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The Lost Women Spies S01E04 (2025) [Full Movie] [Official Release]Full EP - Full
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00:07April 1945, the war is entering its brutal final stages.
00:17The Nazis are surrounded as the UK and US advance into Germany from the west
00:26and the Soviets lay siege to Berlin from the east.
00:33As the Allied forces sweep through Europe, liberating the citizens,
00:41they begin to uncover the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
00:50In London, the Allied advance brings news for Vera Atkins
00:57as one of her lost women spies, Yvonne Bazden arrives back
01:04at Euston railway station, but many of her agents remain missing,
01:10presumed dead, like Violet Sabo, who left her one-year-old child to fight the Nazis,
01:20or headstrong Noor Inayat Khan, who many said was unsuitable to be an agent.
01:26Are you ready?
01:27Yes, Miss Atkins.
01:29Vera begins the hunt to find her agents, dead or alive.
01:37Answer me!
01:38But she can't do it alone.
01:42So she turns to Britain's elite fighting service,
01:49the S.A.S., the S.A.S., and specialist Nazi hunter, Major Bill Barkworth.
02:01The S.A.S.
02:01The S.A.S.
02:03The S.A.S.
02:06The S.A.S.
02:07The S.A.S.
02:08Veronica Davies
02:08The S.A.S.
02:31it's the 28th of April 1945 the Ravensbrück concentration camp for
02:38women in northern Germany 90 kilometers north of Berlin SOE agent Odette Sansom is in solitary
02:49confinement but the camp is about to be overrun by the Soviet Red Army at this point in the war
03:00the
03:01Germans are completely on the back foot they've got the Russians attacking from one side the Red
03:05Army and they've got the Americans and the British from the other side Himmler has given the order
03:12that all witnesses to the horrors of the camp must be killed the man who has come for Odette is
03:24Fritz
03:24Surin get up move yes yes out out out Fritz Surin was the commandant of Ravensbrück concentration camp
03:42it was a women's only camp and Surin had complete control of everything that went on within it so
03:47the forced labor programs that the women would be sent out into the roundups for the executions and
03:53also the medical experiments that were carried out at Ravensbrück he would oversee those and have an
03:59understanding of what that meant Odette is about to see daylight for the first time in six months but her
04:09life hangs in the balance
04:21Surin flees the Soviet liberation of his camp driving south of Berlin towards the U.S. Army line
04:33as the Red Army and the Americans get closer to Ravensbrück the commandant Surin panics because at this
04:41point he knows he is going to get captured by one army or the other and he's going to make
04:48that decision
04:49himself he's going to pick a side and so he goes for the Americans and the British this is who
04:53he aims for
04:56Surin takes Odette with him believing she is the perfect bargaining chip to win him freedom
05:06when Odette was captured she gave the surname of her network chief Churchill as her own surname
05:13convincing Surin that she is related to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
05:19hands up hands up but Surin is about to get a nasty shock
05:32don't fire identify yourselves this is a dead Churchill don't shoot get out this is a dead Churchill the
05:44niece of Winston Churchill don't fire who are you
05:53my name is Odette Sanson I'm a member of the British special operations executive
06:04this man is a war criminal
06:12can you imagine what Surin would have thought because immediately Odette announces that not only is
06:18she not Churchill's niece or any relation to him but she's an SOE agent and she just confesses
06:25everything this key information that he's been after for ages it must have been incredibly frustrating
06:29and also humiliating for him Odette's final act of humiliation is to steal Surin's bag containing his
06:39personalized pistol she hands him over to the Americans watches while he's taken in takes his bag which has a
06:47pistol and his other belongings and hands it over in London to Vera Adkins it would have been a huge
06:54relief to finally get to safety it would also be crucial because she knew about other agents she could
07:01then give crucial information to Vera Adkins 8th of May 1945 the Nazis surrender victory in Europe
07:24in London thousands pour into the streets to celebrate as Churchill announces peace across the continent
07:34for the SOE it appears much of their work is done
07:41but for Vera her hunt is just beginning Odette arrives back in London she meets with Vera to debrief her
07:52and to see if
