Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (52 page)

I read the paragraph again: “Yolande was lying on a bed of iron, flat on her stomach and crying and writing painfully with a bleeding finger.” I looked up to where Diana was sitting, still shuffling through papers, and I tried to say how extraordinary it was that their mother had dreamed about Yolande, lying on an iron bed, writing in blood at exactly the time that Yolande was writing in blood on her iron bed in her prison cell. The pictures that I had found by chance in an elderly man's home in Germany, only two weeks earlier, were now lying on the table next to me. But when I tried to speak to Diana, I found for a moment I couldn't. She turned and saw me and came over straight away and took the diary and read it herself and said: “Yes, my dear, I know it is so terrible, it is, I know, my dear. You see, I am so glad you see how terrible it all is.”

And then for the first time Diana looked at Yolande's drawings. “But it is not possible my mother could have known that she was writing in blood at this time. It is not possible she could have known,” she said over and over again.

We carried on reading the rest of the diary, which described more dreams. In September, the month that Yolande died, her mother wrote: “I dreamed that Yolande was in a camp and policemen were looking at her with their hands in their pockets, and she was sitting down and started putting on her stockings, and she told me: ‘Do not take revenge. I will avenge myself

And there was a description of another dream: “Yolande is on a bed. She is very thin. She is crying and screaming. I am holding her very, very tight.”

On another page she wrote: “The one who reads this do not laugh at
me. I observe my dreams and I try to see what it means. Anyway I am very happy when I dream about my daughter each time I see she is happy.”

As soon as Vera had finished reading the statement of Christian Ott, she intensified her hunt for Max Wassmer. She soon located him in an internment camp, and under interrogation, he confirmed most of Ott's story. Vera then wrote a report to Norman Mott saying the case had been “cleared up” and attaching, as always, draft letters to next of kin. The first paragraph of the letters was the same for all three girls, with blanks for names left for the London official to fill in.

It is with deepest regret that I have to inform you that your ——— was killed in the early hours of 13 September 1944 in the Camp of Dachau. According to what is believed to be a reliable report she was shot through the back of the head and death was immediate. The body was cremated in the Camp Crematorium.

The second paragraph of Vera's draft continued: “As we have already informed you ———was captured on or about ———at———after many months of success and very gallant work. On one of the letters Vera noted in brackets: “This passage will have to be modified in the case of Madeleine Damerment who unhappily was captured on landing.” Vera then devised a form of words to disguise the fact that Madeleine had been dropped by F Section directly into German hands. Instead of saying Madeleine was captured “after many months of success and very gallant work,” the Damerment letter should say she was captured “when she had volunteered to return to France on a special mission in the company of two British officers.”

Then this letter would continue the same way as the others, concluding with the consolation that “until the end they were cheerful and of good faith.”

20.
Dr. Goetz

I
n early October 1946 Vera returned from Germany and was on the road to Colchester, in Essex. The bulk of her war crimes work concluded, she was glad to be back in England. Her honorary commission in the WAAF would expire at the end of November, and her mission in Germany could not be extended further.

There were still unsolved cases, but they largely lay in the Russian zone, which by the autumn of 1946 had been almost entirely closed off to the Western Allies. Even Vera could not break through the new Iron Curtain.

Francis Suttill's trail—along with those of the Ravitsch boys and the MI6 man Frank Chamier (Frank of Upway 282)—were among those Vera had been forced to abandon as the remaining evidence lay in the Russian zone. Before she left Germany she had found a Sachsenhausen orderly who said Francis Suttill was executed, but the witness had only glimpsed what happened through a chink in a cell door. Suttill was hanged, not shot, he said, but his only proof was that there was no blood on his clothes, which he had the job of collecting.

The Russians were planning to hold a trial of the Sachsenhausen camp staff, but Vera had been unable to find out when, and she knew there was little hope that any news of the trial would reach the West.

I discovered that Vera did, however, receive news of the Sachsenhausen trial shortly after it took place in October 1947, thanks only to a resourceful young Haystack investigator and a British journalist who defected to Moscow. The story was recounted to me by the Haystack man, Sacha Smith, now living in Devon. Smith worked for the British war crimes unit in Berlin as liaison officer with the Russians, although by 1947 almost no information was coming through from his Soviet counterparts.

“One day I was in the officers' club in Berlin when I was told there was a call for me from a man called Peter Burchett,” said Smith. Burchett had worked in Berlin for the Daily Mail and been friendly with Smith, often covering war crimes cases, until he surprised everyone by defecting. He was calling his old friend from somewhere in the Russian zone.

“I had to take the call from Burchett in a cupboard with no light bulb, so I couldn't see what I was writing and the line was bad, so I couldn't hear well,” Smith told me. “Even though he had chosen to go over to the other side, he was calling as a favour, because he knew I would want to know about the Sachsenhausen trial, and we wouldn't get to hear otherwise. I had to scratch down what I could in the dark. I just got that people were convicted but certainly no details and nothing about Suttill. But I was able to pass on what I had to Tony Somerhough, who I am sure told Vera.” Six months later, during the Berlin airlift, Smith became the last British officer to leave Berlin by road. The Cold War had now begun.

