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The Germans had his radio, his codes, and his name, but they still could not get everything they needed from Frank Pickersgill. After he and another Canadian were stopped at a checkpoint in Dhuizon, the capture of this Winnipeg classics scholar turned into a long intelligence struggle inside occupied France.
Picked to build a resistance network in the Ardennes, Pickersgill instead became the focus of German counter-intelligence at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris. The SD could use his wireless sets and forged messages, and even run operations in his name, but London kept asking for the one thing no forgery could replace. This wartime history story follows the fourteen-month contest between a Canadian agent and the interrogators who tried to break him.
For viewers searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military intelligence, resistance operations, and prisoner interrogation stories, this is a gripping account of occupied France and the hidden battle behind the front lines. It is also a strong fit for military history, World War 2 documentaries, and historical narration about espionage, deception, and courage under pressure.
Picked to build a resistance network in the Ardennes, Pickersgill instead became the focus of German counter-intelligence at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris. The SD could use his wireless sets and forged messages, and even run operations in his name, but London kept asking for the one thing no forgery could replace. This wartime history story follows the fourteen-month contest between a Canadian agent and the interrogators who tried to break him.
For viewers searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military intelligence, resistance operations, and prisoner interrogation stories, this is a gripping account of occupied France and the hidden battle behind the front lines. It is also a strong fit for military history, World War 2 documentaries, and historical narration about espionage, deception, and courage under pressure.
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LearningTranscript
00:00June 26th, 1943. Friends Prison, on the southern edge of Paris.
00:05A prisoner is scratching words into the wall of his cell.
00:09He is 28 years old. He has been in German hands for five days.
00:15He came into France by parachute, wearing civilian clothes,
00:19which means the men holding him can shoot him as a spy on any morning they choose.
00:23He scratches his name, then his nationality, then his rank, then the date.
00:32Frank Pickersgill, Canadian, Army officer, 26, 6, 43.
00:41Hold on to those words. Nobody outside this building will read them for almost two years.
00:47When a copy of them reaches London in March of 1945,
00:52they will be one of the very few traces anyone there has of where this man went.
00:58Now look at his position that week, because it is worse than it sounds.
01:03The Germans already hold almost everything a captured agent is trained to protect.
01:08They have his partner.
01:10They have his partner's wireless sets, the crystals, the codes.
01:14They have the security checks, the small, deliberate mistakes an operator builds
01:19into every message to tell London he is still free.
01:23Those checks were written down on paper, and the paper was in the car when it was stopped.
01:29They even have letters in plain English that the two Canadians were carrying to other agents.
01:34So ask yourself the question the rest of this story turns on.
01:38If the Germans hold the radio, the codes, and the checks,
01:43what could they possibly still need from Frank Pickersgill?
01:48Keep that question in your head, because the Germans were asking it too,
01:52and it took them a while to find the answer.
01:55The answer is something they could not take out of a car.
01:58For the next 14 months, the German Security Service in Paris will try to get it.
02:03They will try cells.
02:05They will try comfort.
02:07They will try a good meal and a bottle of wine.
02:10They will ship him across Germany into occupied Poland and bring him back again.
02:14And in January of 1947, the man who ran that effort, Hans-Josef Kiefer,
02:21head of counterintelligence at 84 Avenue Foch,
02:24will sit in a British cell across from a woman who had come from London to find her missing agents.
02:31She will ask him which of his prisoners refused him.
02:35He will give her a very short list.
02:39There is a Canadian on it.
02:41If you believe the Canadians who fought this hidden war deserve to be remembered,
02:46subscribing helps their stories reach more people.
02:52Frank Pickersgill came from Winnipeg.
02:55He had a master's in classics from the University of Toronto,
02:59spoke French, German, Latin, and Greek,
03:02and had spent the late 30s in Europe selling articles to Canadian newspapers that did not always pay him.
03:09He had met Jean-Paul Soft in Paris and wanted to translate him.
03:14And the Germans had already locked him up once before.
03:17Remember that.
03:19It matters later.
03:20When he volunteered for this work, he explained himself in a letter.
03:24I'm convinced that as far as this war is concerned,
03:27there are certain jobs I could do better than anybody but about a handful of people, he wrote.
03:34That such jobs would be dangerous is just one more thing in their favor.
03:39His partner was Ken McAllister from Guelph, Ontario,
03:43a Rhodes Scholar who had placed first out of 142 candidates on the British bar exams
03:51and then walked away from the law to enlist.
03:54McAllister was the wireless operator.
03:57Pickersgill was the organizer.
04:00They had chosen each other.
04:02On the night of June 15, 1943, a woman from the French section of the Special Operations Executive
04:10drove the two of them to the airfield herself.
04:14Her name was Vera Atkins.
04:17Keep that name, too.
04:19She is the woman who will sit across from Kiefer four years later.
04:24Their job was to build a new network in the Ardennes, near Sedan, under the codename Archdeacon.
04:32Pickersgill was Bertrand.
04:35McAllister was Valentin.
04:37Here is the part they did not know.
04:39Three days before the drop, the French agent who would meet them on the ground,
04:44Pierre Cullioli, had asked London to cancel.
04:48There were German troops around the drop zone.
04:52The head of the big Prosper network around Paris, Francis Suttle, overruled him.
04:59The flight went ahead.
05:01The two Canadians came down in the Loire Valley, near Romorantin.
05:06Cullioli was there to meet them, with an agent named Yvonne Rudelat.
05:11For six days they stayed in the area while their French papers were finished.
