Another captured agent, radio operator Adolphe Rabinovitch, entered the portals of avenue Foch at about the same time. John pretended not to know him, although they had trained together in 1941. A few days later, Rabinovitch whispered to John that he had escaped to Spain at the end of his first mission in June 1943 after transmitting for his brother, George. He parachuted back on the night of March 2, 1944, but Dr. Goetz was waiting for him. Rabinovitch was furious that London had sent him into the SD’s hands, and John despaired that he had no means to prevent the entrapment of more agents.
On Sundays, Major Kieffer distributed chocolates, biscuits, and cigarettes to inmates in their cells. Sometimes, the cigarettes were English, undoubtedly from SOE consignments to Placke’s false reception committees. Rabinovitch refused to accept presents from the Germans, but John gave the radio operator some of his. John observed that, while Kieffer knew Rabinovitch was Jewish, he did not single him out for ill treatment. That came a short time later, when Kieffer deported him to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Germany.
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At the end of March, Parisot, the commander who had become George’s closest friend, made the fortuitous acquaintance of a Spaniard named Tomás Guerrero Ortega. Known by his nom de guerre, “Camilo,” the thirty-year-old was a legend among Spanish Civil War veterans. The youngest commander in the Republican forces, he lost a leg during the January 1939 retreat from Barcelona. Like a half million other refugees, Camilo, his men, and their families crossed the French border only to suffer internment in a concentration camp. The French government forced Spanish men of military age to labor under its Main d’Oeuvre Immigré (MOI) program, and when Germany invaded in 1940, Camilo fought in a Spanish regiment of the French Army. Vichy police again interned the Spaniards in a succession of camps. In April 1943, the Germans planned to deport them to Spain, where Franco was waiting to execute them. The men escaped with the help of Camilo’s former commanding officer, communist general Luis Fernandez. Fernandez appointed Camilo chief of the Groupe Espanol de Résistance dans le Gers, also called the 35th Spanish Brigade of Guerrillas. Camilo moved to a house near Maurice Parisot in Saint-Gô and approached the Frenchman to request weapons and ammunition for more than three hundred men. Parisot introduced him to George Starr.
George’s sympathies during the Spanish Civil War had been with his wife’s conservative and religious family, who supported Franco. Although Camilo was a communist, George trusted the dashing “Red” with the Latin moustache and called him “a real character.” Camilo’s independent spirit—changing the gears of cars and motorcycles at breakneck speed with his only leg—appealed to the maverick British agent. The French called Camilo uni-jambe, one-leg, a fearless warrior with a rifle in one hand and his crutch in the other. The handsome bachelor lamented to Anne-Marie Walters that no woman would marry him as a one-legged man, although several women left testimonies to the contrary. Walters wrote that the Spaniard “had thick, long black hair shining with icy-blue lights. He wore it long down to his neck and usually said he had not time to have it cut, to excuse his secret pleasure at his romantic appearance.” George armed Camilo’s 35th Brigade, excusing his decision to help communists by calling them “a mixture of all sorts, anarchists, communists, liberal democrats.”
In March, one of Hitler’s most decorated armored formations, Das Reich 2nd SS Panzer Division, began arriving in southwest France. Das Reich’s record included invading Yugoslavia in 1941 and defeating a Soviet armored division on the River Dnieper. Yet its reputation for massacres of partisans, Jews, and other civilians overshadowed its battlefield achievements. On April 6, the division established its headquarters about sixty-five miles east of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, in the town of Montauban. The location was between two and four days’ travel to the most likely landing beaches on the Mediterranean and the English Channel, giving the division flexibility to confront the Allies on either shore. Das Reich troops were dispersed among several Gascon villages, where they absorbed replacements for the thousands of men lost on the Russian front. The division recruited from Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Alsace-Lorraine, and other conquered territories. Many did not speak German and lacked the customary SS fanaticism. WHEELWRIGHT’s maquisards avoided Das Reich. George had no wish to provoke the reprisals for which the unit was notorious in the east.
