The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (15 page)

There is some confusion as to which one of them it actually was who fought so savagely to save her life. Some reports say Vera Leigh, others Andrée Borrel. But does it really matter?
Knowing it doesn’t lessen the horror of this horrendous massacre. And perhaps for the families left behind – three of them had mothers alive at the time – it was better not to
know. The knowledge of their daughter’s fate must already have been a terrible enough memory to carry with them for the rest of their lives, a wound which I am sure would never heal. One can
only hope that they imagined that besides being paralysed by the injection, their daughters were also unconscious, and that the flames consumed them before they revived and realized what was
happening.

I knew Vera Leigh’s mother and her younger sister, Frances, very well. They were personal friends, living very near me. Her mother never forgot her daughter’s excruciating death. How
could she? And she never forgave. She had a plaque put on the wall of Holy Trinity Anglican church in Maisons-Laffitte, which the family had always attended. It read: ‘In memory of Ensign
Vera Leigh, brutally murdered by the Germans.’

Vera’s mother was a formidable old lady. She died at over ninety and, as the years passed and wartime memories faded, she was asked more than once to remove the plaque, which had become
offensive to some people in that multi-national congregation. Regular attenders included a German lady married to a Japanese, and in the summer there were often German tourists visiting the church.
But she always refused, stating categorically, leaving no room for argument or discussion: ‘My daughter was brutally murdered by the Germans. Full stop.’ But after her death
Vera’s sister, Frances, had it modified. It now reads: ‘To the memory of Ensign Vera Leigh killed by the Nazis in 1944.’ The message is the same, but the executioners are now
limited to a specific group, and not to the German people as a whole.

The soldier responsible for heaving these four woman into the incinerator was brought to trial after the war, where he told the story of their final moments, his face still bearing the scars of
the last agent’s fingernails; scars which he carried with him for the rest of his life. He pleaded that he was merely a soldier carrying out orders. But what orders! He was a private or
corporal, I believe, so perhaps he was terrified of disobeying, and of the subsequent dire punishment disobedience of the Reich would incur. But apart from the scar on his face, what a
‘scar’ to have to carry on his conscience till the end of his days.

Every June there is a ceremony at Natzweiler, attended by dignitaries from many countries, and also the descendants of those who perished: now only ageing cousins, nephews and nieces, or
great-nephews and -nieces of those prisoners who died in that infamous camp. How many of them in the same way? That also is something we shall never know.

Very recently I received a telephone call from an elderly lady, a relative of Diana Rowden, one of the four women incinerated at Natzweiler. She wanted to know whether I could tell her where
Diana was buried. I thought at first it was Diana’s mother; mercifully I remembered that she had died some years ago. But I was left with the painful task of telling this lady that there was
no grave and in the end, at her insistence, revealing how she had died. I imagine the circumstances of her daughter’s execution had been so painful that Diana’s mother had not been able
to share even with her relatives exactly what had happened.

The fate of these four women agents might never have been known had it not been for another F Section agent, Brian Stonehouse, who was himself a prisoner at the Natzweiler camp when the four
arrived. They had been transferred from another camp, Ravensbrück I believe, where they had been condemned to death by hanging. But at the last minute, for reasons unknown, the decision was
overturned, and they were hastily transferred to Natzweiler. Natzweiler was a men’s camp, so the arrival one afternoon of four young women did not go unnoticed. The men were intrigued
because, before the four girls arrived, they were ordered to stop working and return to their huts, where the windows and shutters were all tightly fastened and the curtains closed. But Brian, and
I imagine others also, managed to peep through a crack in the shutters and saw the four women cross the campus and enter the crematorium block, never to be seen again. After the war Stonehouse, a
well-known artist and portrait painter in civilian life, drew and painted from memory a picture of their arrival. It hangs today on the wall of the staircase at the Special Forces Club in London,
an incredible likeness of each one of them.

