Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (60 page)

Schubert had noticed that the British woman's name was never written in the prison register. “It seems to me that this was done on purpose for it to be easier to get rid of her. I don't know what happened to her, but my opinion is that she died there, the same way as so many others did.”

By now Vera needed no more convincing that Nora had been at Pforzheim, and she already had her own ideas about what might have happened to her next. She also had her own ideas about who would know.

Vera had never expected to return to Tomato, the little British prison near Minden where the previous year she had spent so much of her time interrogating suspects, but once again she was sitting in a Mercedes as it
wound its way down the icy track leading to the jail. Tomato was fuller than ever, according to Tony Somerhough, although few of the prisoners there were now expected to face trial. German lawyers representing war criminals were gaining confidence, sending in letters protesting that their clients were being unfairly held without charge. The wife of one Karlsruhe Gestapo prisoner had written saying she could “scarcely imagine” why her husband was being held. German church leaders were also beginning to speak out for the first time since the end of the war, calling for a new period of healing.

Elsewhere internment camps were increasingly impossible to police, complained Somerhough. “Bodies” were regularly mislaid in the system, and escapes were commonplace. One of two men Vera had been keen to reinterrogate for the new Nora Baker investigation had simply been “lost” by the Americans. She had asked for Christian Ott to be transferred to Tomato from the U.S. zone, but an entirely different Christian Ott had been handed over by mistake. The other “body” Vera was interested in reinterrogating—Max Wassmer—had, however, been found, and it was he that Vera had now come to see for a second time. She hoped that Wassmer would be able to confirm what she already believed had finally happened to Nora.

Yolande Lagrave and others had talked of massacres of Pforzheim women prisoners near the prison, and Vera now knew that hundreds of bodies had been exhumed from a mass grave—most of them identified as French deportees, although some were too badly decomposed to identify. However, she did not consider it likely that Nora was among those randomly killed near Pforzheim. Nora, she believed, was taken to a concentration camp, like all the other SOE girls. And like the others, she was almost certainly executed on the specific orders of Berlin.

Vera also thought she knew which concentration camp Nora had been taken to, and it was not Natzweiler, as she had first believed. As yet she had no new evidence to support her theory, and she certainly had no new witnesses. On the contrary, what she had was old evidence, but she was reading this old evidence in a new way.

When Vera was first investigating the Dachau case the previous summer, she had acquired statements from several members of the Karlsruhe
Gestapo, but none was as important as those of Christian Ott and Max Wassmer. These men provided the crucial evidence that enabled Vera at last to clear up the case of Madeleine Damerment, Yolande Beekman, and Eliane Plewman, the second group of girls imprisoned at Karlsruhe, whose fate had remained a mystery for so long. The evidence of Ott and Wassmer showed that the three women had been taken from the prison in Karlsruhe to Dachau concentration camp, where they were killed by shooting.

Ott's evidence had been particularly detailed and helpful. The descriptions he had given of the women and their ranks were clearly—as far as they went—accurate.

However, in certain respects Vera had found Ott unreliable. For one thing, throughout his statement he had talked of four, not three, women being taken to Dachau. He said, for example, that “four women” were collected from Karlsruhe prison. He also said that “four women” had been handcuffed “two by two in the usual fashion.” There were “two French and two English.” Ott also said in his original statement that the fourth woman “was brought from Pforzheim” and joined the other three at Karlsruhe before they all left for Dachau.

When Vera then interrogated Wassmer, he denied ever having said to Ott that he was present at the shootings. However, he clearly corroborated the main elements of Ott's story. He said he too had accompanied the women to Dachau as Ott had described, and he also spoke about the journey; the girls had brought bread and sausages from the prison to eat in the train, and they had chatted in lively fashion, showing no fear when the train had to stop for an air raid. On arrival at Dachau, Wassmer said he had delivered the women to the SS guards and had not seen them again. He said he had been told the next morning that they had been shot and was given a “receipt” for the bodies. And he, unlike Ott, was willing to accept Vera's suggestion at the time that there were probably only three women involved and not four.

As a result of statements taken from these men, Vera had concluded back in August that the three women she was then looking for had indeed been executed at Dachau, discounting the evidence that a fourth was present. In her report to London Vera had attached both Ott's and
Wassmer's statements, but the section of Ott's statement referring to a fourth prisoner, who was brought from Pforzheim, was omitted from her report.

Now, however, Vera realised that Ott's evidence of a fourth woman at Dachau could no longer be ignored. Her main purpose therefore in seeing Wassmer again was to secure a new statement from him saying there were four women killed and not three. Vera also hoped he might be able to give a description of the fourth prisoner, brought from Pforzheim.

Max Wassmer, a policeman before he joined the Gestapo, was in his late fifties with a full white beard. Considered a safe pair of hands, he had been responsible for the transport of Gestapo prisoners, usually to concentration camps. He was also said by colleagues to be “good at settling women.”

Vera explained to Wassmer why she had come to see him a second time. She then took a sheet of plain paper and wrote across the top, “Notes on reinterrogation of Max Wassmer,” and began to take him through his story once again.

Six months after their first meeting Wassmer had even less to say than before. His memory, which had always been weak, was even weaker now. At the end of the interrogation Vera's jottings barely filled one side of paper. Wassmer's story, though, had not changed. According to Vera's notes, he described the journey just as he had done in his first interrogation. “Wassmer came from Bruchsal;” “Changed trains Munich for Dachau;” “Arrived Munich at 8pm;” “Arrived Dachau 11–12pm;” “Did not tell them on outward journey purpose of journey other than destination Dachau.”

