By January 1947 Vera Atkins had given evidence at two of the trials organized by the Allies for those high-ranking Nazis held responsible for killing at the various camps that they had managed to capture, hoping both to learn and to see justice done. First was the trial in 1946 of SS officials at Natzweiler-Struthof, where she believed four of her girls had died – Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Noor Inayat Khan – and then early in 1947 she assisted the prosecution at the first trial of guards and staff at Ravensbrück, which had claimed the lives of another four – Cecily Lefort, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. But several other agents remained unaccounted for. Just as the Germans had intended for their Nacht und Nebel prisoners, they had disappeared without trace. But, two years on from the end of the war, there was now a palpable change of atmosphere as the victorious powers started to turn their energies increasingly towards post-war reconstruction and diplomacy rather than punishing the perpetrators of war crimes.
For Vera it had never been simply a case of retribution. Establishing the truth was a duty she owed her girls. However, some who knew her felt that her grim determination reflected also the guilt she harboured; some agents had been parachuted directly into already compromised circuits, infiltrated by the Germans. Madeleine Damerment, dropped on the night of 29 February 1944, twenty miles east of Chartres, had been seized on landing in an operation arranged by the Germans as part of their Funkspiel (radio game), using Noor’s captured set. Madeleine was taken to Fresnes, then interrogated at the Avenue Foch SiPo-SD. In May, she was transferred to Karlsruhe civilian jail in Germany with seven other female agents. Quite possibly, Vera’s tangled personal circumstances and insecurity – she dreaded her own lack of Britishness being revealed – were part of the reason she had not spoken out earlier and demanded investigations. In addition, she was always deeply loyal to Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE’s F Section, with whom she worked so closely. If she could discover the truth now, she desperately hoped, there was at least a chance of winning posthumous justice for these brave girls.