05:16Nobody in London understood yet that the network they had landed into was being torn apart,
05:23arrest by arrest, by the same German service that would soon be very interested in Frank
05:29Pickersgill.
05:30One French agent who met them that week, Pierre Reynaud, chose to travel alone rather than ride
05:37with them.
05:39Ken McAllister's French accent worried him.
05:42On the morning of June 21st, Cullioli and Rudelat put the two Canadians in a car and set out
05:48north, toward Beaujancy, with the Canadians' radio sets and codes on board.
05:54The road ran through a village called Douison.
05:57There was a German checkpoint in it.
05:59By nightfall, all four people in that car would be in German hands.
06:03And one object in that car would turn out to be worth more to the Germans than any of
06:08the four of them for the next ten months.
06:11June 21st, 1943.
06:14Douison, a village in the forest country south of the Loire.
06:20The car stops at the barrier.
06:22German soldiers order all four people out.
06:26The two Canadians are taken into the town hall for questioning.
06:30Cullioli and Rudelat are left outside with the car.
06:34Think about what Frank Pickersgill has to work with inside that room.
06:39Identity papers barely a week old.
06:42A cover story he has never tried on a real German.
06:47His own French, which is very good.
06:50And Ken McAllister's French, which is not.
06:54Historians still argue over what gave them away.
06:58Whether it was an accent, bad luck, or a betrayal somewhere up the line.
07:04What matters is the result.
07:06The Germans did not let them go.
07:09Outside, a soldier came back and ordered Cullioli and Rudelat in as well.
07:15Cullioli decided in a second.
07:18He put his foot down and drove.
07:20The Germans fired after the car.
07:23A bullet struck Ivan Rudelat in the head.
07:26About ten kilometers on, the car left the road and ended up in a field, and both of them were
07:32taken.
07:32Cullioli and Rudelat survived that bullet.
07:35She did not survive the war.
07:38She died at Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945.
07:42Cullioli lived.
07:44Then the Germans went through the car.
07:46I want you to look at what they found, item by item, because each one matters to the question we
07:52are chasing.
07:53Ken McAllister's wireless sets, the crystals that tie a set to its frequencies, the codes,
08:00the security checks, written out on paper, against every instruction the two men had been given,
08:06and a bundle of letters in plain English, carried from London for agents already working in France.
08:13Here is what that adds up to.
08:15A wireless set is a voice in London's ear.
08:18A code is the language the voice speaks.
08:22A security check is the password that tells London the voice is still free.
08:27Hold all three and a German operator does not have to break anything.
08:31He just sits down and starts tapping.
08:34So the first German move in this story is almost lazy.
08:38They do not need Frank Pickersgill to say a word.
08:42The car has already talked for him.
08:45That does not mean they left him alone.
08:47The two Canadians were taken to Blois, then to Fren.
08:51They were beaten.
08:53They were questioned.
08:53Forrest Yeo Thomas, a British agent who would later share a camp with them and hear the story firsthand,
09:01summed it up in four words.
09:03Neither of them squealed.
09:05Now go back to the wall in Fren, because you can read it differently.
09:10A man caught in civilian clothes with a radio in the car is, to the Germans, a spy.
09:16A spy has no rank and no army behind him.
09:20Five days after Duzon, before anyone had asked him to be anything else,
09:25Pickersgill scratched into the plaster what he considered himself to be.
09:30Canadian.
09:31Army officer.
09:33Three days after the Canadians were taken, the Germans arrested Francis Suttall in Paris,
09:38the same man who had overruled the request to cancel their drop.
09:42His wireless operator, Gilbert Norman, went with him.
09:47Prosper, the largest British network in France, came apart.
09:52Hundreds of resistance members and dozens of agents were rounded up that summer.
09:57The two Canadians had parachuted into the middle of the worst defeat the French section would suffer in the whole
10:04war.
10:05The service behind it was the counterintelligence section of the Zischeheizdienst, the SD,
10:12at 84 Avenue Foch, in one of the most elegant streets in Paris.
10:17Its chief was Hans-Josef Kiefer.
10:21His wireless specialist was Dr. Josef Goetz.
10:24And, after the war, Goetz explained exactly what they did with Ken McAllister's radio.
10:32They gave it to a man named Josef Plaque, who spoke fluent English, and had him trained on it.
10:39By August of 1943, Plaque was in the Ardennes, near Sedan, exactly where the Canadians were supposed to be.
10:47And, here, the Germans ran into a problem.
10:51Archdeacon did not exist.
10:54The two Canadians had been arrested before they could recruit a single person.
10:59There was no network to take over.
11:01So, Kiefer and Plaque built one.
11:05From nothing.
11:06Stop on that for a moment.
11:09London sent two Canadians to raise a resistance network in the Ardennes.
11:14The Germans raised it for them, in their names.
11:19Goetz said later that when the two Canadians turned up in the area, played by Kiefer's men, nobody noticed.
11:28Local Frenchmen, who believed they were joining a British network, were joining a German one.
11:34And London answered.
11:37Over the coming months, McAllister's set asked for arms, explosives, money, and more agents.
11:45The parachutes came down onto fields the Germans had chosen, into the arms of reception committees the Germans had organized.
11:54In his cell in Frenn, Frank Pickersgill had no way of knowing any of this.
11:59His name was commanding a network he had never seen.
12:04So you might reasonably ask why the Germans kept him alive at all.
12:09They had his radio.
12:11They had his code.
12:12They had his name.
