However, no one from Dachau stood trial specifically for the executions of Madeleine, Yolande, Noor and Eliane, partly because there was no proof of their demise and no witnesses to describe the killings. Those most likely to have been responsible were either dead themselves or already facing trial for other war crimes. All Vera Atkins could do, once she had discovered what she finally believed to be the truth of Nora’s death at Dachau, was to fight tirelessly to have her posthumously awarded a George Cross, the highest civilian award for bravery in Britain. This she did, citing in her recommendation for the award how even Kieffer had wept when he recounted Noor’s exceptional courage. The award was granted in 1949.
Vera herself was demobilized in 1947, and her story continues to fascinate and puzzle. Relatives of those girls unaccounted for found her cold and unemotional, with ‘a callous streak’ according to her biographer, in stark contrast to her dedication to finding the missing. There is a note in a file now at the National Archives at Kew from the mother of the Paris-born Yolande stating that her daughter was pregnant at the time she was sent into France, while Diana Rowden’s mother did not know that her daughter had received the Croix de guerre until the author Elizabeth Nicholas found out while researching her 1958 book, Death Be Not Proud. Nicholas also discovered that the fiancé and family of Sonia Olschanesky, who had shown incredible courage by staying on to work as a courier near Paris after the Prosper ring of Francis Suttill had been blown, had never been informed of her fate. Tania Szabo, Violette’s young daughter, found Atkins ‘cold and distant’, and Vilayat Inayat Khan told Vera’s biographer that she was ‘cold blooded’: ‘Vera Atkins was the intelligence officer who really wanted to find out what happened, she wanted to sort things out – to be clear about things,’ he said. But he believed his sister had been used. Yvonne Baseden, one of those who survived thanks to the Swedish Red Cross, described Vera when she met her on release as ‘quite distant – cold almost at first. Suspicious even … I think she must have thought – you know – why had I been released? What had I done to be released and not the others? I think that must have been why she was a little wary of me.’
Yet, however keen the French public and government might have been to move on, there were some whose crimes were so heinous they could never be forgiven. Anne Spoerry, or ‘Dr Claude’, who had been seen on several occasions to execute patients by lethal injection in Ravensbrück, was one such. After the Liberation, Spoerry had returned to Paris hoping to complete her medical exams, but once she was asked to defend the sadistic blockova Carmen Mory at the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, even though she refused to attend, her anonymity was over. She was swiftly arrested herself on charges of torture and murder, and throughout 1946 and 1947 was summoned to appear in courts in Switzerland as well as before a Free French Forces Court of Honour in Paris, where she was judged by former members of the resistance. Mory, at her trial, accused Spoerry of being the Block 10 murderer, but Spoerry’s defence lawyers persuaded the court that this could not be proven, thus absolving her from the most serious charges. Mory was sentenced to death by hanging, but in April 1947 she killed herself by slitting her wrist with a razor blade a week before the sentence was due to be carried out.