07:53she can help track down the lost women's spies it's so good to have you back thank you
08:08after they arrested me I was kept in prison in Paris
08:19then the Gestapo came
08:25just tell us
08:30I didn't tell them anything
08:36they seem to know so much
08:42about the circuits
08:44who was involved where when
08:51and then they took me over the border into Germany
08:56Karlsruhe
08:58with other women
09:02Karlsruhe
09:02and finally Ravensbrück
09:32Karlsruhe
09:34Karlsruhe
09:34Odette
09:45Odette describes seven female agents that she remembers from Karlsruhe
10:02Odette describes seven female agents that she remembers from Karlsruhe
10:09Noura Nyerkan was one of Vera's favorite agents one of the people she seems to really have cared about when
10:15she was in training there was some question mark as to whether or not Nora was good enough for the
10:20job because she seemed to be so kind she said she could never lie and yet Vera was really the
10:25one who gave the final approval and said no you're going to go and she'll be fine and it'll work
10:36and Vera seems to have had a very guilty conscience very deeply felt question as to what had happened to
10:44this delightful young woman who she really had been responsible for sending to France
10:53but no
10:55but no
10:58don't take my word for it though
11:01ask the b**** at the prison
11:04Becker
11:07Fraulein Becker
11:09she ran the place
11:13if anyone knows
11:15she will
11:21I think Vera's reaction to starting to uncover the stories of these women and to trace them
11:26to Karlsruhe must have come as a real shock to her. To understand the dehumanizing process
11:36that they'd been put through right from their arrest and now they're in solitary confinement.
11:43These women that she would have last seen on an airfield in England full of life and full of hope
11:47and excitement for their missions suddenly in this horrible world having experienced some brutal
11:53things already and just starting to unravel their stories and wondering what became of them after
12:00they left this prison at Karlsruhe. Thanks to Odette Vera has a major breakthrough in
12:10intelligence. It's important for Vera not only professionally but also personally.
12:18In a way although Vera never had children herself she does kind of have maternal qualities here in her investigation.
12:34Vera has the prison in Karlsruhe in southern Germany as the last location for at least seven women.
12:44Vera also knows about the Ravensbruck women's concentration camp situated in northeastern Germany.
12:54Ravensbruck was a concentration camp just north of Berlin and unlike every other concentration camp
13:00it was for women. It was particularly horrifying for the sensibilities of people in the 1940s as well
13:07where women are meant to be kept out of combat out of war and treated with some level of humanity.
13:12Ravensbruck was a particular horrific site to end up in.
13:20It's from here that three agents including Yvonne Bazden and Odette Sansom have come back alive.
13:33Ravensbruck is also the last known location for young mother and widow Violette Szabo.
13:47But there is one of Vera's agents that has not been spotted at either a prison or a camp.
13:54Nor Inayat Khan.
14:02There's a generally held sense that Noor amongst the others might be alive.
14:10And so she realises too that there's a tremendous amount of pressure on her
14:14that if she's going to find her missing agents she's going to have to do it fast.
14:19Vera can't travel to Germany and continue her investigations due to her low rank.
14:27So she enlists the help of an army unit who are hunting Nazis across post-war Germany.
14:34A unit that was founded just a few years before.
14:38The S.A.S.
14:54The S.A.S. or Special Air Service are an elite commando unit founded during the height of the war.
15:03The S.A.S. were formed in the North African desert.
15:06And the concept behind their kind of operations were these fast hit-and-run missions
15:10that they were deploying in these Willis jeeps which were very manoeuvrable and nimble.
15:14And they were heavily armed with mounted machine guns.
15:17And the idea was to carry out these hit-and-run raids largely targeting Italian and German airfields.
15:25And they were extremely successful in the North Africa campaign.
15:29So in those 18 months or so that they soldiered there,
15:32the S.A.S. had destroyed 387 proven enemy warplane kills.
15:37That's a spectacular achievement.
15:41But in the winter of 1942, Hitler fights back.
15:47His Nazi high command issues the so-called commando order.
15:53What the command order said was that any parachutist,
15:57so any allied parachutist, that could be S.A.S., it could be commandos,
16:01it could be special operations executive agents.
