Spy Princess (30 page)

After the arrests, the Germans sent London a message on Operation Nurse that Antelme had injured his skull on a container when he landed. They continued to send false medical bulletins about him finally reporting his ‘death’ without regaining consciousness at the end of April. The Germans also played back Lee’s set to London and it took Baker Street three weeks to notice that the security checks were wrong. It was finally by March that London realised that the wireless messages were false and the agents, including Noor and Antelme, were in German hands. Leo Marks heard the news in his office in Malvern Court while briefing another agent. He found it hard to hide his emotion and found himself saying a silent prayer: ‘Please God, can anything be done to help Noor, who knows you by another name? I can feel her pain from here, and know how much worse it must be for you.’
²⁶

The months crawled by, the harsh winter of 1943/4 changing into spring. Alone in her cell Noor became weaker, and the girls thought she looked very frail and sad. Noor felt particularly low in the months of May and June as the birthdays of her mother and Vilayat passed. She missed not being able to write her usual birthday poem to her mother and cried silently to herself in her cell. She had told Vera Atkins to say nothing to her family if she was missing, so she knew they had no idea she was in prison. She hoped that Claire was managing the house well. When the sympathetic Krauss visited her cell she told him how much she missed her mother and her family. Once again she meditated and thought about her father, drawing strength from his philosophy. Yolande and her friends tried to keep up her morale as they knew Noor was having the hardest time of all of them. Once she told her friends never to tell her mother that she was in prison and that she was so unhappy.

If the girls were feeling low, Noor would try to cheer them up. As the French girls gave her news of the progress of the war, she felt happier. On 4 July, American Independence Day, Noor wrote ‘
Vive le 4 juillet
’ (Long live 4 July) on her bowl and passed it round. On 14 July, Bastille Day, she wrote ‘
Vive la France libre
’ (Long live free France) and drew two small flags – one British and one French – on the mugs. This rallied the French girls and so the time went by at Pforzheim.

They could hear the roar of RAF planes go over the prison and hear the bombing. The French girls, who were probably allowed to write letters or receive parcels, were somehow able to keep up to date with news of the outside world. They passed this information to Noor and kept her posted on the Allied victories. They told her to have courage as the war would soon be over and they would celebrate and drink champagne together.

Two women prisoners in Cell Number 3, Alice Coudel and Clara Machtou, also communicated with Noor. They sang the news to her when they were passing her cell. Yolande heard the singing and heard a prison warden called Trupp raising his voice angrily. She heard him open Noor’s cell door and strike her and take her down to the basement, from where they could hear her cries. The girls were appalled by the treatment but could not help Noor. After he had beaten her, Trupp returned to the cell where Alice and Clara were imprisoned, shouted at them in German and left.
²⁷
Everyone noticed that Noor was singled out for the worst treatment.

One day the chief warden, Guiller, noticed that the spy hole in Noor’s cell was open. He went into the cell and shouted at Noor. Yolande and the other prisoners heard him screaming at her, then they heard Noor replying with great dignity in German. Rosy Storcke told them that Noor spoke to Guiller in very good German and held her head high even as he insulted her. Then they heard him slap her on the face and heard Noor reply defiantly. Later they heard her sobbing in her cell.

‘That day again all of us felt deeply for Nora,’ said Yolande,
²⁸
who had become very attached to the frail and gentle young woman who bore all her torture and abuse with tremendous spirit.

A few days after the incident, they saw Noor walking in the courtyard dressed in a sackcloth. That night they received a message from Noor on their food bowl that the prison wardens had taken away her clothes. In the middle of September came her final message, ‘I am leaving’, written in a nervous, trembling hand. It was her last note. The girls did not know where she had gone.

The Pforzheim prison register shows that Noor was discharged from the prison at 6.15 p.m. on 11 September and driven 20 miles to Karlsruhe. Orders had come directly from Berlin to move Noor. She was now summoned to the office of Josef Gmeiner, head of the Karlsruhe Gestapo.

