Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (37 page)

After interrogating Fräulein Becker, Vera headed for Baden-Baden, the nearby headquarters of the French zone, where she had secured a billet during her stay. The French war crimes team were based in the city's luxury Badischer Hof hotel, as were British liaison officers, whose job was to ensure communications between the different zones, but off-duty they were having the time of their lives. The French had made available all manner of entertainment for military and civilians seconded here, including a casino, horse shows, and even hunting in the surrounding countryside. Vera found much in common with a bullish Grenadier guardsman based in Baden-Baden named Peter Davies, who after the war ran a nightclub in Park Lane. And she developed a close friendship with a Haystack investigator, also based in Baden-Baden, named Charles Kaiser, a colourful Austrian never seen without his vast Great Dane, Lord. Parachuted into Austria by SOE just before the end of the war, when he found that his father had been deported to Auschwitz, Kaiser was much acclaimed for his success in getting suspects to talk, which some put down to the fact that Lord accompanied him to interrogations.

On this visit Vera also made the acquaintance of General Furby, head
of the French war crimes group. A fervent Anglophile, who spoke English with a cockney accent, Furby took a shine to Vera, and she dined at his table at the Badischer Hof for the duration of her stay.

Back in Karlsruhe over the following days, Vera saw a number of further witnesses. The most useful to her was a young German woman, Hedwig Müller, who had been held in the women's prison. Vera had found the woman's name by pure chance in a letter Hedwig had sent nine months previously to a Catholic convent in Hertfordshire and addressed to “Madame Martine Dussantry, c/o Réverende Mère Superior, French Convent, Verulem Road, Hitchin, Herts, England.”

Chère Madame, I was given this address by your daughter Martine (she never told me her real name). I knew Martine in June 1944 in the prison at Karlsruhe. The Gestapo kept me there for three months for political reasons. Martine and I shared a cell. I learnt to love her as she deserved. I once said to Martine: “I cannot understand how you can be a spy.” Her reply was: “I love my country. I would do anything for England. I am an officer.” I came out of prison on 6 September 1944. From 15 June until 6 September 1944 when I was in prison I saw eight English women, among whom were Mrs Audette or Odette Churchill and one Eliane… Every now and then some of these English women were taken away… we didn't know where to.

The letter, dated June 1945, had been intercepted by Britain's Postal Censorship and after many months had found its way into Vera's hands. She saw at once that it concerned Madeleine Damerment, whose alias, misspelled by the letter writer, was Martine Dussautoy. Vera hoped Fräulein Müller might know more about her girls, when they left the jail, and where they went.

The small woman wearing spectacles who answered the door of Im Grun 28 appeared nervous when she first saw Vera standing on her
doorstep. Hedwig Müller, aged twenty-nine, a nurse, had been arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944 for loose talk to her boyfriend about the Führer. As soon as she saw the letter Vera was holding in her hand, however, she offered to help. She had loved Martine “as a sister,” she said, repeating this many times.

“When were you arrested?” Vera asked her, in order to pinpoint the exact chronology of her imprisonment.

“It was on a Pentecost Saturday evening,” said Müller, because she recalled going for a walk with her boyfriend, a Frenchman, who had been brought to Germany as a labourer. “My boyfriend, Henri, said that the Germans would never beat England and America. ‘They are too powerful and strong. Hitler is pursuing murder on Germany and the rest of the world,' he said. I said I feared this was so, then I told him a loud joke to show him what the German people thought about the Führer. We didn't notice that a woman passerby had called a policeman. A few days later I was imprisoned by the Gestapo. The charge was that I had made a joke to a foreigner.”

Vera and Müller then established that in 1944 Pentecost had fallen on June 4. From the other information Vera now had, she knew that all her girls were still in the prison in Karlsruhe on June 4. This meant that Müller might have encountered all of them.

“Which was your cell?” Vera asked.

“It was cell number seventeen.”

“Who was in the next cell?”

“There was another Englishwoman, Eliane, in cell number sixteen.” Müller added that she never saw Eliane. The political prisoners were not allowed to mix. She just knew she was there, because Martine had told her. Eliane and Martine spoke to each other through the walls, tapping with plates or spoons in Morse code. Eliane was obviously Eliane Plew-man, another of the women on the Karlsruhe transport.

There was a woman called Lisa Graf in cell eighteen, said Müller. This was not a name that Vera knew. Lisa Graf was another political prisoner, a Frenchwoman from Strasbourg, said Müller. Graf had tried to help American spies escape and was a very clever woman, very beautiful
and very strong. And in cell twenty-five was another “political”: Elise Johe, a German from Karlsruhe, who was imprisoned because she was a Jehovah's Witness.

“What of the other Englishwomen?” asked Vera. Müller said she had heard there had been others—she thought seven in total at one time— but she could not name any more, except Odette Churchill. Odette had left alone. The rest left in two different groups. One group left in July, soon after she herself arrived, and the second in September.

Müller's recollection that after Odette's departure the other women left in two separate groups contradicted what the chief wardress had said. Fräulein Becker insisted that the remaining seven girls left in one group. Müller's evidence fitted, though, with Brian Stonehouse's recollection that three women only arrived at Natzweiler sometime in July.

It was now imperative that Vera learn which three women left Karlsruhe in the first group, in July. They must have been Stonehouse's Nos. 1, 2, and 3, whom he had seen walking to the Natzweiler crematorium.

In the first group, said Müller, there had been a girl called Diana. She had only heard the name. And there was another, “a dark southerner,” who had left in the first group, and there was also an older woman. The older woman was more stocky in appearance, she thought, and now she recalled that she was named Simone. Vera Leigh's alias was Simone, so Müller was probably talking of her. Berg, the crematorium stoker, had identified Vera Leigh at Natzweiler from a photograph.

