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  Following standard practice, Starr was dispatched to 84 Avenue Foch as a guest of Kieffer and his cronies. But before that, his Dijon captors subjected the wounded SOE agent to a horrific beating and interrogation – ‘the full treatment’. Once he arrived in Paris, Starr reached some kind of an accommodation with Kieffer, which had enabled him to take up residence at the Avenue Foch, where he became the subject of one of the Paris Gestapo’s greatest ever Funkspiel. In short, for months on end no one in London would have the slightest idea that their star agent had been captured.

  As a demonstration of how utterly SOE had been hoodwinked, on 17 April 1944 Starr’s promotion to major, for ‘important operational work in the field’, was signed off by the head of SOE’s F Section, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, plus SOE’s director himself, the long-experienced Brigadier McVean Gubbins. In truth, of course, Starr had been in Gestapo captivity for fully nine months by then. How was this even possible? And how was Starr’s double life finally rumbled?

  On 27 September 1944 a letter arrived at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters on ‘Box No. 500’ letterhead. The euphemistic title was how MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, was known, due to its wartime London address – PO Box 500. Allegations had surfaced about Starr, and they were of sufficient weight to warrant MI5 asking SOE for ‘full particulars’ of their agent. By the spring of that year, SOE had got wise to Starr’s capture, and that his circuit – codenamed Acrobat – had been penetrated, which made it all the more concerning that for months on end they had continued to dispatch sensitive messages, supplies and even agents to what they had believed was their man in the field.

  By November 1944 the depths of the allegations against Starr were becoming increasingly clear. In a report dated 13 November, based upon the interrogation of a French prisoner – a suspected Avenue Foch collaborator – Starr was said to have cut a deal. ‘Kieffer proposed to him that if he played with the Germans, he would be completely free on condition that he continued his W/T communications with the UK and helped with the arrest of parachute agents and the collection of parachuted arms and ammunition.’ (W/T stood for wireless telegraphy – Morse Code sent by radio means). Starr had ‘betrayed all the W/T agents of whom he had knowledge’, the report continued, ‘made accurate drawings of all British . . . officers of which he had knowledge . . . and of all landing grounds in England and France that he knew.’

  If true, this was devastating. But there was more: ‘The last people who were arrested thanks to him were twelve to fifteen soldiers who landed with a number of pigeons.’ Could Starr’s betrayal – if it was betrayal – have extended even to the capture of Captain Garstin and his men? Certainly there was no other parachute patrol of anything like that number that had dropped directly into the Gestapo’s hands, in the summer of ’44 in France. It seemed inconceivable that this could have been anything other than the SABU-70 raiders.

  On 15 November 1944, SOE wrote to MI5 that ‘Bob Starr has quite obviously been proved to have been working for the Germans.’ A day later, Starr was being referred to as ‘the notorious Bob Starr’. By the twenty-seventh of that month, a Major John Delaforce, who ran the Paris based SPU-24 – one of SOE’s field security units – reported how the Avenue Foch Gestapo had maintained ‘approximately fifteen false WT traffics with the home station’ – in other words, Funkspiel – although he was unsure if ‘they were all the result of traffic maintained through’ agent Starr.

  By early January 1945 MI5 was actively seeking to get their hands on Starr, though no one had the slightest idea where he might be or even if he was still alive. He was by then officially listed as ‘a British renegade’ by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), whose role it was to track down ‘British traitors and suspect traitors’ across Europe. The hunt was very much on.

  For months the trail went cold. Then, on 7 May 1945, Captain John Ashford Renshaw Starr appeared from out of the blue in Bern, Switzerland, as one of a shipment of ‘French’ prisoners who had been spirited out of Mauthausen by the Red Cross. His very survival was close to miraculous. No one would ever know how many perished at Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in the hills above the Austrian market town of the same name. Estimates are between 120,000 and 320,000, most of whom were worked to their deaths in a network of subterranean weapons factories, mines and aircraft plants.

