https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iCtJ5kWvd9U<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n(British SAS Archives explores the personal mission of intelligence officer Vera Atkins to account for 118 missing secret agents after World War II. Using a private record of names and human details, the investigation documents the final movements of those sent into occupied France, ensuring their stories were not lost to history.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
British SAS Archives (YouTube)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1945, a small woman in a plain coat walked into occupied Germany with no staff, no budget, and no rank worth mentioning. She carried a private notebook containing the real names of 118 British agents she had personally sent into Nazi-occupied France \u2014 and 117 of whom had never come home. Whitehall told her not to bother. She ignored them. Then she began knocking on the doors of the SS men who had murdered her spies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This documentary reveals the untold story of Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer of Special Operations Executive F Section, and the four-year hunt she conducted, alone, across the ruins of the Third Reich, to trace the fate of every last agent she had put onto a black Lysander at midnight. Born Vera Rosenberg in Romania and not even a British citizen until 1944, she became one of the most feared interrogators of the war crimes machinery \u2014 because she already knew the answers before she sat down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Discover how Vera Atkins tracked down the murderers of Andr\u00e9e Borrel at Natzweiler, Violette Szabo at Ravensbr\u00fcck, and Noor Inayat Khan at Dachau, and how her patient, quiet, methodical German-language interrogations put SS camp commandants on the scaffold at Hameln prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Airfield: Why Vera Atkins insisted on being the last person every agent saw before boarding the Lysander.
The Baker Street Silence: How SOE was wound up so fast that Whitehall lost interest in finding out what had happened to 118 dead spies.
Natzweiler: The four Englishwomen injected with phenol in a crematorium in the Vosges, and the camp doctor Vera Atkins put on the stand.
Ravensbr\u00fcck: The interrogation of Fritz S\u00fchren and the identification of the women murdered in the last weeks of the camp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The One File She Never Closed: Vera Atkins’s private notebook, the 117 fates she confirmed, and the one name she carried to her grave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sources:
Helm, S. (2005) A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE<\/em>. Little, Brown, London.
Foot, M. R. D. (2004) SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940\u20131944<\/em>. Whitehall History Publishing, London.
Escott, B. E. (2010) The Heroines of SOE: F Section, Britain’s Secret Women in France<\/em>. The History Press, Stroud.
Ottaway, S. (2002) Violette Szabo: The Life That I Have<\/em>. Leo Cooper, Barnsley.
The National Archives (UK), HS 9 series \u2014 SOE Personnel Files; and WO 235 series \u2014 Ravensbr\u00fcck and Natzweiler Trial Records.
Disclaimer: This video is a historical documentary intended for educational purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n______________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Transcript<\/strong>
0:00
The airfield is dark and the wind smells of aviation fuel. It is 1943.
0:06
The moon is up. It is called an agent’s moon because agents are only sent on
0:12
nights like this. And no one who is not one of them ever needs to know the term.
0:17
The aircraft is a black Lander, low and squat, waiting on the grass with its
0:22
engine at idle. Its paint has gone matte from where the pilot is in the cockpit.
0:27
He is very young. Everyone tonight is very young. The two women stand at the
0:33
edge of the grass. One is [music] the agent. The other is Vera Atkins. Vera
0:38
Atkins is not tall. She wears a plain coat because there is no uniform for what she does. Her hair is pinned
0:45
neatly. Her gloves are leather and worn thin at the fingertips. She does not carry a clipboard. She never has to. She
0:53
remembers the young woman beside her is 23 years old. She has been trained in
0:59
wireless work and in [music] silent killing and in how to parachute onto a French field at night without [music]
1:05
breaking an ankle. She wears a French coat and French shoes and a French wristwatch. Every seam has been checked.
1:13
Every label has been unpicked [music] and replaced. Her false papers are folded into her handbag next to a
1:20
lipstick bought in Leon in 1939 and kept for exactly this moment. Vera Atkins
1:27
reaches out and turns down the collar of the young agent’s coat. She smooths it with her thumb, [clears throat]
1:32
she says quietly. Empty your pockets. The agent obeys. They all obey. [music]
1:40
They are trained to. But there is always something. There is always a small thing
1:45
that England has slipped into the seam of a life without meaning to. And it is Vera Atkins [music] job to find it
1:51
before the Germans do. Tonight it is a bus ticket. A single London bus ticket 4
1:56
days old printed with a route number and a fair and at the bottom the small sentence [music] which reads retain
2:03
until the end of the journey. Vera Atkins takes it between two fingers. She does not comment. She does not scold.
2:11
She places it in her own pocket and closes her hand over it and does not let go of it until she is home. She says
2:19
fountain pen. Yes. Comb. [music] Yes. photograph in the wallet. Show me. The
2:26
agent shows her a young man in French army uniform. The photograph is worn in
2:32
exactly the way a photograph is worn when it has been kept in a wallet for 4 years. It has been made worn on purpose
2:39
at a workshop in London by a man whose entire wartime job is to make photographs look old. Vera Atkins says,
2:47
“Good.” She squeezes the agent’s hand. She does not embrace her. The embrace is
2:52
not for the airfield. The embrace was in the flat in Baker Street where they had tea 2 hours ago and where the agent left
2:59
a letter behind for her mother, sealed, undated to be posted only in the event.