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On April 20, 1944, Dr. Goetz sent for John Starr. When John entered Goetz’s office on the second floor, he noticed that the German staff, who normally wore civilian suits, were in full dress military uniforms with medals on their chests. The mood was somber. John did not know what was happening until Goetz explained it was Adolf Hitler’s fifty-fifth birthday. John stood to attention, raised his arm in the Nazi salute, and blurted, “Heil, Churchill!” Dr. Goetz, Josef Placke, and their colleagues laughed. Afterward, Placke stopped by John’s workspace and repeated, “Heil, Churchill!”
A few weeks later, on May 12, 1944, John saw seven women led into the guardroom. One was his former courier, Diana Rowden. The Germans had captured her with his former radio operator, John Young, on November 18, 1943. He also recognized Odette Sansom, whom he had seen briefly on her arrival with his brother in November 1942. John wanted to speak to the women, so he went to the guardroom with chocolates that Kieffer had given him. With the warders present, he and Rowden pretended not to know each other. She was unable to tell him that his comrades had tracked down Pierre Martin, the double agent who betrayed him. Harry Rée made the first, failed attempt to kill Martin in Dijon, and later two French résistants shot him dead in Dijon’s Café de Belfort.
John gave the sweets to Rowden, Sansom, and the other women. There was nothing else he could do. The Germans took the women out of the guardroom and three weeks later sent them to Karlsruhe and on to concentration camps.
John observed so many SOE agents at avenue Foch that it seemed as if all of F-Section was in SD custody. “The door of my room was often open,” John wrote, “as the guards were next door and at the top of the stairs or wandering about the corridors and could of course see me through the open door.” The prisoners saw him, usually at work in shirt and tie and listening to the radio. One who recognized him was the childhood friend he had put forward for SOE, Maurice Southgate.
The Germans had captured Southgate, whom the RAF had promoted to squadron leader before his latest mission, on May 1, 1944. A radio detector van located the safe house in Montluçon, where his operator, René Mathieu, was transmitting. Southgate and Mathieu withstood violent interrogation in Montluçon and convinced the Germans that Southgate was a minor courier. The SD sent the two men by train to Paris for further questioning. Rather than hold them first at Fresnes Prison, they drove them straight to 84 avenue Foch. Southgate recalled that when he reached the top floor:
I had the shock of my life on seeing opposite me in a little room Capt. JOHN STARR (BOB), sitting in a comfortable easy chair, smoking a cigarette in a very leisurely fashion. My immediate reaction was to think: “Oh . . . !”, but pushed that idea from my mind immediately. He winked at me, but that was all.
John, having read a message in the guardroom a short time before referring to “les amis de Hector,” was expecting Southgate. Not only did he remember that Southgate’s code name was Hector, he had recognized a photograph of his friend that Vogt had shown him. To Vogt, however, he had denied all knowledge of Southgate.
While the warders gave Southgate and Mathieu lunch in the guardroom, John’s voice came from next door singing traditional British tunes like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Rule, Britannia.” Southgate said the songs “cheered me up a lot.”
After lunch, a Ukrainian guard took Southgate to the first floor and handcuffed him to a chair. Then “a German speaking fluent French, whose name I later found out was Ernest,” came to question him. Southgate pretended to be “just a poor, miserabl
e little courier,” which Ernest Vogt did not contradict. Dr. Goetz, whom Southgate called “the second in command of all wireless transmitting activities,” interrogated him afterward on the second floor.
Southgate spent the night at avenue Foch, and the SD moved him to Fresnes the next day. Two French cellmates there gave him coffee and biscuits from their Red Cross packages, and he fell asleep. A mere ten minutes later, guards woke him. A “French Gestapo man” roughed him up and threw him into the back of a black Citroën car.
At four thirty that afternoon, Southgate found himself back at avenue Foch without knowing why. He was, he said, “greeted by a large smile from ERNEST, Dr. GOETZ and a German colonel [Major Kieffer], head of that branch of the Gestapo [SD].” The three Germans were pleased to tell him that they realized he was not a “miserable little courier,” but Squadron Leader Maurice Southgate, chief of SOE’s STATIONER circuit. Southgate feared that John had betrayed him. As far as he was aware, no one else at avenue Foch knew who he was.