16:03Any of those captured behind the lines, whether in uniform or out of uniform,
16:08whether fighting or not fighting, whether trying to surrender or not,
16:12would be kept alive only for as long as it took the Gestapo and the S.A.S. to interrogate
16:17them
16:17and find out what they knew, and then they'd be shot out of hand.
16:24In other words, murdered.
16:28And what that meant for the S.A.S. is if you were captured, it was a death sentence.
16:35Despite the order, the S.A.S. continue their raids
16:39and are a key part of the Allied's success in northern France that sees the Nazis defeated.
16:49With the end of the war, S.A.S. Major Bill Barkworth and a team are sent to Germany
16:55to hunt down the Nazis who carried out the commando order and bring them to justice.
17:04Major Eric Bill Barkworth is an extraordinary figure in World War II,
17:08and especially within Special Forces history.
17:11He's eccentric, he's single-minded, he's a maverick, he's a rule-breaker.
17:16He's one of those very, very archetypal individuals who can think the absolute unthinkable.
17:22But the other thing about Barkworth as well,
17:23which is key to how he develops as a character during the war,
17:27is he's got this unshakable moral compass.
17:29His sense of right and wrong is absolutely inflexible.
17:37Barkworth has commandeered a private villa, the Villa Daegler,
17:43in Garganau, near Karlsruhe, on the edge of the Black Forest.
17:51And he is here on a special mission for the S.A.S.
17:59On the 12th of August, 1944, an S.A.S. team was dropped behind enemy lines
18:06in the Vosges mountains of eastern France to hit the Nazis before an Allied advance.
18:14But the team were tracked down, and 31 soldiers were captured.
18:26After months of interrogation,
18:30the soldiers were taken to the woods, stripped and shot.
18:38Such a loss of life would have a profound effect on everyone in the S.A.S.
18:45When you are serving in a unit like the S.A.S. in World War II,
18:49you forge these bonds of brotherhood with your fellow operators,
18:52which are extremely, extremely powerful and close.
18:56You read the accounts from people at the time,
18:58or you interview veterans, as I have,
19:00and you speak about those kind of relationships,
19:02they are very, very, very special.
19:05It's the kind of spirit that means you will lay down your life
19:09for your fellow brother-in-arms, and that's what so often happens.
19:12They are very, very special.
19:14They are very, very special.
19:18They are very, very special.
19:20Barkworth is determined to find those responsible
19:24for the deaths of the 31 S.A.S. soldiers.
19:31Chief among them is Hans Kieffer, the head of the S.D.
19:40the nazi intelligence agency in paris a man vera also believes may know what happened to her lost
19:50women spies so vera shares the photos of her agents with barkworth in the hopes he can help
19:59her both barkworth and vera their investigations led them to one name and that was hans kieffer
20:09he was in charge of the sd he was responsible for all of the investigations that the gestapo
20:15and the sd were doing in paris so he was responsible for the interrogation of what
20:20the agents and what the soldiers of the sas went through
20:26he was a spider at the center of the web issuing all these orders for interrogating and this is
20:32the man that they were desperate to find but as the atrocities of kieffer and other nazis come
20:39to light people back in the uk begin to ask some difficult questions
20:52vera receives a letter alerting her to the actions of violette sabo's father charles bushel
21:02violette has a child called tanya and bushel wants to know when the baby's mother will return
21:33bushel is talking to his mp and giving interviews to the newspapers about his
21:39missing daughter for vera and the soe this could be a major problem vera is in a very difficult
21:51situation because suddenly the war's over and these young women who've gone off to serve somewhere and
21:58their families don't know anything about what they really did in the soe aren't coming home
22:07violette sabo's father who's been left with her infant daughter is starting to ask questions is
22:12starting to push for answers what's happened to my daughter why hasn't she come home and there are
22:17others starting to step forward and say listen you know we've heard nothing we don't know where
22:21they were serving we don't know what part of the world they've ended up in we don't know why
22:24they're not home and so there starts to become this pressure from family members and friends and
22:29other acquaintances of these young women who've just suddenly vanished and vera has another problem
22:38she has a new boss head of soe f section maurice buckmaster has returned to his civilian role of public
22:50relations manager at the ford motor company he is replaced by new broom
22:56vera captain norman mott please have a seat a man who comes from the soe security section
