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The Lost Women Spies S01E04 (2025) [Full Movie] [Full Episodes]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.
01:57Is not Hai!
01:58To me!
02:07You.
02:12Okay.
02:31It's the 28th of April 1945, the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women in northern Germany, 90 kilometers north of Berlin.
02:45S.O.E. agent Odette Sansom is in solitary confinement, but the camp is about to be overrun by the
02:57Soviet Red Army.
02:59At this point in the war, the Germans are completely on the back foot.
03:03They've got the Russians attacking from one side, the Red Army, and they've got the Americans and the British from
03:07the other side.
03:08Move! I'm on my way!
03:10Himmler has given the order that all witnesses to the horrors of the camp must be killed.
03:21The man who has come for Odette is Fritz Surin.
03:26Get up! Move! Yes! Up, up, up! Yes! Out, out!
03:36Come on!
03:38Fritz 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.
03:47So, the forced labor programs that the women would be sent out into, the round-ups for the executions, and
03:53also the medical experiments that were carried out at Ravensbrück.
03:56He would oversee those and have an understanding of what that meant.
04:01Move! Come on!
04:02Odette is about to see daylight for the first time in six months.
04:08But her life hangs in the balance.
04:21Surin flees the Soviet liberation of his camp, driving south of Berlin, towards the US Army Line.
04:33As the Red Army and the Americans get closer to Ravensbrück, the Commandant, Surin, panics.
04:40Because at this point, he knows he is going to get captured by one army or the other, and he's
04:47going to make that decision himself.
04:49He's going to pick a side, and so he goes for the Americans and the British. This is who he
04:54aims for.
04:57Surin 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!
05:22But Surin is about to get a nasty shock.
05:32Don't fire!
05:35Identify yourselves!
05:37This is Odette Churchill!
05:39Don't shoot!
05:40Get out!
05:42This is Odette Churchill, the niece of Winston Churchill!
05:46Don't fire!
05:48Who are you?
05:53My name is Odette Sanson.
05:57I'm a member of the British Special Operations Executive.
06:04This man is a war criminal.
06:13Can you imagine what Surin would have thought, because immediately Odette announces that not only is she not Churchill's niece
06:20or any relation to him, but she's an SOE agent.
06:23And she just confesses everything, this key information that he's been after for ages.
06:28It must have been incredibly frustrating and also humiliating for him.
06:33Odette's final act of humiliation is to steal Surin's bag containing his personalised pistol.
06:41She hands him over to the Americans, watches while he's taken in, takes his bag, which has a pistol and
06:48his other belongings, and hands it over in London to Vera Adkins.
06:53It would have been a huge relief to finally get to safety.
06:57It would also be crucial, because she knew about other agents.
07:00She could then give crucial information to Vera Adkins.
07:078th of May, 1945.
07:12The Nazis surrender.
07:17Victory 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.
07:47Odette arrives back in London.
07:49She meets with Vera to debrief her, and to see if she can help track down the lost women spies.
07:57It's so good to have you back.
08:08After they arrested me, I was kept in prison in Paris.
08:19Then the Gestapo came.
08:21Ah!
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.
08:53Into Germany.
08:56Karlsruhe.
08:58With other women.
09:02Karlsruhe?
09:03Hm.
09:05And finally, Ravensbruck.
09:33Karlsruhe.
09:34You said there were other women.
09:45Karlsruhe.
09:46You said there were other women.
09:48Things that she remembers from Karlsruhe.
10:00It's an important lead for Vera.
10:09Nora Njerkan was one of Vera's favorite agents,
10:12one of the people she seems to really have cared about.
10:14When she was in training, there was some question mark
10:17as to whether or not Nora was good enough for the job
10:20because she seemed to be so kind.
10:22She said she could never lie.
10:23And yet Vera was really the one who gave the final approval
10:26and 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,
10:40a very sort of deeply felt question as to what had happened
10:43to this delightful young woman
10:45who she really had been responsible for sending to France.
10:53Pretty.
10:55But no.
10:58Don't take my word for it, though.
11:01Ask the b**** at the prison.
11:04Becker.
11:06Fraulein Becker.
11:09She ran the place.
11:12If anyone knows, she will.
11:21I think Vera's reaction to starting to uncover the stories of these women
11:25and to trace them to Karlsruhe
11:27must have come as a real shock to her.
11:33To understand the dehumanizing process
11:36that they'd been put through right from their arrest
11:38and now they're in solitary confinement.