He felt that the “game was up,” the end of three weeks’ telling the Germans nothing, much longer than the forty-eight hours SOE required for his confederates to disappear. Southgate said:
I was considered as a gentleman, taken to a room where a table was set and offered dinner. I at first refused the offer, but they insisted, saying that they were soldiers and so was I, that I would be treated as a prisoner of war. . . . I accepted certain of the food, telling them that as it had originally been intended for the Maquis I felt justified in eating it. This was real coffee, chocolate, spam and American K-rations.
John was working upstairs, when the telephone rang. A guard answered and handed him the phone. Vogt asked if he had eaten lunch. John said no. “You’ll have lunch with your cousin,” the German said. John was puzzled. “Yes,” Vogt said. “‘Hector,’ Maurice Southgate. He is your cousin, isn’t he?” John played along, assuming that Southgate had told Vogt they were related. Guards took him downstairs to the fourth floor, where he sat at the table with Vogt and Southgate. Kieffer came from his office next door and said something in German. Vogt translated, “Bob, we ought to shoot you.”
“Why?”
“Because you knew perfectly well all the time who Hector was, and you didn’t tell us.”
“Well, would you expect me to?”
Kieffer, as John recalled, thought it over and said, “No.”
After lunch, Vogt left John and Southgate together in the guardroom. Thinking that a hidden microphone might monitor their conversation, John spoke softly. This precaution may have been unnecessary, as Ernest Vogt revealed after the war “that there was never a single microphone in the whole building at 84 Avenue Foch.” John told Southgate about his work for the Germans. Southgate remembered his justification: “If I don’t do it somebody else will, and in doing it I am gathering very valuable information which may come in useful sometime.”
Southgate attested to John’s loyalty, recalling that “he used to run the German military and Nazis down, always boasting and [saying] ‘Thumbs up for England,’ telling the Germans they were doomed. . . .”
Kieffer asked John to take on the additional duty of writing summaries of the BBC’s daily news broadcasts. Southgate felt the summaries had little significance, because Kieffer liked to read them “before he received the full list from the other office which also took them down.” While listening to the BBC one day, John asked the guards, “Are you going to take us down to the cellars with you?” To their bewildered expressions, he explained that Radio Londres, which often warned civilians in advance of air strikes, had said the RAF was going to bomb avenue Foch. The RAF didn’t bomb avenue Foch, but his practical joke sent the guards flying to the basement, while leaving the prisoners undisturbed in their cells, every time the air-raid sirens blared.
During one of Kieffer’s interrogations of Southgate, the major, whom Southgate referred to as “the German colonel,” showed him charts outlining the organization of SOE. He was shocked to see the names and photographs of Maurice Buckmaster, Gerry Morel, Nicholas Bodington, and several sergeants at commando school in Scotland. “They asked me numerous questions on our organisation, but I just said that it seemed to me they knew more about it than I did. The Colonel was very proud and excited, and laughed once this had been translated to him.”
The SD had penetrated SOE more deeply than Southgate imagined. John showed him even more damning documents he had hidden in the hope of sending them with someone to London. According to Southgate, they included “wireless transmissions between LONDON and the German H.Q. Both of us were amazed at the ridiculous and foolish things done by LONDON H.Q. I would even go so far as to call them criminal.” Southgate was enraged to learn that London asked SD wireless operators for security checks and that F-Section agents were parachuting into SD receptions.
In the weeks that followed, John learned more about Germany’s counterespionage triumphs and still hoped to tell another prisoner who might escape with the information to London. But the prisoner he saw most often, Maurice Southgate, had also given his word not to escape. All this time, the SD was boring deeper into F-Section’s networks. John’s subsequent debriefing report to SOE stated, “The Germans kept adding new circuits to the map. In addition, they brought [the] source small printed maps showing ammunition dumps and others showing grounds.”
One afternoon, John reported to Kieffer’s office on the fourth floor without knowing what the major wanted. Kieffer showed him the map of France with F-Section’s regions and operatives clearly indicated in John’s beautiful hand. By now, the number of circuits known to the SD had increased from thirteen to thirty. A newly marked area, as large as Wales, stretched across southwest France from Périgord to the Pyrenees. Kieffer pointed at it and instructed him to write “Hilaire.” John had no idea who Hilaire was.
