CHAPTER 20 Allies or Enemies?

By the time the US First Army captured Leipzig on 19 April 1945, the Americans had liberated at least three Nazi camps. Two of the subcamps of Buchenwald—Ohrdruf and Dora-Mittelbau—were freed on 4 April and 10 April respectively. The US forces had then gone on to liberate Buchenwald itself on the 11th. A news report about the visit to the camp at Ohrdruf, by American generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, on 12 April, said:

As they toured the Ohrdruf concentration [sic] camp today, Eisenhower and Bradley burst into tears. General Patton, the most battle-scarred of them all, was overcome by the sight and smell of the piled-up corpses; gagging at each fresh horror, in the end he simply bent down and vomited.

… The GIs cannot believe their eyes. There are piles of unburied corpses, stacked higher than a man, at every turn…¹

General Dwight D. Eisenhower added to the description of the horrors they had witnessed:

I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief, or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.”²

Despite Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton having discovered what the guards had done in these camps, the news doesn’t appear to have reached the American troops who captured and occupied Leipzig until much later. The German prisoners were treated well by their American captors and this encouraged them to expect favors. Unconcerned about the frail men and women they had mistreated only a few weeks before, the camp guards and overseers behaved as if it would soon be recognized that their actions had been justified. They were relaxed, the female overseers especially friendly with the American soldiers, flirting and begging cigarettes from them, and inviting them into their rooms.

Didi remained in American custody, sharing her accommodation for most of that time with the female Nazi inmates. As if it were not bad enough to be regarded as one of them, she also found their behavior intolerable. She was furious that these brutal, sadistic women were now receiving better treatment than she, who had spent nearly five months in great danger working in occupied France for the Allied cause, and another eight months as a concentration camp inmate. But she would not behave as the German women did, making advances to gullible young soldiers in return for better conditions, and she refused to have anything to do with them. They must have known that she wasn’t one of them, but didn’t bother to tell anyone and in turn simply ignored her. Didi demanded to see a senior American officer and reported to him everything that was going on. She was pleased to see the following day that one of the German women had had her head shaved by her comrades. No one admitted to knowing why this girl had been singled out but they must have suspected that it was she, not Didi, who had told the officer in charge what had been happening.

Didi was again interviewed by an American intelligence officer. She was asked the same questions as she had been before, and again told her interrogator how she had flown into France one night in a small aircraft that landed in a field and remained there only long enough for her and her companion to disembark and for two other agents to board the plane to be taken back to England. To all his questions, Didi repeated the answers she had already given, but once again the officer made it clear that he didn’t believe a word, especially about the aircraft landing.

It is odd that the Americans, especially those in the Intelligence service, professed to have no knowledge of how the British had landed their people, as well as parachuting them, in enemy territory. The Americans themselves had participated in flying agents to occupied countries, including France, and must have known that in order to repatriate agents to the UK by air, they had to have been able to land the aircraft in France in the first place.

Nevertheless, a report about Didi made by the intelligence officer on 2 May 1945 and sent to the commanding officer of the American Intelligence Center four days later shows a complete ignorance about the life lived by captured agents. Having heard that she had been tortured and suffered in a concentration camp, the officer should not have been surprised that Didi’s account was confused, incomplete and contained some errors. He wrote:

SECRET

HEADQUARTERS
FIRST UNITED STATES ARMY
OFFICE OF AC OF S, G-2
INTERROGATION CENTER

MEMORANDUM:

TO: Officer in Charge, Master Interrogation Center.
SUBJECT: NEARNE, Eileen, alias DUTERTE, Jacqueline, alias WOOD, Alice, alias ROSE.

Subject claims to be a British subject by birth and to have worked in France for the British Intelligence Service until she was arrested by the Gestapo on 25 July 1944.

Subject stated that she has lived in France with her family since the age of two; that in March 1942 she was issued a passport by the British Consul in GRENOBLE, France, to return to England; that she went to LONDON via BARCELONA, MADRID, LISBON, GIBRALTAR, and GLASGOW, in company of her sister Jacqueline NEARNE; that almost immediately after her arrival in LONDON she and her sister joined the Information Service FANY where she was trained as a W/T operator; that she subsequently entered another Intelligence organization, run by a Col. Max BAXTER (British Army); and that she received training as a W/T operator and cryptographer in a school near OXFORD.

