Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (34 page)

During my visit Fyffe would not let his Germany diaries out of his sight, but after lunch he offered to read extracts to me. He said he had not picked up the diaries himself for more than fifty years. Sitting beside his gas fire, he read aloud what had happened as he, Vera, and Volmar set off first to find Anton Kaindl at a British internment camp for suspect war criminals near Paderborn. “ ‘We travelled over the moors until we came to a road that I thought led to the Paderborn camp. We turned this way, and after a mile or two we saw the beams of searchlights in the air; that was the internment camp all right, but the difficulty was to find our way to it. We circled round and round, now making for the beams, now from them. It was raining now, very hard, and it was difficult to see our road.' ” Eventually the three reached the camp, “ ‘a huge place holding various types of prisoners—SS, camp guards, Nazi bad hats and other kinds of sinister Germans, and it is swept from dusk to dawn by a battery of searchlights to keep the place bathed in a cold blue light.' ”

On their arrival Vera, Volmar, and Fyffe were told that Kaindl was waiting to see them, and they were led by an adjutant down a muddy path through trees to a hut. “ ‘We walked into a small room, and finding Kaindl was already there took us back a little, for it would have been
much better if we had been sitting there waiting for him, rather than that he should have been there waiting for us. There were three chairs in the room; one was behind the desk, and Vera sat herself on that one as she was prepared to carry out the interrogation. Kaindl of all people was given a chair by this small adjutant fellow, while he himself took the third chair, leaving Volmar and myself to hang around the walls.'

“This Kaindl fellow,” continued Fyffe, smiling to himself as he recalled the commandant, “was a very small man, just five feet if that. He had a high forehead, with sandy hair that was cropped short. He had high cheekbones over which a red-veined shiny skin was drawn tight. He had a kind of ferret face, and wore glasses; his hands were well kept, and he looked a bit of a dandy. I believe that he wore top boots that had specially high heels, and a peaked cap with a high crown, so that he might give the impression of being taller than he was.”

Vera's interrogation got nowhere, read Fyffe. She learned nothing about Suttill or any of the others. “ ‘She thought she was doing nicely, as she told us afterwards, trying to show that she had nearly tricked Kaindl, but we were no further forward than we were when we started.

Reading on, Fyffe recounted how the next morning he, Vera, and Volmar made an early start to get to the other internment camp, at Reck-linghausen, where they were to interrogate Fritz Suhren, “ ‘erstwhile full colonel in the SS and ex-commandant of the notorious annihilation camp at Ravensbrück, where thousands of women died of hunger or were put to death by hanging, gassing or shooting.' ”

Once again they got lost looking for the camp and stopped to ask where the Internierungslager'was, but this reference to an internment camp brought no response from locals. Then a small boy asked if they were looking for the Konzentrationslager. Evidently, Fyffe had recorded, this internment camp had formerly been a concentration camp. “ ‘Now we got precise instructions how to reach the concentration camp.' ”

Fyffe had noted down that there were different kinds of Germans in Recklinghausen. “ ‘There were well-dressed ones who had had enough time to bring decent clothes with them; there were others who had either been seized whilst a fugitive, or had been arrested suddenly without warning and had had no time to collect anything other than the clothes
they stood in. As we drove through, every German took off his hat or cap and stood there clasping it in front of him in an attitude that was meant to portray abject humility' ”

The three English officers were shown into a room and Suhren was brought in. “ ‘He stood to attention. He was a youngish-looking man of probably forty or so, with a fairish complexion topped by reddish fair hair that was well kept. His face was round and seemed intelligent. He wore only socks, breeches, and shirt.' ”

Vera handled the interrogation better this time, wrote Fyffe, but Suhren denied any knowledge of Englishwomen in Ravensbrück. She asked him about Odette Churchill (the surname Odette Sansom had given on her arrest), “ ‘and he admitted that she was a special prisoner for whom he was held personally responsible, probably because it was thought that she was a niece of Winston Churchill, which was quite untrue.'”

Suhren continued to admit nothing, and they sent him out in order to interrogate two women guards from Ravensbrück who were also being held. The first, read Fyffe, was a middle-aged woman of “ ‘very low mentality,' ” and the second “ ‘looked half silly' ” but did reveal there were English girls in the camp and they wore red triangles on their shoulders with the letter E.

They confronted Suhren with her admissions, “ ‘but he still insisted he knew nothing of the gas chamber or the hangings or the English prisoners.' ” Fyffe said that Suhren did “start slightly” when Vera mentioned the crematorium. “But he recovered himself quickly; he gave no reaction when mention was made of the gas chamber.”