3:06
The agent climbs the little ladder into the aircraft. The engines lift. The wind
3:12
flattens the grass. Vera Atkins stands and watches the wings tilt over the
3:17
trees and watches the tail lights vanish and waits for the silence to come back to the field. She stands there longer
3:23
than most people would. [music] She always does. She did this over 400 times. 118 never came back. To
3:32
understand why she went looking for them and how far she was willing to go, you have to understand what she was in
3:38
charge of [music] and what that meant and how few people in the whole of the British war effort were prepared [music]
3:44
to do it the way she did. The organization was called the special operations executive. It was not part of
3:50
the army. It was not part of the ordinary secret services. Winston Churchill had ordered it into being in
3:56
1940 and he had told its founders to set Europe ablaze. That was the phrase, set
4:02
Europe ablaze. It sounded better than what the job actually was. The job in
4:07
practice was this. Take ordinary young people, most of them under 30, most of
4:14
them with no military background at all. Train them to blow up factories [music] and railway lines. Train them to work a
4:21
wireless set for their lives. Train them in the killing arts. fit them into false identities so complete that even their
4:28
own mothers would not have recognized the papers, [music] then put them one at a time into an aircraft in the middle of
4:35
the night and dropped them into occupied France to work with the resistance. Some
4:40
parachuted, some landed by Zissander in a field marked by three men with electric torches. Once they were on the
4:47
ground, [music] they were on their own. The whole point of them was that they were on their own. The wireless operator
4:53
would send in Morse to a country house in Buckinghamshire and a girl in the country house would type it up and it
4:59
would go to Baker Street and someone in Baker Street would read it and decide what to do. Within that whole
5:05
architecture [music] there was a section that ran agents into France. It was called F section. F for France because
5:12
someone in a corridor in London had thought that was as good a letter as any. F section was run by a man called
5:18
Maurice Buckmaster. [music] He was decent and hardworking and had commanded the section for most of the war. But the
5:25
person the agents came to know, the person who saw them off, the person who wrote to their families, the person who
5:32
read their signals in the small hours was not Buckmaster. It was his intelligence officer. His intelligence
5:39
officer was Vera Atkins. She had not been born Vera Atkins. She had been born
5:44
Vera May Rosenberg in Romania into a Jewish family. She had come to England
5:50
before the war and had taken her mother’s maiden name. She spoke French and German with the ease of a person who
5:56
had been raised switching between them at the dinner table. She was not at the beginning a British citizen at all. She
6:04
would not become one until 1944 and she would have to fight for it. That was the
6:10
woman who ran in effect the human side of F-section. She was the one who chose
6:15
which recruits would go and which would not. She was the one who briefed them on the weather in Paris that week and the
6:21
current price of a metro ticket and which cafes on the left bank had been raided lately and which had not. She was
6:28
the one who read every wireless message. She was the one who noticed sometimes
6:33
when a message did not sound like the person who was supposed to be sending it. And she was the one who went to the
6:39
airfield. She did not have to. Nobody in her job description was required to go
6:44
to the airfield. Buckmaster went sometimes, but not always. Some officers
6:50
never went at all. They said honestly enough that it was too painful and served no operational purpose. Vera
6:57
Atkins did not agree. Vera Atkins believed that the last person an agent saw before the aircraft door closed
7:04
should be somebody who knew their real name. So she went every [music] time. She drove out to Tempsford or to Tangmir
7:11
and she stood on the grass and she said the same things. Empty your pockets. Show me your [music] papers. Show me
7:18
your photograph. Good. She turned down collars and she straightened scarves and
7:23
she pretended not to notice hands that had begun to shake. She looked into faces [music] she would not in most
7:29
cases see again. She kept a book in it. She kept for each agent a photograph and
7:36
a few notes and the name they had been given for the field and in her own private code small human details. what
7:43
they had drunk that last afternoon, what they had said about their mother or their brother or their fiance\u00e9 who had
7:50
been killed in Norway, whether they had cried, whether they had laughed, whether they had smoked, and if so, which brand.
7:58
Nobody had told her to keep the book. It was not authorized. She kept it anyway.
8:03
It fitted in a desk drawer. Later, [music] when the war was over and the drawer was cleared and Baker Street was
8:10
closed down and the section itself was quietly folded into the past, she took the book with her. She never let anyone
8:17
else read it. That book, in the end, was what she went to Germany with.
8:23
1945 began with silence. Through the autumn of 1944,
8:28
F section had lost transmissions from agent after agent. Some had gone off the air because they had been arrested.
8:35
[music] Some had gone off the air because they had been shot on the spot in a stairwell. Some had gone off the
8:40
air because their circuits had been broken up in mass raids in the previous year and no one in London had noticed
8:46
quickly enough. Vera Atkins had noticed and had said so and had been told that
8:51
operational realities were operational realities. [music] Then Paris was liberated. Then one by one the transit
8:59
camps were opened. Then [music] the death camps in the offices at Baker Street. The lists began to arrive. Not
9:07
lists of the recovered, lists of the vanished. At [music] the end of it, when the numbers had settled and the
9:13
survivors had all come home from wherever they had come home from, Vera Atkins totted up the agents she had
9:19
personally sent into France, and she counted the ones who had not come back, and she came to a figure 118.
9:27
118 men and women whom she had seen off from a grass runway at night, whom she
9:32
had bought tea for that afternoon, whose bus tickets she had taken out of their pockets, whose collars she had
9:38
straightened, 118 faces from her book, 118 envelopes that would have to go or
9:44
had already gone to families. The British government, taken as a whole, was not much interested in what had
9:51
happened to them. [music] There is no polite way to describe how quickly the special operations executive was wound
9:57
up. Once the war was won, Baker Street was closed. Files were burned or filed away. Officers were demobilized. The men
10:05
who had run the various country sections [music] went back to civilian jobs. Nobody wanted to talk about circuits
10:11
that had been broken. Nobody wanted to look too closely at the ones that had been run for months by German
10:16
intelligence [music] sending false traffic to London with London believing every word. There was in short no
10:23
appetite in Whiteall to send anyone to Germany [music] to find out precisely what had happened to 118 dead spies.
10:30
There was in particular no appetite [music] to send Vera Atkins. Vera Atkins was not on paper the right kind of
10:37
person to send. She was a woman. She was [music] until very recently technically
10:43
not a British subject. She had no military rank. She was not a lawyer. She
10:48
was not a police officer. She was [music] not part of the war crimes machinery which was being set up with a
10:54
great deal of trouble in the British zone of occupied Germany. Vera Atkins went anyway. She badgered. She wrote
11:01
letters. She used her contacts. She got herself eventually a modest commission in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force so
11:09
that she would have a uniform and a rank when she needed to interrogate camp guards. She got herself eventually an
11:15
attachment to the war crimes group in the British zone. [music] She got herself a driver part-time and a room in
11:21
a requisitioned house and a typewriter and permission in theory to speak to
11:26
prisoners. She had no staff to speak of. She had no expense budget worth mentioning. She had her book. She had
11:33
her 118 [music] names. She had her German, which was better than the German of most of the men she would sit across
11:40
from. She had her calm, which was the thing that would ruin them. She would trace in the end 117 fates. [music] One
11:48
would remain forever unknown. She would refuse to close that file. She would keep it open [music] until her death.