12:14And they were using it.
12:16What was left?
12:17The answer arrived over McAllister's own set.
12:21London asked for something a radio cannot do.
12:26It wanted one of its agents in Paris to meet the two Canadians in person, at a café on the
12:33Champs-Elysees.
12:35The Germans had Pickersgill's set, his code, and his name.
12:40Now they needed his face.
12:42And the agent London was sending to look at it was a young woman the Gestapo had been hunting all
12:49summer.
12:50The basement of the Café Colisee on the Champs-Elysees.
12:54A young woman comes down the stairs to meet two Canadians she has never seen.
13:00Her name is Noor Inayat Khan.
13:04London knows her as Madeleine.
13:07She is a wireless operator.
13:09And after the arrests of that summer, she is one of the very few British agents left in Paris who
13:16is still free and still transmitting.
13:18Her orders are simple.
13:21Make contact with the new men from London, Bertrand and Valentin.
13:28The man waiting for her as Valentin is Joseph Plaque, the SD's English speaker, the one working Ken McAllister's radio
13:37in the Ardennes.
13:38The man waiting for her as Bertrand, as Frank Pickersgill of Winnipeg, is a Gestapo officer named Carl Holdorf.
13:48Holdorf had worked on an ocean liner before the war and picked up a transatlantic accent there.
13:55In front of a woman who had never met the real man, it would do.
14:00Noor did not know the Canadians had been arrested.
14:03She had never seen their faces.
14:06She sat down with two German officers and treated them as colleagues.
14:11And for the first time, the Germans got a long, calm look at hers.
14:17They did not arrest her that day.
14:19They wanted to see where she went.
14:21By the middle of October, she was in Kiefer's building on the Avenue Foch.
14:27Why does this scene belong in a story about Frank Pickersgill?
14:31Because of what it tells you about the machine he was up against.
14:35That machine could copy a radio.
14:38It could copy a code.
14:40And in a cafe basement, in front of a stranger, it could copy a man.
14:46That is the second layer.
14:48The Germans had found a way to use Frank Pickersgill without needing Frank Pickersgill at all.
14:54So the question gets sharper.
14:57If a former liner hand can pass for him across a cafe table, what could the Germans possibly want from
15:04the real one?
15:05Here is the weakness in what they had built.
15:08And I want you to keep it in mind for the rest of this story.
15:11An imposter is only safe in front of people who have never met the original.
15:17And in London, there were people who knew Frank Pickersgill very well.
15:22There is something else the Germans had to reckon with.
15:26This was not the first time they had held him.
15:29Go back to June of 1940.
15:32France falls.
15:34A young Canadian writer living in Paris is suddenly an enemy alien.
15:38The Germans lock him up with other British subjects in an old barracks at Saint-Denis, on the northern edge
15:46of the city.
15:46He stays there for well over a year.
15:50He does not wait to be exchanged.
15:53A hacksaw blade comes into the camp baked inside a loaf of bread.
15:57One day, a German officer leaves his key in a lock,
16:01and Pickersgill and the men with him get into the censor's office,
16:06which has a barred window opening onto the street.
16:09They saw at those bars for four hours.
16:13It is loud work.
16:15Nobody comes.
16:17When the bars give, they climb through and walk away in the morning crowd.
16:22For months, he lives quietly in the French countryside.
16:25Then he makes his way south to the American consulate in Lyon, in the unoccupied zone.
16:32An American diplomat there, Constance Ray Harvey, remembered how he looked when he walked in.
16:39Lean, hungry, and with practically no clothes.
16:43He waits for an exit permit and spends the time helping the Americans put out a French-language newsletter.
16:50Then Lisbon.
16:52Then Britain.
16:53And in Britain, he is offered a safe desk job in Ottawa.
16:57He turns it down.
16:58He takes a commission in the Canadian Intelligence Corps instead and asks to go back.
17:05Put those pieces side by side.
17:07Locked up by the Germans, he cuts his way out.
17:10Offered a desk, he refuses it.
17:13Every time someone hands Frank Pickersgill a comfortable way out of this war, he says no.
17:19Hold on to that pattern, because the Germans are about to offer him the most comfortable way out of all.
17:26But not yet.
17:27Through the rest of 1943, they do not need to.
17:31Pickersgill sits in Frenn while his name runs a network in the Ardennes.
17:40Back in London, at least one senior officer warned that summer that nobody on the ground seemed to know anything
17:49about Archdeacon
17:50and that it should be treated as compromised.
17:53The head of the French section, Maurice Buckmaster, rejected that warning and kept the circuit running.
18:01So far then, every German move has worked, and not one of them has required the prisoners' cooperation.
18:08Then came Christmas.
18:11The Germans did what any careful operator would do.
18:15They sent London a seasonal greeting over Macalester's set in Frank Pickersgill's name.
18:22The right code.
18:23The right checks.
18:25Nothing in it a cipher clerk could fault.
18:28In the French section offices on Baker Street, a junior staff member named Kay Gimple read that message,
18:35and she knew at once that Frank Pickersgill was in German hands.
18:41The thing that gave him away was not in the code.
18:45It was in the man.
18:46Baker Street, London.
18:48The last days of December, 1943.
18:53Kay Gimple was a junior member of the French section staff.
18:57She knew Frank Pickersgill.
19:00She knew how he wrote, how he talked, what he found funny.
19:04And when the Christmas greeting from Bertrand came across her desk, correctly coded, correctly
19:10checked, she read it and felt the floor drop away.
