Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (33 page)

Despite the devastation that lay beyond the perimeter fence, and the crises facing the politicians trying to manage a shattered Germany, the atmosphere in the British camp was positive. Young servicemen transferred from fighting at the front relished the freedoms and the spoils of victory on offer in every mess and bar. Junior officers were given a car and a driver to get around the British and other occupied zones; the car was taken from a pool of requisitioned German vehicles, though it was the Americans who got the first pick of the SS Mercedeses. Wives were not allowed to join the husbands in the occupied zone, but the supply of single young women was constantly being replenished. Hundreds of typists were needed to process the vast number of permits and orders allowing people to move between zones, as well as the countless directives aimed at instilling order to chaos. The British zone included some of the greatest devastation of all: the blasted wasteland of the Ruhr, once Germany's industrial heartland. In autumn 1945 millions of displaced people were still on the move, mostly pouring in from the east.

For the Americans the priority was to ensure total denazification by interning hundreds of thousands of German males in camps for screening. The British element of the Allied Control Commission, the central body administering occupied Germany, was more concerned with how to get the Ruhr mines working again and feed the swollen, shattered population.

Winter—predicted to be a bad one—was approaching, as Anghais Fyffe was well aware as he set out for Berlin in his fifteen-hundredweight truck. The road he had to follow took him across several pontoon bridges, which could freeze over in minutes and were often clogged with German convoys returning home. Bad Oeynhausen to Berlin could take more than eight hours if heavy rain swamped the craters in the roads. But Fyffe sped through the British zone at the regulation speed of 50 mph, stopping
only at the petrol dump at Helmstedt to put two jerry cans' worth of fuel in his tank. For a change, there was no delay at checkpoints into the Russian zone.

A sinewy, sharp young Scot, Fyffe, formerly of SOE's security directorate, had been posted to a small mission sent out to the British zone to start searching for SOE agents. Until the summer of 1945 his boss had been Commander John Senter, but in more recent weeks Flight Officer Vera Atkins had been sending him instructions from London. Vera was one of very few SOE staff officers still in post in the autumn of 1945. Senter was back at the Bar, prosecuting a case against the Anti-Vivisection League. And as Buckmaster had returned to the Ford Motor Company as its public relations manager, Vera had now acquired the symbol “F”

For Fyffe, the first sign that Vera was in charge came in September, when he received a teleprint containing a long list of desiderata in respect of F Section's missing men and women. Vera's questions demanded instant answers. For example, could Fyffe get “confirmation” from the Russians that Cicely Lefort was gassed in the Jugendlager at Ravensbrück? Could he arrange for interrogation of the commandant of Ravensbrück? And could he recheck the nominal rolls at Belsen for the name Yvonne Rudellat? Vera still could not believe that Yvonne could have simply disappeared, given that records showed she was alive on the day of liberation.

Fyffe considered that Vera's requests showed an ignorance of reality on the ground, and he signalled back that it would take weeks to secure an answer on Ravensbrück from the Russians, who were refusing access to their zone. Most of the internment camps were guarded by Germans, and suspects were escaping all the time. Indeed Ravensbrück s commandant, Fritz Suhren, had just escaped from a U.S.-run camp. Finding people in Germany's bombed-out cities was almost impossible as most streets were now piles of rubble. And the latest figures from Belsen showed that as many as fifteen thousand inmates had died—most of starvation or typhoid—within days of the liberation; each impossible to identify, the bodies thrown into mass graves.

Anghais Fyffe told me that he knew of Vera's reputation as a “conniving woman” well before the end of the war. Buckmaster and she ran F Section “like an ivory tower.” We were talking over mint-pea soup at Anghais s home in Cupar, Scotland. A copy of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management lay close by, as well as Anghais's war diaries, hundreds of pages of detailed daily reporting, all typed out by Anghais himself on an Imperial typewriter that had gone everywhere he went.

After the war, however, Anghais had come to like and admire Vera. He described her in exactly the way Pat Holbeton had—“cagey,” he told me, but he respected her determination to find her agents. “They were her ‘bairns,' if you like. And after all, she knew she had sent them to their deaths.”

Despite the urgency of her questions from London, Fyffe had not expected that Vera might soon be coming out to the British zone in person to get her own answers, although she had long been campaigning for the authority to take over the investigation in Germany. As by far the largest number of the missing were F Section agents, it should be an F Section staff officer who went to look for them, she insisted. Men like Fyffe, she argued, though assiduous, knew nothing of the individuals they were being asked to trace; his people had failed to uncover a single piece of new evidence. At first Vera's superiors in London rejected her request, but before long several factors shifted Whitehall opinion in her favour.

First, confirmation of further SOE deaths at Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen had dispelled lingering hopes that men and women might still just “turn up,” as Buckmaster had prophesied back in January of that year. Several of the men once thought to have been in the Russian zone were found to have been murdered at these three camps, among them Gilbert Norman, hanged at Mauthausen, and Jack Agazar-ian, hanged at Flossenbürg. “Agazarian was the last to go,” wrote Vera in a report on what she had learned about the Flossenbürg deaths. “He tapped on his wall: ‘It's my turn next. Send my love to my wife.'

Furthermore, as the Foreign Office was well aware, if any missing people were still stranded in the Russian zone, there was no time to waste
in the search for them, as relations with the Russians were worsening every day.

A further help to Vera's case was, as she put it, the new “market” for war crimes. At the end of the war prosecution of Nazi war crimes focused on the trial of men identified as the “major” Nazi war criminals—Goering, Hess, and Ribbentrop among them—which began at Nürnberg on November 20, 1945. But as the facts of the Nazis' atrocities began to sink in, public demand for wider justice could not be ignored. At Nürnberg a map was produced showing more than three hundred concentration camps and subcamps scattered across Europe.