11:55
But of the 117, she would produce for each a note in her own hand of what had
12:01
happened and where and by whose order, and in many cases she would produce a
12:06
witness willing to say it under oath, and in a smaller but not small number of cases she would produce the executioner
12:14
himself. She would begin with the ones she had known best. She would begin with the women. There were altogether 39
12:22
women whom F-S section had sent into France. Of those 13 had not come back.
12:28
Vera Atkins knew each of the 13 by their first name. She had had tea with each of
12:33
them in the flat [clears throat] in Baker Street. She had put each of them in turn into an aircraft on a grass
12:40
field at night. Four of them had ended, she was told, at a place called Natweiler. She had heard the name for
12:47
the first time in the summer of 1945 in a report so short it was almost an insult. Four English women it said camp
12:55
Natsweiler injection crerematorium. She read it once and put it down and read it
13:01
again. [music] Then she began to go back for a moment to the airfield. It is a
13:07
different airfield. It is the summer of 1942. The aircraft this time is a
13:12
bomber, a Whitley converted for parachuting. Its belly hangs low. [music] It is going to fly to a field
13:19
somewhere south of Paris. And it is going to fly back the same night. The moon is up. It is always up. Standing on
13:26
the grass with Vera Atkins is a small young woman with dark hair and a compact athletic [music] build. Her name is
13:34
Andre Borell. She is French. She is 22 years old. She has already had one war.
13:40
She was a nurse in 1940 on the roads from Paris when the Germans came through. She helped run an escape line
13:47
[music] for airmen out through the Pyrenees. When that line was blown, she came to London and offered herself for
13:54
the work. She is the first woman that F-section has ever parachuted into France. Vera Atkins [music] is aware,
14:01
though she does not show it, that she has never done this particular thing before either. She has sent men. She has
14:08
never sent a woman by air. There is no protocol. The parachuting instructors
14:13
have said that Andre Burell is one of the best they have ever trained. Andre Burell is wearing a French coat over her
14:19
jumping overalls. Her hair is pinned back. She has a knife strapped [music] to one calf. She has a false identity
14:26
card in the name of a French shop assistant. She has 50,000 Franks sewn into a belt. Vera Atkins turns down the
14:33
collar of her jumpsuit. She checks the seams. She reaches into a pocket and finds of all things an English lozenge,
14:41
a cough suite. Andre Burell looks at it and shrugs and laughs briefly once the
14:48
way [music] she does. Vera Atkins takes it and puts it into her own pocket. She says, “Bonchans.”
14:54
Andre Borel says in French, “Abento,” which means [music] in the polite sense
15:00
goodbye, but in the literal sense it means see you soon. Andre Borell goes up
15:06
into the aircraft. The engines lift. The tail lights [music] vanish. Vera Atkins
15:12
stands until the field is empty. By the summer of 1945, she knew that Andre
15:17
Borell had lived in France for 8 months, had helped run one of the largest resistance networks in the country, had
15:24
been arrested with most of it in the summer of 1943, had been held in Friends
15:29
Prison outside Paris, had been transferred to a civil prison in Carl’s Roo, and had then one day in July 1944
15:37
been taken by train with three other women into the Ves Mountains and up to a
15:43
camp on spur above a village called Natsweiler. The camp was Natweiler Stru.
15:48
It had been [music] the only concentration camp on French soil. It had held at various points resistance
15:55
fighters and Norwegians and Russians and Jews and homosexuals and criminals and a
16:00
great many people who had been categorized under the initials NN which stood for knacked unable night and fog
16:08
meaning that they were to disappear without record and without notice to their families. The four women had been
16:15
NN prisoners. Vera Atkins went to the camp in the autumn of 1945.
16:21
She went by car in a British Army uniform borrowed for the trip. The road up from the village was steep and the
16:28
pines closed over it. She had been told at Baker Street before she left London
16:33
that the camp had been evacuated by the Germans in the summer of 1944 ahead of the American advance and that many
16:40
prisoners had been marched east into worse places and that the huts still stood. She saw the huts. She saw the
16:47
small oven. She stood on the parade ground and looked down at the roofs of the village below. It was a beautiful
16:53
spot in the terrible way that many of these places were beautiful. She did not remark on it. She never remarked on it
17:00
in her letters. She noted only in her book that she had been there. She began
17:06
to look for people who had been there in July of 1944 when the four English women came up the road. She found some, a
17:14
former prisoner, a [music] doctor, a camp interpreter, a guard who had been arrested by the French. She sat down
17:21
with each of them in a series of small rooms and she asked them in the calm
17:26
voice of a woman who was not going to raise it what they had seen. She learned that on the evening of the 6th of July
17:32
1944, four women had arrived at the camp under escort. They had been walking. They had
17:39
come from a car parked at the gate. They had been kept together and not registered in the usual way. They had
17:45
been taken to the crematorium building and locked in cells on the ground floor. There had been food brought to them, but
17:52
the food had gone largely uneaten. The four women were at that point still alive. The four women, from what could
17:59
be reconstructed, [music] had been told that they were to be inoculated against typhus. Vera Atkins wrote in her book
18:05
what she had learned. She did not write more than she needed to. She kept always
18:10
to what she could prove. She learned that a camp doctor had gone into each of the cells in turn that night. She
18:17
learned that he had been carrying a syringe. She learned that the substance in the syringe had been carbolic acid,
18:23
phenol, given by injection to the heart, which is not a kind death, but which is
18:28
not, when done accurately, a long one. She learned that the four women had been carried one at a time, into the room
18:36
next to the cells, which contained the oven, and that the oven had been used.