Kieffer explained, “Ihr Bruder.”
“My brother?” John asked. “I haven’t got a brother in France.”
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By the spring of 1944, George Starr was attacking the Germans when and where he could. F-Section compiled a “RECORD OF ACHIEVEMENTS OF COLONEL STARR’S WHEELWRIGHT CIRCUIT” for the month of April:
April: German general is killed in attack on German column in DORDOGNE.
April 22: Train containing munitions and German war material attacked between Bergerac and St. Foy.
April 26: Further 12 wagons from same train destroyed in station at LAMONZIE.
April: 1,500 kgs of heavy submarine oil burned at BOUSSENS. Factory temporarily stopped, more oil and six transformers destroyed.
April: Further BOUSSENS information: 1 electric distributor destroyed, putting fire-pumps out of action; 150 tons of synthetic lubricant set on fire.
April 29: Petrol tanker train derailed at MONTREJEAU.
“It was the last day of April,” Anne-Marie Walters wrote, “and the sun was bright and hot: the cherries were pink, the flowers in bloom, and the approaching summer seemed to burst out of every living thing.” Not everything was bright for her. Since the killing of Albert Cambon in Agen and the capture of another résistant, Aldo Molesini, in the town of Tonneins, French police had been seeking a young Englishwoman courier in the Gers. She wrote that “no one was quite sure whether the Gestapo was in on the search or not, but it was quite probable.” George ordered her to stay away from Tonneins, where the authorities had her description (along with those of himself and Yvonne Cormeau), and dispatched her to Paris to meet his old rival Maurice Rouneau, who had returned to France by sea.
Rouneau and his Victoire comrade Pierre Duffoir were now organizing SOE’s RACKETEER circuit. Jeanne Robert stayed behind in England, waiting to give birth to her child by Rouneau. Lacking a radio operator, Rouneau turned to George for help in transmitting messages to London. Walters memorized London’s answers to Rouneau’s queries about parachutage sites and, using false i
dentity papers, took a train to Paris to recount them in person. Rouneau was not there when she arrived, and she settled in to wait for him. The capital presented a vivid contrast to the southwest. Parisians were suffering more from shortages than Gascony’s farmers, who grew their food and had firewood outside their doors. German counterintelligence in Paris was more thorough, severely restricting Resistance activity. “Paris was, of course,” wrote Buckmaster, “far and away the most dangerous place to work: it was swarming with Germans and with security police of every description.” Walters went one afternoon to the Gestapo headquarters in rue de Saussaies, “drawn by a sense of morbid curiosity.” Watching it from outside, she wondered, “How many of my own friends, the men and women I had trained with in England, had spent endless and terrifying hours of cross-examination behind those black walls?”
Two weeks after Walters’s arrival in Paris, Rouneau sent a courier to tell her “that his circuit was in the process of breaking up, and asking me to leave my messages at Vanves [just south of Paris]. I left a long coded letter to him, which he found when he came to Paris a few days later.”
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There could be no doubt, whether among the résistants in France or the German High Command in Berlin, that a sea and air invasion on an unprecedented scale was coming to France. The only questions were, where and when? The American and British air forces were decimating Luftwaffe squadrons in aerial duels over Germany, the better to ensure air dominance for the protection of troops pouring onto the beaches of France. The RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) bombed rail lines, reducing Germany’s power to reinforce frontline troops battling the Allied invaders. The Resistance and the French railway workers’ union assisted with sabotage operations. Allied maneuvers up and down the British coast rehearsed amphibious assaults, causing casualties but teaching commanders what to avoid in real combat. American and British intelligence engaged in a monumental ruse to convince the Germans that General George Patton’s fictitious First U.S. Army Group would lead the invasion with a landing at Calais from its nonexistent base in Dover. SOE and other intelligence agencies sent out thousands of radio transmissions to confuse the Germans, the signals version of the fog of war.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 18