  Yet somehow Starr – as an SOE agent, one who would have been earmarked for the very worst; for Nacht und Nebel treatment – had emerged from Mauthausen very much alive. Instructions were telegraphed to Bern: ‘RETURN HIM UK IMMEDIATELY . . . ADVISING US ETA AND PLACE OF ARRIVAL.’

  By 9 May John Starr was back in Britain and facing his first interrogation at the hands of his employers. But from the very start, Starr presented a markedly different figure from what his accusers might have been expecting. As far as he was concerned, he had done nothing wrong. Quite the contrary: the long months he had spent at the Avenue Foch were all to one purpose – to gather intelligence on the depths of the Gestapo’s penetration of the SOE, and to escape and bring that to London.

  While Starr accepted that he needed to provide a full account of himself, and was ‘only too willing to write it’, he resented his chilly reception by SOE. ‘I do feel that above all, I would like to see my family if only for a few hours,’ he objected. Starr was married with one daughter.

  In due course he would present a case for his own actions that would prove very hard to disentangle and disavow. Yes, he had lived at 84 Avenue Foch for eleven months. Yes, at times he had dined with his Gestapo captors at fine Paris restaurants. Yes, he had used his skills as a graphic artist to draw maps of the various SOE circuits. But all of this was done with one purpose in mind – to gauge the depths of the Gestapo’s duping of SOE, learning all of their secrets so he might spirit them away to Britain.

  Starr’s in-depth interrogation took place between 28 and 30 May 1945. In it he described the two key reasons why he had started drawing the SOE circuits for Kieffer. Firstly, he hoped ‘to glean a lot of information that would be extremely valuable’ if it could be got back to London. The second reason, he openly admitted, was for his own personal gain: conditions at Avenue Foch were infinitely more comfortable when compared to the Gestapo’s alternative places of incarceration.

  During his eleven months as a guest at Avenue Foch, Starr argued he ‘never saw an Englishman ill-treated there’. On the Funkspiel side, he claimed that he ‘never did any coding or decoding’. Sometimes the Gestapo brought him a Funkspiel text, ‘perhaps to ask him how to spell a word, or occasionally to discuss a message’. As to the coded BBC signals the Gestapo intercepted, while he ‘used to take these to Kieffer’, he claimed he never aided the Gestapo in their interpretation. ‘I might have made a slip once or twice,’ he conceded, ‘but I tried not to.’

  Starr was quite open about how cosy were his relations with his Avenue Foch captors. On his birthday, 6 August, he ‘was given presents by the Germans and flowers were placed in his room’. That evening they threw a party, and ‘the Commandant [Kieffer] came up to the cell and brought a bottle of champagne and a bottle of cognac’. In Starr’s view, ‘Kieffer was very decent and usually brought round, personally, chocolate and cigarettes for the prisoners.’ On a few occasions he and Kieffer had had a swim together at 84 Avenue Foch, ‘in a static water tank which had been built in the grounds’.

  Starr’s interrogation report read like a bizarre cross between a confession and a case for the defence. The aces up his sleeve, Starr argued, were his two escape attempts, which were unarguably courageous and spirited. The first, just hours after his capture, had ended in his being gunned down on the streets. The second was even more demonstrative of his supposed good intentions and unimpeachable motives. In December 1943 he’d made contact with a female agent codenamed Madeleine – real name, Noor Inayat Khan – a British SOE agent and unarguably one of the bravest ever to have served. Together with another Avenue Foch captive, they would undertake
a daring escape attempt.

  To that end, Starr offered to repair the Avenue Foch’s vacuum cleaner. To do so he’d needed tools. He’d managed to spirit those into his cell, and to that of his fellow captives on the building’s fifth floor. With those they had loosened the bars to their windows and in the dead of night the three escapees had crawled onto the roof. But by ill fortune, an Allied bomber squadron had chosen that night to launch a raid over Paris. The city’s searchlights blazed into life, catching the three fugitives as they crawled to safety. In short order they were dragged down, at which stage ‘Kieffer was furious and said they were going to be shot’.