19:15She explained it later in a single thought.
19:18If everything had been alright with Frank, he would have sent something more personal.
19:24That is the whole of it.
19:26The message was not wrong.
19:28It was empty.
19:29It had the shape of a greeting and nothing of the man inside it.
19:35And here is the part that should stay with you.
19:39Kay Gimple told no one.
19:41She was junior, and she was sure the head of the section would not listen to someone in her position.
19:48Maurice Buckmaster read the same message as perfectly normal and sent back his thanks.
19:55Over in the Ardennes, Joseph Plaque kept tapping.
19:59But notice what has just happened.
20:02For the first time in this story, the German machine has failed at something.
20:07It copied the radio.
20:09It copied the code.
20:11It copied a face for a stranger in a cafe.
20:14It could not copy the man for someone who knew him.
20:18Kiefer's whole operation now depended on nobody in London listening too closely to the people
20:26who had known Frank Pickersgill.
20:28That put the real Frank Pickersgill back at the center of the board.
20:34To understand what the Germans tried next, you need to see how Kiefer usually worked.
20:40His building on the Avenue Foch was not only a place of beatings, it was also a place of comfort.
20:48And the comfort was the more dangerous of the two.
20:52Take a British agent named John Starr, captured that July.
20:57By late September, he was on the Avenue Foch, and Kiefer had found a use for him.
21:04Starr was an artist.
21:06Kiefer had him redraw a map and charts of British operations in France.
21:12In return, Starr had a private room in the building and took his meals in the officer's mess.
21:19Starr told himself he was gathering intelligence for London if he ever got out.
21:24But the Germans got their charts.
21:26That was the method.
21:28You do not ask a man to betray anyone.
21:31You ask him to help with something small.
21:34You give him a room, a clean shirt, a hot dinner, and a reason.
21:39And then, something a little less small.
21:43In the first months of 1944, Frank Pickersgill was taken out of Fren and moved to a house
21:50the SD used as a holding prison in Paris, on the Place des Etats-Unis.
21:56Kiefer wanted him for the radio game.
21:59The stakes were plain.
22:01The Germans wanted the safe houses and drop zones that would bring the next agents down
22:06into their hands.
22:08And they wanted the prisoners' help to make the deception hold.
22:12In exchange, he would get what Starr had.
22:16Comfort.
22:17Food.
22:18Probably his life.
22:21According to the account Ken McAllister's and Pickersgill's biographer later pieced together,
22:27it came to a head over a meal.
22:29There was food on the table.
22:31There was a bottle of wine.
22:33Frank Pickersgill picked up the bottle and broke it.
22:36He went for the guard with the jagged neck and put him down.
22:39He rushed the others.
22:41Then he did the same thing he had done at Saint-Denis.
22:45The thing he always did when he was shut in.
22:48He went for the window.
22:50It was on the second floor.
22:52He threw himself through it and dropped into the street.
22:56He landed badly.
22:58The fall shattered his elbow.
23:00He got up anyway and ran.
23:02And German guards opened fire from behind him.
23:06Two bullets hit him.
23:08He went down on a Paris pavement and they took him back.
23:12Stop and look at that from Kiefer's side of the table.
23:16Here is a man who has had eight months in Frenn,
23:19who has every reason to want a room and a dinner and a future.
23:24And the moment the Germans put that future in front of him,
23:28he turns the bottle on them and jumps out of a window.
23:32Kiefer had a word for prisoners like that.
23:35He would use it on Frank Pickersgill to Vera Atkins three years later.
23:40Not yet.
23:42They took him to a hospital.
23:44Surgeons operated on the elbow under general anesthetic.
23:48And here, the story turns somewhere you might not expect.
23:53Because when Frank Pickersgill woke up,
23:56the thing that frightened him most was not the arm,
23:59and not the bullets,
24:01and not what the Germans would do to him now.
24:04It was the anesthetic.
24:06He had been unconscious, in German hands,
24:10for as long as the operation took.
24:13And he could not remember whether, while he was under,
24:17he had said anything.
24:19He would carry that fear into the cell
24:22next to a Frenchman named Marcel Rousset
24:25and tell him about it through the wall.
24:28Remember Rousset.
24:29He is the one man in this story
24:31who will get out of that building alive and free.
24:34And what Pickersgill told him
24:36is going to travel a very long way.
24:40Because while Pickersgill lay in that hospital,
24:43an officer of the French section in London
24:45had stopped believing in Archdeacon.
24:48His name was Jerry Morrill.
24:50And Morrill had worked out the one test
24:53the Germans could not pass
24:55without the real Frank Pickersgill.
24:57He wanted to hear his voice.
25:00Paris, the Place des Etats Unis,
25:03the spring of 1944.
25:06The Frenchman in the next cell was Marcel Rousset,
25:10a captured agent of the French section.
25:13Through the wall,
25:14and in the moments when the guards let prisoners speak,
25:17Frank Pickersgill told him everything.
25:20How he and Ken McAllister
25:22had come down by parachute in June.
25:25How, as he put it,
25:27they had been taken three days later
25:28in a village full of SS.
25:31The window.
25:32The elbow.
25:33The two bullets.
25:35The hospital.
25:36And the operation.
25:38And the gap in his memory.
25:40And the question he could not answer
25:42about what he might have said
25:44while he was under.
25:46Notice what Pickersgill is doing there.
25:48He is not confessing to the Germans.
25:51He is reporting to his own side
25:54through the only channel he has left,
25:56a man in the next cell.
