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00:00April 1945 the war is entering its brutal final stages
00:14the Nazis are surrounded as the UK and US advance into Germany from the west
00:24and the Soviets lay siege to Berlin from the east
00:30as the Allied forces sweep through Europe liberating the citizens
00:37they begin to uncover the horrors of Nazi concentration camps
00:46in London the Allied advance brings news for Vera Atkins
00:55as one of her lost women spies Yvonne Bazden arrives back
01:03taking you home at Euston railway station but many of her agents remain missing presumed
01:11dead like Violet Sabo who left her one-year-old child to fight the Nazis
01:19or headstrong nor Inayat Khan who many said was unsuitable to be an agent
01:26are you ready
01:27yes Miss Atkins
01:28Vera begins the hunt to find her agents
01:33dead or alive
01:35answer me
01:38but she can't do it alone
01:41so she turns to Britain's elite fighting service
01:49the SAS
01:52and specialist Nazi hunter Major Bill Barkworth
02:01so
02:06it's the 28th of April 1945
02:30the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women in northern Germany 90 kilometers north of Berlin
02:43SOE agent Odette Sansom is in solitary confinement
02:50but the camp is about to be overrun by the Soviet Red Army
02:58at this point in the war the Germans are completely on the back foot
03:02they've got the Russians attacking from one side the Red Army and they've got the
03:06Americans and the British from the other side
03:08I'm on my way
03:09Himmler has given the order that all witnesses to the horrors of the camp must be killed
03:16the man who has come for Odette is Fritz Surin
03:25Fritz Surin was the commandant of Ravensbruck 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
03:50the roundups for the executions and also the medical experiments that were carried out at Ravensbruck
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
04:07but her life hangs in the balance
04:11Surin flees the Soviet liberation of his camp
04:24driving south of Berlin
04:27towards the US army line
04:31as the Red Army and the Americans get closer to Ravensbruck the commandant Surin panics
04:41because at this point he knows he is going to get captured by one army or the other
04:47and he's going to make that decision himself he's going to pick a side
04:50and so he goes for the Americans and the British this is who he aims for
04:54Surin takes Odette with him believing she is the perfect bargaining chip to win him freedom
05:07when Odette was captured she gave the surname of her network chief
05:11Churchill as her own surname
05:14convincing Surin that she is related to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
05:19hands up
05:22but Surin is about to get a nasty shock
05:33don't fire
05:35identify yourselves
05:37this is Odette Churchill
05:39don't shoot
05:40get out
05:43this is Odette Churchill
05:44the niece of Winston Churchill
05:47don't fire
05:47who are you
05:54my 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
06:17that not only is she not Churchill's niece or any relation to him but she's an SOE agent
06:24and she just confesses everything this key information that he's been after for ages
06:27it 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 personalized pistol
06:42she hands him over to the Americans watches while he's taken in takes his bag which has a pistol
06:47and his other belongings and hands it over in London to Vera Atkins
06:53it would have been a huge relief to finally get to safety it would also be crucial because she knew
06:59about other agents she could then give crucial information to Vera Atkins
07:078th of May 1945
07:12the Nazis surrender
07:18victory in Europe
07:19in London thousands pour into the streets to celebrate as Churchill announces peace across the continent
07:35for the SOE it appears much of their work is done
07:39but for Vera her hunt is just beginning
07:47Odette arrives back in London she meets with Vera to debrief her and to see if she can help track down
07:54the lost women's spies
07:58so good to have you back
08:01thank you
08:02after they arrested me
08:11I was kept in prison
08:15in Paris
08:19then the Gestapo came
08:25just tell us
08:26I didn't tell them anything
08:37they seem to know so much
08:42about the circuits
08:44who was involved, where, when
08:46and then they took me over the border
08:54into Germany
08:56Karlsruhe
08:59with other women
09:01Karlsruhe
09:06and finally Ravensbruck
09:16you said there were other women
09:37Odette
09:45Odette describes seven female agents
09:49that she remembers from Karlsruhe
09:59thank you
10:00it's an important lead
10:02for Vera
10:07she was one of her 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 as to whether or not Nora was
10:19good enough for the job because she seemed to be so kind she said she could never lie
10:23and yet Vera was really the one who gave the final approval and said no you're going to go and
10:28she'll be fine and it'll work
10:29and Vera seems to have had a very guilty conscience a very sort of deeply felt question
10:42as to what had happened to this delightful young woman who she really had been responsible for sending to France
10:49it's pretty
10:55but no
10:58don't take my word for it though
11:02ask the the prison
11:04Becca
11:06Fraulein Becker
11:09she ran the place
11:13if anyone knows