After this first interrogation of Hedwig Müller, Vera felt close to identifying No. 1 and No. 3 of the Natzweiler dead. No. 2, however— Müller's “dark southerner”—remained a mystery. And then Müller suddenly complicated the picture by saying there might have been a fourth. But she could not identify the fourth in any way at all.

Vera now tried to solve the problem in a different way. She asked Müller which of the seven women stayed behind after July. Müller said she herself had left the prison by the time the second group departed, in September. But she knew from a friend, another political prisoner, Fräulein Else Sauer, who stayed on longer, that Martine and Eliane had left in the second group for sure. And then suddenly she remembered another girl whom she had known in the prison named Yvonne. Yvonne
did not leave her cell much because she suffered badly with her legs, Müller said. But she did see Yvonne from time to time and remembered that she was blonde. Yolande Beekman's alias was Yvonne.

“Was her hair dyed blonde or naturally blonde?” came Vera's question. Stonehouse had said that No. 2 at Natzweiler had dyed blonde hair. From photographs Yolande had been identified by Stonehouse—along with Nora—as one of the two possible matches for No. 2. Perhaps Müller was now going to confirm that No. 2 was therefore Yolande and not Nora, after all. “It was dyed blonde,” she said with certainty. But then she added that she didn't think Yvonne left in the first group. Was she sure? Vera insisted. Hedwig was not sure. She would check with her friend Else Sauer.

By the time Vera wrote up her notes on her interrogation of Hedwig Müller, she had gathered a few more details from the young nurse and, as a result, had formed the firm view that Yolande (Yvonne) had indeed stayed behind in the jail until September and therefore she could not have been No. 2 in Stonehouse s drawings. By a process of elimination, Müller's evidence had, in Vera's opinion, added strength to the case for saying Nora must indeed have been No. 2.

But the story was still confused, and by the time Vera wrote to Lisa Graf, the French political prisoner in cell eighteen, she was once again seeking confirmation of No. 2's identity.

And now she was also considering the identity of a fourth girl who might have gone to Natzweiler. She asked Lisa Graf: “Have you heard the name Andrée—or Denise—Borrel?” She stressed: “The smallest details would be of interest to me and could prove vital, for example descriptions of clothes, of hair, and approximate dates of various little events that might have taken place.”

Before Vera left Karlsruhe, she tried to find one more witness. Hedwig Müller had given her the name and address of Elise Johe, the Jehovah's Witness, who had shared a cell with Yolande Beekman. But when Vera and Corporal Trenter found the house, it had been destroyed by a bomb.

“My mother talked a lot about Yolande when she came out of jail,” Erich Johe, Elise's son, told me. “There were four in the cell, which was made for one. My mother was the eldest. There was a German woman named Anie Hagen, who was jailed for selling food on the black market. And Clara Frank, who had slaughtered a cow on the family farm. And Yolande told the others that she was with an English circuit in France. She was transmitting by wireless from a farmhouse when the Germans found her. My mother loved Yolande. She was very young, and my mother took pity on her. Yolande was very scared, especially during the bombing when they could not go to the shelters. She said Yolande cried a lot all the time. My mother used to ask: “Are they going to execute me?” She thought they probably were because she knew about many Jehovah's Witnesses who were executed. She tried to comfort Yolande but I think she knew Yolande would probably die.”

As we spoke in Erich's flat, his wife served tea and raspberry cakes with dollops of whipped cream. “They got very little food in prison and were always hungry,” he told me. “They made jokes about what they would like to eat if they were back at home. My mother said Yolande loved to embroider and to draw. She lay on her bed embroidering for the chief wardress, and sometimes she would take a needle out and prick a finger until blood came out, and then she used the blood to draw little sketches on the toilet paper—because she had no pencils and no paper.

“Once she drew a picture of the cell. It showed all four of them, and another showed a plate of food. They were all imagining something nice to eat, and words described what they were thinking of. She gave the pictures to my mother on the day my mother left the prison.”

I asked what happened to the pictures, and Erich said he had them right there. He reached up to the table from where he was sitting and passed two flimsy pieces of paper to me.

On one paper was what appeared to be a sketch in brown ink, which was obviously the blood. At first it was hard to make out what it showed, but then I saw the outline of the cell with the window high up the wall and an iron bed underneath it. On a bed a girl was lying and there was a name: Yolande. Three more figures were sketched in, and in the middle
of the cell was what looked like a plate piled high with grapes, joints of meat, and bread. The names of the prisoners were written here, also in Yolande s blood: Clara, Elise, Anie, and Yolande.

I said I was surprised I had not found any statements from Elise in Vera's papers. Did Erich know if his mother had been interviewed by Vera about Yolande? He didn't know, but as soon as his mother had been released in September 1944, the family house was hit by a bomb and they had to move away. His mother always talked of Yolande and never learned what became of her, though she tried to find out.

After we had finished talking, Erich said he wanted to show me where his mother had been imprisoned. He walked me to Rief-stahlstrasse, and I realised I had earlier been looking for the wrong prison entirely. This was a massive jail constructed in granite around a central courtyard. I rang at the gate, and eventually a youngish man came to the door. He was friendly enough but said I was in the wrong place. There had never been women in the jail. This was a high-security jail and had recently held a number of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.

I pulled out some old prison records with the words “Gefängnis 11” written on them. The records were copies of the original prison records and gave the list of names of prisoners admitted to Prison No. 11 in May 1944 and the dates when they left. “Well, yes,” he said, “we are Gefängnis 11.” Now he remembered there had once been a women's wing, a long time ago. I also showed him a deposition, made by Ida Hager, the deputy chief wardress, giving a detailed description of the prison in 1944. He said not much had changed. Would I like to look around? He was called Heinrich Graf.