25:59Hold on to that.
26:00It is going to matter.
26:01On April 18th, 1944,
26:06the Germans emptied the house.
26:08Rousset counted 19 men loaded onto a bus.
26:12Frank Pickersgill was one of them.
26:15Ken McAllister was another.
26:17So was Gilbert Norman,
26:18Prosper's wireless operator,
26:20limping badly from three bullets of his own.
26:23At Vers-sur-Marne station,
26:25they were joined by a group of women from Freze,
26:28and the train went east.
26:30Four days.
26:31Maastricht, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Dresden, Breslau.
26:36At Breslau, the women were taken off.
26:39The men went on to a prison at Rawicz
26:42in occupied Poland.
26:43From Kiefer's point of view,
26:45that should have been the end of Frank Pickersgill,
26:48a man who will not help you,
26:50out of the way,
26:51a thousand kilometers from Paris,
26:53while his name goes on working for you in the Ardennes.
26:57Then London asked the one question
26:59Kiefer could not answer without him.
27:02Jerry Morel, in the French section,
27:04had decided that Archdeacon was rotten.
27:07He was not the first to suspect it,
27:10but he did something about it.
27:11He arranged a test that no codebook could pass.
27:15There was a device called the S-phone,
27:18a radio telephone
27:20that let a man in an aircraft circling overhead
27:23talk in plain speech
27:25to an agent standing on the ground below.
27:29Morel would fly over the Ardennes himself,
27:33and Frank Pickersgill,
27:35organizer of Archdeacon,
27:37would pick up the handset and talk to him.
27:40Now you can see the whole of what the Germans had built,
27:44and where it stopped.
27:47A wireless set sends dots and dashes.
27:51A code turns words into numbers.
27:54A Gestapo man with a liner accent
27:57can fool a stranger across a cafe table.
28:02None of that survives a voice in the ear
28:05of someone from your own side who knows you.
28:09So this is what Kiefer needed.
28:12Not information.
28:14Not a confession.
28:16Not a map.
28:17He needed Frank Pickersgill
28:20to stand in a field in the Ardennes,
28:23at night,
28:24hold a handset,
28:26and speak to London
28:27as if he were free.
28:30According to Kiefer's own people,
28:32he went to Berlin for approval,
28:35and had Pickersgill brought back
28:37from Ravich to Paris
28:38for exactly that.
28:41Think of what was being offered.
28:43Every German method we have seen so far
28:45had been a demand.
28:47This one was barely an inconvenience.
28:50A few sentences in English,
28:52his own voice,
28:53in his own language,
28:55to his own side.
28:56And then, very likely,
28:59the room,
29:00the dinner,
29:00the clean shirt,
29:01the chance to see the end of the war.
29:04Frank Pickersgill refused.
29:07Flatly.
29:08So Kiefer went to his favorite prisoner.
29:11He asked John Starr,
29:13the artist with the private room,
29:15to pretend to be Pickersgill
29:17on the S-phone.
29:18And Starr agreed,
29:20much to Kiefer's delight.
29:22Then, at the last moment,
29:24Starr backed out.
29:25Whatever else he had drawn for the Germans,
29:28he would not do this.
29:31Kiefer had run out of Englishmen.
29:33So, he sent one of his own men
29:35into that field,
29:36knowing, according to his radio specialist,
29:39that the man's German accent
29:41would very likely give him away.
29:43On May 8, 1944,
29:47Jerry Morrell was in the aircraft
29:48over the Ardennes with the S-phone.
29:50A voice came up to him from the ground.
29:53It spoke English with a strong, guttural accent.
29:57Morrell's verdict was one sentence.
29:59It was not Pickersgill.
30:02Stop on that,
30:03because this is the moment
30:05the whole German operation is exposed.
30:07And it is exposed by an absence.
30:11The Germans had his set,
30:13his codes,
30:15his checks,
30:16his name,
30:17and a stand-in for his face.
30:19The one thing they could not get
30:21was the one thing he controlled.
30:24His voice was his,
30:26and he would not lend it to them.
30:29So, when London finally listened,
30:31it heard a German.
30:33And here is the cost of honesty.
30:36It still was not enough.
30:39Back in London,
30:41Maurice Buckmaster put the strange voice down
30:43to atmospheric conditions.
30:46He ordered the drops to Archdeacon to continue.
30:49Morrell had the truth in his hands,
30:52and the man above him would not take it.
30:55So, the refusal did its work,
30:56and it did not save anyone that month.
30:59That is the hard part of this story,
31:02and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
31:04But Kiefer now knew something
31:07he had not known before.
31:09London had begun to listen.
31:11The game in the Ardennes
31:13had a crack running through it,
31:15and only one man could have closed it.
31:18And he was sitting in a German cell,
31:20with a shattered elbow,
31:22having said no.
31:24So Kiefer tried one more time,
31:26on May 19th,
31:28the men at Ravitch were sent back to Paris.
31:31And this time,
31:32the Germans did not bring a guard to the table
31:34with Frank Pickersgill.
31:36They brought a drink.
31:38Paris,
31:39the last days of May, 1944.
31:42The men from Ravitch were back on the Place des Etats-Unis,
31:46and Marcel Rousset was back with an earshot of Frank Pickersgill.
31:51What Pickersgill told him this time was short.
31:55He and Ken McAllister had been questioned again,
31:58and this time,
31:59during the questioning,
32:00the Germans had got them drunk.
32:03Put yourself at that table for a moment.
32:05Eleven months a prisoner.