Just after 2 a.m., in Gmeiner’s office Noor met three other SOE agents, Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman. She had known Yolande from her training days at Wanborough Manor. All four agents were given their orders to leave for Dachau. They were escorted by Gestapo officer Christian Ott and driven to the station in Gmeiner’s car. At Bruchsal Junction they were joined by their second German escort, Max Wassmer, and together they caught the express train for Stuttgart. At Stuttgart they had to wait on the platform for about an hour for the train to Munich. The women stood on the platform and talked. On the train to Munich they were given window seats and allowed to relax. They exchanged news about how they had been arrested and what had happened to their colleagues. Eliane Plewman, 25, was the daughter of an Englishman, Albert Browne-Bartroli and a Spanish-French mother. After many years in Marseilles, the family returned to England in the 1930s and Eliane married a young engineer, Tom Plewman, in 1942. Eliane joined the SOE with her brother Albert, who parachuted into France with Robert Benoist, the racing-car driver, in whose chateau Antelme and Noor had hidden in July. In August 1943, Eliane parachuted in near Lons-le-Saunier and made her way south to join Charles Skepper’s Monk network in Marseilles where she worked as a radio operator. Skepper had flown in by Lysander to start his circuit on the same day as Noor in June 1943.

In the spring of 1944, Skepper’s Monk network was infiltrated and he was arrested. Eliane and another colleague, Arthur Steele, a 20-year-old London music student, tried to rescue him but were captured. Skepper was taken to Hamburg where he was executed. Steele was hanged at Buchenwald and Eliane was taken to Fresnes prison, then to Karlsruhe with the other two girls.

Madeleine Damerment’s fate had been sealed by the chain of events after the fall of the Prosper and Cinema circuits, and the subsequent wireless games of the Gestapo. The 26-year-old was the daughter of the head postmaster of Lille and had became a postal clerk just before the war. The Damerment family joined the Resistance after the fall of France and Madeleine worked with a Belgian doctor, Dr Albert Guérisse, who organised escape routes for Allied airmen and Resistance workers under the name of Pat O’Leary.
²⁹
Madeleine eventually reached England where she was trained by SOE and returned to France with Antelme and Lionel Lee on the night of 28/29 February 1944, parachuting in near Sainville, 31 kilometres south-east of Chartres. All three were arrested almost immediately and taken to the Avenue Foch, from where Madeleine was taken to Fresnes and then Karlsruhe. Antelme and Lee were tortured and sent to Gross Rosen where both were executed. Noor now learnt that Antelme had returned to Paris and had been arrested.

Yolande Beekman had also been arrested as a result of the collapse of the Prosper and Cinema circuits. Beekman was the radio operator for the circuit Musician which had been established by Gustave Biéler in the St Quentin area of northern France. Yolande Beekman joined him in the late summer of 1943. Yolande’s father, Jacob Unternaehrer, was of Swiss/French origin. Yolande went to finishing school in Switzerland and was fluent in German and French. She married a young officer, joined the WAAF and was given wireless training like Noor. Later she joined the SOE and was parachuted in near Tours from where she made her way to St Quentin to work with Biéler. The circuit successfully destroyed the lock gates at St Quentin, which was at the heart of the canal system of north-east France through which the Germans transported arms, troops and materials.

On 13 December 1943, the Gestapo pounced on Biéler and Yolande as they met at a café at St Quentin. Biéler was tortured and killed within weeks at Flossenburg and Yolande was taken to Avenue Foch, and then on the familiar route via Fresnes to Karlsruhe. Eliane, Yolande and Madeleine had all been sent to Karlsruhe in May 1944 by Kieffer. By September 1944, the tide had turned in the war. With Paris liberated and the first US army at the German frontier and the Nazi troops in western Russia routed, the end of the Third Reich clearly lay ahead and the Nazi leaders turned their fury on the captives, exterminating nearly 200,000 French men and women in concentration camps and forced labour camps.

