  She reflected, “I never thought before when I met him casually, I must admit, in Brussels, that I would trust this man Hilaire with my life.” But she did trust him and embarked on a clandestine life with le patron as his wireless operator, courier, confidante, and, a few alleged, his lover.

  EIGHT

  Avenue Boche

  In secret wireless work under far from perfect conditions, we were quite unable to ask for repetitions of doubtful passages and to employ all those aids to accuracy and checks which are so easy in peacetime work.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  In Dijon’s Wehrmacht prison, SS guards roused Captains John Starr and Brian Rafferty from their cells, handcuffed them to each other, and shoved them into the back of a car. The Germans drove all day through the barren summer landscape without telling the prisoners their destination. After about two hundred miles, the car turned south toward the Parisian suburb of Fresnes. Its late-nineteenth-century penitentiary was by then notorious for the torture and execution of résistants, Jews, and hostages.

  The SS handed the British agents over to the prison warders, who locked them in separate cells at opposite ends of a corridor. John’s three cellmates were “a Polish officer [Zbigniew Jablonsky], subsequently shot, the second was a French student [Jean-Claude Comert] whom informant had previously met, the third was a man called JEAN ARGENCE, a garde forestier [forest ranger] from VIEUX CHENES, near LISEUX.” Argence, who had worked with the PHYSICIAN circuit under Francis Suttill, told John the Germans had penetrated PHYSICIAN. His interrogator had shown him a map of the circuit’s arms caches and photostatic copies of correspondence between London and PHYSICIAN. Neither Argence nor John knew that French double agent Henri Déricourt had copied the documents before aircrafts took them to London with returning agents. Argence said that the Sicherheitsdienst knew more about F-Section than he did.

  At the end of September, three weeks into John’s stay at Fresnes, SS guards came for him. His cellmates, knowing the drill, asked him to bring cigarette butts from the interrogation room ashtray. The guards drove him north across Paris to the fashionable 16th arrondissement and stopped at an imposing eighteenth-century mansion on avenue Foch. The broad thoroughfare, designed in 1866 by Baron Haussmann as the avenue de l’Imperatrice, stretched from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne. Sundry and competing German security services had commandeered the stately residences along the north side, numbers 58, 72, 82, 84, and 86, as well as another house just behind. Standartenführer (SS Colonel) Helmut Knochen, chief of both the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO) and Sicherheitsdienst, had requisitioned one of the homes for himself, as had the Paris Gestapo chief. So much of the elegant thoroughfare hosted Germans that Parisians called it “avenue Boche.”

  John, weak from his wounds and torture, hobbled on crutches up the steps of 84 avenue Foch. Number 84, the middle of the SD’s three adjoining belle époque mansions, was its counterespionage headquarters. One British detainee wrote of the establishment, “It was incongruous to think that this lovely building in this equally elegant and majestic Avenue shou
ld now house the most brutal elements of Nazi Germany.” The first person John encountered was a man who introduced himself as “Ernest.” Half-Swiss, half-German Ernest Vogt had moved to Paris in 1920, working first in a bank and then in a patent office. The French interned him as an enemy alien at the beginning of the war, and the Germans freed him when they occupied Paris. His color blindness and poor eyesight disqualified him from army service, but the SD hired the French and English speaker as an interpreter. He held the rank of Untersturmführer, second lieutenant. Yet like most other officers at headquarters, he dressed in a civilian suit and tie. Vogt’s talent for winning inmates’ confidence led to his conducting interrogations on his own. Having lived in England, he gave British detainees tea with milk instead of violence. His methods were unlike anything John had endured in Dijon.

  During their first interview, Vogt ordered lunch for them both and spoke as if to a friend. Vogt’s chief, Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer, joined them soon afterward. A former policeman in the city of Karlsruhe, he had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s. On June 27, 1940, just after the German conquest of France, the Wehrmacht ordered him to Berlin, where it issued him a military field police officer’s uniform. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Main Security Office) sent him to Paris, and his wife and their three children remained at home in Karlsruhe.