11:15she will
11:19I think Vera's reaction to starting to uncover the stories of these women
11:25and to trace them to Karlsruhe must have come as a real shock to her
11:33to understand the dehumanizing process that 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 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 they
12:00left this prison at Karlsruhe
12:06thanks to Odette
12:07Vera has a major breakthrough in intelligence
12:11it's important for Vera not only professionally but also personally
12:17in a way although Vera never had children herself she does
12:23kind of have maternal
12:25qualities here in her investigation
12:35Vera has the prison in Karlsruhe in southern Germany
12:39as the last location for at least seven women
12:45Vera also knows about the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp
12:50situated in northeastern Germany
12:54Ravensbrück was a concentration camp just north of Berlin
12:58and unlike every other concentration camp it was for women
13:01it 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
13:12Ravensbrück was a particular horrific site to end up in
13:20it's from here that three agents including Yvonne Bazden
13:25and Odette Sansom have come back alive
13:33Ravensbrück is also the last known location
13:37for young mother and widow Violette Sabo
13:48but there is one of Vera's agents that has not been spotted at either a prison or a camp
13:55Noor Inayat Khan
13:56there's a generally held sense that Noor amongst the others might be alive
14:07and so she realizes 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
14:20Vera can't travel to Germany and continue her investigations due to her low rank
14:26so she enlists the help of an army unit who are hunting nazis across post-war Germany
14:35a unit that was founded just a few years before the S.A.S
14:40The S.A.S. or special air service are an elite commando unit founded during the height of the war
14:49the S.A.S. were formed in the north african desert and the concept behind their kind of operations were these fast
14:55hit-and-run missions and they were deploying in these willis jeeps which were very maneuverable and nimble
15:00and they were heavily armed with mounted machine guns and the idea was to carry out these hit-and-run raids largely targeting Italian and German airfields
15:07and they were extremely successful in the North Africa campaign so in those
15:13the S.A.S. were formed in the north african desert and the concept behind their kind of operations were these fast
15:18hit-and-run missions and they were deploying in these willis jeeps which were very maneuverable and nimble
15:22and they were heavily armed with mounted machine guns and the idea was to carry out these hit-and-run raids largely targeting Italian and German airfields
15:27they were very successful in the North Africa campaign so in those 18 months or so that they soldiered there
15:32the S.A.S. had destroyed 387 proven enemy warplane kills that's spectacular achievement
15:41but in the winter of 1942 Hitler fights back his Nazi high command issues the so-called commando order
15:52what the commander order said was that any parachutist so any allied parachutist that could
15:59be S.A.S. it could be commandos it could be special operations executive agents any of those captured behind
16:05the lines whether in uniform or out of uniform whether fighting or not fighting whether trying to surrender
16:11or not would be kept alive only for as long as it took the Gestapo and the S.S. to interrogate them and find out what
16:18they knew and then they would be shot out of hand in other words murdered
16:29and 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 and are a key part of the allied success
16:42in 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 to hunt down the
16:56Nazis who carried out the commando order and bring them to justice
17:01major Eric Bill Barkworth is an extraordinary figure in world war ii and especially within special
17:09forces history he's eccentric he's single-minded he's a maverick he's a rule breaker he's one of
17:17those very very archetypal individuals who can think the absolute unthinkable but the other thing about
17:22Barkworth as well which is key to how he develops as a character during the war is he's got this unshakable
17:28moral compass his sense of right and wrong is absolutely inflexible
17:37Barkworth has commandeered a private villa the Villa Daegler in Garganau near Karlsruhe
17:46on 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 in the Vosges mountains of eastern
18:08France to hit the Nazis before an allied advance but the team were tracked down
18:18and 31 soldiers were captured
18:26after months of interrogation
18:28the 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 which are extremely extremely
18:55powerful and close if you read the accounts from people at the time or you interview veterans as i
18:59have and you speak about those kind of relationships they are very very very special it's the kind of
19:06spirit that means you will lay down your life for your fellow brother in arms and that's what so often
19:12happens
19:20barkworth is determined to find those responsible for the deaths of the 31 S.A.S. soldiers
19:31chief among them is hans kiefer the head of the sd
19:36the nazi intelligence agency in paris a man vera also believes may know what happened to her lost women