18:41
She learned that on that night the pattern which had usually been followed had not in one case been followed
18:48
correctly. She learned that [music] one of the four had regained consciousness. She learned that the men present had
18:54
understood at the time what that meant. She did not put more into her file than the trial record when it came would
19:01
[music] say that was her practice. She wrote in her book one of the four returned to consciousness before the
19:08
end. She did not name the woman. Nobody would ever be able to say for certain which of them it had been, but she
19:14
thought in the small requisitioned room of Andre Burell on the airfield, small
19:20
and dark and shrugging, laughing once, [music] saying, “Aento,” she closed the file. She opened another the airfield
19:27
again. It is [music] a different night. It is the spring of 1944.
19:33
The moon is exactly what it needs to be. The aircraft is a liberator. It is going
19:38
to drop supplies as well as the agent. It will not land. The agent standing on the grass this time is not tall. She has
19:46
a small handbag and a smart coat and lipstick and her hair is dark and set.
19:52
And she is altogether a very striking looking young woman. Her name is Violet
19:57
Sabo. She is 23 years old. She has a daughter aged 18 months at home with her
20:04
mother in Brixham. Her husband was a French officer who was killed at Elamagne before he ever knew that his
20:10
daughter had been born. [music] Violet Sabo speaks French with a Paris accent because her mother was French. She was
20:17
raised in London. Before the war, she worked at the perfume counter at the bomb mare in Brixton and she was good at
20:23
it. When she was told at her final debrief that she should try to blend in,
20:29
she looked at the officer who told her and said dryly that she had been blending in at a perfume counter for 4
20:35
years and she thought she could manage. She is now on her second mission. [music] On her first 3 months ago, she
20:42
went in to reconoiter what remained of the salesman circuit around Ru. She reported that the circuit had been
20:49
almost entirely destroyed. She came out again. [music] This second mission she
20:54
is being dropped near Limoge. The Normandy landings are days away. Her job is to help a colleague establish a new
21:01
circuit in the Corez in time to sabotage German troop movements north. Vera
21:06
Atkins is standing on the grass with her. There is a free French officer standing to one side. There is a war
21:12
correspondent present under strict rules who will later describe Violet Sabo
21:17
[music] in his notebook as pretty, cheerful and utterly matter of fact. Vera
21:23
Atkins turns down the collar of Violet Sabo’s coat. She smooths the shoulders.
21:28
She reaches into a pocket. She finds a photograph. A little girl aged 1 and a
21:33
half sitting on a rug laughing at the camera. She does not take it. She looks
21:38
at Violet Sabo. Violet Sabo looks back. Violet Sabo says, “I know.” Vera Atkins
21:45
says, “You are sure. I am sure.” Vera Atkins puts the photograph back into the
21:51
pocket. She squeezes Violet Sabo’s hand. Violet Sabo climbs into the aircraft.
21:57
The engines lift. The tail lights vanish. By the summer of 1945, Vera
22:03
Atkins knew that Violet Sabo had landed safely near Limoge on the 8th of June
22:08<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n- She knew that Violet Sabo had on the morning of the 10th of June been
22:13
traveling by car through the countryside with a leader of the local Machi when the car had run into an SS patrol. She
22:20
knew that Violet Sabo had held off the patrol from behind a wall with a Sten gun until her ammunition ran out. She
22:27
knew that Violet Sabo had been captured, wounded, and had been taken to prison in Lamage, then to Paris, then to the
22:34
prison at Fren, then to Ravensbrook. She knew that Ravensbrook was a women’s concentration camp about 50 mi north of
22:41
Berlin and that it had been evacuated in the winter of 1945 and that in the last
22:47
month of its operation it had been the site of a great many executions of women whom the SS did not want to leave alive.
22:54
She knew that Vlet Sabo had not come home. She did not in the summer of 1945
23:00
know how. She began to look. Ravensbrook had been liberated by the Red Army. The
23:05
camp was in the Soviet zone. Getting into it was for a British officer not
23:10
straightforward. Vera Atkins used what channels she had. She wrote to survivors. She read testimonies. She sat
23:18
down with women who had come out of Ravensbrook and asked [music] them quietly whether they had seen three
23:23
particular English women in the winter months. Two of the three she was asking about were Denise Block and Lillian
23:30
Ralph. They had also not come back. Denise Block had been on the same aircraft as Violet Sabo on the 8th of
23:37
June. Lilian Rolf had been in Paris longer, arrested in July, taken east in
23:43
the same great sweep. Vera Atkins was [music] tracing all three of them at once because they had been last seen
23:49
together. She spoke in the end to a French woman who had been in Ravensbrook in the last winter. The French woman had
23:56
known Violet Sabo whom she called by her field name and she had known Denise Block [music] and she had known Lillian
24:03
Rolf. The three women had come to the camp together transferred from another site and they had been kept together and
24:09
they had been in a state by the winter which the French woman described very carefully. Violet Sabo said the French
24:17
woman had been thin [music] and had been ill and had walked with a limp because
24:22
of an injury she had received earlier but had not lost her nerve. Denise Block
24:27
had been able to move only with help. Lily and Ralph had been carried on a stretcher at the end. All three of them
24:33
had one evening in the winter [music] been called out of their block and told to report to the camp office. The French
24:40
woman had watched them go. [music] Violet Sabo had walked as best she could. Denise Block had been held up
24:46
between two other women. Lilian Rolf had been on the stretcher. The French woman had never seen any of the three again.
24:52
Vera Atkins wrote this down in her book. She did not embellish. She did not need
24:58
to. She then over the course of the following months tracked down men who had worked at Ravensbrook and she found
25:05
one and then another. And eventually she found a member of the camp staff who had
25:10
been present in the small yard behind the camp office on the night in question. She found also documents. She
25:17
found orders. She read them. The three women had been taken into a small yard behind the office. They had been told to
25:24
kneel. They had been shot one at a time in the back of the neck. The camp doctor
25:30
had certified death. The bodies had been taken to the crematorium. Vera Atkins
25:36
wrote in her book the date as best [music] she could establish it. The evening of the 5th of February 1945.
