When the newspapers carried headlines about British women being burned alive there was a shocked response, especially as the British public had not previously been aware that any women had been sent into the field on such dangerous missions. On 18 September 1946 Vera Leigh, the former Parisian milliner, was awarded the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. She was, according to the document proposing her for a posthumous decoration, ‘a very gallant girl. She was secretly terrified by the idea of the mission but still more terrified by the fear of showing her terror to anyone. She was very game, very plucky and rather imaginative …’
As Vera Atkins remarked later, all the girls in F Section had different motivations but the one quality they had in common was bravery. ‘You might find it in anyone. You just don’t know where to look.’ Bernard de Gaulle, nephew of the General who later married Sylvie, the youngest Geoffroy-Dechaume daughter, and who knew many résistantes, elaborated: ‘Those women who gave their lives were not without fear. One of the reasons why the role of women has not been recognized for so long – and it’s complicated – is that one lived in permanent fear, one trembled with fear, but nobody wants to talk about fear. People afterwards talk about war in general but it’s not “their” war. That is irracontable – something they cannot talk about. They are ashamed of having fear.’ Odette Churchill was another who admitted later that none of them was without fear in Ravensbrück, but she suggested that it was a question of how they managed it. ‘Everybody tried to be a little braver than they felt. All of us had a moment of weakness, we did all cry together at one moment.’ Both Odette Churchill and Violette Szabo were awarded the George Cross in 1946 (in Szabo’s case posthumously), but Atkins knew that her own work was not over and that in her search to uncover what had happened to all the women she would have to follow up every lead urgently, interviewing prison guards and former prisoners who might help before it was too late and they either died, escaped or were executed. In October she had her honorary commission extended so that she could stay longer in Germany to assist the prosecution in the Ravensbrück trial, which started in December and lasted into early 1947 and beyond.
In mid-January 1946 Charles de Gaulle resigned, to the surprise of many, and retired to the country, ostensibly to write his memoirs. His main task had been to unite the country and to give it back a sense of pride following the humiliating defeat. His determination to create the narrative that France was not one of the defeated countries but a victorious nation gave further strength to his criticism of the Communist Party, which was most in favour of continuing with the épuration trials and bringing to justice everyone who could possibly be described as a collaborator. De Gaulle believed that while well-known traitors had to be punished, so-called ‘economic collaborators’ (occasionally industrialists but more often civil servants and police chiefs) had to be forgiven where possible in order to ensure the continued smooth running of the country. In addition, as Head of State de Gaulle assumed the right to stay executions and, of the 1,554 capital sentences submitted to him, he commuted 998, including all those involving women.
These political machinations go some way to explaining the government’s frenzied attempts to stage trials of high-profile collaborators, allowing them to proceed faster than many considered decent, and on 22 February the journalist and editor Jean Luchaire was executed. During his trial the prosecuting counsel began his opening speech by explaining that ‘when men committed treason with their pen, their treason was often inspired by fascism. In Luchaire’s case, it was inspired by venality and corruption.’ He said that the anger that had moved him in other trials was joined by ‘disgust’. Luchaire’s daughter Corinne, now a divorced single mother with a small child – Brigitte, born in May 1944 after a brief liaison with a Luftwaffe officer, Wolrad Gerlach – wrote pathetically, ‘and still it was not all over for me. There was still my trial to come but … I remember nothing. I was crying the whole time. I was in mourning for my father.’ Corinne, whose golden youth – when she had lived off nothing but champagne and cigarettes – had long since evaporated, had not made a film since 1940, was still battling tuberculosis and was reduced to little more than a character in other people’s novels. She had to wait another four long months for her own trial. When it came, a journalist for Life reported in an article headed ‘The Nazis’ Courtesan, French actress-collaborationist, once the toast of Occupied Paris, loses her beauty and citizenship’:
While the court recited a long list of the lovers and parties she had enjoyed, she stood by silently, her pride destroyed, her face aged by dissipation and TB. When the judges sentenced her to ten years of ‘National Indignity’ without any of the privileges of a French citizen, she could plead only: ‘I was young and stupid. I did not realise.’