19:50spies
19:54so vera shares the photos of her agents with barkworth in the hopes he can help her
20:01both barkworth and vera their investigations led them to one name
20:06and that was hans kiefer he was in charge of the sd he was responsible for all of the investigations
20:14that the gestapo and the sd were doing in paris so he was responsible for the interrogation of
20:20what the 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 the man
20:32that they were desperate to find but as the atrocities of kiefer and other nazis come to light
20:40people back in the uk begin to ask some difficult questions
20:46so
20:53vera receives a letter alerting her to the actions of violette sabo's father charles bushel
21:03violette has a child called tanya and bushel wants to know when the baby's mother will return
21:09and giving interviews to the newspapers about his mp
21:23and giving interviews to the newspapers about his mp
21:37daughter
21:43for vera and the soe this could be a major problem
21:49vera is in a very difficult situation because suddenly the war's over and these young women
21:56who've gone off to serve somewhere and their families don't know anything about what they
21:59really did in the soe aren't coming home
22:06the violette sabo's father who's been left with her infant daughter is starting to ask questions
22:12is starting 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 they
22:21were serving we don't know what part of the world they've ended up in we don't know why they're not
22:25home and so there starts to become this pressure from family members and friends and other acquaintances
22:30of these young women who've just suddenly vanished
22:35and vera has another problem
22:37she has a new boss
22:43head of soe f section morris buckmaster has returned to his civilian role of public relations
22:51manager 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
23:09and whose main interest is in keeping things secret
23:13a lot doesn't help vera very much he doesn't see this as the sort of passionate necessity that vera
23:20sees it as and she's now started to get information about the camps
23:28and she's pushing to see if she can get a chance to have some sort of contact or
23:33interrogate 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 she
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
24:30letters from agents relatives asking difficult questions puts pressure on the home office
24:36and 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 germany
24:53her to go to germany but she is told that she has just four days to demonstrate she can get results
25:09her to go to germany and her to go to germany and her to go to germany and her to go to germany
25:15december 1945
25:19vera's destination is berlin
25:23a capital city in ruins
25:28a city conquered by the soviet union
25:31in among the destruction of germany
25:36vera 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 clement mark jumeau
25:54who 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 with
26:05the 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
26:24she really had to mask that and to go forward with an air of confidence and to prove that she
26:30was the right person to uncover the stories of the missing agents but vera has a problem
26:37jumeau's grave is most likely in soviet-controlled germany north of berlin after the fall of germany
26:45the 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
27:12the soviet zone
27:19vera is blocked from entering the soviet zone
27:27if vera fails here she knows there is no chance that mott and the war office
27:32would allow her to continue her investigations
27:34but then vera addresses the century in russian
27:43something the century 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
27:54for him she was a member of the waft you know she was a lady in a blue uniform and suddenly she's
28:00speaking russian 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 century lets them through
28:18vera is able to continue her journey into the soviet zone
28:22thanks to her unexpected ability to speak russian
28:36at the hospital vera questions the staff
28:39and 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
28:58that her investigations get results
29:02now she can move on to the main reason for her journey ravensbruck
29:09the women's camp
29:2590 kilometers north of berlin
29:32ravensbruck is hideous camp which was set up specifically to hold women
29:39and tens of thousands of 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 the
30:01concentration camp where a lot of her agents disappeared
30:04ravensbruck 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 rolfe and denise block
30:27suren holds the key to not just one but possibly the lives of three of her agents
30:33the pressure is on vera's not particularly experienced yet at interrogations and she knows he has information
30:45he knows everything that went on in the camp and if there were special prisoners considered to be agents he would have known
30:58in the camp
31:00how many english women were at the camp
31:06there were no english women at the camp
31:09odette is english
31:14she was a special prisoner for whom i had special responsibilities
31:20because we thought she was related to churchill
31:26so the other english women how many were there
31:30i 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