25:43
She sat in the small room in the requisitioned house and she thought of the airfield in the spring [music] and
25:49
Violet Sabo climbing into the aircraft with a photograph of her daughter still in the pocket of her coat. She closed
25:55
the file. She opened another the airfield again. It is the summer of 1943.
26:02
The aircraft is a Lysander. The moon is up. There is an old timber hut at one
26:07
end of the field where the pilots sign in and out. And inside the hut, there is a stove and a kettle. And Vera Atkins is
26:15
standing outside the hut on the grass with an agent she has come very much to know. And she is troubled about her. She
26:22
has been troubled about her for weeks. The agent’s real name is Nure Iniat Khan. She is 29 years old. She was born
26:30
in Moscow. She grew up in Paris. Her father was an Indian musician and mystic
26:35
of the Sufi tradition. Her mother was [music] American. She was educated at the Saon. She played the harp. She wrote
26:43
children’s stories, one collection of which had been published in Paris before the war and was really rather good. She
26:50
is a pacifist by upbringing [music] and belief. She is also fluent in French, brave to the point of
26:55
recklessness in her own estimation, and one of the only qualified wireless operators of the right age and
27:01
background whom F- section has available in the summer of 1943. The training
27:06
reports have not been enthusiastic. The instructors have written that she is dreamy. They have written that she is
27:12
not always security-minded. They have written that they do not think she should be sent. The circuit in Paris to
27:18
which she is going has been asking urgently for a wireless operator.
27:23
Wireless operators at that point in the war are being killed at a rate which nobody in Baker Street will say aloud.
27:29
The average life of a wireless operator in Paris from insertion to arrest has begun to be measured in weeks. 6 weeks.
27:37
Some are saying some are saying less. Vera Atkins has argued in the corridor at Baker Street that Nor Inayat Khan
27:45
should not go. She has been overruled. The circuit needs an operator. Nor Inat
27:51
Khan has volunteered. She has in her own quiet way insisted. She says she is
27:57
ready. Vera Atkins is now standing with her on the grass. She turns down the collar of No’s coat. No watches her
28:05
calm. She has very dark eyes and a very quiet voice. She is small. Vera Atkins
28:12
reaches into the pocket. She finds a slim envelope. She takes it out. The
28:17
envelope is addressed to No’s mother. It is the letter to be posted in the event. No says gently. You know I want it
28:25
there. Vera Atkins says, “I know.” She puts the letter into her own pocket. She
28:31
will keep it, she thinks, until No comes back and can pay for the stamp herself. She says, “Empty your pockets.” No
28:40
obeys. There is nothing else in them. Vera Atkins looks at her a long moment.
28:45
She says, “You do not have to go.” Nor says, “I know.” Vera Atkins says, “I
28:51
mean [music] it. Even now, even at the aircraft, it is not too late.” No looks
28:56
at her and smiles. Very briefly, she [music] says, “I want to go.” Vera Atkin
29:02
squeezes her hand. Nor climbs into the Lander. By the summer of 1945, Vera
29:09
Atkins knew that Nora Khan had landed near Angar on the 16th [music] of June
29:14<\/li>\n\n\n\n - She knew that within days of her arrival, the Paris circuit into which she [music] had been inserted had begun
29:21
to be rolled up by the Germans. Arrest after arrest, one entire chain going
29:26
down in a fortnight. She knew that Norinayat Khan had refused offers to be
29:31
brought home. She knew that Nor Inayat Khan had continued to work her wireless set alone in a city where the Germans
29:39
were now more or less hunting her personally. She knew that Norin Iniad Khan had been arrested in October 1943.
29:47
She knew that Noriniat Khan [music] had at some point after her arrest escaped
29:52
briefly from the building where she had been held and had been recaptured. She knew that Norinayat Khan had been sent
29:59
in November of 1943 to a prison in Germany and had been kept in that prison
30:05
[music] in solitary confinement in chains for 10 months without being
30:10
permitted to communicate with anybody and had [music] been listed as a person to be treated with the greatest
30:16
severity. She knew that no Inayat Khan had at some point been transferred out
30:21
of that prison along with three other English women who had also been held in solitary in the same wing. She did not
30:28
[music] know in the summer of 1945 where the four of them had been taken. She did
30:34
not know what had happened to them. She began to look. She traced the three other women first because their fates
30:40
were in the end easier to establish. All three had been taken in the September of 1944 to the concentration camp at Daau
30:49
near Munich. All three had been shot on arrival or shortly after in the yard
30:54
beside the crematorium. Their names were Yoland Beakman, [music] Meline Damon, and Elellane Plumman. Vera Atkins had
31:02
also seen them off at airfields. She had also turned down their collars. She wrote each of their fates in her book.
31:09
She did not linger. She had a fourth to find. She could not at first find Nure
31:15
in Nayat Khan at Dhau. The three others were there in the records. [music] Nur was not. She had not according to what
31:22
she could find been at Dhaka in the September of 1944. She looked for her in other camps.
31:29
Bergen, Bellson, Mauousen, Ravensbrook. No, [music] she read the transfer papers
31:35
from the Carl’s Ruer civil prison. The three others were listed. No was [music] not. She began to think quietly that
31:43
Norah Inayat Khan might have been separated from the other three at some earlier point. She began to think
31:49
quietly that Norinayat Khan might have been killed elsewhere. She began to
31:54
think quietly that Norinat Khan might be the one she would not find. She would
32:00
not accept it. Not yet. She kept looking. She sat down with a former staff member of the Carl’s Ruer Civil
32:06
Prison in a small room in early 1946. She asked patiently whether the prisoner
32:13
Norah Baker had ever been held there. Norah Baker had been Nor Inayat Khan’s
32:18
cover name for administrative purposes. The staff member said yes. The staff member said the prisoner had been kept
32:24
in chains. The staff member said the prisoner had been transferred out on a particular date in the September of
32:30<\/li>\n\n\n\n - transferred to where the staff member did not know. The transfer papers had
32:37
gone with the escort. Vera Atkins wrote it down. She looked elsewhere. She found
32:42
in the archives of the German security police a list of prisoners transferred from Carl’s on that date. Four names.