32:07An elbow that has been shot and broken and stitched back together.
32:12A cell.
32:13A bucket.
32:14Prison soup.
32:15And now a glass that keeps being filled,
32:18by men who are suddenly friendly,
32:20asking easy questions in a warm room.
32:23This was not the cellar.
32:25This was the other method,
32:27the one that had worked on so many others.
32:30Loosen the man,
32:31and let him drift into helping.
32:33We know what Kiefer wanted from that evening,
32:36because we know what he had lost on May 8th.
32:39And we know what he got,
32:41because three years later,
32:42he will say it himself.
32:44Nothing.
32:45Now step back and look at what you have seen,
32:48because this is where the picture finally comes together.
32:51The Germans took Frank Pickersgill's radio in June.
32:55They took his codes and his checks the same afternoon.
32:59By August they had his network,
33:02built from scratch in his name.
33:04By the autumn they had a man to sit at a cafe table and play him.
33:09At Christmas they had his signature on a greeting to London.
33:13None of that needed his consent.
33:16Every time they needed something more,
33:18the thing they needed moved closer to the man himself.
33:22First his paper,
33:24then his name,
33:25then his face,
33:27then his voice.
33:28And at the end of that line,
33:30there was only one thing left
33:32that they could not seize,
33:34copy,
33:35or fake.
33:36Frank Pickersgill,
33:38standing in a field of his own free will,
33:41speaking to his own side,
33:43as if nothing had happened.
33:45That is what Kiefer was trying to turn.
33:48Not a secret,
33:49a man.
33:50And that is the one thing the man had decided,
33:54a long time before douison,
33:56that nobody would ever get.
33:59In a camp at Saint-Denis,
34:01in an office with a desk in Ottawa that he left empty.
34:05On a wall and friend,
34:08in five words,
34:09Canadian,
34:10army officer.
34:13On June 6th, 1944,
34:16the guessing ended for both sides.
34:18That morning,
34:19around 14,000 Canadians came ashore at Juneau Beach in Normandy.
34:25Some of them would be fighting in Cannes within weeks,
34:28not 200 kilometers from the house where Pickersgill was being held.
34:33And that same day,
34:35the Germans in Paris finally closed the game.
34:38Over the captured sets,
34:40signed with the name of the Gestapo,
34:43they sent London their thanks
34:45for the large deliveries of arms and ammunition.
34:48A message over Ken McAllister's code went further.
34:52Some of the agents, it said,
34:54had had to be shot.
34:56Others had agreed to work with the Germans.
35:00Read that line again,
35:01because it was sent in the name of the two Canadians.
35:05It was meant to land in London like a final insult.
35:09It is also,
35:10as far as Frank Pickersgill is concerned,
35:13simply untrue.
35:15Whoever else that sentence was about,
35:17it was not about the man
35:19who broke the bottle
35:20and would not pick up the phone.
35:23Maurice Buckmaster replied in a light tone,
35:26as if the Germans were a rival club
35:28that had lost its nerve before the end.
35:31It is not his finest moment.
35:34But for the first time in a year,
35:37nobody in London could pretend about Archdeacon any longer.
35:42And then, two days later,
35:44something happened that Kiefer
35:46had not planned for.
35:48On June 8th, 1944,
35:51Marcel Rousset escaped.
35:54He got away from the Germans
35:56and went to ground in Paris,
35:57and he took with him
35:59everything he had heard through that wall.
36:13Frank Pickersgill had been reporting to his own side the whole time,
36:18through the only man who could carry it.
36:21Now that man was out.
36:23Do you see what that does to the story?
36:26For a year, the Germans had spoken in Frank Pickersgill's name.
36:31Now, for the first time,
36:33Frank Pickersgill's own account of what happened to him
36:37was free in Paris,
36:38in the head of a man who would hand it to the British.
36:42The Germans had owned his voice on the air.
36:45They had never owned his story.
36:47There is one honest question left hanging,
36:51and I won't skip it.
36:53Pickersgill himself did not know what he had said under the anesthetic.
36:58Rousset could only repeat that he did not know.
37:00Nobody on the Allied side could answer that question in 1944.
37:07Only one man could.
37:08The man who had read every interrogation report
37:12that crossed his desk on the Avenue Foch.
37:15He would answer it in a British cell in 1947,
37:19in front of Vera Atkins, without being asked.
37:22But in August of 1944,
37:25with the Americans and the British breaking out of Normandy,
37:28and the Canadians grinding down toward Falaise,
37:31Kiefer had one decision left to make about Frank Pickersgill.
37:35He made it on August 8th.
37:38The prisoner who would not be turned was no further use to him,
37:42so he put him on a train.
37:44August 8th, 1944.
37:47Paris.
37:49The Allied armies were closing on the city,
37:51and the Germans were clearing their prisons.
37:54That morning, the captured agents of the French section
37:57were loaded onto buses and driven to a train heading east.
38:02Frank Pickersgill was on it, his elbow still not right.
38:06So was Ken McAllister.
38:09So were the women, among them Violette Sabo,
38:13chained by the ankle to another agent, Denise Bloch.
38:17Somewhere along the line,
38:19Allied fighters came in low and shot up the train.
38:22It was disabled.
38:24None of the prisoners were hit,
38:26but the guards scattered,
38:28and the men were left in the cars,
38:30handcuffed in pairs and desperate with thirst.
38:34Violette Sabo, still chained to Denise Bloch,
38:37dragged herself along the corridor with water for them.
38:40Hold that picture for a second.