  One detainee at avenue Foch described Kieffer as “square-headed, not tall, hair cut short, strongly built, energetic, about 40, rather dark—could not speak French.” Kieffer asked John a few questions, which Vogt translated, and then left the room. While Vogt resumed working on him politely and subtly, John dissembled as he had under the earlier brutality. Vogt recalled that John “had the sense to keep the Dienstelle [department] in Dijon in the dark about his activities until he was certain his collaborators knew of his arrest and were able to get to safety.” Vogt attempted to succeed with courtesy where the thugs in Dijon had failed with cruelty, but he admitted that his technique was not working with John:

  He made it appear that he was the only one it would be worth trying to get anything out of, and this impressed me very much. He told it with so much conviction and so many elaborate and supplementary details that he even made our men believe it for some days. I admired his inventiveness as well as his courage.

  The first interview, more conversation than third degree, went on for most of the afternoon. In the evening, Vogt brought another prisoner, Major Gilbert Norman, to meet John. SOE had parachuted Norman into France on October 31, 1942, as the radio operator for Francis Suttill’s PHYSICIAN circuit, the same circuit John’s cellmate Argence had worked for before it was infiltrated. Eight months later, the Germans arrested Norman and most other members of the circuit. Norman believed Suttill had given Kieffer his agents’ names in return for Kieffer’s promise that none of them would be executed, though some suggested that either Norman himself or a double agent had handed over the names. Vogt left the room, and the two agents spoke to each other in whispers. Norman said the SD knew all about SOE and “it was no use to attempt to hide anything.” The Germans had shown him copies of his own radio traffic with F-Section, and Norman was convinced that “there was a leak high up in London.”

  Vogt returned to resume his interrogation of John, asking whether he worked for “the French Section.” Realizing that Vogt knew the answer, John confessed that he did. “You see,” Vogt said. “There is no point in keeping anything back.”

  John slept that night for a few hours in the guardroom on the fifth floor. Early in the morning, guards brought him to Vogt for more questions. The verbal sparring lasted most of the day. Despite the absence of torture, the session was draining. Vogt spotted inconsistencies, and John had to stay alert for hours without letup. Vogt showed him correspondence between London and F-Section agents in France to demonstrate the futility of lying. He did not tell him that Henri Déricourt had obtained the documents in France, leaving John to share Norman’s suspicion that the SD had a mole in London.

  Kieffer joined the evening interview. Vogt translated as his chief unfurled a large map of France. The SD had demarcated twelve of SOE’s operational areas, each marked with the names of captured F-Section officers. Kieffer asked John to draw a line around his zone of operations. John complied, expanding ACROBAT’s borders in the hope of sparing neighboring SOE organizers SD scrutiny. Kieffer told him to put the number 13 and his code name, Bob, over his region. John did so in the clear calligraphy he had used as a poster artist.

  Kieffer said something in German to Vogt, who translated, “He likes the way you print.” The major asked him to redraw the map with his professional flourishes. In a statement made shortly after the war, John said he “decided to comply with the Germans’ request.” However, a few years later, he claimed that he agreed to consider the offer. Guards returned him to Fresnes at ten thirty that night. His pocket was full of cigarette ends from Vogt’s ashtray.

  While he and his cellmates smoked, John told them about Kieffer’s proposition. Should he accept? They thought he should. If he gained the Germans’ trust, he could discover what else they knew about SOE. The question troubling them was: who had betrayed them? John was inclined to work for Kieffer, as his debrief stated, in order “to glean a lot of information which would be extremely valuable if he could get it back to London.” The same debrief conceded a more personal reason: “At the AVENUE FOCH, the food was good, being the same as that served to the German personnel in charge.”

  There may have been a third consideration: staying alive. After the Germans condemned one of his Fresnes cellmates to death, another recalled John saying, “That’s what’s waiting for me.”