  Noor Inayat Khan and the other escapee were dispatched to Germany, Inayat Khan to Dachau concentration camp, where she would face an unspeakable death, having never once cracked or breathed a word of any use to her captors. The first female radio operator ever sent to France, she would be posthumously awarded the George Cross, Britain’s highest civilian decoration for valour. Starr, meanwhile, had been presented with an ultimatum by Kieffer. He could choose either to be shipped to Germany or to remain at Avenue Foch, but for the latter would need to ‘give his word of honour never again to attempt to escape . . . while in France’.

  Faced with such a stark choice – Germany almost certainly spelled torture and death – Starr gave his word. In his SOE interrogation report, he stressed that when trying to escape he’d taken with him ‘a number of documents containing much valuable information, which he hoped to get over to England’. That, he maintained, was his foremost reason for doing as he had done at Avenue Foch.

  In August 1944 Starr had been informed of his imminent dispatch to Germany, ‘in view of the approach of the American forces’. Starr seemed convinced that Kieffer had ‘taken a good liking to him and that was the main reason for his good fortune . . . three times already Berlin had demanded that he . . . should be shot, but the Commandant had managed to put it off’. Starr was duly sent to Mauthausen, and in due course had somehow managed to convince the camp authorities that he was French, and to wangle a place on the Red Cross prisoner convoy to Bern, from where he had been returned to Britain.

  At the end of Starr’s interrogation, SOE and MI5 compared notes. To prosecute or not to prosecute, that was the question. On balance, the two agencies had to weigh up ‘whether such traitors can be prosecuted without doing more harm than good’. While Starr had definitely worked with the enemy, SOE’s Major Delaforce concluded, he had also made those two escape attempts. If the second had succeeded and he’d made it back to Britain, Starr would doubtless have been hailed as the hero of the hour. Delaforce suspected that prosecuting Starr ‘would not be worthwhile from an SOE point of view, as it would result in a certain amount of mud being raked up’. That ‘mud’ chiefly concerned the extent to which SOE had been duped by the Avenue Foch’s Funskpiel operations.

  In weighing up whether to send Starr for trial, charges were considered of ‘materially aiding the enemy’, which carried the death penalty. But establishing Starr’s culpability in the Funskpiel operations would be key, and how could that ever be proven? Certainly, his status almost as a ‘member of staff’ at Avenue Foch was unconscionable, SOE argued, especially when other captured agents became aware of it, as invariably they did. It had proved devastating to their morale, and on that basis alone Starr ‘acted very wrongly’.

  He was a ‘conceited type and considers he was extremely clever in making the Germans take such a fancy to him’, his SOE interrogators concluded. ‘Clever as Starr thinks his behaviour was, I am sure that the Germans at Avenue Foch were far cleverer . . . and he was undoubtedly useful to them in many ways.’ In the final analysis, the decision was taken not to prosecute. SOE had far too many skeletons in the closet to risk the blaze of attendant publicity. As for MI5, an elegant argument was found to justify taking no action: it would be bad for recruitment and the retention of agents.

  ‘It would be said . . . that a trained agent ought to be able to deceive the enemy . . . in order to save his own life,’ MI5 argued, in a July 1945 letter on the Starr case. ‘It might be a very bad thing if it were to be thought amongst prospective agents that any effort to double-cross the enemy . . . were tolerably likely to result in a trial by Court Martial on their return.’ In short, no prosecution was to be brought against Starr. It was case closed.

  For the ghosts of the SABU-70 raiders, it didn’t much matter either way. What was crucial to them was what John Starr knew and could tell. And on that front, his insider information would prove revelatory. Starr had been present at Avenue Foch at the same time as Captain Garstin and his men, and what he didn’t know about the circumstances of their capture, and the identities of their captors/killers, wasn’t worth knowing.

  On 8 October 1945 Starr gave a detailed statement: ‘In the matter of the shooting of British prisoners of war near Noailles, France, 9 August 1944’. In it, he confirmed that he’d been told of the 5 July ’44 Funkspiel operation, and of the subsequent – surprise – capture of the SAS men. He’d seen the captives brought to Avenue Foch, including the SAS captain ‘who wore a decoration’. Starr even claimed he’d ‘been able to give these prisoners some cigarettes’, but that he was forbidden from talking with them, although there is no record of anything like that happening in any of the SAS captive’s own accounts.

