Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (64 page)

On the other hand, there were many people in London who wanted to see Déricourt convicted; none more, it appeared, than the woman who had spent so much time investigating his treachery. Déricourt's conviction would have been a fitting finale to Vera's “private enterprise.” Whatever her impulse to guard F Section secrets, she must have wished to see justice done, if only for the sake of her dead men and women. Remarkably enough, however, Vera was not even in court to listen to the case.

There was no coverage of the trial in the British press. Until the late 1950s the name Henri Déricourt remained entirely unknown in Britain.

However, Déricourt was by no means the only person to walk free at the end of Vera's war crimes investigation. The case of Horst Kopkow was in some ways an even greater scandal.

Horst Kopkow was the senior counterintelligence officer with the Reich Security Head Office, in Berlin, and was responsible for all enemy “parachutists,” which included all SOE agents captured in France. As Vera had established time and again, it was Kopkow who passed down orders to men like Kieffer relating to the agents' capture, interrogation, imprisonment, and death.

By the end of 1946 Kopkow was also in British custody and being “very helpful,” but he coolly denied responsibility for the murder of F Section people, saying that it was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer and head of the SS, who had personally decided on their fate. He even revealed, for the first time, what happened to the agents held at the Rav-itsch fortress: Himmler had directed that they be taken to the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen, in Poland, and shot.

Kopkow, however, was less cool when he was questioned about the case of the MI6 man Frank Chamier, dropped into Germany in April 1944. Vera, on MI6's behalf, had established that Chamier had once been in Ravensbrück men's camp, where he used his alias, Frank of Upway 282. By the end of 1946 evidence suggested he was later executed. Asked about Chamier by British interrogators, Kopkow at first “nearly fainted” and “asked for a glass of water,” so frightened was he of the charges he would face over the Chamier case. Kopkow, however, had nothing to fear.

In 1948, when the war crimes investigator Alexander Nicolson checked on progress in the Kopkow prosecution, he was told that Kopkow, by then detained in London, had died in British custody of natural causes. A letter dated June 15, 1948, and marked “secret,” in a newly opened war crimes investigation file in the National Archives, certified Kopkow s death. The letter, addressed to the War Crimes Group and from a Lieutenant Colonel Paterson, said: “The above [Horst Kopkow] as
you know was sent to England about ten days ago for special interrogation and when he arrived here he was found to be running a temperature and after two days was sent to hospital, where we regret to say he died of Bronchopneumonia before any information was obtained from him.

“We enclose a certificate of death issued by the Hospital Authorities and would request that you duly advise his relatives of his decease. He has been buried in that portion of the local Military Cemetery allocated to prisoners of war who have died here.”

Kopkow, however, had not died. A pact had been made with him, sparing him prosecution for the SOE deaths and for the torture and death of Frank Chamier so that he could be released “for special employment.” He was released from custody to work for British and American intelligence.

The evidence of this pact was contained in Vera's file on the Chamier case. MI6 has never spoken about Chamier—the secret service never speaks about its agents. Chamier's family have never even been told about his mission to Germany or his death.

Kopkow's “special employment” was helping the West catch Communists. As well as rounding up SOE agents, Kopkow had spent the war gathering intelligence for Germany on the Red Orchestra, a Russian Communist spy network first based in Antwerp. After faking Kopkow's death, therefore, MI6 issued him a new identity and used him to help them fight the Cold War.

Karl Boemelburg, head of the Sicherheitsdienst in France, also escaped the net; he eluded capture by taking a false name, under which he continued living in Germany until, in 1947, he slipped on a piece of ice, cracked his skull, and died. Neither Dr. Goetz nor Hugo Bleicher was ever charged with any crime. Dr. Goetz returned to Germany as a schools inspector.

Several minor officials were in the end released. Wassmer and Ott, for example, the two men who transported Vera's women to Natzweiler and Dachau, were freed after it was concluded that they were only carrying out orders. And Hermann Rösner, of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, who instructed Wassmer and Ott to take these women to the concentration camps, was also freed, as he too was only doing as he was told. In the
1960s Rösner was hired by the British to provide intelligence for NATO. Of the concentration camp staff, many eluded capture, the most notable perhaps being Dr. Heinrich Plaza, who with Dr. Werner Rohde had injected the four SOE women before they were cremated at Natzweiler.

At the conclusion of the Ravensbrück trial eleven of the camp staff— including Johann Schwarzhuber, Dorothea Binz, Vera Salvequart, and Carmen Mory—received death sentences for crimes against humanity, although Mory killed herself with a razor blade hidden in the heel of her shoe before she reached Albert Pierrepoint's noose. Fritz Suhren, the camp commandant, was eventually recaptured and executed by the French.

As for Kieffer, Vera clearly had her doubts about whether he should have been hanged at all. If it had not been for the SAS killings, “he would have been a free man today,” she said after the war. “We [SOE] had nothing against him.” Just before he was taken from his cell at Wupper-tal, Kieffer removed the photograph of his daughter Hildegard from the wall and asked for it to be posted to her with a note on the back: “Moggele, I bless you in my last hour. Your father.”

Although Vera would always keep to herself much of what Kieffer had told her, she was determined to make public some of the evidence she had drawn from him. While burying the mistakes of SOE, Vera was just as eager to promote its successes. Kieffer's evidence had, above all else, proven the extraordinary bravery of Nora Inayat Khan. When Vera got home from Germany in early February 1947, she therefore had one more task to perform before finally leaving “this game of war crimes.” She was determined to put Nora up for a George Cross.