By this time it was dark, and the cell was lit by a fluorescent strip light in which Suhren looked a sickly colour. Fyffe then described how they left the interrogation room, hungry and tired, to find the car, only to discover that somebody—probably a hungry German child—had stolen their sandwiches. Vera was quite peeved but “brightened visibly” when they were offered doughnuts filled with cream in the Red Shield Club, the canteen used by “other ranks.”

Putting the diary aside for a moment, Fyffe told me how the next day he saw Vera off from Bückeburg airfield and a few days later received a
letter from her that he had kept all these years, and he produced it for me to see. In the letter Vera thanked him for all his help, saying she had been “dazed with the experiences of the last few days.” She added that she had had a rather bumpy return flight and had been sick “but discreetly so.” Fyffe chuckled as he pointed out Vera's signature: “the Blau Angezogen.”

After arriving back in London from her four-day trip, Vera lobbied to return to Germany on a long-term basis, but many obstacles remained. As anticipated, SOE was to be closed for good at the end of the year, and no government department would henceforth have any responsibility at all for SOE affairs. Officials pointed out therefore that even if Vera's mission were deemed worthwhile, there was nobody to “carry” her—in other words, to pay for her mission. And there was considerable objection still to the very principle of a woman carrying out such a task. But then the evidence of a young intelligence officer named Prince Yurka Galitzine swiftly changed minds.

Just as signals intelligence had, from the start of the war, uncovered far more about Nazi atrocities than anyone had been told, so much intelligence about war crimes gathered after D-Day was also kept secret. As Allied armies began to push through France in August 1944, SHAEF had sent specialist officers to gather “political intelligence” about the German occupation of France and in particular about war crimes. One of these officers was Yurka Galitzine, a twenty-five-year-old captain, son of a former military attaché at the Imperial Russian embassy in London and his English wife.

Appalled by much of what he found as he progressed through France, Galitzine was most horrified by the ghastly remains of the little concentration camp of Natzweiler, hidden away among the spectacular Vosges Mountains in Alsace.

Natzweiler, as Galitzine discovered, was specifically designated as a camp for prisoners who were to disappear under the Nacht und Nebel order. Galitzine immediately sent an official report on Natzweiler to SHAEF, anticipating an outcry. He expected an outraged reaction in London in particular, because his report had uncovered the death of at least
one British woman at the camp. He had few details, but he had gathered enough evidence to write that “one day three women spies were brought to the camp and shot in the sandpit. They were described as being one Englishwoman and two Frenchwomen.”

But Galitzine's report was buried. Outraged by the official silence, Galitzine, a former journalist on the Daily Express, leaked the story. By autumn 1945 word of his findings reached a charismatic young SAS intelligence officer named Major Eric “Bill” Barkworth, who had men missing after two operations in the Vosges in September 1944. Armed with Galitzine's report, Barkworth immediately set off for Germany with a team of investigators. He promised to signal any findings to Galitzine's office in Eaton Square, London, where, under the eaves, Galitzine had installed signallers, including a man named Freddie Oakes, to receive Barkworth's reports.

In a letter to Vera in 1985, Oakes said he had never been able to forget taking those signals. He had kept a diary, which his son, William Oakes, showed me:

We established ourselves in an attic room and ran an aerial between some chimneys. The traffic we handled was quite traumatic. In one incident eight members of the SAS regiment, who had been held and interrogated for several months, were manacled and driven in a lorry into a large wood. Here a hole had been scraped—not more than a couple of feet deep. One at a time they were unchained, stripped, taken to the edge of the hole, and shot in the back of the head. After the first one had been shot, subsequent victims could see the bodies of their friends for a moment before they too were shot. The German driver of the lorry stated that none of the men showed any fear, and none trembled even though it was a cold day in October. None spoke except the last man—a signaller I knew—who told the SS squad they were “bastards” and would be hounded down for what they were doing.

Oakes also recalled receiving the signal about the women who died at Natzweiler. “Evidence showed,” he wrote, “that one of the women woke up as she was about to be put in the oven and scratched the face of the camp doctor who was carrying out the murders.”

One day in early December 1945 Vera paid a visit to Yurka Galitzine. She found a striking figure, at least six feet four inches tall, with dark good looks and impeccable English public school manners. Galitzine was surprised to discover a WAAF officer knocking at his door. She did not say how she had heard about him, but he thought she might have seen a story about his report on Natzweiler in the Daily Express. She asked directly about the report. “I believe you have evidence of the death of young women at Natzweiler?” Galitzine could help her little with identities except to say he had heard the women might have been brought to Natzweiler from Karlsruhe.