Later you will remember that in order that you and all the other children of your generation might live in peace and freedom, your Mother and myself as well as all the other Mothers and Fathers have made great sacrifices, and have missed many years of happiness.
My dear Georgina as you grow to be a woman, you will realise what these last years have cost your Mother.
You will always look upon your Mother as the most wonderful lady in the world, always follow her advice and love and cherish her always. Be proud of your mother, my child.
You have not known your Daddy much; but in the future you will know him much more. You will find him to be just an ordinary sort of person, but a person who will always be by your side to help and guide you, have confidence in me, I shall never let you down.
I want you to keep this letter so that as you grow up, you can read it from time to time.
I will give you one golden rule for all your life:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Au revoir Georgina
All my love & kisses,
Daddy
A short time later, George wrote another letter. It asked Colonel Buckmaster why F-Section treated his brother, John, differently from other returning agents and why John had received no decorations. Buckmaster did not reply.
The government officially disbanded SOE on January 15, 1946, although the organization had a short second life as the Special Operations Branch of MI6 until the new Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee liquidated it later in the year.
SIXTEEN
Starrs on Trial
In no other department of war did so much courage pass unnoticed.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER
With the end of the war came the reckoning. The Allies established tribunals to prosecute those who had perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity. The most notable were the Nuremberg Trials, whose chief British prosecutor, Hartley Shawcross, wrote:
At Nuremberg the Defendants, the leaders of Nazi Germany, were charged not only as common murderers, as they all were, but also with the crime of aggressive war. It is the crime of war which is at once the object and the parent of the other crimes: the crimes against humanity, the war crimes, the common murders.
The trials of some of the Nazi “common murderers” took place at Wuppertal, Germany, in March 1947. It may have been less significant than the prosecution of men who had massacred millions at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the other death camps, but it represented an important precedent for both the Allied military and international law. The premeditated killing of five SAS commandos by the Sicherheitsdienst on August 8, 1944, near Noailles, France, could not be left unpunished. The British owed it to their personnel in uniform and future combatants needed to know that there were sanctions for murdering captured soldiers.
Former SS Major Hans Josef Kieffer was one of the defendants. The others were his superior, Helmut Knochen, and some of the men Kieffer had commanded, including Richard Schnurr and Karl Haug. Kieffer’s counsel, Dr. Lauterjung, based his client’s defense on the fact that he had merely relayed Knochen’s command to kill the British soldiers. Kieffer maintained, “I had to obey because the whole affair took place during the time after the attempt on Hitler’s life, when every opposition was impossible. . . . If I had refused, I would not have survived the prisoners.”
Dr. Lauterjung asked John Starr to come to Wuppertal and testify on Kieffer’s behalf. Although John knew nothing about the SAS victims, he could attest to Kieffer’s humane treatment of SOE prisoners at avenue Foch. He flew to Wuppertal in northwest Germany on March 12, the last day of Kieffer’s trial. He rode to the tribunal through the battered city, where Allied bombardment had killed more than 25,000 civilians and left another 350,000 homeless. It was two o’clock when he arrived at the court. He took the stand a half hour later, following the massacre’s two survivors, Serge Vaculik and Thomas Jones, who testified for the prosecution. Unlike them, he was there to save the life of the man who had spared his. Dr. Lauterjung asked for his sworn statement. John said:
I know the accused Kieffer and identify him. I knew him at 84 Avenue Foch. I was his prisoner. He treated me very well indeed. The food I received was the same as that of my guards. Other prisoners at the Avenue Foch were treated in the same way. My good treatment did not change after I had tried to escape. Kieffer often distributed chocolate and cigarettes to the prisoners. I gave Kieffer my word of honour that I would not escape again as long as I was at the Avenue Foch. After that, my door was not locked any longer. From his behavior, I do not think that he would take part in the deliberate murder of British prisoners.
The court adjourned. Two hours later, Serge Vaculik remembered, the justices returned. The president of the court addressed Kieffer, “The court martial at Wuppertal has found you guilty of wilful murder against the persons of five British soldiers and condemns you to death by hanging.” When Kieffer’s sentence was translated into German, Vaculik wrote, “Kieffer’s eyelids blinked, but he did not falter.” A guard ordered, “Right turn! Quick march!” Vaculik watched Kieffer march out, “his head held high and his face and neck as red as ever.” John was also watching Kieffer, who paused, looked at his former prisoner, and bowed his head.
Kieffer wrote an appeal for clemency: “Even to-day I feel innocent before God, Christ and my conscience, because I was not aware of the illegality of the order given to me.” He asked the court to reduce his sentence to imprisonment “in view of my three minor children who, since the death of my wife 18 months ago, are without a mother.” The court denied his request. The British executioner hanged Kieffer, along with Schnurr and Haug, at the prison of Hamelin on June 26, 1947. The court commuted the death sentence of Helmut Knochen, overall commander of the massacre, reducing his sentence to life, then to twenty years. He served fifteen.