Nevertheless, by the time she left Germany, Vera had achieved much of what she set out to do: the fate of all the women had been settled, as had the fate of the majority of the men imprisoned in camps liberated by Americans or British. Now she hoped she could put the tragedies behind her and devote her time to helping survivors, securing honours and awards, and promoting positive memories of SOE.

And yet Vera's enquiries were not quite over. Although her investigation into the fate of the missing appeared to have run its course, her investigation
into how agents were captured was certainly not complete. Vera was still hoping that certain senior German officers, particularly those responsible for rounding up her people, would be tracked down. On September 11, 1946, she had issued a note to the Haystack team passing on new intelligence as to where these men—Horst Kopkow, the Berlin coun-terintelligence chief, and Hans Kieffer, of the Paris Sicherheitsdienst— might be found. As she admitted in that note: “It seems impossible to stop this game of War Crimes once you have begun.”

And even now Vera was making her way across Essex to another interrogation. Along with thousands of German internees and suspect war criminals, Dr. Josef Goetz, the radio mastermind at Avenue Foch, had been brought to England for investigation and was being held in a disused army barracks at Colchester now serving as a camp for prisoners of war.

Vera was already seated at a table when Dr. Goetz was led in. She didn't offer him a seat but simply observed him. She already knew a fair amount about him. Dr. Goetz was a schoolteacher from Hamburg who had been selected for the Sicherheitsdienst because of his facility with languages. She saw now that he was a tall man with a high-domed cranium, brown eyes, and glasses. His hair was white, but he could not have been more than forty.

Dr. Goetz also observed Vera, then pulled up a chair and sat down opposite her. She was annoyed at this impudence but said nothing and took out a cigarette, as did he. She lit her cigarette without offering him a light, so he asked her for one. He had a deep bass voice. She paused, looked at him again, and offered him the light. Then Vera laughed, and she signalled to the attending corporal that he could leave the room and wait outside the door.

Vera's discussions with Dr. Goetz were to be conducted on quite different terms from her earlier interrogations of SS concentration camp staff in Germany. Those meetings had been held to establish how and where her agents were killed. Dr. Goetz had not been hired to kill. He had been hired to outwit the British by playing back the radios of captured agents. He then pretended to be those agents, talking by Morse
signal directly to London. Vera had not only spent the last months piecing together how her people died, she had also been slowly piecing together how they were caught, and on that subject Dr. Goetz would be able to tell her more than any German officer she had seen so far.

“How did it begin?” asked Vera.

“It began with Bishop,” said Goetz, and Vera nodded. They were going to understand each other well. In a sense they had met before—or at least communicated—as Vera herself had sent messages to Dr. Goetz, believing him at different times to be Gilbert Norman, Marcel Rousset, Nora Inayat Khan, Lionel Lee, or one of the other dozen or so captured signallers whose radios he had operated. She had also received his messages back.

And in a sense they also had a lot in common. Dr. Goetz was probably the only person in the world who knew the French Section agents— their aliases, their codes, their messages—as well as Vera. Vera had helped create their cover stories, but Dr. Goetz had had to learn every last detail about these people in order to imitate them when playing back their radios. So both Vera and Dr. Goetz knew that Bishop was the alias for the radio operator named Marcus Bloom, the gutsy and flamboyant north-London Jewish businessman, infiltrated into France by boat in November 1942 to work with the Pimento circuit, headed by Tony Brooks. On his return to England after the war, Brooks claimed to Vera and others that Bloom had arrived in Toulouse in a loud check coat, smoking a pipe, and looking as though he had stepped off a train from Victoria. Nearly blowing Brooks s cover, Bloom greeted him with the words “ 'Ow are ya, mate,” so Brooks decided to have nothing more to do with him. Vera had established that Marcus Bloom was shot at Mauthausen.

When Bishop was arrested, said Dr. Goetz, his radio was found with all his codes. This gave Goetz's boss, Hans Kieffer, his first chance to play back a captured radio. He told Dr. Goetz to experiment, so he sent a few messages. But it didn't work well. He needed more practice.

Vera remembered the worries in the late spring of 1943 when Bloom's strange messages came in, but the worries had not lasted. Though F Section had been duped before by enemy radio deception, staff
officers in early 1943 were confident that they could prevent it happening again.

And nothing was known in F Section at that time about the systematic way such deception had already been worked on other SOE sections. Only since the end of the war had Vera learned the full story of how, the year before Bloom was captured, the Germans had been playing the Funkspiel, or “radio game,” to devastating effect against SOE's Dutch and Belgian sections (N and T sections). As a result of that deception, almost every SOE agent parachuted into the Low Countries had been dropped into German hands.