In the end of February 1944, Subject stated she was flown to a field near ORLEANS, France, from where she made her way to PARIS. She was in company of another agent, whose name she does not know, and whom she met twice daily in PARIS in order to obtain from him the reports she had to transmit to England. Those reports were written in clear and Subject encoded them. Subject signed her messages “ROSE,” but claims she has forgotten her agent’s number.

In July 1944 Subject’s transmitter was detected and Subject was arrested by the Gestapo on 25 July. Subject claims she was not asked to continue her transmission. She claims, moreover, that despite being tortured she did not reveal any information detrimental to the British Intelligence Service or its agents.

On 15 August 1944 Subject was sent to the extermination camp of RAVENSBRUCK (970 Km N of BERLIN) where she stayed for two weeks, from there to TORGAU, then to ABTERODA, and finally to MARKELBERG near Leipzig. From that last camp, Subject claims, she managed to escape on 13 April 1945.

Subject creates a very unbalanced impression. She often is unable to answer the simplest questions, as though she were impersonating someone else. Her account of what happened to her after her landing near ORLEANS is held to be invented. It is recommended that Subject be put at the disposal of the British Authorities for further investigation and disposition.³

SECRET

One positive result of her meeting with the senior American officer was that Didi was moved away from the Nazi women and spent the final part of her imprisonment in a cell with a French girl called Paulette, whose account of her life with the Resistance and in the concentration camps the Americans had also disbelieved. Like Didi, Paulette was furious with her treatment by the people she had believed were the allies, not the enemies, of France.

Happily for Yvette and Suzanne, after they separated from Didi they did not have the same problems with the Americans, being repatriated soon after they were placed in the hands of the Red Cross.

Monique, Didi’s other friend from the camp, also managed to escape from the forced march out of Markkleeberg as Didi, Yvette and Suzanne had, but she did so further away from the camp. Three days into the march, a group of Belgian workers passed close by the emaciated prisoners and two of them helped Monique to get away. She was taken to a farm where a group of French prisoners of war was working, and given food and a dress by the woman who owned the land. Now dressed as a German peasant, she discarded her camp overalls but cut off the red triangle and her camp number and kept them safe.

Nearly three weeks after leaving Markkleeberg, during which time she had sometimes had to hide in fields to avoid being seen by German troops, she stumbled across Red Army troops, who treated her well. One was obviously attracted to her but she knew that she could not trust him to help her get back to France, so, hearing that the Americans were also close by, she stole a bicycle and made her way to American-held territory, where she too had some difficulties making the Americans understand her position. A few days later she came across a Frenchman with a list of missing persons and found that her name was on the list. She also learned that her father, RAF pilot Philippe Livry-Level, was in Leipzig, staying with the American officer commanding the area while trying to find her; he had been driving around the area looking for her in a car belonging to the French army. When they finally met up with each other they had a very emotional reunion. Leaving almost immediately, they set off for Paris, where the rest of the family were waiting for news of Monique, and arrived on the evening of 8 May—VE Day—in time for a celebratory family dinner.⁴ A week later Philippe received a cable from one of his old American friends (who would five years later become the father-in-law of Robert F. Kennedy). The cable said: “CONQUERING THE BARBARIANS AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SAFETY AS WELL AS YOUR OWN IS SUFFICIENT GOOD NEWS FOR A SINGLE LIFETIME VIVE LA FRANCE—GEORGE SKAKEL.”⁵

Yvette returned to her home in Caen to recover from her ordeal. Just after VE Day she put on her camp overalls for the last time so that she could have a photograph taken as a lasting memory of what she had lived through, and she then got on with the rest of her life. In November 1947 she was demobilized from the Air Force after having been awarded the Médaille Militaire, the Croix de Guerre with palm, and the Légion d’Honneur by a grateful France. She later married and had two children, Danielle and Yvan, but if she and Didi kept in touch after the nightmares they had endured together, no record of their friendship remains. Didi remembered both the name and the address of her friend, but there were no letters from Yvette amongst the papers found in Didi’s flat in 2010.

