Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (36 page)

Diana was the most English-looking of all the agents. Vera's photographs of her showed her pleasant, toothy smile, blue eyes, and bobbed light-brown hair, set off against the khaki of her FANY uniform. And had there been any doubt at all as to whether this was Diana, here was the bow. She always wore a bow in her hair.

As recently as Christmas Vera had written to Mrs. Rowden at her home at Alton, in Hampshire, telling her the news that Diana had last been seen alive in the prison in Karlsruhe and still holding out hope of finding her alive. But here was this drawing showing Diana striding directly to her death, more than eighteen months ago.

Then came Stonehouse s sketch of No. 2. When Vera first turned to this second drawing, she was expecting to recognise this girl also. But she was taken aback; she did not know who it was.

She looked for the description. “As for No. 2,” wrote Stonehouse, “the sketch describes her. She was I believe perhaps a little younger than No. 1—smaller—with dyed blonde hair… only it had not been retouched for a long time as there were several inches of hair from the roots of the hair line which were dark.” His description went on: “She wore wooden soled shoes, a black coat, carried a fur coat of not very good fur— some sort of dyed rabbit—rather chocolat au lait.” Looking again at the
sketch, Vera could see that the roots of the girl's dyed-blonde hair had indeed been sketched in. Perhaps it was somebody she knew, she thought, but with dyed hair, so that she was hard to recognise.

Like No. 1, the second girl was smartly dressed. In the drawing it looked as if her dress were striped. She had a coat slung over her right arm and a bag in her left. She was more stylish than No. 1. In fact she was “quite different,” Stonehouse wrote. “No. 2 was obviously continental— maybe Jewish.”

Vera had hoped for more sketches. There were none. As for No. 3, Stonehouse said, he could remember too little to draw her. She was “nondescript” with very black hair—a brown tweed suit and shortish. But she had made so little impression that he had retained no more detail and confessed to Vera: “I can't remember anything else about her.” The visions he had summoned up nine months after he first came home had suddenly faded.

Next Stonehouse addressed himself to the photographs Vera had sent him of the missing women, and he marked the photograph of Diana Rowden as the match for No. 1. As for No. 2, he could not be sure. He, like Vera, must have seen that she did not obviously match any of Vera's “corpses,” so he marked two as possibles: Yolande Beekman and Nora In-ayat Khan. At first he seemed confident of being able to identify No. 2 as Yolande. “Her hairstyle and type of face correspond exactly with No. 2 photo.” But then he seemed to hesitate as if something were not Yolande, after all, and added: “The silhouette anyway.”

He made no comment about why he had seen a similarity between the sketch of No. 2 and the photograph of Nora, and Vera could see none. And yet the written description he gave could have been of Nora. It was quite possible that she had dyed her hair and that her clothes had been part of a deliberate disguise, purchased in Paris while she was on the run. She had an eastern, possibly Jewish, look. And who could say what months in captivity might have done to her appearance? Furthermore, Diana's story had been to an extent entwined with Nora's. They had left for France together. They had been imprisoned together at Avenue Foch. Their names had been carved alongside each other on the wall in the cell. Perhaps, at the very end, fate had thrown the two young women together.

Stonehouse's letter was invaluable to Vera's investigation. When this was taken with Franz Berg's deposition, it now seemed likely that at least two of her girls were among those who had died at Natzweiler. Berg had confidently identified Vera Leigh, and Stonehouse had clearly identified Diana Rowden. However, there was no certainty about who the other girls were, or even if in total there were three or perhaps four. Vera's only hope was to gather more evidence in Karlsruhe, at the prison in which the women were first held. In particular she hoped to find the chief wardress, whom Odette had named as Fräulein Beger, a Quaker and most “correct.”

The car was now making good time towards Karlsruhe. The snow had eased, and on the road there were just a few horses and carts and the odd military vehicle. The roads here were also clear of refugees, as few had come as far west as Baden-Baden. Tented camps near Karlsruhe were mostly filled with the city's homeless. Passing through pine forests, Corporal Trenter pulled up beside a large Schloss on top of a hill to look over the city. Heaps of reddish masonry dusted with snow stretched to the horizon. Down below, filth lay all around in oily pools. Trenter was worried about how they were to reach the city centre.

Vera's instructions from U.S. liaison were to check in, on arriving in Karlsruhe, with the representative of OMGUS (Office of the Military Government of the United States for Germany), which was quartered in the main post office in the city's central square. Trying to follow the line of what had once been a railway, Trenter eventually steered the car into the square. On one side not a single building was standing, and figures clambering on heaps of stone and metal girders passed stones to one another. They were mostly women and old men trying to clear the rubble. The air stank of sewage spilling from holes that had once been drains. On the other side of the square buildings were intact, including the main post office, where Vera found the American town major, who was the local military governor, and his public safety officer, Captain Truxhall. She wanted to find Fräulein Beger of the city's women's prison, she told them, but Truxhall was not hopeful. The prison was empty now,
he said. Any public building left standing had been gutted by the French before the Americans arrived.

A complete list of Karlsruhe residents had survived from prewar police files, but the chances of finding anyone was remote: seventy percent of the city had been bombed. Some people had stayed put, living in basements or tents near their homes, waiting for their men to return from the front. But many had left, some going into the country to find food. People were afraid to talk.

Truxhall showed Vera his rogues' gallery of Nazi war criminals, circulated in each city and updated daily. Vera noted certain names, for example of men who had joined the local Werwolfgruppe, one of the gangs of Gestapo diehards who vowed to fight on and “come back from the dead.” Truxhall said his staff had little time for catching war criminals; they were swamped by denazification work and were dealing with 200,000 forms, filled in by every adult in Karlsruhe, answering questions about their Nazi past. Vera then scanned Truxhall's residents lists. She found no Beger, but a Fräulein Theresia Becker lived at Eisenlohrstrasse 10. After noting other useful addresses Vera left to see if Becker was a prison wardress.