32:50
Three of them she recognized. The fourth was Norah Baker. The list said at the
32:55
top Dhau. She went back to Dhau. She found the camp records. She found the
33:01
intake for that day. Three names in the intake, not four. She could not at first
33:07
understand [music] it. She looked again. She looked at the paperwork. She looked at the sequence of transfers. She looked
33:14
at where the three had been shot and by whom. She began to ask quietly [music]
33:19
who had been on duty at Dhau in the small hours of the 12th of September, 1944. She got names. She wrote down the
33:27
names. She began to interview. She found eventually a former camp official who
33:32
had been on duty that night. She sat down with him. She asked him to describe the events of that night. He did not at
33:39
first describe the events of that night. [music] He was reluctant. She did not press him. She sat with him for a long
33:46
time. She was patient in the way that she was always patient. Eventually, over
33:51
the course of hours, he told her four prisoners, he said, “Four women. They had arrived in the night. [music] One of
33:58
them, he said, had been kept apart from the others. He did not know why. He
34:04
thought perhaps because she had been considered a special case. He thought perhaps because there had been
34:10
particular instructions about her. The other three, he said, had been shot together in the morning. The one who had
34:16
been kept apart had been shot alone in the early hours before dawn. He gave the
34:23
name of the officer who had done it. He gave the name as best he remembered it. He did not remember all the details.
34:29
Vera Atkins wrote it down. She did not in the small room allow her face to change. She continued to sit with him.
34:36
She asked him quietly what he had understood about the prisoner who had been kept apart. He said that she had
34:43
not been well. She had been illreated on the journey. She had been in poor condition. She had when she had been
34:50
taken out into the yard refused to speak. Vera Atkins asked quietly whether
34:55
the prisoner had said any word at all before she died. The official thought for a moment. He said he did not
35:01
remember. Then after a further pause he said that he thought but he was not sure
35:07
that she had said one word. He thought the word had been in French. He thought the word had been liberte. Vera Atkins
35:14
wrote in her book, Fate of Norah Baker, real name Inayyat Khan, established
35:20
executed Dhau concentration camp early hours of the 13th of September 1944.
35:27
Refused to give the names of her comrades, refused to give the names of her circuit, refused in the [music] end
35:34
to give a single name. She closed the file. She thought of the young woman with the very dark eyes on the airfield
35:41
in the summer of 1943, saying quietly that she wanted to go.
35:46
She sat in the small room for a long time. The four women at Nutsweila, the
35:51
three at Ravensbrook, the four at Daau, others in other places, singly or in
35:57
twos or in threes, men shot into pits at Bukinwald, a young officer garrotted in
36:02
a corridor at Mountousen. A wireless operator dead in a stairwell in Paris in
36:07
circumstances that would never be fully explained. Nine of her women at Ravensbrook accounted for. Four at Daau,
36:14
four at Natweiler. A everywhere she went, she went with the book and with the photographs and with the small
36:21
folder of last known addresses and next of kin and with the letters that had not been posted [music] that were still in
36:28
her handbag and that would only be needed in some cases and would still in
36:33
some cases never be needed at all because there was no next of kin left.
36:38
She was called back that autumn to Nuremberg to be present as a British representative when the American
36:44
interrogators were about to question a certain prisoner. The prisoner was Rudolph Ho. Rudolph Hos had been from
36:52
May of 1940 [music] until November of 1943 the commonant of the concentration
36:58
camp and killing center [music] at Awitz. He had in that role presided over
37:03
the murder of well over a million people. He was at the time she came to see him a man in his early 40s, ordinary
37:11
in appearance, spectacled, quiet, who did not raise his voice. He had been
37:17
captured in March of 1946 after a period in hiding, betrayed by his own family
37:23
under British interrogation and had been brought to Nuremberg as a [music] witness. He was, when Vera Atkins was
37:30
shown into his cell, a witness rather than a defendant, because the allies wanted his testimony against others
37:36
before they hanged him themselves, which they intended to do and which they would. His cell was cold. It was
37:43
mid-inter. The stone was cold. The window was small. There was a table and
37:48
two chairs. Vera Atkins wore her uniform. She was technically at the rank
37:54
of squadron officer of the women’s auxiliary air force. She had on paper no more standing to interrogate this man
38:01
than any other junior officer in the British zone. Rudolfph Hurse had been the commandant of Awitz. Vera Atkins was
38:08
one of two people in the world who was going to make him answer to her personally about her [music] women. He
38:14
looked at her as she came in and he stood as he had been trained. She did not tell him to sit. She sat first. She
38:22
placed her book on the table. She opened it. She looked at him. She spoke in German. She said, “I want you to tell me
38:30
what happened at Awitz.” Rudolph Host looked at her. He was not at this point
38:36
a man who was any longer resisting. [music] He had before her arrival already given a written statement. He
38:42
had already in a certain sense stopped fighting. He answered her. He described
38:47
[music] in a factual voice the arrival of the transports. He described the selection on the ramp. [music] He
38:53
described the two lines. He described the disposition of children. He described the [music] buildings. He
38:59
described the number of people who could be killed per hour, per day, per week. [music] He described the difficulty of
39:06
the disposal of the bodies. He described the technical problems he had solved. He described the technical problems he had
39:12
failed to solve. He described figures. He gave with a slight correction here and there the totals. Vera Atkins wrote
39:20
down what he said. She did not interrupt. [music] She did not raise her voice. She did not ask him whether he
39:26
was ashamed. She did not need to. That was for the tribunal. She asked him then
39:31
when he had finished about specific transports. She asked him whether he could remember any transports of small
39:37
groups of women who had arrived not with the regular Jewish deportations but under separate arrangements under the
39:44
label nak unable. He said that there had been such prisoners. He said he did not
39:50
remember individuals. He said there had been [music] so many. She asked him whether he had
39:56
been aware of the presence at any point of British agents in his camp. He said
40:01
that if there had been such prisoners, [music] they would not have been treated differently. He said that if they had come on a transport, they would have
40:08
gone the way of any other prisoner on that transport. She wrote down what he said. She asked him then a series of
40:14
questions about procedures at other camps. She asked him about Natsweiler. [music] She asked him about Ravensbrook. She
40:20
asked him about Dhaka. She was trying to establish on the record that a commandant of one camp knew and
40:27
understood how executions were carried out at the other camps of the system and that instructions of the kind that had