11:43These women that she would have last seen on an airfield in England
11:45full of life and full of hope and excitement for their missions
11:49suddenly in this horrible world,
11:52having experienced some brutal things already
11:54and just starting to unravel their stories
11:58and wondering what became of them
12:00after they left this prison at Karlsruhe.
12:06Thanks to Odette,
12:08Vera has a major breakthrough in intelligence.
12:11It's important for Vera,
12:13not only professionally,
12:15but also personally.
12:18In a way, although Vera never had children herself,
12:22she does kind of have maternal qualities here
12:26in her investigation.
12:34Vera has the prison in Karlsruhe in southern Germany
12:38as the last location for at least seven women.
12:45Vera also knows about the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp
12:50situated in north-eastern Germany.
12:54Ravensbrück was a concentration camp just north of Berlin
12:57and unlike every other concentration camp,
13:00it was for women.
13:01It was particularly horrifying.
13:03For the sensibilities of people in the 1940s as well,
13:07where women are meant to be kept out of combat,
13:09out of war and treated with some level of humanity,
13:12Ravensbrück was a particular horrific sight to end up in.
13:20It's from here that three agents,
13:23including Yvonne Basden
13:24and Odette Sansom,
13:28have come back alive.
13:33Ravensbrück is also the last known location
13:36for young mother and widow,
13:39Violette Sabo.
13:47But there is one of Vera's agents
13:50that has not been spotted
13:51at either a prison or a camp,
13:55Nor Inayat Khan.
14:01There's a generally held sense
14:04that Nor, amongst the others,
14:06might be alive.
14:10And so she realises, too,
14:12that there's a tremendous amount of pressure on her,
14:14that if she's going to find her missing agents,
14:16she's going to have to do it fast.
14:20Vera can't travel to Germany
14:22and continue her investigations
14:25due to her low rank.
14:27So she enlists the help of an army unit
14:30who are hunting Nazis across post-war Germany,
14:34a unit that was founded just a few years before,
14:39the SAS.
14:54The SAS, or Special Air Service,
14:58are an elite commando unit
15:00founded during the height of the war.
15:03The SAS were formed in the North African desert,
15:06and the concept behind their kind of operations
15:08were these fast hit-and-run missions
15:10that they were deploying in these Willis jeeps,
15:12which 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
15:20largely 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 SAS had destroyed 387 proven enemy warplane kills.
15:37That's a spectacular achievement.
15:41But in the winter of 1942,
15:44Hitler 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 SAS,
16:00it could be commandos,
16:01it could be Special Operations Executive Agents,
16:03any of those captured behind the lines,
16:06whether in uniform or out of uniform,
16:08whether fighting or not fighting,
16:10whether trying to surrender or not,
16:12would be kept alive only for as long as it took
16:14the Gestapo and the SS to interrogate them
16:17and find out what they knew,
16:19and then they would be shot out of hand.
16:24In other words, murdered.
16:28And what that meant for the SAS is if you were captured,
16:32it was a death sentence.
16:34Despite the order, the SAS continue their raids
16:39and are a key part of the Allied success in northern France
16:43that sees the Nazis defeated.
16:49With the end of the war, SAS Major Bill Barkworth and a team
16:54are sent to Germany to hunt down the Nazis
16:57who 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,
17:14he's a maverick, he's a rule-breaker,
17:16he's one of those very, very archetypal individuals
17:19who 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.
17:30His sense of right and wrong is absolutely inflexible.
17:37Barkworth has commandeered a private villa,
17:40the Villa Daigler, in Garganau, near Karlsruhe,
17:46on the edge of the Black Forest.
17:51And he is here on a special mission for the SAS.
17:59On the 12th of August, 1944,
18:02an SAS team was dropped behind enemy lines
18:05in the Vosges mountains of eastern France
18:08to hit the Nazis before an Allied advance.
18:14But the team were tracked down,
18:18and 31 soldiers were captured.
18:26After months of interrogation,
18:30the soldiers were taken to the woods,
18:33stripped,
18:34and shot.
18:38Such a loss of life
18:39would have a profound effect
18:41on everyone in the SAS.
18:44When you are serving in a unit
18:47like the SAS in World War II,
18:49you forge these bonds of brotherhood
18:51with your fellow operators,
18:53which are extremely, extremely powerful and close.
18:56You read the accounts from people at the time,
18:58or you interview veterans,
18:59as 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
19:07you will lay down your life
19:09for your fellow brother-in-arms,
19:11and that's what so often happens.