* * *
• • •
The past pursued John Starr to Paris, where French investigators were reviving the case that the British had abandoned. Denunciations came from French former inmates of 84 avenue Foch, who remembered a well-dressed Englishman fraternizing with the enemy. Former SD officials Dr. Josef Goetz, Josef Placke, and Werner Ruehl added German voices to the chorus of recrimination. Over a period of more than one year, policemen of the Direction de la Surveillance Territoire (DST) at 13 rue des Saussaies in Paris interviewed witnesses. Placke told a police inspector on April 1, 1946, that John “was completely all right about working with us. He helped our service strongly in the transmission of messages to London.” His tales of John accompanying him to a Paris restaurant and on outings to the field sounded to the investigators like collaboration.
Dr. Goetz was even less helpful to John during his interrogation on December 13:
It was he [John Starr] who corrected certain mistakes in my spelling, in editing, who let me know the correct way to edit a technical message . . . he enjoyed a certain liberty, returning to his cell on the fifth floor every night.
His account of John’s cooperation in drawing maps and organizational charts for Major Kieffer constituted evidence for a potential prosecution. But, Goetz admitted, John had provided no useful information and betrayed no colleagues.
John drove to the rue des Saussaies the same day. Police Superintendent René Gouillaud asked him about his childhood, marriage, and prewar life before moving on to his missions for SOE in France. Subsequent questions dwelled on his eleven months at avenue Foch. John admitted drawing maps of “Gaullist and Giraudist organisations.” Yes, he had gone to Saint-Quentin with Josef Placke “to assist in an S-Phone operation” and on other trips. The strongest factor in his favor was the attempt to escape with Léon Faye and Noor Inayat Khan in November 1943. The examiners, who did not appear hostile, kept a record of his responses.
The process resumed on January 6, 1948, again at the DST bureau in rue des Saussaies. John answered more questions from Sup
erintendent Gouillaud about his relationship with Placke, who had lured SOE and Resistance personnel to their deaths. “It’s true that I went out on several outings with PLACKE,” John again admitted, “but never in his service.” He elaborated on his dinner with Placke in the restaurant, adding that “he took me another time to an apartment where he had a housewarming.” He denied assisting the Funkspiel: “I never took part in their editing or their transmissions, as he [Placke] seems to claim.” And he protested against Dr. Goetz’s assertion that he had “corrected certain mistakes in my spelling, in editing”:
To tell the truth, I never worked for Goetz. Only, it happened that he called me to his bureau on different occasions and asked me to correct certain spelling in messages sent or received. For him, at his instruction, I received messages from the BBC; but if I had not done it, the Germans would have had it anyway, because during the broadcast times, there were six or seven radios for listening . . . I repeat, I never drew likenesses of agents that I knew. I knew very few of them at the time and I could not have done it.
Two days later, John was back in the chair at rue des Saussaies. Superintendent Gouillaud asked about the period before his arrest. He wanted to know about Pierre Martin, the Frenchman who had betrayed John. John told him what he remembered about the double agent whom the Resistance assassinated. He continued with the long tale of the torture he endured in Dijon, his experiences at Fresnes and avenue Foch, and, finally, the ordeal of the concentration camps.
The next witness, ten days later, was Werner Ruehl. The former corporal stated that John had made “a tour of inspection in the region of Le Mans to find objectives and emplacements that we could use in the radio game as possible sites for demolition.” Ruehl thought that John, who “had been sent to France to undertake sabotage,” was qualified to serve as “our expert” in convincing London that the sham “Resistance” was blowing up bridges and rail lines.
Evidence from Placke, Goetz, and Ruehl, alongside John’s own admissions, were tipping the scales against him. In June, investigators questioned the German who knew John best, Ernest Vogt. Vogt had been on the move for nearly four years. “Following our retreat from Paris in August 1944,” he wrote, “we brought one [radio] link with us, and we fruitfully continued our transmissions with London from Nancy, then from Offenburg, from Freiburg . . . and then from the shore of Lake Constance.” When the war ended, he went into hiding. He was working in a dairy on May 29, 1946, when the American Army tracked him down. It took the Americans a year to determine that they had no case against him. They passed him to the British, who incarcerated him for three months before returning him to the Americans. The new government of West Germany took charge of him and confined him at Dachau camp until it issued his Certificate of Denazification. Western intelligence services attempted to recruit him, as they did many other German spies, but he declined.
He returned to France seeking the release of his wife from French detention. On June 19, 1948, he answered questions about John Starr:
As far as I know BOB only corrected the text of the transmissions devised by Dr. GOETZ so that it was not known that they were German translations . . . so far as I know, BOB did not devise the texts himself, but only corrected those that Dr. GOETZ gave him. . . . As far as I know BOB never denounced any members of the “French Section” Organisation nor any members of any other organisation or resistance movement. Nobody was captured owing to a statement or denunciation of BOB’s as far as I know. BOB always declared to me that he would never become an agent or informer of our Dienststelle [Department] and on no account would denounce anyone else.
The French informed London about the investigation and requested corroboration. The British complied, but they were unenthusiastic about bringing the case to trial. A senior officer in Military Operations at the War Office wrote to Miss J. Russell King of MI5 on September 28, 1948, “I, too, hope that the STARR case may peter out—certainly the present testimony does not provide a very hopeful basis for a successful prosecution, but, as you say, the processes of French justice are unpredictable.”