23:08and whose main interest is in keeping things secret a mark doesn't help vera very much he doesn't see
23:17this as the sort of passionate necessity that vera sees it as and she's now started to get
23:22information about the camps and she's pushing to see if she can get a chance to have some sort of
23:31contact or interrogate the heads of these camps where her agents might have ended up
23:39and yet she's given the cold shoulder she's really effectively told
23:43that this isn't of interest to the government this is not of interest to her former colleagues
23:48and would she please just leave it alone
23:56so it's really tense for vera she doesn't know how much power she will have to carry on this
24:01investigation she needs to find out if there are agents surviving in these camps she has to find them
24:07before they are dead or gone or any evidence of them is wiped out so the timing is crucial and
24:13she
24:14is basically racing against the clock vera has to fight to convince mott and the war office to allow
24:22her to go to germany and speed up the hunt for her missing spies
24:29letters from agents relatives asking difficult questions puts pressure on the home office
24:38and after months of lobbying vera gets her answer
24:45vera will be given the rank of flight officer in the women's auxiliary air force allowing her to travel to
24:53germany but she is told that she has just four days to demonstrate she can get results
25:03the rank of flight officer in the women's auxiliary air force
25:14december 1945
25:19vera's destination is berlin a capital city in ruins
25:28a city conquered by the soviet union
25:34in among the destruction of germany vera has just a few days to prove her worth to the war office
25:46vera's first mission is to identify the grave of f section's male agent clément
25:53who is believed to have died of tuberculosis at a hospital north of berlin
25:59many women were sent to germany post-war but mostly in secretarial roles or in a way to assist
26:05with the men of the armed forces who were trying to reconcile germany but vera was there in a totally
26:11different capacity she had a mission that she wanted to fulfill
26:20and although she was probably very nervous and had a sense of trepidation she really had to mask
26:25that and to go forward with an air of confidence and to prove that she was the right person to
26:32uncover
26:32the stories of the missing agents
26:35but vera has a problem jumeau's grave is most likely in soviet-controlled germany north of berlin
26:43the country is split into zones under control of the us the uk france and the soviet union
26:57at a checkpoint in book vera is stopped by a soviet sentry and her progress is halted
27:18in russian
27:19vera is blocked from entering the soviet zone
27:26if vera fails here she knows there is no chance that mott and the war office
27:31would allow her to continue her investigations
27:37but then vera addresses the sentry in russian
27:43something the sentry would not have been expecting
27:48they come to a russian checkpoint and she speaks in russian and it must have been a real shock because
27:53for him she was a member of the waft you know she was a lady in a blue uniform and
28:00suddenly she's speaking
28:01russian which would have been something he would have been completely unprepared for
28:06vera somehow not only speaks russian
28:11but she does so with a level of fluency that the sentry lets them through
28:18vera is able to continue her journey into the soviet zone thanks to her unexpected ability to speak russian
28:35at the hospital vera questions the staff
28:44and they direct her to the location of jumo's grave
28:51within the first day of her time in germany vera proves to the war office and to mott that her
28:58investigations get results now she can move on to the main reason for her journey ravensbruck
29:19the women's camp
29:2590 kilometers north of berlin
29:32ravensbruck is a hideous camp which was set up specifically to hold women and tens of thousands
29:40of women died there i think over 50 000 women were imprisoned there
29:48ravensbruck is of particular interest of vera because she interviewed odette who'd come out of
29:54ravensbruck who had told her about her agents who were there so ravensbruck seems to be the place
30:00the concentration camp where a lot of her agents disappeared
30:05vera is here to interrogate the commandant fritz suren ravensbruck camp is the camp which odette
30:13left alive it is also the last known location of vera's missing agent violette sabo along with two
30:22others lillian rolf and denise block suren holds the key to not just one but possibly the lives of three
30:31of her agents the pressure is on
30:38vera's not particularly experienced yet at interrogations and she knows he has information
30:47he knows everything that went on in the camp and if there were special prisoners considered to be
30:52agents he would have known
30:59how many english women were at the camp
31:06there were no english women at the camp
31:11odette is english