19:20Barkworth is determined to find those responsible
19:23for the deaths of the 31 SAS soldiers.
19:30chief among them is Hans Kiefer,
19:35the head of the SD,
19:40the Nazi intelligence agency in Paris.
19:45A man Vera also believes may know what happened to her lost women's spies.
19:54So Vera shares the photos of her agents with Barkworth in the hopes he can help her.
20:01Both Barkworth and Vera,
20:03their investigations led them to one name,
20:06and that was Hans Kiefer.
20:09He was in charge of the SD.
20:11He was responsible for all of the investigations
20:14that the Gestapo and the SD were doing in Paris.
20:16So he was responsible for the interrogation of what the agents
20:21and what the soldiers of the SAS went through.
20:26He was a spider at the centre of the web,
20:28issuing all these orders for interrogating,
20:31and this is the man that they were desperate to find.
20:34But as the atrocities of Kiefer and other Nazis come to light,
20:40people back in the UK begin to ask some difficult questions.
20:52Vera receives a letter alerting her to the actions
20:56of Violette Sabo's father, Charles Bushell.
21:03Violette has a child called Tanya,
21:05and Bushell wants to know when the baby's mother will return.
21:33Bushell is talking to his MP
21:35and giving interviews to the newspapers about his missing daughter.
21:43For Vera and the SOE,
21:46this could be a major problem.
21:49Vera is in a very difficult situation
21:51because suddenly the war's over,
21:54and these young women who've gone off to serve somewhere,
21:57and their families don't know anything about what they really did in the SOE,
22:01aren't coming home.
22:07Violette Sabo's father,
22:08who's been left with her infant daughter,
22:11is starting to ask questions,
22:12is starting to push for answers.
22:14What's happened to my daughter?
22:15Why hasn't she come home?
22:16And there are others starting to step forward and say,
22:18listen, we've heard nothing.
22:20We don't know where they were serving.
22:21We don't know what part of the world they've ended up in.
22:24We don't know why they're not home.
22:25And so there starts to become this pressure
22:27from family members and friends and other acquaintances
22:30of these young women who've just suddenly vanished.
22:35And Vera has another problem.
22:39She has a new boss.
22:43Head of SOE F section, Morris Buckmaster,
22:47has returned to his civilian role
22:49of public relations manager at the Ford Motor Company.
22:54He is replaced by new broom...
22:57Vera.
22:59...Captain Norman Mott.
23:01Please, have a seat.
23:04A man who comes from the SOE security section
23:08and whose main interest is in keeping things secret.
23:13Mott doesn't help Vera very much.
23:16He doesn't see this as the sort of passionate necessity
23:19that Vera sees it as, and she's now started to get information
23:23about the camps.
23:27And she's pushing to see if she can get a chance
23:30to have some sort of contact or interrogate the heads of these camps
23:35where her agents might have ended up.
23:39And yet she's given the cold shoulder.
23:41She's really effectively told that this isn't of interest to the government,
23:46this 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.
23:58She doesn't know how much power she will have to carry on this investigation.
24:02She needs to find out if there are agents surviving in these camps,
24:06she has to find them before they are dead or gone,
24:08or any evidence of them is wiped out.
24:11So the timing is crucial, and she is basically racing against the clock.
24:17Vera has to fight to convince Mott and the war office
24:21to allow her to go to Germany and speed up the hunt for her missing spies.
24:30Letters from agents' relatives asking difficult questions
24:33puts 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
24:48in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force,
24:50allowing her to travel to Germany.
24:56But she is told that she has just four days
25:00to demonstrate she can get results.
25:15December, 1945.
25:19Vera's destination is Berlin.
25:23A capital city in ruins.
25:28A city conquered by the Soviet Union.
25:34In among the destruction of Germany,
25:36Vera has just a few days
25:38to prove her worth to the war office.
25:46Vera's first mission
25:47is to identify the grave
25:49of F-Section's male agent,
25:52Clément Marc Jumeau,
25:53who is believed to have died of tuberculosis
25:56at a hospital north of Berlin.
25:59Many women were sent to Germany post-war,
26:02but mostly in secretarial roles
26:03or in a way to assist with the men of the armed forces
26:07who were trying to reconcile Germany.
26:10But Vera was there in a totally different capacity.
26:13She had a mission that she wanted to fulfil.
26:20And although she was probably very nervous
26:22and had a sense of trepidation,
26:24she really had to mask that
26:26and to go forward with an air of confidence
26:28and to prove that she was the right person
26:31to uncover the stories of the missing agents.