The DST weighed the pros and cons of l’affaire Starr and came to no conclusion. They turned his dossier over to the Permanent Military Tribunal of Paris. The tribunal studied the evidence and, on December 13, 1948, officially indicted Captain John Ashford Renshaw Starr under Article 75 of the Penal Code for “intelligence with the enemy.” The maximum penalty was death.
The case fell to a conscientious young officer named Captain J. Mercier, described by one British observer as “tall, blond, very smart.” Mercier cast a wide net, seeking evidence in France, England, and Germany. As juge d’instruction, investigating judge, his role was not that of prosecutor so much as adjudicator. His word would determine whether John had to face a French court-martial and, possibly, the guillotine.
Mercier requested a character assessment of John from the local gendarmerie in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The response, dated December 23, 1948, affirmed that “his conduct and morality are excellent. To our knowledge he has no prior history [i.e., criminal record].”
The interrogations and examination of documents proceeded throughout 1949. In the midst of the investigation, John acquired an unexpected ally in the person of British author Jean Overton Fuller. Fuller was writing a biography of her friend and London neighbor, Noor Inayat Khan, whom the Germans had murdered in Dachau. Vera Atkins, F-Section’s former intelligence officer, told Fuller that John had been at the avenue Foch when Khan was imprisoned there. Not knowing how to contact him, she put Fuller in touch with George Starr in Brussels. George sent her his brother’s address in Paris. Fuller wrote to John, and on September 14, 1949, she met him, along with his wife, Michelle, at home in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
John told her all he could remember about Khan, her courage at avenue Foch, and their near escape. He mentioned the Funkspiel, but he warned Fuller that the former SOE officials assisting with her biography might disown her if she wrote about Germany’s successful deception of SOE. Back in London, Fuller saw Colonel Buckmaster to discuss Khan. Toward the end of the interview, she asked, “What do you think of Starr?”
The vehemence of Buckmaster’s answer startled her: “Nothing! After he’d been taken by the Gestapo, he did everything they asked him for a year! . . . Well, almost everything.” Fuller defended her new friend. Buckmaster conceded that John probably gave no information to the Germans, but he wondered why he had not tried to escape with Khan and Faye. “But he did,” she said.
As Fuller recalled the conversation, he responded, “You’ve only got his word for that. And that’s worth nothing.” A moment later, he added, “I never trusted him from the beginning.”
John was convinced that F-Section’s former staff had a vendetta against him, because his report had revealed their mortal errors. The report he gave the War Office disappeared, and he was convinced that SOE had suppressed rather than lost it. But that was not germane to his case in France.
At ten in the morning on November 15, 1949, John reported to the headquarters of the Permanent Military Tribunal in its barracks at 20 rue de Reuilly in Paris. Captain Mercier told him he was entitled to a lawyer but John, like his brother at the court of inquiry in England, believed in his innocence so strongly that he declared, “I do not deem it necessary to have the presence of an attorney, and I am ready now to answer all your questions.” The interrogation was brief, running a mere two typed pages. John corrected minor errors in documents Mercier presented to him relating to the degree of movement he enjoyed at avenue Foch and his cooperation with the SD. “It is necessary,” he said, “to understand that I made it appear I was working for them, and that in reality I worked there, but with the exclusive intention of learning everything they knew about our organization.”
Mercier showed him Ernest Vogt’s statement and asked for his response. John read it and said,
VOGT confirms what I told you. I rendered to the Germans little, inoffensive
services. I denounced no one. I gave no useful information on either the transmissions of messages or the organization of French-Section. . . . I am convinced that I always acted loyally.
Captain Mercier located two of John’s cellmates from Fresnes, Jean-Claude Comert and Jean Argence. Both confirmed everything John had told him about their discussion over whether John should cooperate with the SD at avenue Foch in order to gather information. Comert testified on November 22 to the tribunal that they had discussed German infiltration of British operations in France and London’s dispatch of weapons to the SD. Comert added, “He [John Starr] confided at the time that there was treason that was so well organized that he thought it must have originated in London.”
The next day, Mercier wrote to the French ambassador in London, René Massigli. He outlined the case and hinted at doubts about John: “He pretends that his services were never anything but of a purely material character with no chance of harming Allied interests and that his functions permitted him to understand what the Germans knew about the British networks with a view to alerting the Allied services so they could stop it.” Mercier admitted a troubling aspect of the case, “It seems difficult to hang the honor and an eventual penal sentence on a British officer [based] on German testimony. . . .” He asked the ambassador, “in the absence of direct testimony, French or Allied” that John had betrayed F-Section, to ask Colonel Buckmaster whether John’s actions had harmed his organization. The tribunal’s file contains no response from Buckmaster.
The British Consulate in Paris advised John to leave the country. He refused, explaining to Fuller, “If I were to leave the country now, with a thing like this pending, I should never be able to show my face again either here or anywhere else in the world.”
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 28