40:33
led to her women being killed had not been eccentric but were routine. He
40:38
confirmed in his flat voice that they were routine. She asked him what he
40:44
thought personally of orders to execute prisoners at night by injection or by shooting without record and without
40:51
notice to their families. He said that such orders were orders. He said that in
40:56
the SS an order was an order and one did not question it. He said that [music]
41:02
the orders had come from the highest offices in Berlin. She wrote it down. She sat with him for hours. She did not
41:09
at any point express what she felt. She did not at any point express what she
41:15
felt about him. She had been told in an earlier conversation with the American colonel who had been interrogating him
41:21
that Hurse responded well to a courteous manner and might close down completely
41:26
under a hostile one. She had said [music] quite politely that she was aware of this. Thank you. She had
41:33
brought the courteous manner with her. She had brought also the cold underneath it. [music] At the end of the interview,
41:40
she asked him one further question. She asked him whether he understood that people, individuals, women with names
41:47
and mothers and children had been killed at his camp and at the other camps that he had described. He said yes. He said
41:54
he understood. She asked him whether he understood that this had been a wrong done to them. He hesitated. He said
42:01
eventually that he now believed it had been a wrong. She closed her book. She stood. She walked out of the cell into
42:08
the corridor. There was a British officer waiting for her outside. He asked her later whether it had been a
42:14
useful interview. She said that it had he asked her later still whether she had
42:21
felt anything at all sitting across from Rudolph Hurse. She said, “I felt exactly what you would expect me to have felt.
42:27
Now let us not discuss it again.” The trials came on one after another. The
42:33
one that mattered most to her was the trial of the men from Natsweila. It was held in the British zone in the
42:40
summer of 1946 at a place called Wapatal. The defendants were the commonant of the camp, the camp doctor,
42:47
the crerematorium operator and various others associated with the events of the 6th of July 1944. Vera Atkins had been
42:55
the officer who had assembled the case. Vera Atkins gave evidence. Vera Atkins
43:01
provided the identification of the four women who had died. The identification mattered a great deal. The German
43:07
defense was that no such women had ever been at the camp or that if they had they had been anonymous prisoners in
43:13
transit or that if they had not been that [music] they had been executed under lawful orders. Vera Atkins
43:19
produced the paperwork from Carl’s Ruer Civil Prison. She produced descriptions.
43:24
She produced testimony [music] from prisoners who had been at Natsweiler that night and had seen the four women.
43:30
She produced a woman who had shared a cell with Andre Borell and friends and could describe her precisely. She
43:37
produced photographs. She stood in the witness box. She spoke calmly. She did
43:42
not raise her voice. She was cross-examined at length. She did not lose composure. The [music] defense
43:47
attempted to cast doubt on the identifications. She answered every question in the same flat voice. She was
43:54
by then in her middle 40s. She was small and neatly dressed. The court took her
44:00
correctly as the walking authority on the four dead women. The verdicts came in. [music] The commandant was sentenced
44:07
to be hanged. The doctor was sentenced to be hanged. Several others were sentenced to varying terms of
44:13
imprisonment. The crerematorium operator’s evidence, complicated and disputed, went one way and then on
44:20
appeal another. The executions took place at Hamill prison in the British zone later that year and into the next.
44:28
Hamill was where the British zone’s condemned men went. The hangings were carried out by a British executioner
44:35
brought over from England for the purpose. He was a professional. He was efficient. He knew his work. Vera Atkins
44:42
did not usually attend. She did not need to. She was not and did not need to be
44:48
that kind of person. But she made a point of being informed in each case of the date and the outcome. She made a
44:55
point of writing the outcome into her book in her small precise hand under the entry for each agent whose murderer it
45:02
was. She did not on those days seem different to anyone who worked with her. She did not on those days close herself
45:09
away or refuse work or cry or drink. She did not do any of the things which
45:15
people in later years when they imagined this story tended to think she must have
45:20
done. She had tea. She wrote letters. She worked on the next case. The next
45:26
[music] case, there was always the next case. There would be other trials. There would be the trial of the men from
45:33
Ravensbrook at Hamburg. She would testify. There would be the trial of
45:38
officials from the German security police in Paris. At other courts, at other times, she would produce [music]
45:44
evidence. She would fight again and again over the identification of women
45:50
whom the Germans at the trial would attempt to make anonymous. She would refuse again and again to allow them to
45:57
be made anonymous. Nine at Ravensbrook in the end. Four at Dao to Notweiler.
46:04
others elsewhere. Men she had also seen off from airfields, though it was the women who tended to make the newspapers.
46:11
Men shot into wooded ravines in the Vosge. Men worked to death in tunnels. Men who had died of typhus in a camp
46:18
infirmary in the last week of the war. By the end of 1947, she had traced 117
46:24
fates. She had one left. She would work on the 118th for the rest of her working
46:30
life. She would not [music] in her lifetime close the file. She would
46:35
insist to her superiors and to anyone else who cared to raise it [music] that the last file remain open. Some of them
46:42
she never met the killers of. Some of the killers she met were already in the dock at Nuremberg or at Hamburg or at
46:49
Watar for other things. And the fates of her people were rolled into indictments they were going to hang for anyway. Some
46:55
of them she found and confronted personally sitting across a table in a cold room and asked in her flat voice in
47:02
German what precisely had happened and by whose order and on what date. [music]
47:08
Some of the killers walked away protected by amnesties or by the death of a witness or by the collapse in the
47:15
late 1940s of political appetite for any further war crimes trials. She did not
47:21
give up on the ones who walked away. She wrote letters. She lodged reports. She sat in the 1950s and the 1960s in the
47:30
small back office at her flat. And she wrote Menorander to the foreign office and to the West German authorities and
47:36
to anyone who would read them on this or that outstanding case. Sometimes it
47:41
worked. More often it did not. She lived in her later years in a small house in
47:47
the south of England. She kept the book. She kept every photograph. She kept the
47:52
file cabinet. She had been ordered at various points in her career to hand parts of it in. She had in various ways
48:00
declined. The cabinet stayed with her. Visitors came. Some of them were the
48:05
families of her agents. [music] A sister who wanted to know once precisely how her brother had died. A daughter who
48:12
wanted to know once whether her mother had spoken of her. At the end, Vera Atkins told each of them what she knew.