38:43The prisoners the Germans were moving east
38:46were still acting like a unit,
38:48still looking after one another,
38:50under fire, in chains.
38:52Forrest Yo Thomas was on that transport too,
38:56and he remembered the two Canadians
38:58on the long, slow journey that followed.
39:00They talked, about almost everything,
39:04and they sang to keep their spirits up.
39:08Fourteen months in German hands,
39:11and the man the Germans could not turn
39:13was singing in a cattle car.
39:16The trucks took the men onto Neue Brem,
39:19a Gestapo camp on the edge of Sabochen.
39:23The guards chained the prisoners at the legs
39:26and made them run in small circles until they fell.
39:30Some of the agents wanted to break out right there.
39:34Others argued against it.
39:36They believed they would be treated as prisoners of war,
39:40not as spies.
39:42The plan was dropped.
39:44Around midnight on August 16th,
39:47the men arrived at Buchenwald.
39:49They were told they would be gassed.
39:52Instead, they were stripped, shaved,
39:55disinfected, and put into block 17.
39:59Somewhere in that block,
40:00the Canadians found a third Canadian,
40:03another agent of the French section,
40:05named Roméo Saburin,
40:07a young wireless operator from Montreal.
40:11And now I want you to notice something
40:12about where the contest stands.
40:15For 14 months,
40:17from Douison to the Avenue Fauche,
40:19the Germans had been trying to get something
40:21out of Frank Pickersgill.
40:23In Buchenwald, for the first time,
40:25nobody was asking him anything.
40:28No interrogators.
40:29No interrogators.
40:31No glasses of wine.
40:33Kiefer had shipped him out of his life
40:35because he had nothing left to try.
40:37That is the shape of a German defeat,
40:40not a German victory.
40:42The prisoner had outlasted every method they had.
40:46On September 9th, 1944,
40:49the Commandant of Buchenwald received an order from Berlin.
40:5316 of the prisoners in block 17
40:55were to receive what the order called
40:57special treatment.
40:59The list was read out.
41:01Frank Pickersgill was on it.
41:04Ken McAllister was on it.
41:06Romeo Saburin was on it.
41:08Within days,
41:08the sixteen men were taken to the cellar
41:11of the camp crematorium.
41:13A French scientist held in the camp,
41:16Serge Balachowski,
41:17later pieced together from prisoner workers
41:20what was done to them.
41:22They were beaten first,
41:24as was the custom there.
41:26Then they were hanged from hooks
41:28on the cellar wall,
41:29and their bodies were burned.
41:31The dates in the records vary.
41:34The official date for Frank Pickersgill
41:36is September 14th, 1944.
41:40He was 29 years old.
41:42I am not going to dwell on that cellar.
41:45There is only one more thing from it
41:47you need to hear,
41:48and it comes from Balachowski.
41:51He said every one of the sixteen
41:53behaved with great courage,
41:55and not one of them showed weakness.
41:58Not one.
41:59Some of the men in Block 17 survived.
42:03Maurice Southgate got himself
42:05into the camp hospital
42:06by faking an illness.
42:08Forrest Yeo Thomas,
42:10with two others,
42:11was smuggled through the typhus block
42:13under the name of a dead Frenchman.
42:15Everything we know
42:17about the Canadians' last weeks,
42:19we know because those men
42:21lived to tell it.
42:22Now go back to the question
42:24you have been carrying
42:25since the wall at Fren.
42:26The Germans had Frank Pickersgill's radio,
42:30his codes,
42:31his name,
42:33a stand-in for his face.
42:35They had his body in the end.
42:38What they never had,
42:39for a single sentence,
42:41was his voice speaking for them.
42:43And his own account
42:45of what had happened to him
42:46was already out of their reach,
42:49in Marcel Rousset's head,
42:51on its way to London.
42:53But the record was still incomplete.
42:55In the autumn of 1944,
42:58nobody in Ottawa or London
43:00could say where Frank Pickersgill was,
43:03or whether he was alive.
43:05And the one question
43:07he had carried out of that Paris hospital
43:09was still open.
43:11Had he said anything under the anesthetic?
43:14Only the Germans knew.
43:16The Germans were finished with Frank Pickersgill.
43:20The Canadians were not.
43:22In the spring of 1945,
43:24three things would happen.
43:26A copy of a wall would arrive in London.
43:29A Canadian ambassador
43:31would climb onto a plane to Weimar
43:34to look for his countrymen.
43:36And the man from the Avenue Foch
43:38would find himself in a cell
43:40across a table
43:42from the woman who had driven
43:44Frank Pickersgill to the airfield.
43:46March, 1945, London.
43:49A package from the French authorities
43:51lands on Vera Atkins's desk.
43:54Inside are papers from Friends Prison,
43:57a register,
43:58and a copy of an inscription
44:00found scratched into the wall of a cell.
44:03Frank Pickersgill, Canadian,
44:06Army officer, 26-6-43.
44:11It is the first hard proof
44:13London has that the two Canadians
44:15were taken in June of 1943,
44:18not months later
44:19as the French section
44:20had let itself believe.
44:22For a whole year,
44:24Archdeacon had been a German operation.
44:26The woman who drove him to the airfield
44:29is now holding five words he wrote
44:31five days after he was caught,
44:34the words he chose
44:35when he had no idea
44:36whether anyone would ever read them.
44:39He was telling the truth
44:40about himself to the wall,
44:42so it would be there
44:43for whoever came looking.
44:44And someone did come looking.