Most streets on the way there were flattened, or if houses had been left standing, they were often just burned-out shells. But Trenter and Vera found Eisenlohrstrasse largely intact. A woman came to the door of number 10. Fräulein Becker was not in; she was at the women's prison. She had never left her post. Fräulein Becker was an excellent wardress, said the woman. She was “very humane and very fair.”

The Frauengefängnis, the women's prison, at Akademiestrasse 11, was almost empty in January 1946. It had been hit in the bombing, and most of the windows were boarded up. Arriving at a large double door that opened directly onto the street, Vera reached for a huge bell rope and pulled at it. There was no sound, but it must have rung somewhere inside the building, because in a few moments a woman appeared. Fräulein Theresia Becker, the chief wardress, was tall and thin, aged about fifty, with a sparrow's face, and she wore a light-blue overall faded with washing. Observing Vera's uniform, she ushered her indoors.

She showed Vera into a small room, and they sat. Another woman now
came in, who was as round as Theresia Becker was thin. The second woman, whom Fräulein Becker introduced as her deputy, Fräulein Hager, greeted Vera with a broad smile. Vera explained she was looking for missing women who had been held in the prison in 1944. Fräulein Becker nodded and gave Vera a short speech, saying she had worked at the women's prison for twenty-eight years and had been chief wardress for the past eight. She explained a little of the workings of the prison, which during the war had been divided into two: the main part here in Akademiestrasse and a second part, for female political prisoners, in a wing of Gefängnis 11, the men's jail in Riefstahlstrasse. It was in Riefstahlstrasse that the British and French women had been held. In May 1944, when they arrived, the main women's prison was very overcrowded, as many prisoners had been transferred there from France, ahead of the German retreat.

Vera now asked Fräulein Becker if she could identify the women, showing her photographs of all those who Odette Sansom had said were on the train to Karlsruhe, and including one of Nora Inayat Khan. Becker looked at the pictures and said that they had all been in the prison. Was she quite sure that she recognised the photo of Nora? “Quite sure,” answered the wardress. Then Vera asked if she remembered the women's names. She recalled only one: Martine. This was an alias used by Madeleine Damerment.

When Vera asked Becker to describe the girls, she said she could not recall them in any detail, although one, perhaps the one they called Mar-tine, had a red pullover. “What else do you remember about them?” Vera asked. “About how they looked?” Becker said she could remember very little else, except that one—again she thought it was Martine—had arrived carrying a New Testament.

“And their admission to the prison was, of course, most irregular,” added the wardress, who now explained that the women had been admitted under the “protective custody” order, which applied to political prisoners and spies. “I had no authority to take such prisoners into a civilian jail. It was highly unusual. It was against the rules,” she said. She had protested to her seniors, and it was agreed that she should only have to keep the women for a maximum of two weeks. It meant a lot of extra work keeping such prisoners, said Becker, as they had to be exercised
separately and the prison was short-staffed. Protective custody prisoners could not associate with one another and therefore could not be taken to the basement during air raids.

After two weeks the women were still there, Becker said, so she called the prison governor to ask what was to be done. The governor said he would speak to other authorities, but still nothing happened. Becker called again a few weeks later. “It was as if they had been forgotten,” she said. But eventually somebody took notice of her protests and came to take the women away.

“When were they taken?” asked Vera.

“Mrs. Churchill left alone in July 1944, and the rest left soon after,” said Becker, suddenly remembering Odette's name. When Vera pressed her further, she said she was sure all the other women, apart from Mrs. Churchill, had left together in one group, sometime in August. But she had no other memory at all of the circumstances of the women's departure. However, Vera might like to talk to a man named Stuhl, the gatekeeper. Vera asked to see the prison records, but Becker said they had all been destroyed by the French. When Vera expressed surprise that the French had destroyed prison records, Becker insisted this was what had happened. They had made a fire.

Fräulein Becker had not told the whole truth, of that Vera was quite sure, although she was certainly “very correct,” just as Odette had said. Becker was a bureaucrat who always obeyed the rules. And it was evident to Vera that, had Becker not been such a stickler for the rules, her agents might have stayed here safely in the wardress's custody—entirely forgotten until the end of the war. It was only because, according to the rules, Becker was not supposed to hold prisoners of their category that she had protested and asked to be relieved of them.

“I interrogated staff at the women's jail at Akademiestrasse,” noted Vera in her report on the meeting. “While they are all very anxious to be helpful, their information cannot be relied upon.”

I had not expected to find many traces of Vera's investigation in Karlsruhe. There is no prison in Akademiestrasse today, and I was told there
never had been. When I asked ordinary people about the period, they all looked blank and said: “Go to the archives.” In Karlsruhe's main archives I found some files on OMGUS, given to the city by the United States in the 1980s. The files were indexed in such a complex way that it was almost impossible to look at anything in sequence.

Karlsruhe's prewar police files were here too, so I looked up Hans Kieffer, the counterintelligence chief in Paris, who, I had read, came from Karlsruhe. His file stated: “Hans Josef Kieffer, born in 1901 in Offen-burg [south of Karlsruhe].” But it was just a record of his police pay until he left Karlsruhe for Paris, along with notes of the remuneration he received to keep his children in college here while he was away. The note gave their names, Hans, Gretel, and Hildegard, and dates of birth.

Then as I walked past the main post office, I spotted Zum Goldenen Kreuz, the bar Vera had identified in one of her 1946 interrogation reports as a haunt of the Karlsruhe Werwolfgruppe.