  Three days later, the SD took John back to 84 avenue Foch and locked him in a sealed room. Keeping suspects on the premises was more convenient than bringing them every day from Fresnes, where they could pass messages to the outside world through other prisoners or sympathetic French staff. The cell in which John stayed was one of seven in the fifth floor attic that had been chambres de bonnes, maids’ rooms, before the SD occupied the house. The only natural light in the cells came through shafts leading to skylights in the roof, and each shaft was barred at the base to prevent escape. The only furniture in his cell was a single bed with a blanket. Near the cells were two larger rooms, one for the guards and the other Vogt’s office. A bathroom and a separate lavatory were at the end of the hallway. Below, on the fourth floor via white wooden stairs, was Kieffer’s apartment. It had a bedroom, a kitchen, an imposing office lit by a crystal chandelier, and a small lobby for Kieffer’s secretary. The radio unit was on the second floor, while the first floor housed other SD offices. A magnificent marble staircase led to the foyer and the front door.

  The original arrangement was that John would remain at avenue Foch for three or four days to complete the map and some charts, but the drawing led, as he had hoped, to other tasks and a longer stay. Kieffer and Vogt provided tables of all the F-Section networks they had neutralized for John to redraw. “Eventually,” recalled Vogt, “BOB was given various graphical drawings or sketches and representations to do, which were drawn up by KIEFFER and his collaborators owing to arrests or from captured documents.” One captured SOE agent who saw John’s scrolls described them: “The charts consisted of two large rolls of paper (one showing the German estimate of the S.O.E. organisation and the other that of the PROSPER [PHYSICIAN] organisation, the latter with photographs).” The SD sent photographs of the maps and charts to Berlin. The documents became instruments to break the morale of prisoners at avenue Foch by convincing them that the SD knew everything about F-Section through a German agent in London.

  John worked in the guardroom, where the open door gave him a view of other captured agents on their way to Vogt’s interrogation room. The warders kept him under surveillance and, during air raids, checked the cells to make sure that prisoners were in their beds and not signaling to the planes above. The guardroom had a small library from whic
h prisoners borrowed books.

  “Sometimes, he would be taken into the guardroom in the morning,” one SOE report stated, “at other times, he would have to wait until the afternoon, according to the position in the guardroom.” Life atop 84 avenue Foch was more comfortable than in any other prison of the Third Reich. Cooks provided meat, vegetables, bread, fresh butter, desserts, and wartime France’s most prized commodity, real coffee. “Prisoners were better fed at the Avenue Foch than the guards, the prisoners being on officers’ rations, while the guards had ‘other ranks’ rations,” one inmate observed. Another SOE prisoner said, “I was amazed at H.Q. GESTAPO, to see the quantities of British food, guns, ammunition, and explosives which they had at their disposal; this was quite easy to understand owing to the contacts they had with ENGLAND.” The coffee, tea, and many of the foodstuffs were unintended gifts from SOE in London. The Germans permitted inmates at avenue Foch to wash and shave. John wore a shirt and tie rather than prison clothes.

  While working in the guardroom, John came to know the German staff and the East European guards. In addition to Kieffer and Vogt, he met Hauptscharführer (Master Sergeant) Josef Placke. A Catholic school alumnus and First World War veteran, he had worked for the German Field Police and the Abwehr before transferring to the SD in avenue Foch. Another official he met was Unterscharführer (Corporal) Alfred von Kapri. Kapri worked in the radio department, assisted at interrogations, and went on raids to capture résistants. Interpreter August Scherer sometimes accompanied Kapri to make arrests. Scherer’s wife, Ottilie, also worked as an interpreter and was a friend of Kieffer’s secretary (and lover), Käte Goldmann. Michel Bouillon, a French collaborator, was a driver and odd-job man. The cleaner, Rose Marie Holwedts, was a Frenchwoman whom one SOE prisoner called “dark, dirty and very vulgar.” John came to believe she was the mistress of another staff member, Master Sergeant Karl Haug.