Josef Gmeiner said later that the orders to move Noor and her colleagues had come by teleprinter from Berlin. One was addressed to his office at Karlsruhe and the other to the Commandant of the concentration camp. Gmeiner’s instructions were to transfer the prisoners to the camp at Dachau. The instruction to the Camp Commandant of Dachau ordered the execution itself.
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Though they did not know it, the four women were making their final journey together. Both Wassmer and Ott knew about the orders but did not tell the women anything. Wassmer told Madeleine Damerment that they were being taken to a camp where farming was done. After a few hours, they had their lunch; they also smoked English cigarettes. It was a happy reunion for the agents and they savoured the little freedom they were given. They admired the scenery during the train trip, particularly the beautiful Swabian mountains. At Geisslingen there was an air raid which held them up for 2 hours. The women remained calm. At Munich Central, they changed trains again for Dachau. It was midnight when they reached Dachau and they walked up to the concentration camp, where they were locked in separate cells.

The end came in the early hours of the morning. Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Yolande Beekman were dragged out of their cells, marched past the barracks and shot near the crematorium.

For Noor it would be a long, tortuous night. According to two letters received by Jean Overton Fuller’s publishers after her book appeared in 1952, Noor was stripped, abused and kicked all night by her German captors. One of the letter writers was a Lieutenant Colonel Wickey, who worked for Canadian intelligence during the war and was Military Governor in Wuppertal in the British zone after the war. Here he met a German officer who had spent time in Dachau. This officer had been told by some camp officials that four women had been brought to Dachau from Karlsruhe. He described the women as French but added that one had a darker complexion and ‘looked much like a Creole’. The officers told the German officer that she (Noor) was considered to be a very ‘dangerous person’ and to be given the ‘full treatment’. Wickey then traced the German camp officer who had given the account and was told by him that Noor was tortured and abused in her cell by the Germans. She was stripped, kicked and finally left lying on the floor battered and bruised. Then in the early hours of the following morning she was shot in her cell.

Wickey identified the ‘Creole woman’ as Noor Inayat Khan.

The second letter received by Jean Overton Fuller through her publishers was from a man in Gibraltar who said he had been a prisoner in Dachau. His account matched that of Wickey. He said he had been told by another camp officer, Yoop, how Noor had been killed and described it as ‘terrible’. Noor he said, had been stripped, kicked and abused all night by an officer called Ruppert. When Ruppert got tired and the girl was a ‘bloody mess’, he told her that he would shoot her. He ordered her to kneel and put his pistol against her head. The only word she said before dying was ‘
Liberté
’. Both accounts confirmed that Noor had been tortured before her death.

When Vera Atkins interrogated Ott, he told her that he had been told by Wassmer, who Ott said had been present at the time, that some time between 8 and 10 on the morning of 13 September 1944, the four agents were taken to the crematorium, made to kneel in pairs and shot through the back of the neck. Ott had recalled that Wassmer had told him that before she was shot, Madeleine Damerment, whom he described as the woman who spoke German, had asked to see a priest. But the Commandant said there was no priest in the camp. Three of the girls had died with a single shot but Damerment had to be shot twice as they were not sure she was dead. All the bodies were then burnt in the crematorium ovens.
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But Ott had been constantly changing his story. In his first interrogation, he had given the wrong dates and said he took the girls to Dachau on 23 August 1944. Later he changed his version and amended the dates. However, Wassmer denied that he had been present at the execution and said he had slept the night at the camp, simply collected the receipt of their deaths at 10 in the morning and set out for Karlsruhe.

When Ott was reinterrogated by Vera Atkins, he too said he never believed Wassmer’s version, and Atkins is known to have rejected it herself.
³²
Vera privately believed and had told her niece, Zenna Atkins, that Noor had been raped and tortured before her death. However, Noor’s personal files carry the official line given out by Wassmer and Ott. The letters from the eyewitnesses lie with the family and with Jean Overton Fuller’s publishers at The Hague.

Further evidence that Wassmer had lied was recorded by Alexander Nicholson, the war crimes investigator, who had taken over the Karlsruhe investigation from Vera Atkins. When Nicholson reinterrogated Ott, he was told that when Ott had asked Wassmer what really happened, he had replied: ‘Do you want to know what
really
happened?’
³³
And he had left it at that. Which meant, according to Ott, that Wassmer did not want to reveal the real details of the execution and he had made it all up. Ott further said that he had mentioned this fact during his interview in May 1946, but the secretary, Hirth, had said it wasn’t of any interest to him and did not put it down on record.