31:14she was a special prisoner for whom i had special responsibilities because we thought she was
31:22related to churchill
31:25so the other english women how many were there
31:32i already told you there were no others i have testimony that there were
31:48answer me
31:53i have nothing else to say
32:00soren offers vera nothing
32:13without any new evidence vera leaves ravensbruck and returns to london empty-handed
32:29back in london vera gets some news that could prevent her from ever finding her agents
32:35have a read please
32:40she is informed that f section is to be closed down permanently
32:48norman martin tells vera that she's to wind down she's to close the office and really nobody's
32:55very interested in what's happening to these agents of hers
33:02there is no sense that there should be accounts from surviving agents which is what we see from other
33:09military intelligence departments so there's no accountability there's no learning from the
33:15mistakes of the past soe was so embarrassed by some of its mistakes that it was just going to hush
33:23everything up and close it down as quickly as possible
33:28if f section is shut down it would see vera without the mandate to find her lost women spies
33:36they would remain missing presumed dead
33:41but for vera this wasn't acceptable it wasn't fair it wasn't fair it wasn't fair on them it wasn't
33:46fair on their families and so she was determined to find out what had happened particularly to the
33:52young women agents that she had personally sent to france
34:03what vera needs is new evidence that will shock her bosses into letting her continue
34:15to find out what's going on in the future and to find out what's going on in the future
34:21vera receives word from sas major barkworth about evidence from a secret concentration camp
34:30a camp that has been liberated and filmed by u.s forces
34:37known as nazweiler struthoff the camp is hidden in the vosge mountains of eastern france close to the german border
34:52it is the only camp the nazis build in france a camp built to destroy the french resistance
35:05on the 7th of december 1941 hitler passes an order code named night and fog
35:14this secret order means anyone believed to be endangering german security
35:19can be abducted at night and without trial taken to nazweiler
35:26people would be according to the nazi order turned into mist
35:33it's a way of punishing people that was more feared than any other
35:41but it's what barkworth includes next in his report that has the most shocking impact
35:47on vera's hunt for her lost women spies
36:01vera reads barkworth's interrogation report of a former prisoner at nazweiler franzberg
36:28berg
36:28berg tells barkworth he worked in the prematorium as a stoker
36:34one day in july 1944 berg and the other stokers are told to expect some english women
36:46from his crematorium cell he witnesses their arrival
36:56france gives a detailed deposition he describes these english women who come and on the night
37:03he says that the head of the crematorium has told him to light the fires and take it to the
37:09hottest
37:09point by 9 30 pm they're hearing that these girls are going to be killed by lethal injection
37:20they see three women being dragged these are the english women two are unconscious one of them
37:26seems to be moving there's groans and grunts and one even speaks and says purkwa
37:32they are then dragged into the crematorium they can't see anymore and they say later that one of
37:37the women was alive and had scratched one of the men who had come then they heard the crematorium doors
37:43being shut and they knew it was all being fired up after that their silence
37:55it's horror at what these girls would have gone through there is no way when they prepared them for
38:00their training for the torture that might lie ahead they would have envisaged something like this
38:10they would have gone through there is no way that they would have gone through the crematorium
38:10after being shown vera's photographs of her missing spies berg says that he believes one of the
38:16women brought to the crematorium is nor inayat khan
38:25vera would have been absolutely horrified and they thought that this could have been nor as well i mean
38:30horrified for all the girls and the fact that maybe this is what happened to nor is something that
38:39really haunted her
38:40the fact that this is what happened to nor is it that this is what happened to nor is it
38:52that
38:52armed with berg's testimony from natsweiler vera heads to her superiors
38:59she will not give up on her women
39:11berg's testimony makes disturbing reading for the british security services
39:23whitehall would be deeply troubled by the evidence that vera is actually gaining of the sheer horror
39:29of the concentration camps because let's not forget that the public don't know that women were sent
39:36behind enemy lines whitehall would not want this highly secret organization the soe knowledge of it to
