During the next year Atkins collected and carefully filed details of several arrests and transfers to different prisons, but still lacked confirmation of anyone’s fate. Of Noor Inayat Khan, codenamed Madeleine, often referred to as Nora, or Nora Baker, she knew nothing for certain at this point. At the end of 1945, SOE had been wound up but Atkins was only just beginning her own search for the missing agents. ‘I went to find them as a private enterprise,’ she was to tell her biographer years later. ‘I wanted to know. I always thought “missing presumed dead” to be such a terrible verdict.’ Atkins, newly promoted to squadron officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and funded by MI6, now began her investigations in earnest, attached to the War Crimes Investigation Unit. In this position she was able to carry out interrogations of Nazis suspected of war crimes and testify as a prosecution witness in subsequent trials. But her priority was always to search for the stories of what had really happened to ‘her’ missing girls.
Just before leaving for Germany in 1946, Atkins had been in touch with Brian Stonehouse, an SOE agent and artist with a natural aptitude for drawing, a talent which helped him survive four different camps from the time he was first arrested in October 1941.
In June 1944, Stonehouse was a prisoner in Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in the Vosges which held some 6,000 male prisoners and was the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil. Stonehouse later told Atkins that, although he did not know the precise date, one day around the time of the attempted assassination of Hitler (which had occurred on 20 July 1944) four women, escorted by SS officers, had been marched into the camp, just past where he was working inside the fence on the east side. In fact, several people noticed the girls pass by that afternoon and, while they all remembered something slightly different about them, each of the witnesses commented that they were well dressed, appeared to be in good health and were defiant in their bearing and attitude towards their captors. Stonehouse, eighteen months after the event, dug deep into his memory to supply Vera with drawings and descriptions of the women, one of whom she was easily able to identify as Diana Rowden from the bow she always wore in her hair, and another she thought might have been Noor; ‘obviously continental – maybe Jewish’, Stonehouse had told her. By the time Vera gave evidence at the specially convened Natzweiler trial, from 9 April to 5 May 1946, she believed that the four victims were Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Nora Inayat Khan and that they had all been drugged before being burned alive. But she tried to withhold information to the UK press about their individual identity on the spurious grounds that she wished to spare their families undue grief. More likely, as by now the families were pressing for public recognition of their loved ones’ outstanding courage, she hoped to avoid too much press questioning about the recruitment and training of the women.
The one clear fact was that four women were brought to Natzweiler on 6 July 1944 and killed in the camp crematorium the same evening. In a letter to the War Office, Atkins wrote that the four women died by lethal injection, ‘probably Evipan, a narcotic, and were immediately cremated. They were unconscious but probably still alive when thrown into the oven.’ Various graphic accounts of how the four women had died were heard at the trial. They were all told to undress before being injected and one was heard to ask ‘Pourquoi?’ and was told ‘Pour Typhus.’ One asked for a pillow. Several witnesses described hearing groaning as the women were dragged along the floor to their deaths. One of the four clearly woke up from the narcotic and scrabbled and fought to the last to resist being placed, feet first, in the oven. Giving his testimony, camp executioner, Peter Straub, denied everything. But the most shocking statements came from Walter Schultz, who worked as an in interpreter in the camp’s political department. Schultz described how, the day after the killings, Straub, still drunk from the night before, gave him a detailed account of what had happened and how the fourth woman, as she was being put into the oven, regained consciousness. Straub, pointing to scars on his face, said to Schultz: ‘There, you can see how she scratched me … Look how she defended herself.’ By the time Atkins interrogated Straub he still had scars on his face. She believed they were probably inflicted by Vera Leigh, the oldest of the four, but there was no proof.
Although Atkins accepted that in the trial her women should be described as ‘spies’ – there was no other category for military persons operating in civilian clothes in enemy-occupied territory – she had also been concerned that the defence should not therefore be able to claim ‘lawful execution’. However, the prosecution counsel successfully made the case that as the girls were executed without trial, even if they were spies, this was contrary to the Geneva Convention and therefore constituted a war crime. Atkins was reasonably satisfied with the result: the camp doctor and camp Kommandant were sentenced to death; although Straub was sentenced only to thirteen years in prison at this trial, a few months later he was found guilty of war crimes in other trials and was hanged in October.