26:34But Vera has a problem.
26:37Jumeau's grave is most likely
26:39in Soviet-controlled Germany,
26:41north of Berlin.
26:43After the fall of Germany,
26:45the country is split into zones
26:47under control of the US,
26:49the UK, France
26:50and the Soviet Union.
26:56At a checkpoint in Buch,
26:59Vera is stopped by a Soviet sentry
27:01and her progress is halted.
27:18Vera is blocked from entering the Soviet zone.
27:26If Vera fails here,
27:28she knows there is no chance
27:30that Mott and the war office
27:31would allow her to continue her investigations.
27:36But then,
27:38Vera addresses the sentry in Russian.
27:43Something the sentry
27:45would not have been expecting.
27:48They come to a Russian checkpoint
27:50and she speaks in Russian.
27:52And it must have been a real shock
27:53because for him,
27:54she was a member of the WAF, you know.
27:57She was a lady in a blue uniform
27:59and suddenly she's speaking Russian
28:01which would have been something
28:02he would have been completely unprepared for.
28:05Vera, somehow,
28:07not only speaks Russian,
28:11but she does so with a level of fluency
28:13that the sentry lets them through.
28:18Vera is able to continue her journey
28:20into the Soviet zone
28:21thanks to her unexpected ability
28:24to speak Russian.
28:35At the hospital,
28:37Vera questions the staff.
28:43And they direct her
28:45to the location of Jumot's grave.
28:51Within the first day of her time in Germany,
28:54Vera proves to the war office
28:56and to Mott
28:57that her investigations get results.
29:02Now she can move on
29:03to the main reason for her journey,
29:06Ravensbrück.
29:16Ravensbrück.
29:17Ravensbrück.
29:20The women's camp.
29:2590 kilometers north of Berlin.
29:32Ravensbrück is a hideous camp
29:35which was set up specifically
29:37to hold women
29:38and tens of thousands of women died there.
29:42I think over 50,000 women
29:43were imprisoned there.
29:48Ravensbrück is of particular interest to Vera
29:51because she interviewed Odette
29:53who'd come out of Ravensbrück
29:55who had told her
29:56about her agents who were there.
29:58So Ravensbrück seems to be
29:59the place,
30:01the concentration camp
30:02where a lot of her agents disappeared.
30:05Vera is here
30:06to interrogate the commandant,
30:09Fritz Soeren.
30:10Ravensbrück camp
30:11is the camp which Odette left alive.
30:15It is also the last known location
30:17of Vera's missing agent,
30:20Violette Sabo,
30:21along with two others,
30:23Lillian Rolf
30:23and Denise Block.
30:26Soeren holds the key
30:28to not just one
30:29but possibly the lives
30:31of three of her agents.
30:34The pressure is on.
30:39Vera's not particularly experienced yet
30:41at interrogations
30:43and she knows
30:44he has information.
30:47He knows everything
30:48that went on in the camp
30:49and if there were
30:50special prisoners
30:52considered to be agents,
30:53he would have known.
30:59How many English women
31:01were at the camp?
31:06There were no English women
31:08at the camp.
31:11Odette is English.
31:14She was a special prisoner
31:16for whom I had special responsibilities
31:20because we thought
31:21she was related to Churchill.
31:25So the other English women
31:28how many were there?
31:32I already told you
31:34there were no others.
31:38I have testimony
31:40that there were.
31:48Answer me!
31:52I have nothing else to say.
32:00Surin offers Vera
32:02nothing.
32:12Without any new evidence,
32:15Vera leaves Ravensbrück
32:16and returns to London
32:18empty-handed.
32:20I have nothing else to say.
32:24I have nothing else to say.
32:25I have nothing else to say.
32:29I have nothing else to say.
32:29Back in London,
32:31Vera gets some news
32:32that could prevent her
32:33from ever finding her agents.
32:36Have a read, please.
32:40She is informed
32:42that F-section
32:43is to be closed down
32:44permanently.
32:48Norman Morton tells Vera that she's to wind down, she's to close the office, and really
32:54nobody's very 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
33:08from other military intelligence departments.
33:11So there's no accountability, there's no learning from the mistakes of the past.
33:18SOE was so embarrassed by some of its mistakes that it was just going to hush everything up
33:24and 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
33:35spies.
33:36They would remain missing, presumed dead.
33:41But for Vera, this wasn't acceptable.
33:43It wasn't fair.
33:45It wasn't fair on them.