39:44come out but even more sensitive and potentially a public outcry to hear that women have been dropped
39:52into these dangerous areas and that some of them hadn't come back and have been horrifically tortured
40:00after seeing berg's testimony mi6 agreed to fund vera for another three months of investigations
40:07in the hope that vera can keep the story of the lost women spies out of the public eye
40:16replication of the lost women's
40:17it was
40:17that's
40:17that's
40:17that's
40:18that's
40:19that's
40:22that's
40:40it's
40:42it's
40:44that's
40:44army headquarters in germany the war crimes unit was based at bad or in house and which was the
40:51headquarters of the british army on the rhine so it was a very important place and the war
40:58crimes unit was really trying to find high-ranking nazis people who would have been involved in what
41:04we would call war crimes so with executions with maltreatment of prisoners with the concentration
41:10camp system in general and the idea would not only be to find these officers but also to find
41:16evidence about crimes against humanity that they had committed so various murders or procedures
41:24that they had followed that were against the geneva convention vera will support the british judges
41:32in their evidence gathering
41:40vera's main role within the war crimes unit was to trace the missing soe agents and her job would be
41:45to trace them as best she could this was going to be exceptionally difficult for her as the prisoners
41:51were classified as nacht and naval night and fog so most records would technically have disappeared if
41:58they'd ever been kept in the first place but her job was to trace them through the various
42:02prison systems that they'd been through had they gone into camps and not only to trace them but to
42:08trace the people responsible for their imprisonment and murders if that was going to be the case
42:16vera begins by tracing back her agent's whereabouts before they get to the camp at natsweiler
42:24and her attention turns to a witness who could hold the key
42:28it's a name given to vera by odette sansam it is the chief warder of karlsruher prison frulein becker
42:43vera leaves the war crimes office headed for karlsruher prison in the hope that finding becker might give
42:51her the information she needs
42:56frulein becker would have been really important for vera to get her hands on she'd been identified in
43:01one of the affidavits of the surviving agents anyway and vera needed to go out and find her
43:07because as the chief wardress she would have received all new prisoners coming into karlsruher
43:12she would have met them personally taken away their personal effects made a record of what they were she
43:18would have also recorded their names so be they real names or their aliases she would have recorded
43:24the names of the soe women going into that prison
43:34on arrival at the prison vera discovers that frulein becker hasn't even left her post
43:42as chief warder vera can now begin her questioning
43:52karlsruher was technically a civilian prison so it wasn't really used for political prisoners which
43:58arguably the soe agents were when they arrived at karlsruher they were put into solitary confinement
44:09food would have been pretty grim and very scarce they would have only had the clothes they
44:14were standing up in and we know that the cells were quite sparse a single bed maybe a bucket for
44:20a toilet so it was a very grim place i didn't want them here this is a regular prison not
44:29for politicals
44:30like them they should never have been here
44:45them
45:08yes
45:12all of them
45:16and they all left in july 1944
45:22no the one you mentioned adet she left then the others it was later in the year
45:31so these seven in the photographs they didn't leave in july that's what i said they left later
45:41i need to see your records now please we don't have any i can't imagine that
45:50the french when they came they destroyed everything smashed it all up
45:58all gone
46:07thank you frulein becker i'm sure i'll see you again soon
46:17vera doesn't have the written records she needs as evidence but she does have something more important
46:25becker's testimony directly contradicts the evidence of the crematorium stoker at natsweiler
46:31franzberg
46:34berg berg stated that four women are killed at the natsweiler camp in july 1944
46:41but becker claims that including nor
46:44seven of vera's lost women spies are still in karlsruhe prison later than july 1944
46:52so those women could not have been the ones killed at natsweiler
46:57vera already has an eyewitness testimony from natsweiler saying that nor is dead
47:03and now she has another eyewitness testimony saying no that is not true she is here
47:08she needs some sort of cooperating evidence to prove where nor is one way or the other
47:15vera leaves becker and karlsruhe with the chance that some of her lost women spies could still be alive
47:28so
47:40so
47:42so
47:42so
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