48:20
She told each of them always the truth, and she told each of them always the
48:26
truth, as gently [music] as it could be told, which was not in most cases gently at all. She was asked more than once by
48:33
a journalist or an author or a historian why she had done it, why she had gone to
48:39
Germany with no staff and no budget and no support, why she had spent years at
48:44
the cost of [music] her health chasing men whose fates she could not always affect. why she had insisted when almost
48:51
nobody else did [music] on knowing. She was asked this in different ways at different times. She usually declined to
48:58
give an answer. She was by inclination a private person. She did not think that
49:04
the doing of the thing needed to be justified to those who had not done it. But [music] once late in her life, a
49:10
woman writing a book about her sat with her in the small living room and asked the question again and did not press it
49:18
and waited. Vera Atkins looked at the woman. She said quietly [music] that she had been the one to see them off. She
49:25
said that she had known each of their real names. She said that she had known who was at home waiting for them. She
49:31
said that if she had not gone to Germany and found out what had happened to them, [music] then no one would have and their
49:37
names would have been forgotten, and the men who had killed them would not have been made to answer for it, and the
49:43
memory of what those young people had been and had [music] done would have gone into the same night and fog into
49:48
which the Germans had intended to send [music] them. She said, “I could not abandon their memory.” That was the
49:54
whole of what she said. [music] Return at the end to the airfield. It is
50:00
not 1943. [music] It is not any night in the war. It is now. It is a gray
50:06
afternoon in England. The grass runway is still [music] there, more or less,
50:11
though the tarmac has taken over most of it. There is a preserved hut [music] and a small museum and a low black stone.
50:19
The stone is inscribed with the names of the men and women who went out from this field into occupied Europe. There are a
50:26
great many names on it. Some are French, some are Belgian, some are Norwegian,
50:31
some are Polish, [music] some are Dutch, some are American. A great many are
50:36
English. Standing at the stone, in the imagination of anyone who has read this far, is a small woman in a plain [music]
50:43
coat, no longer young. She is not visible, of course. She died some years ago. She is buried [music] elsewhere.
50:50
Her ashes are in a churchyard in the south of England in a place she loved. But she is at the stone anyway because
50:56
she was always at the stone. She has in her mind the book. She has in her mind
51:02
the photographs. She has in her mind the airfield as it was and the aircraft as
51:08
they were and the young people as they were. She has in her mind Andre Burell
51:13
shrugging and laughing [music] and saying Abento. She has in her mind
51:19
Violet Sabo with the photograph of her daughter in her pocket. She has in her mind No Inayat Khan with the very dark
51:26
eyes saying quietly, “I want to go.” She has in her mind the 118 faces. She has
51:34
in her mind the 117 files, each of them closed, each of them with its date and
51:40
its place, and where she was able to establish it, its cause and its executioner. She has in her mind the
51:47
last file which she never closed. She has in her mind the question she was
51:52
asked. Why did you do it? She has in her mind the answer she gave. She could not
51:59
abandon their memory. The wind is up in the field. The pines beyond the runway
52:04
move. The names on the stone are old now and the ink of the register in the
52:09
little museum is faded and the photographs have gone brown at their edges. A visitor walks past the stone
52:16
without stopping. [music] It is a Tuesday afternoon. It is many years after the war, but the woman who is not
52:22
there stands at the stone anyway. She has for her all the time she needs. She has been at this stone for years. She
52:29
has been at it since the first name went on it. She will be at it for as long as anyone still comes to read the names.
52:35
She reads them one by one in the order in which she remembers them and not in
52:41
the order in which they are inscribed. She reads them in the order in which she stood on the grass with each of them and
52:47
turned down each collar [music] and looked into each face and let go of each hand and watched each aircraft go. She
52:54
reaches the last of them. She stops. She looks up at the sky. The sky is empty.
53:01
She stands there a long time. That is where she stayed. That is where in the
53:07
end she left them and where they left her and where the story properly ends,
53:12
[music] which is not with the men she hanged, and not with Hurse in the cold cell, and not with the four women in the
53:18
crematorium, and not with the three in the small yard at Ravensbrook, [music] and not with the one who said liberte in
53:24
the yard at Daau in the small hours before dawn. The story ends where it
53:29
began, on a grass field at night [music] with a woman turning down a collar and taking a bus ticket out of a pocket and
53:36
squeezing a young hand [music] and watching an aircraft go and standing longer than most people would because
53:42
she was the last person in each case who knew who they truly were. 118 She stood
53:50
there for all of them. She stands there<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
__________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Captain Convey Comment<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These brave people gave their lives to defeat the german SS in WWII.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer of Special Operations Executive F Section and the people she sent into battle must be remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
History can repeat itself if not studied and remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vera Atkins dedication is amazing along with her British Spies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
German troops murdered her spies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vera Atkins made sure they were brought to justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
German soldiers tried to cover up the murders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vera Atkins made sure that did not happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iCtJ5kWvd9U (British SAS Archives explores the personal mission of intelligence officer Vera Atkins to account for 118 missing secret agents after World War II. Using a private record of names and human details, the investigation documents the final movements of those sent into occupied France, ensuring their stories were not lost to history.) British SAS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-do-your-own-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1770,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769\/revisions\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audaciouscat.com\/rabbit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}