The Allies began scouring Germany for every suspect war criminal, and by autumn 1945 the four occupying powers—Britain, the United States, France, and Russia—had become responsible for trying crimes committed in their respective zones and a Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) had been formed.

It was, however, quite another development that really began to shift official opinion in favour of Vera's search. Charles Bushell, a secondhand car dealer in Brixton, south London, had been agitating for news of his daughter, Violette Szabo. Bushell was angry that he had been told nothing about Violette's whereabouts. In June 1945, a year after her disappearance, he approached the Red Cross, only to be referred back to the War Office, which by November still had no news. Bushell then raised the matter with his MP.

To date it had been kept largely secret that British women had been deployed behind enemy lines. Most of the families of the missing had obeyed instructions and kept quiet about their missing loved ones, agreeing not to make enquiries of their own. But now Charles Bushell, for one, appeared set on making sure everyone got to know about the women's secret missions, particularly Violette's. If the matter were raised in the House of Commons, the government would be hard put to explain how the deployment of women was legally authorised, and questions would certainly be asked about whether it was morally justified. A defence would be even harder to mount if the government also stood accused of showing disregard for the fate of these women. Perhaps, some suggested, there was a use for Vera Atkins's mission after all.

Even now, however, Vera secured permission to go to Germany on no more than an exploratory trip. On this first mission, in early December 1945, she was given just four days to demonstrate that she, better than anyone else, could achieve results.

When Fyffe arrived at the Hotel am Zoo, raided the previous night by Russians looking for Red Army deserters, he found Vera waiting for him. She had spent the morning picking up souvenirs around the destroyed ministries of the Reich Chancellery, after persuading a Russian sentry to give her a guided tour. As soon as Fyffe turned up, she announced that she would like to go straightaway to Buch, a small town just north of Berlin, to look for the grave of a man named Jumeau. An F Section agent, twice dropped into France and twice captured, Clément-Marc Jumeau had caught TB in a German jail and was the only agent, as far as Vera knew, to have died in a hospital. His case should therefore be simpler than others to clear up and would help her prove she could get things done. Fyffe, however, told Vera that it would be impossible to reach Buch as it was inside the Russian zone, and it would take days, if not weeks, to get the paperwork. Without a permit, Vera would not be allowed through the checkpoints and would be treated just as another blau Ange-zogen or woman in blue. Undeterred, she said she was quite sure they could manage without the papers, and by early afternoon she and Fyffe were heading towards the Prenzlauer Allee in the Russian sector of Berlin.

They lost their way and moved cautiously, wary of robbers and looters. As they went, Fyffe briefed Vera fully on security, warning her that to stop by the roadside always meant attracting hordes of refugees, mostly children, clamouring for food and firewood. But they saw little to worry them that afternoon. Tramcars were running, children were playing in the streets, and there was hardly a Russian to be seen.

Approaching their first Russian checkpoint, Fyffe spoke first. The sentry spoke no German and Fyffe no Russian. “Franzeski?” the Russian asked, and Fyffe replied that they were British military. “Ah, Angleski,” said the sentry, looking bemused. To Fyffe s astonishment, Vera then uttered
a few words in Russian and showed her new WAAF identity card. The sentry cleared his throat, took the card, and stared at it. Then suddenly he took a step back, saluted smartly, and waved the truck on. Within another hour Vera and Fyffe had located Buch and found a hospital close to the Russian headquarters. From hospital staff they learned the most likely location of Jumeau's grave, and although it was impossible to locate the grave itself, they were given the name of an official who would send the required information on in writing the following week.

By the time Vera and Fyffe arrived back at the Hotel am Zoo, she, not surprisingly, was in excellent spirits. She had cleared up her first case and already had a success to report back home. In addition she seemed pleased by the arrival of a good-looking and engaging young man, Jer-rard Tickell, a major from the War Office's public relations department. Tickell was in Berlin to start researching a biography of Odette Sansom on which Vera was advising. Also here to greet Vera was Francis Cam-maerts, now working with the Allied Control Commission.

Fyffe observed that Vera and Cammaerts were “very close” and had the impression that Vera was seeking Cammaerts's advice on securing work herself with the Control Commission. Vera, Cammaerts, and Tickell were then driven off by Fyffe through the rubble to drink gin at the infamous black-market Royal Club—frequented by Russian, American, and British officers, as well as wealthy Berliners—before returning to the Hotel am Zoo to dine. The following day, a Sunday, Vera intended to spend with Cammaerts at the Yacht Club at Gatow, just west of Berlin. And on Monday, she informed Fyffe, her plan was to interrogate the commandants of two concentration camps. Would he please collect her early, so they could drive to Bad Oeynhausen, and make plans for the interrogations?

Fritz Suhren had been the commandant at Ravensbrück and Anton Kaindl at Sachsenhausen, and both were now in British custody, as Vera had discovered before leaving London. Suhren, who had been recaptured after his earlier escape, would, Vera very much hoped, be able to tell her what had become of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch, of
whom there was still no trace. Kaindl, she hoped, would know the fate of Francis Suttill (Prosper), last heard of at Sachsenhausen.

So on the third day of Vera's visit to Germany, Fyffe drove her to Bad Oeynhausen, where she sought out the head of the war crimes unit, Group Captain Tony Somerhough, whom she would have to win over to secure permission to interrogate Suhren and Kaindl. Although momentarily taken aback by the WAAF officer who breezed into his office unannounced, Somerhough was instantly impressed by Vera's knowledge of the concentration camps and judged her mission to be of the utmost seriousness. He cautioned only that she should not go straightaway to interrogate the men, as the camps where they were held would be hard to find and it was already dark. Vera, however, said she had no time to lose, so Somerhough sent along one of his officers, Captain Arribert Vol-mar, as a guide.