On 6 May, the American authorities in Leipzig forwarded the damning report about Didi to the British for their comments. By the time it was received on 12 May the war was over, and Vera Atkins was making lists of those agents who had been accounted for and those who were still missing, including Didi. Buckmaster already knew that Didi had escaped from Markkleeberg; the news had reached him in an unattributed note, which he signed and placed on her file. It said: “Known to have escaped into woods Markleberg near Leipzig April 12/13th. Probably using name Jacqueline Dutertre. 5th Corps First US Army asked to trace her.”⁶

As Didi’s claim to be an SOE agent had been given a low priority by the Americans, their report hadn’t been compiled until she had already been in their custody for three weeks. Happily for her, the SOE acted much more rapidly. On reading what the American officer had said about her, it was immediately evident that it described one of their missing agents. Despite having asked the 5th Corps, First US Army, to trace Didi, it was not the Americans but Vera Atkins in London who recognized the veracity of her story. Didi had been found at last.

On hearing the news, Buckmaster added another note to Didi’s file: “Not the same stamp as her sister, but a conscientious worker. Rather apt to frivol and difficult to keep on a serious plane, but she did all that was asked of her and we are truly thankful to hear of her reported safety.”⁷ Why Buckmaster formed such an opinion of Didi, before she had returned from Germany and been through the debriefing process and given a full account of what she had been through, is difficult to fathom. To say that she was “not the same stamp as her sister” seems to disclose more about Buckmaster’s opinion of Jacqueline than it does about Didi.

Once the war was over the task of locating and repatriating missing agents had begun. The SOE sent two two-man teams to Germany, each team carrying a long list of the people they were hoping to find. One of the men in each team was tasked with keeping the list chained to his wrist at all times and each list contained approximately 600 names. When it was discovered that Didi was in Leipzig, being held by the Americans on suspicion of being a German spy, one of the teams was contacted and went immediately to rescue her. The two Army officers, Major Denis Newman and Captain Rollo Young, had already reached Weimar in their search for agents, and, according to Captain Young, it was his colleague who found Didi. They had

spent some time at nearby Buchenwald concentration camp and were now touring smaller camps individually.

We had accreditation to the American forces and he [Major Newman] had no difficulty extracting her and bringing her to the Christliche Hospice where we were billeted. We got her some informal American WAAC [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps] uniform and she stayed with us I think for two nights. We then got her on a plane to England but I don’t know where.

There was a poignant moment on the first evening. We depended on American rations but had got some small addition locally, eggs I think. As we set out to cook supper, she said in a tiny voice “Could I do that, it will be heaven to be in a real kitchen.”

She spoke of her sister Jacqueline but did not know much about what had happened to her.⁸

The officers listened to everything that Didi was able, or wanted, to tell them about what she had been through and she recalled that they were “extremely nice and very sympathetic.”⁹ They took her to the aircraft that would bring her back to England, telling her that another Army officer would meet her at the transit stop in Brussels and he would ensure she got to England as soon as possible. Captain Young gave her a note to carry, to safeguard her from further difficulties:

The bearer Cadet Ensign Eileen Nearne is a British Officer employed by MOI (SP) war office. She has been given instructions by me to report back to London and in view of the treatment she had received while a prisoner in German hands may she be given every help please.

Her credentials may be verified by telephoning Major Sherren at Welbeck 7744 London.

R.S. Young CAPT. (BR) “T” Force. Att. 12 Army.

When she arrived in Brussels the officer was there to greet her and listened to her story. Then he waved her off on the final part of her flight to England, where she arrived on 23 May 1945. The document given to her by Captain Young also had a small penciled note that said “15.45 Croydon.” Whether it was written by him or by the officer in Brussels, it is likely to be the time that Didi’s flight was due to arrive at Croydon airport, which was still the main airport for London in 1945. Didi recalled how, after the aircraft landed and the doors opened, she “had the joy and emotion of seeing my colonel [Buckmaster], who came to greet me.”¹⁰

Didi’s war was now officially over. She had only been away for 15 months but the horrific experiences she had endured during that time would haunt her for many more years to come—perhaps for the rest of her life.