  More importantly, Starr was able to furnish chapter and verse on the identity of their captors. On SS Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer: ‘The chief of the Gestapo . . . was an SS man and had been one of the earliest NS [Nazi] recruits. He is reputed to have been an athlete, aged about 40, height about 5 ft 7 in, hair dark, turning to black, plentiful and inclined to be wavy. His eyes were light blue and deep set; complexion fresh; prominent forehead, small nose, square type of face, smallish chin. He wore glasses for reading and was close shaven. He had broad shoulders, thick chest, stocky build. He could not speak English.’

  On SS Untersturmführer Alfred von Kapri: ‘about 25; height 5 ft 6 ins; hair dark; complexion pale; oval type of face; clean shaven . . . He spoke Romanian, German, Russian, Italian, French and English fluently . . . He was at Avenue Foch for the whole of the period I was there, and I last saw him in August, 1944.’ On Hauptscharführer Karl Haug: ‘aged about 40–45; height 5 ft 8 ins; thick dark wavy hair; dark eyes; thick eyebrows; thick lips; complexion sallow; square face; very thick set in build. He had been a prisoner of the British in the last war. He was married with four children.’

  And so on and so forth.

  By an absolute freak of fate, a suspected British traitor, or a courageous double agent – depending on how you tended to look at things – had managed to escape almost certain death at Mauthausen, and to return to Britain with the intelligence that the ghosts of the SABU-70 raiders had so needed, not to mention the patrol’s survivors. Vaculik and Jones had begun to fear that their quest for justice had hit the buffers. In truth, the next stage of that long and tortuous journey was only just beginning.

  The day after Starr’s bombshell testimony, ten ‘Wanted Reports’ were issued in London. They were for Kieffer, Goetz, von Kapri and Haug, plus six others whose role in the Noailles Wood massacre was not significant, although no one knew that yet. The descriptions given in those wanted reports were basically carbon copies of what Starr had provided in his statement. Somewhere across post-war Europe, some of the wanted surely had to be in custody, or at least they should be.

  Allied policy was for all former SS to be arrested, no matter what their rank or role. Post-war prosecutors charged the SS with being ‘the very essence of Nazism. For the SS was the elite group of the Party, composed of the most thorough-going adherents of the Nazi cause, pledged to blind devotion to Nazi principles, and prepared to carry them out without question and at any cost.’ The SS was deemed a criminal organisation, the very membership of which was enough to make one an automatic target for pursuit, capture and interrogation.

  Interestingly, a ‘Wanted Report’ was also issued for George Richard
, the German soldier who had done so much to help Lieutenant Wiehe in hospital. ‘The wanted person is described as about 6 ft tall . . . close-shaven, wore glasses . . . Spoke broken French but no English. In Aug 1944 he was employed as an orderly at La Pitié Hospital, Paris. He is wanted for interrogation only as he may be able and willing to describe Gestapo personnel who are wanted in connection with the murder of five British POWs.’

  On 13 March 1945 Lieutenant Wiehe had been ‘pronounced permanently unfit for any form of military service’. A month later the War Office had written, thanking him for ‘the services which you have rendered . . . during a period of grave national emergency . . . the Army council fully appreciate the patriotism which led you to give your services in this way’. Sadly, Lieutenant Wiehe would never fully recover from his injuries and would be wheelchair-bound for life. Even so, shortly after being ruled unfit for duty, Wiehe felt well enough to give his own statement in support of the Noailles Wood case.

  ‘I am now a patient in the Emergency Hospital, Leatherhead’, he began. ‘In the early morning of 5 July 1944 I was dropped by parachute behind the German lines . . . northeast of Étampes, together with Captain Garstin and other SAS personnel. We were ambushed by the Gestapo and I myself was seriously wounded.’ And so it continued, chronicling all that had followed. Wiehe’s statement provided yet more ammunition for those seeking the Noailles Wood killers. Now it only required a team with the tenacity and dedication to hunt down the suspects.

  It was time for the SAS to prove how they would look after – and avenge – their own.