It was only his artistic talents which had saved him, a radio operator, the most vulnerable and most hated by the Gestapo of all SOE agents, from execution. Brian was incarcerated in four
different concentration camps. After his initial arrest and imprisonment, he happened to have a pencil and a pad in his pocket and sketched an extremely good likeness of his guard. The delighted
guard spread the news of this new prisoner’s talents, which information reached the ears of the commandant of the camp he had been sent to. He summoned Brian and ordered him to draw his
likeness, which Stonehouse did. The commandant was equally delighted with the finished sketch and did not issue the order for his execution, or even obey such an order, had it been issued. When
Stonehouse arrived at Natzweiler, his fourth and last concentration camp, as in the previous ones, his talent saved him. He returned unscathed after the war.

Without his artistic talent, we might never have known the fate of these four women, which, I imagine, is what the Germans intended to happen. They would have been just four more agents who had
disappeared without trace. Would it have been a fate easier to bear for their grieving families? That is something else we shall never know.

Quite by chance, I recently heard the story of one such family.

I had arranged to meet a friend at the Special Forces Club for lunch. When I arrived my friend was waiting in the bar, together with an elderly lady. The moment this lady turned round and
smiled, I recognized her. It was Helen Oliver. I had known her for years without actually knowing a great deal about her except that her twin sister, Liliane Rolfe, had been an agent who had not
returned. We went into lunch and were chatting amicably, when suddenly she began to talk about her sister, something she had never done before, certainly not with either of us.

‘Liliane and I were twins,’ she mused. ‘Mirror twins.’

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I had never heard of mirror twins.

‘There was no “telepathy” between us as there often is with twins, but we mirrored each other. I am right-handed and my sister was left-handed. We were the opposite sides of
the same coin.’ She paused and seemed to be looking into the distance at something far away that we could not see. ‘During the war, I didn’t know what Liliane was doing,’
she went on. ‘No one in the family did. But I guessed it was something clandestine, since we had no news from her, not personally, although we had an official notification every so often
telling us that she was alive and well.’

She paused again, as if not sure she wanted to go on. ‘It was strange,’ she continued quietly. ‘I remember it so clearly, even after all these years. One night, not long before
the war in Europe ended, I was fast asleep when, just before dawn, I was suddenly awakened by an overwhelming foreboding. A dread . . . an awful fear that something terrible was about to happen. I
didn’t know what it was, but I was trembling, and very frightened. I couldn’t shake it off.’ She paused again. ‘It was so vivid, that impression of disaster, that I was
unable to go back to sleep. I told myself it was a nightmare, although I hadn’t been dreaming. I knew, I felt, that something evil had crept all over me.’

She folded her napkin and pushed her plate away. ‘They always give one too much here,’ she smiled, as if wanting to change the subject, dismiss the terrifying thoughts from her mind.
But she went on all the same. ‘That sensation was so vivid,’ she continued, as if impelled by some force outside herself to share her fears, ‘that I wrote about it in my diary the
next day.’ She looked out of the window and down into the square below. ‘I learned later that it was at that precise moment that Liliane had been executed and then thrown into –
was it the gas chamber or the incinerator? I don’t remember, it was so long ago.’

I don’t know whether Helen ever learned the details of her sister’s mission, or of her last months – and her death; but I hope not. Liliane, codenamed ‘Nadine’, was
parachuted as a radio operator to organizer George Wilkinson’s (‘Etienne’) Historian
réseau
near Orleans in April 1944. A few months later she was arrested,
tortured, imprisoned and sent to various concentration camps, enduring hard labour, starvation and degradation. She ended up at Ravensbrück, where, in a murderous spate of killings, she was
executed together with Violette Szabo and Denise Bloch.

We have heard that Liliane was so weak from torture, beatings, malnutrition and probably rape, since, in the prisons run by the Nazis, after being tortured the women prisoners were routinely
gang-raped, she could hardly stand: she had to be helped to her execution by Violette Szabo, who died with her. They were most probably shot in the back of the head, but there was a rumour that
they were hung. We shall never know the truth. Whatever it was, it was grim and doesn’t bear thinking about.