Three years after the end of the war it was not easy to persuade the powers that be that Nora's recommendation for a gallantry award should be rewritten for a fourth time. First she was proposed for a George Medal, then for a member of the Order of the British Empire, and then for a Mention in Dispatches; now that the truth about her courage appeared to have emerged, she was to be put forward for the highest award for bravery anyone could receive. The correspondence between Vera and Eileen
Lancey of the Honours and Awards Office showed Vera endlessly battling to prove that this time she had got the facts for the citation for Nora right. First Miss Lancey seemed to doubt the evidence that Nora had really been held in chains in Pforzheim. Then there was doubt about how she could have communicated via the prison mugs. “How they exchanged mugs I cannot say, but that they did is proved by the fact that Mlle Lagrave was in possession of Madeleine's names and address and many other details concerning her,” wrote Vera in an exasperated reply to the official. In the end it was Kieffer's evidence of Nora's escape, and of her absolute refusal to give any information, which counted more than anything towards her award. Although Kieffer's evidence was not available to convict Déricourt, it was crucial in securing Nora her George Cross. Vera quoted Kieffer as the source for the fact that the escape with Starr and Faye was “Madeleine's idea.”

Nora's George Cross was finally made public in 1949. “G/C for Braver Than They Thought Girl,” said one newspaper headline. And it was under this headline that Vera revealed how Kieffer cried when he heard of Nora's death at Dachau.

In London yesterday a woman executive of the Top Secret Department described Nora's heroism and said: “Since the war I have seen Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer, Gestapo chief at Avenue Foch, Paris. It was he who sent her on her way, describing her as intractable and highly dangerous. Bully and hard man though he was, the reminder of her courage and patriotism caused him to break down and weep bitterly.”

After concluding her interrogation of Kieffer in January 1947, Vera had nearly completed all she had returned to Germany to do: she had assisted the prosecution at the Ravensbrück trial, established where Nora died, and interviewed the man who captured her agents. Before she returned to England, however, she went briefly to Hamburg, where sentences were about to be passed on the sixteen defendants.

By the time the former Ravensbrück guards were brought into the
dock for the verdicts, Vera had resumed her seat on the prosecution bench. As the sixteen lined up, she took a small scrap of paper and down the left-hand side, in tiny black writing, she wrote the number of each defendant, one to sixteen, with a full stop after each. As the sentences were read out she noted them down. Against the number of the five defendants who received a prison sentence, she wrote the number of years each was to serve in jail. Against the number of each of the eleven defendants sentenced to death she marked a tiny black cross.

PART IV

ENGLAND

24.
Conspiracies

A
ny history of SOE would seem to be in the nature of self-vindication which as a secret service is in my opinion undesir-
.
able and unnecessary. That other people will seek to claim the honour and glory should, I think, leave us unmoved,” wrote Leslie Humphreys in September 1945, when SOE was considering how its work should be recorded, once the organisation had been closed down.

The Whitehall establishment was content to bury all memory of SOE after the end of the war. MI6 could not snuff out its awkward wartime rival fast enough, and the Foreign Office was delighted to see an end to the organisation that had interfered so much with quiet diplomacy, particularly in France, where Buckmaster's celebratory tours—his so-called Judex Mission—had led to vitriolic attacks on him in the French press. As one diplomat put it: “To a certain extent Buckmaster is himself to blame. He has courted postwar popularity in France and has enjoyed the floral tributes of a resistance hero. Now that spirit has changed he is getting the rotten eggs.”

Officially, Humphreys s view that SOE should rest in silence prevailed. (Humphreys himself had soon retired from intelligence to become a schoolmaster at Stonyhurst.) The Special Forces Club was formed in 1946 to keep SOE memories alive and to provide a network for job hunters, but all members were instructed never to speak again of their wartime work. The best of the SOE rump were offered work in MI6 or
other departments, but Vera was offered no such position. After she failed “by one place” to achieve her MBE in the 1946 Birthday Honours, a further attempt to secure her an honour, in recognition of her war crimes work, was unsuccessful. Although she received a Croix de Guerre from the French in 1948, Vera was, as she put it, “undecorated” by Britain. When she arrived back from Germany in early 1947, she was also unemployed.

Sometime in early 1947, probably soon after returning from Germany, Vera wrote again to Dick Ketton-Cremer's brother, Wyndham, asking if he had any more news. She received this reply:

Dear Miss Atkins, I was so glad to hear from you again and to know your address though I am afraid I have no good news to tell you about Dick. There can now be no doubt that he was killed in Crete on or about 23 May 1941, during the German attack on Maleme airfield, where he was stationed. We heard from a man in the squadron to which he was unfortunately attached in Crete, who found him badly wounded and practically unconscious during the fighting. He thought he had very little time to live and could do nothing to help him. We know no more, and have heard nothing at all about his grave.
It is unbearable to think of this even now, and I am afraid it will grieve you very much.
While he was in the Western Desert in 1940, he made a codicil to his will with various bequests to his friends. Among those bequests was one to you, and I shall send you a cheque for the amount as soon as we have settled his affairs.

The news that Dick died at Maleme must already have reached Vera, through her contacts with the RAF and the Red Cross. But the finality— “There can now be no doubt—” of Wyndham's brief account must have compounded Vera's grief. And what she would not have known until now was that she had been mentioned in Dick's last will.

In his fourth and final letter to Vera, Wyndham Ketton-Cremer sent
a cheque “which represents Dick's legacy to you, plus interest but less tax.” He added: “I did so much appreciate your letter about Dick. As you say, the whole story is just heartbreaking.”

I obtained a copy of Dick's will, hoping it might contain further clues about his intentions towards Vera.