32:19back in london vera gets some news that could prevent her from ever finding her agents
32:36have a read please
32:41she is informed that f section is to be closed down permanently
32:46norman 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
33:37they would remain missing presumed dead
33:40but for vera this wasn't acceptable it wasn't fair it wasn't fair on them it wasn't fair on their families
33:47and so she was determined to find out what had happened particularly to the young women agents
33:53that she had personally sent to france
33:56what vera needs is new evidence that will shock her bosses into letting her continue
34:11the new
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
34:35known as nazweiler struthoff the camp is hidden in the vosges mountains of eastern france close to the german border
34:53it is the only camp the nazis build in france
34:58a 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 at night
35:21and without trial taken to nazweiler
35:26people would be according to the nazi order turned into mist
35:31it's a way of punishing people that was more feared than any other
35:42but 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 france berg
36:09berg
36:28berg tells barkworth he worked in the prematorium as a stoker
36:32one 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
36:50france 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 hottest
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
38:07they would have been absolutely horrified and they thought that this could have been noor as
38:13well i mean horrified for all the girls
38:31and 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
38:58she will not give up on her women
39:11berg's testimony makes disturbing reading for the british security services
39:16whitehall 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
39:53into these dangerous areas and that some of them hadn't come back and had 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
40:13vera heads back to germany
40:27vera is assigned to the war crimes unit at the british army headquarters in germany
40:48the war crimes unit 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 nazis
41:01people who would have been involved in what we would call war crimes so with executions with
41:07maltreatment of prisoners with the concentration camp system in general and the idea would not only be to
41:13find these officers but also to find evidence about crimes against humanity that they had committed so
41:20various murders or procedures that they had followed that 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
41:46to 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
41:57they'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
42:25and her attention turns to a witness who could hold the key it's a name given to vera
42:31by odette sansom it is the chief warder of carlsruher prison frulein becker
42:44vera leaves the war crimes office headed for carlsruher prison in the hope that finding becker
42:51might give her the information she needs
42:56frulein becker would have been really important for vera to get her hands on she'd been identified in one
43:01of the affidavits of the surviving agents anyway and vera needed to go out and find her because as the
43:08chief wardress she would have received all new prisoners coming into carlsruher she would have
43:13met them personally taken away their personal effects made a record of what they were she would
43:18have also recorded their names so be they real names or their aliases she would have recorded the
43:24names of the soe women going into that prison on arrival at the prison vera discovers that frulein
43:38becker hasn't even left her post as chief warder vera can now begin her questioning
43:48so
43:52carlsruher 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 carlsruher 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 toilet
44:21so 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
44:44them
45:08yes
45:12all of them
45:14and they all left in july 1944
45:22no the one you mentioned adet she left then the others it was later in the year
45:32so these seven in the photographs they didn't leave in july that's what i said they left later
45:39i need to see your records now please we don't have any
45:45i can't imagine that
45:50the french when they came they destroyed everything smashed it all up
45:54all gone
46:05thank you frulein becker i'm sure i'll see you again soon
46:11vera doesn't have the written records she needs as evidence but she does have something more important
46:24becker's testimony directly contradicts the evidence of the crematorium stoker at nazwiler
46:31franz berg
46:32berg stated that four women are killed at the nazwiler camp in july 1944
46:40but becker claims that including noor seven of vera's lost women spies are still in karlsruher prison
46:49later than july 1944 so those women could not have been the ones killed at nazwiler
46:56vera already has an eyewitness testimony from nazwiler saying that nor is dead and now she has another
47:04eyewitness testimony saying no that is not true she is here she needs some sort of cooperating
47:10evidence to prove where nor is one way or the other vera leaves becker and karlsruher with the chance
47:19that some of her lost women spies could still be alive
47:49so
48:13you