Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (38 page)

We mounted stone steps to the right of the gatehouse to reach a first-floor corridor. The women's wing, said my guide, had been on the east side of the courtyard, but to reach it we had to walk anticlockwise around the three sides of the rectangle, past all the first-floor male cells. This had always been the case, he said, and the women would have walked this way in the past. I mentioned points of interest from the 1946 deposition. The cells with their tiny portals were still here; they closed with little shutters and had tiny shelves for putting a cup on. And the floors were
original, my guide said, as his feet clicked on the brown and black tiles. The prison was full of echoes—banging doors, shouting male voices, keys clanging. There was a smell of disinfectant and stale food.

When we had walked the full three sides, Ida Hager's description said we would arrive at a big white gate outside cell twenty-six. And here it was. Herr Graf now showed me a room that was still used as a warders' office, and then we peered into cell twenty-five. The door was so low we had to stoop.

The cell was exactly as Yolande had drawn it, with a tiny meshed window very high up under a sloping buttress so that all you could see without climbing up was the sky. I showed Herr Graf the picture, and he was intrigued and asked if he could have a copy for the files.

We walked back to Herr Graf's office, and he laid Yolande Beekman's drawing of cell twenty-five on the desk. Would I mind if he scanned it into the prison computer? The drawing was private, and I was reluctant. But within moments the paper was being sucked into the scanner, which almost instantly began to read the picture of the four women. Herr Graf and all his office staff were leaning forward, staring at the machine as the images began to appear. “Super,” said Herr Graf, delighted with the results. The picture drawn in blood by Yolande in her cell across the courtyard had now been reproduced on the Karlsruhe prison computer screen.

16.
Into the Wilderness

K
nown affectionately as “the Gruppenführer” to his war crimes staff at the British HQ at Bad Oeynhausen, Tony Somerhough, a barrister by training, was a big, jolly man with a razor-sharp intellect and a cynical wit. Formerly Deputy Judge Advocate General, RAF, in the Middle East, he was also something of a father figure to his team in Germany and thought nothing of getting up in the small hours to cook an omelette for a hungry investigator back late from an interrogation.

After an exhausting time in Karlsruhe, Vera was content to be back at Bad Oeynhausen in the company of Somerhough and other new colleagues. In March 1946 time was already running out for her mission, and she still had much to do. She was pressing the Russians for information on the Ravitsch prisoners, who she now believed had been marched to Dresden. In addition she was busy interrogating new suspects, picked up by the Haystack men and held at a small British prison in the woods near Minden called Tomato, an anagram combining two investigators' names. Anton Kaindl, the commandant of Sachsenhausen, had been transferred to Tomato by February 1946, but he was still claiming to have no knowledge of any British prisoners. Investigations into the fate of Francis Suttill, last heard of at Sachsenhausen, therefore remained stalled.

A handful of Somerhough's men, among them Gerald Draper, a
qualified solicitor who was later to become a leading human rights jurist, had become hardened to war crimes by 1946, having already prosecuted the Belsen case. But most of the team were under twenty-five, had little knowledge of law, and probably had been seconded to war crimes work for no other reason than that they spoke a little German (although several did not) and were kicking their heels waiting to be demobbed. By contrast, Vera's maturity and aptitude for war crimes work deeply impressed Somerhough. Her task, he said, writing after the war, involved “negotiating with numerous different ministries of justice and police, military headquarters and governments” and called for “the highest qualities of tact, patient research, recording and cross referencing.” She was able to “evolve her own systems as she proceeded,” her judgements were “unbiased and detached,” and she “never flapped.” Somerhough also observed that Vera “could deal sympathetically with the most peculiar people, and was at her best with foreigners who happened to be a little odd.” Vera's young colleagues also observed in her an unusually steady nerve, and it wasn't long before she had won them over. At work they found her a calming influence. In the mess they discovered she was also excellent company. Not matronly, as she had seemed to begin with, Vera liked nothing more than to carouse until the small hours and even enjoyed playing the black market when the opportunity arose. She won over many of the women staff too, particularly a lively young Norwegian secretary named Sara Jensen, who quickly became a fast friend. One colleague wrote of Vera:

Sitting in her office just above waist deep in files
Midst Arribert and Stephen is our Vera, wreathed in smiles.
In office hours she doesn't look as if she liked a frolic,
But just sit next to her when she's a little alcoholic.

On her return from Karlsruhe Vera also spent much time answering correspondence. Norman Mott, who was supervising affairs for her in London, wrote regularly with comments on her “peregrinations,” and she kept him up to date on her progress “tracing our chaps,” complaining that “one spends much time chasing around the countryside” and often
asking him for news of “the old firm,” particularly with regard to honours and awards. Whatever bad news might be uncovered in Germany, Vera was keen that SOE's successes should be the main news back home.

Many letters came from next of kin. In March, Christian Rowden wrote to say she had not given up hope and was starting her own search. “I should like to know what name Diana was going under as that may help my search for her. A friend of a cousin of mine, who went out with Mrs. Churchill to Russia, wanted to get information from Russia for me from either Stalin or Molotov, who she knew personally!”

Madeleine Damerment's mother had also written and thanked Vera for a photograph of her daughter. “It was with great pain that I found the face of my beloved Madeleine in these photographs you sent me. I don't believe any more in the return of my daughter Madeleine. Perhaps you know some details of the situation of Madeleine in England? In what condition did she come to France, and where was she? In fact I want to know so very many things—and I don't know who to ask.”