What Wassmer had to say to Vera about events at Dachau was also unchanged: he knew almost nothing. In particular, he continued to deny Ott's claim that he ever said he was present when the execution took place. All Vera could grasp from Wassmer this time about what happened to the girls was contained in these three little notes: “Some officers arrived and took women away;” “Wassmer slept till 7.30;” “At 10am got
the execution slip from official.” And then Wassmer was on his way back to Karlsruhe. “Caught train from Munich with Ott.”

On the question of who had given the orders for the women to go to Dachau, Wassmer also had nothing to add to what he had said before. Vera noted, “Rösner gave order to Wassmer, who did not want to go,” and “Gmeiner ordered Rösner to order Wassmer.”

On the most vital question for Vera, though—whether there was a fourth girl in the group—Wassmer gave the answer she now wanted. Yes, he said, there were four women, not three. Wassmer even managed to give Vera the briefest of descriptions of the four. It was just one or two adjectives in each case, but she nevertheless noted down what he said with very great care:

• 1 small round face (Dussautoy)
  

• 1 tall blonde a little German (Beekman)
  

• 1 ordinary (?Plewman)
  

• 1 very thin (?Madeleine).
  

And then Vera rose from her interrogation, and Wassmer was led back to his cell.

Feeble though it was, the evidence Vera had secured from Wassmer, combined with other evidence already gathered, supported her new conclusion that Nora had been killed with the other three women at Dachau. Having drawn this conclusion, Vera was now able officially to revise Nora's story. But the end remained very difficult to write. Despite these latest discoveries, Vera still knew very little about how Nora—or any of the Dachau girls—had actually died.

In the Natzweiler case the evidence of how the women had died had been presented virtually minute by minute, from numerous different angles, in the most harrowing detail. The deaths of the four women who died at Ravensbrück had been harder to piece together, but Vera had secured reliable and adequate testimony about their time in the camp, their last few days in the punishment block, and even their final moments before they were shot.

In the case of Dachau, however, nothing at all was known about what happened to these four women after they were handed over to the SS guards at the Dachau gates. Nothing was known about where they spent the night, or what happened the next morning. The evidence given by Wassmer was that they were shot. But Vera knew nothing about their treatment before they were shot, or their bearing at the time, or the manner in which they were shot. No witnesses had been interrogated who had seen anything at all of these women inside Dachau concentration camp.

Vera had for the most part discounted the only account of the deaths she had heard. This was the account Christian Ott had given in his first deposition, which he, in turn, had claimed was given to him by Wassmer, who Ott said had been present. According to this version of events, the women were told “to kneel down with their faces towards a small mound of earth” and were then shot through the back of the neck as they held hands.

While this account was apparently credible, Wassmer from the start denied relating it. Vera then rejected it altogether because Ott, when later reinterrogated, said he himself never believed it. Alexander Nicol-son, the war crimes investigator who had taken the Karlsruhe Gestapo case over from Vera, had himself reinterrogated Ott (who had eventually been found interned in the former concentration camp at Dachau) and had challenged him directly about what Wassmer had really told him about the Dachau deaths. Ott then repeated the same details, but this time he also talked of the conversation he had had with Wassmer after Wassmer had finished his description. Ott told Nicolson: “So I said to him, ‘But tell me, what really happened?' And Wassmer turned to me and said: ‘So you want to know how it really happened?'

Nicolson asked what Ott had taken Wassmer to mean by this comment. “I knew that what he meant was that what he had told me was just a story—eine Geschichte—that he had made up, and I wouldn't want to know how it had really happened.”

The Dachau war crimes trial was held by the Americans. But when I examined transcripts of the trial in the U.S. National Archives, I found no
evidence that any Dachau camp staff were ever charged with the killings of these four women, and no evidence to throw light on the way they died.

Baron Arthur Hulot, a leader of the Belgian resistance and a prisoner in Dachau, told me: “I never heard mention of these women. If the murders took place outside the crematorium, it was far from the camp and nobody would have known. Anything could have happened.”

There was nothing in Vera's war crimes files to suggest that she ever sought to find out more herself at the time. On Ravensbrück and Natzweiler Vera's papers were detailed and extensive; her Dachau file contained only a few newspaper cuttings. Perhaps after probing the depths of horror at the two other concentration camps, Vera was now well and truly exhausted and simply did not wish to know more.

Nor did she, apparently, wish to return to the other mystery, thrown up by the new development concerning Nora. If Nora was not Stone-house's “No. 2,” who was? It must now have been obvious to Vera that Sonia Olschanesky was a real name, or at least a real alias. Yet Vera left it to others, many years later, to find out exactly who Sonia was.

Into the vacuum surrounding the final hours of the Dachau girls, the story told by Wassmer was freely inserted and over the years gained common currency. The story was perhaps a comforting and heroic one, telling of how the four women, holding hands, went to their deaths bravely, from a single shot to the head.

Families and friends of the dead, though, seemed to know instinctively that Wassmer's story was not true. Diana Farmiloe, Yolande Beek-man's sister, said she had been told many years ago, by Nora's brother Vilayat, that the girls had all been tortured before they died. “He said they were all beaten in some way. I remember him saying it was not how we had been told.”

Lisa Graf, who had befriended Madeleine Damerment in prison in Karlsruhe, told me she had visited Dachau years after the war and seen the plaque in memory of the four women, which said they were “cruelly murdered.” “What did it mean—‘cruelly murdered? I know for sure they were not killed nicely. I am sure that was never true.”