44:46In mid-April, 1945,
44:50days after American troops
44:52reached Buchenwald,
44:53Georges Vanier,
44:54Canada's ambassador to France,
44:56flew to Weimar.
44:58He was not there
44:59as a tourist of horror.
45:01He was there
45:02to find out
45:03whether Canadians
45:04had been held in that camp.
45:06He found the records.
45:08Frank Pickersgill,
45:10Ken McAllister,
45:13executed.
45:15Vanier came home
45:16and went on the radio
45:17to tell Canadians
45:18what he had seen.
45:20The Germans had done
45:21everything they could
45:23to make these men vanish
45:24without a trace.
45:26A Canadian walked
45:27through the gate of the camp,
45:29picked up the paper,
45:30and brought their names home.
45:33That left one man
45:34and one question.
45:38January, 1947.
45:40A prison cell
45:41in Wuppertal
45:42in the British zone
45:43of Germany.
45:44Hans-Joseph Kiefer,
45:46former head
45:47of counterintelligence
45:48on the Avenue Foch,
45:50sits across a small table
45:52from Vera Atkins.
45:54She has tracked him
45:55to Garmisch,
45:56where he had been working
45:57as an odd job man
45:58in a hotel.
46:00Now she wants to know
46:01what happened
46:02to her agents.
46:03She asks him
46:04which prisoners
46:05he had managed
46:06to bring round
46:07to working for him.
46:08He does not like
46:10that question,
46:11but he gives her
46:12an answer that is worth
46:13more than the names
46:14he holds back.
46:16Most of them,
46:17he says,
46:18cooperated in one way
46:19or another.
46:20Not always willingly.
46:23Most.
46:24And then he names
46:26the few who did not.
46:27He names Madeline,
46:29Noor Inayat Khan,
46:31the woman from the cafe.
46:32He names France Antelme,
46:35a Mauritian agent
46:36of the French section.
46:39And he names Bertrand,
46:40the Canadian,
46:42Frank Pickersgill,
46:44the one, he adds,
46:46who was shot trying to escape.
46:48Stop and listen
46:49to who is saying that.
46:51Not Pickersgill's brother,
46:53not his university,
46:55not a grateful country.
46:56The man who held
46:58every report
46:59from every interrogation,
47:01who had his radio,
47:03his code,
47:04his name,
47:05his voice on the S-phone,
47:07and a year to work on him.
47:09That man,
47:10in a British cell,
47:12with no reason left
47:13to flatter anyone,
47:15put Frank Pickersgill
47:16on the shortest list he had.
47:18That also answers
47:19the question Pickersgill
47:21took out of that Paris hospital
47:22and never got to settle.
47:24Whatever happened
47:25while he was under the anesthetic,
47:27the Germans got nothing
47:29they could use.
47:30The one witness
47:31who would know
47:32said so.
47:34Kiefer signed
47:35a two-page statement
47:36in a heavy, slanting hand,
47:38and Vera Atkins
47:40signed beneath him.
47:41It stayed secret
47:43for more than 50 years.
47:45In June of that same year,
47:47the British hanged him.
47:49Not for anything done
47:51to Frank Pickersgill
47:52for the murder
47:53of captured British SAS soldiers.
47:56As for Frank Pickersgill,
47:58France awarded him
48:00the Legion of Honor
48:01after his death.
48:03His name is on the SOE memorial
48:05at Valençay,
48:07on an obelisk at Romeronten,
48:09near the field
48:10where he came down,
48:11and on the Grosbeek Memorial
48:13in the Netherlands,
48:15among the Canadians
48:16with no known grave.
48:18The University of Toronto
48:19planted a garden
48:21for him and Ken McAllister
48:23beside Soldier's Tower.
48:25In Guelph,
48:27there is a park
48:27named for McAllister.
48:29In 1996,
48:31Manitoba named a lake
48:33after Pickersgill.
48:34His letters
48:35were published
48:36in 1948.
48:38The woman he had loved,
48:39Allison Grant,
48:41married another man
48:42after the war
48:43and kept,
48:44for the rest of her life,
48:46a bracelet her family believed
48:47had come from him.
48:49So go back one last time
48:51to that cell in Fresnay
48:53on June 26, 1943.
48:56A man from Winnipeg
48:58in civilian clothes,
49:00five days in German hands,
49:03no army around him,
49:05no uniform,
49:06a British organization
49:08that would not believe
49:09he was caught,
49:11an enemy
49:11that already had
49:13his radio,
49:14his codes,
49:15and his name,
49:16and would soon
49:17have a stand-in
49:18for his face.
49:19Everything was taken from him,
49:21except one thing,
49:24and that one thing
49:25was the whole
49:26of what the Germans needed.
49:28He would not lend them
49:30his voice.
49:31And so the man
49:32who ran the interrogations
49:34finally wrote down
49:35what Frank Pickersgill
49:37had scratched
49:38into the plaster
49:39on the fifth day.
49:41Canadian.
49:42Army officer.
49:43Thank you for spending
49:45this time
49:45with Frank Pickersgill
49:46and Ken McAllister.
49:48If you think
49:49what these two Canadians did
49:51deserves to be remembered,
49:53a like genuinely helps
49:54their story
49:55find more people.
49:56And if you'd like
49:58to hear more stories
49:59like this,
50:00we're here every week.
50:01If your father,
50:03your grandfather,
50:04or your uncle
50:05served in the Second World War,
50:07I'd be honored
50:08to hear about him
50:09in the comments.