There was also a letter from a FANY officer in London filling Vera in on the latest salvos from Violette Szabo's father, Charles Bushell, which had appeared in the Sunday newspapers. Mr. Bushell was now telling the papers that he “needed funds” to provide for Violette's baby, but Vera was told the baby, who was in the care of Violette's chosen guardian, had been visited and was “perfectly happy.” Vera was sent a newspaper cutting. “Wondering she gazes at a picture of her missing mother,” said a picture caption below a photograph of Tania, now aged three.

Since interrogating Fritz Suhren, commandant of Ravensbrück, in December 1945, Vera had heard nothing definitive about the fate of Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, or Denise Bloch, although in her hunt for them she had filled her files with descriptions of every imaginable atrocity.

She had even hunted down a Polish survivor named Danuta Kowal-ewska, who, she had heard, had kept notes while in the camp. Kowalew-ska provided a wealth of new details about as-yet-unidentified prisoners, and Vera scanned this material for anything new, even spotting a reference to a “British major” in the small male subcamp of Ravensbrück,
identified oddly as “Frank of Upway 282.” The “major” turned out to be Frank Chamier, one of Vera's “special cases,” who used the telephone number at his home near Weymouth as a kind of alias. Shortly before Vera had left for Germany, MI6 had suddenly decided she could search for their “bodies” too; among them was Chamier, the first British secret agent to be parachuted into Germany, where he went missing, presumed captured.

While she was alerting colleagues to the Chamier lead, Vera's own attention still focused on her girls. What had happened to Violette, Denise, and Lilian after they returned to the main camp at Ravensbrück from a work commando in January 1945? Several witnesses had seen the three women when they returned from the commando. One said of Violette, “She always had such strength and never complained,” although Lilian was desperately ill. Others had passed on stories about what happened next. One former prisoner said that on January 25, 1945, all U.S. and British prisoners had been summoned by Suhren, and it was thought they were going to be repatriated, but instead they were “all hanged.” Another woman said she too had heard that the three were hanged. But Vera rejected these stories out of hand as “too vague.” Other reports suggested Violette was seen alive in the camp as late as March. Nor had Vera forgotten the words of the Ravensbrück escapee Eileen Nearne, who said that two English girls were also rumoured to have escaped.

Moreover, many prisoners had suffered memory loss and extreme psychological damage, and in the chaos of the liberation some had been mistakenly repatriated to the wrong country or had been so incapacitated they were unable to identify themselves to the authorities. Vera had even heard tantalising stories of a woman answering Violette's description being seen among repatriated women in France. So far she had failed to verify the story but had certainly not given up hope, even at this late stage, of finding one or other of the Ravensbrück girls alive.

When arrests of Ravensbrück camp staff began, more information flowed in that Vera hoped would reveal what really happened; but it only added to her confusion. There appeared to have been in the camp two Szabos and three Blochs. In desperation, Vera sent out a ten-point “questionnaire” to all survivors she could trace in various countries, including
survivors of the men's subcamp at Ravensbrück, asking them to recall details of any executions.

The replies inundated Vera with more and more horrific stories: French priests were made to hang a fellow prisoner, wrote one survivor; other concentration camp inmates were forced to “eat their dysentery;” and sick women were cremated alive. But none of this information was of any use.

“And you might be interviewing somebody and they may be telling you about a grotesque crime, but you are thinking I have heard this before, and what I want is for this woman to tell me something I have not heard,” said John da Cunha, one of Somerhough's war crimes staff. Now a retired circuit court judge, da Cunha was just twenty-three when he was seconded to Bad Oeynhausen.

Sitting in the kitchen of his Somerset house, he had spread out his old war crimes papers on the table. He told me he was nearly physically sick when he opened his first Ravensbrück file. He had never spoken of his war crimes work to his family.

Clipped to the papers with rusty pins, photographs fell out showing women in skirts and jackets with their hair pinned up, hanging limp from a crude wooden gallows. “I don't want to shock you,” he said. I asked if Vera ever seemed shocked at Bad Oeynhausen. “No,” he said. “Vera was always composed.”

I looked through Vera's own accounts, written later in life, for a sense of what she felt behind that composed facade. I was disappointed; her attention seemed focused only on the procedure of a particular crime, rather than on the human beings involved.

Occasionally, however, Vera's writing caused an unexpectedly violent shock. It was precisely her attention to technical detail, her concentration on how something had happened, that sometimes made her—accidentally almost—draw the reader face to face with the horror of the situation. On one occasion Vera assisted at the interrogation of a man named Gustav Moll, who was in charge of the gassing operation at Auschwitz. The interrogation came during preparation of a British case against the
German industrialist Bruno Tesch, who made a “killing solid” in the form of a solidified poisonous gas for the gas chambers. Recalling the occasion many years later, Vera wrote:

The gas chambers were built of cement with long pipes, rather like those in a wash house, running along the low ceiling. In these pipes were sprinklers, not unlike those in a harmless watering can. The tins of crystallised gas supplied by Tesch were rammed into the apertures in the roof where they fitted exactly. A plunger then punctured them so that the gas was released. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the warmth and heat of the packed human beings below gasified the killing solid.

I had to read the sentence twice to understand that the packed human beings were mentioned in this sentence only in a passive sense—in order to explain the process of killing. “The procedure took just over twenty minutes and after a safe interval the doors could be opened and the bodies removed to the crematorium.”

At other times Vera recounted her war crimes work in a tone designed to convey the ordinariness of it all, even when the circumstances had been as extraordinary as the interrogation of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. In an interview she gave in 1986 for the Imperial War Museum's sound archives, Vera told the dramatic tale of how one day Höss was arrested by Gerald Draper after a tipoff was given to a Haystack investigator that he was working on a farm. Precise details of Höss's arrest and interrogation are much disputed, but according to the story Vera told, he was picked up overnight on the pretence that he was suspected of stealing a bicycle, and taken to the British prison Tomato.