Violette could hardly drag herself along since she was pregnant as a result of one of the rapes, and her legs were covered with ulcers, making it difficult for her to walk. Denise Bloch, the
third F Section woman agent to die that dawn, was not in a better state. The three of them supported each other as they staggered to their deaths.

Mercifully at the time Liliane’s family was unaware of her activities.

I don’t know why Liliane’s twin sister chose to share these memories with us that day. And I wonder if the agony they revived had not been too much for her. She rose to her feet, a
small, fragile old woman, but still beautiful. I could imagine what the two of them must have been like when they were young, before Liliane was murdered. They had been brought up in Paris by an
English father and an emigrée White Russian mother, and Helen, at ninety-seven, still had the beautiful high Slavic cheekbones and delicate bone structure. She looked like an ageing
ballerina, with her slim figure, her grey hair swept back into a chignon. She smiled and excused herself, saying she had an appointment, and left the room, a slight, upright old lady who carried
with her such tragic memories. And I couldn’t help wondering how many others carried the weight of a loved one’s sacrifice and would continue to carry it right to the grave. Such
memories cannot be erased.

It was terrible that many agents’ families were left in ignorance of their fate. It is true that in many cases no one knew what had happened to them. News had ceased to arrive, and the
authorities could only surmise that they had perished in a concentration camp, since Hitler had ordered that all arrested or imprisoned SOE agents had to disappear, leaving no trace. Would it not
have been kinder to inform the family or next of kin that HQ feared the agent might not return? Looking back, it seems almost unforgiveable that many families were given hope and went on hoping
long after their husband or son or daughter had ceased to exist. And even long after the war had ended.

What was particularly distressing was that the official monthly cards sent out by Buck’s assistant, Vera Atkins, announcing that she had received good news from their husband, son or
daughter and that they were alive and well, were still being sent to their families months after the agents had perished. Did Vera do this deliberately, thinking to ease the blow once they finally
learned that their son or daughter, husband or wife had not survived? Or did she honestly believe that these missing agents would return? Vera was no fool. I cannot think she would have been
ignorant of the fact that, having disappeared, the agents were probably no longer alive.

Vera was the perfect example of an aristocratic Englishwoman. She spoke with an upper-class accent and arrived for work every morning at Baker Street in a taxi, always stylishly, but simply, and
expensively dressed. And the same taxi collected her to take her back to her Chelsea flat at whatever time she finished in the evening.

But Vera concealed her true identity almost until her death in 2000.

There was in fact nothing English, or even British, about Vera. She was born in Bucharest, the daughter of a wealthy Romanian Jewish businessman, and had only arrived in England with her Jewish
mother after her father’s death in 1933. Throughout the war she still had family, including two brothers and their wives, living in Romania. In enemy territory! Vera had many friends in high
places. She had apparently been recruited as a spy in the early 1930s by the German ambassador to Romania, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, a family friend, who became one of her lovers
– another surprising revelation, since she gave the impression of being cold and very strait-laced. No doubt all part of her cover-up. Vera was in secret contact with Count von der
Schulenburg during the war – with or without Churchill’s knowledge? She knew the prime minister well, and he apparently trusted her judgement. Although high up in German diplomatic
circles, the count was secretly anti-Nazi. After the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, along with hundreds of others suspected of being involved in the plot, he was executed in
the same gruesome manner as the prisoners at Flossenbürg: hung with piano wire attached to a meat hook, suspended on a wall. The news of his execution apparently affected Vera deeply. But,
true to character, outwardly she showed no emotion.

I don’t know whether Buck knew of her origins. Certainly no one in F Section did. But I don’t think Buck could have known either, since, had they come to light, she would never have
been recruited or, if discovered, allowed to remain in SOE, and certainly not in such a key position of authority. For a top-secret organization it would have been not only unthinkable, but highly
dangerous to employ someone whose origins lay in a country which was now collaborating with the enemy. However did she manage to slip through the tight security net? The intrigues within SOE were
almost as tangled as those on the outside!