33:46It wasn't fair on their families.
33:47And so she was determined to find out what had happened, particularly to the young women
33:52agents that she had personally sent to France.
34:04What Vera needs is new evidence that will shock her bosses into letting her continue.
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 US forces.
34:37Known as Natzweiler Struthof, the camp is hidden in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France, close
34:44to the German border.
34:46Russia.
34:52It is the only camp the Nazis build in France.
34:57A 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 can be abducted
35:20at night and without trial, taken to Natzweiler.
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 on
35:47Vera's hunt for her lost women spies.
36:01Vera reads Barkworth's interrogation report of a former prisoner at Natzweiler,
36:08Franz Berg.
36:27Bergh 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.
36:45From his crematorium cell, he witnesses their arrival.
36:55Franz gives a detailed deposition.
36:58He describes these English women who come.
37:02And on the night, he says that the head of the crematorium has told him to light the fires
37:08and take it to the hottest point by 9.30pm.
37:12They are hearing that these girls are going to be killed by lethal injection.
37:20They see three women being dragged. These are the English women.
37:24Two are unconscious. One of them seems to be moving.
37:27There's groans and grunts. And one even speaks and says,
37:30Purkhwa.
37:32They are then dragged into the crematorium.
37:34They can't see anymore.
37:35And they say later that one of the women was alive and had scratched one of the men who had
37:40come.
37:42Then they heard the crematorium doors being shut and they knew it was all being fired up.
37:49After that, there's silence.
37:54It's horror at what these girls would have gone through.
37:58There is no way when they prepared them for their training, for the torture that might lie ahead,
38:03they would have envisaged something like this.
38:09After being shown Vera's photographs of her missing spies, Berg says that he believes one of the women brought to
38:17the crematorium is Noor Inayat Khan.
38:25Vera would have been absolutely horrified and the thought that this could have been Noor as well.
38:30I mean, horrified for all the girls.
38:35And the fact that maybe this is what happened to Noor is something that really haunted her.
38:52Armed with Berg's testimony from Natsweiler, Vera heads to her superiors.
38:59She will not give up on her women.
39:11She will not give up on her women.
39:12Berg'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 of the concentration
39:30camps
39:31because let's not forget that the public don't know that women were sent behind enemy lines.
39:39Whitehall would not want this highly secret organisation, the SOE, knowledge of it to come out,
39:45but even more sensitive and potentially a public outcry to hear that women have been dropped into these dangerous areas
39:54and 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.
40:16Vera heads back to Germany.
40:41Vera is assigned to the war crimes unit at the British Army headquarters in Germany.
40:48Vera is assigned to the war crimes unit at the British Army headquarters in Germany.
40:49unit was based at bad or in house and which was the headquarters of the british army on the rhine
40:54so it was a very important place and the war crimes unit was really trying to find high-ranking
41:01nazis people who would have been involved in what we would call war crimes so with executions
41:07with maltreatment of prisoners with the concentration camp system in general and the
41:12idea would not only be to find these officers but also to find evidence about crimes against
41:18humanity that they had committed so various murders or procedures that they had followed
41:25that were against the geneva convention
41:30vera will support the british judges in 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 nabel 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 prison systems
42:03that they'd been through had they gone into camps and not only to trace them but to trace the people
42:08responsible 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
42:51give her the information she needs frulein becker would have been really important for vera to get
42:59her hands on she'd been identified in one of the affidavits of the surviving agents anyway and vera needed
43:05to go out and find her because as the chief wardress she would have received all new prisoners coming into
43:11karlsruher she would have met them personally taken away their personal effects made a record of what they
43:17were but she would have also recorded their names so be they real names or their aliases she would
43:24have recorded the 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 were
44:14standing up in and we know that the cells were quite sparse a single bed maybe a bucket for a
44:20toilet
44:20so it was a very grim place
44:26i didn't want them here this is a regular prison not for politicals like them
44:31they should never have been here
44:45them
45:08yes
45:12all of them
45:16and they all left in july 1944
45:21no
45:23the 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
46:08thank you
46:09thank you fraulein 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
46:32franz berg
46:34berg stated that four women are killed at the natsweiler camp in july 1944
46:40but becker claims that including nor seven of vera's lost women spies are still in karlsruir prison
46:49later than july 1944 so 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 and
47:03now 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
47:15she needs to becker to becker and karlsruir with the chance that some of her lost women spies could still
47:23be
47:23alive
47:24so
48:12Transcription by CastingWords
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