2
The piece of paper that changed Roger Landes’s life appeared on the noticeboard of No. 2 Company, 2nd Operations Training Battalion of the Signals Training College in Prestatyn, North Wales, sometime during the last week of February 1942.
It was brief and to the point: Army Number 2366511 Signalman Roger Landes to report to Room 055 of the War Office in Whitehall on Wednesday 4 March 1942. A military rail warrant for a return journey to central London could be collected from the company office.
Given the vagaries of wartime travel it is likely that young Landes (he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday just before Christmas) went down to London the day before his interview, and spent the night at his parents’ apartment at 48 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16. Although the crescendo of the London blitz had passed by mid-summer 1941, the city’s overground rail system remained in many places unrepaired and everywhere prone to breakdown and delay. Most Londoners used the Underground to get around.
No one would have paid much attention to the small man in the ill-fitting serge uniform of a private of the Royal Signals, making his way this cold grey March day on the Piccadilly line towards central London. If he had spoken, they would have noted his heavy accent, and concluded that he was just another foreigner in a city full of foreigners – from the ‘exotic’ to the ordinary, from kings and queens to commoners – all taking refuge from the German onslaught across the Channel.
Born in December 1916 and brought up in Paris the son of a family of Jewish immigrants of Polish–Russian extraction, Roger Arthur Landes had inherited his British citizenship from his father, Barnet, a jeweller in the French capital, who, through an accident of fate, had been born in London. Sometime in the early 1930s, Barnet Landes was bankrupted by the Great Depression. Roger was forced to leave school at the age of thirteen and start work in a firm of quantity surveyors, while attending technical classes at night school. His parents emigrated to London in 1934, where they rented a small flat off Stamford Hill, an area much favoured by the Jewish community. Roger stayed on in France where, despite not having taken his baccalauréat, he managed to obtain a place at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On graduating (with the École’s Prix d’Honneur, among other prizes), he took furnished rooms in the French capital and set about learning the practical aspects of his trade as an architect and quantity surveyor.
By 1938, however, it was clear to all that war was coming. Landes knew that if he stayed in France he would soon receive his call-up papers for the French army, which, even half a century after the Dreyfus affair, still had a reputation for anti-Semitism. He left for England, moved in with his parents in Stamford Hill and secured a position as a clerk in the architectural department of London County Council. Later he was to say that his time in the LCC was one of the most enjoyable of his life.
On the outbreak of the war, Landes signed up immediately and was posted to the Rescue Service in Islington, where he used his architectural skills to assess bomb damage during the blitz. Two years later he was redeployed to the miserable, windswept, wintry conditions of Prestatyn holiday camp in North Wales for training as a radio operator. It was here in 1942 that the mysterious note on the No. 2 Company noticeboard found him and ordered him to attend the War Office on this March Wednesday morning.
Short (five foot four), slender and unprepossessing, Roger Landes was olive-skinned, with a narrow heart-shaped face, a rather sensitive (even feminine) mouth, oiled black hair carefully coiffed in the fashion of the day, and heavy eyebrows jutting out above eyes which combined humour and cunning in equal measure. He spoke English imperfectly and with a strong French accent, overlaid with the distinctive guttural ‘r’ and nasal cadences of the Jewish community of Stamford Hill. Though proud of being a Jew, he wore his religion lightly and was a rare practicant. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this slight figure amidst the press of wartime Londoners going about their daily business was that he was unusually unremarkable. A fellow British agent later observed: ‘his smallness and … particular facial features’ gave him an uncanny ability to vanish into the crowd, making him, even when undisguised, ‘a difficult man to track’.
The early months of 1942 were the coldest in northern Europe since 1895. The ground remained frozen solid under a carpet of thick hoar frost, which persisted into the early weeks of March. The scene that would have greeted Landes as he emerged from the London underground and walked along the Embankment would have been a sombre one. The parks by the river’s edge had long ago been dug up for vegetable allotments and air-raid shelters. A leaden Thames, indistinguishable from its mud banks, flowed sullenly under a blanket of freezing fog. The trees lining the north side of the river appeared as a row of ghostly mourners emerging from the mist, their lopped branches raised like stumps in supplication to a vengeful sky. Thin drifts of unswept snow still lay in gutters and along the sheltered edges of buildings.
Set back from the Thames, Whitehall, grimy from two centuries of coal fires, now also bore the pockmarks of the recent blitz. Every window was white-taped against bomb blast and curtained with condensation from the human fug inside; every door was protected by a tunnel of sandbags manned by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The War Office building itself had been hit and some of the great buildings of state had been turned into bombsites, which now sprouted young buddleia bushes, stalwart against the cold, and withered mats of brambles whose tentacles reached out across the rubble, hoping for the spring.
Landes made his way to Whitehall Court and the back entrance to the War Office building, where a sentry barred his way. He showed his orders and was passed on to a reception desk. From there an escort took him down long ill-lit corridors with black-and-white mosaic floors and brown panelling to a large room used only for interviews, whose grimy windows looked out onto the inner courtyard. The space, carpeted in linoleum which peeled back in one corner, was empty of ornament or furniture, save for a bare desk behind which sat a forlorn, out-of-place-looking secretary. Landes produced his letter and was ushered into a second, smaller room. Here seated at a desk facing him was a cadaverous-looking man in the perfectly cut uniform of a British major. A small coal fire glowed bravely in the middle of one wall but made little headway against the entrenched cold of a room which had been inadequately heated all winter.
The major rose, extended his right hand and – waving the other at the upright chair positioned opposite him – said: ‘I am Major Gielgud. Do sit down.’
The interview did not last long, for the major’s speech was terse and his manner brusque in the fashion of these urgent times. ‘We are sending British personnel into France who can speak fluent French and use wireless sets – radio operators who will be able to pass for French people. From the report I have on your skill in wireless communications, and as you have lived in France for so long, you are the perfect man to send, should you be willing to go. There are three ways to send you to France; by parachute, by motor-boat, or by fishing boat from Gibraltar. The danger is you may be caught, in which case you will probably be tortured and sent to a certain death. The fact that you are a Jew is not going to make life easier for you, as I am sure you understand. Will you accept? Yes or no? You have five minutes to think about it.’
Landes thought about it very little, before saying yes.
‘Good,’ said Gielgud, who was the brother of the great actor, John. ‘Then return to your unit. Say nothing to anyone, even your parents, and we will be in touch.’
Some days later Landes received another order: he was to report on 17 March to a flat in Orchard Court, Portman Square, and introduce himself as ‘Robert Lang’.
The door at Orchard Court, a 1930s mansion block, was opened by a man in butler’s uniform, who welcomed him with a butler’s smile. His name was Arthur Parks, and he spoke perfect French, having worked for Barclays Bank in Paris before the war. Parks led the new recruit to a grand room where he was introduced to Captain André Simon, who in peacetime had been a wine merchant. Simon was also brief, informing Landes that he was now formally a member of the Special Operations Executive, with the rank of temporary second lieutenant. He was, henceforth and for the rest of his life, subject to the Official Secrets Act and would receive an initial salary of five guineas a week. Captain Simon then gave Landes £10 with which to buy two khaki shirts and ordered him to report back to Orchard Court with a small overnight bag the following day.
Arriving the next morning at Orchard Court, Landes found he was not alone. He and another nine students, all young men and all of them looking equally uncomfortable in ill-fitting army uniforms, were swiftly introduced to each other using the aliases by which they would be known throughout their period of training. They were a hybrid collection, whose only common feature, as far as Landes could see, was their ability to speak French as a native. Most had dual identities, having been brought up in France as the children of mixed French–British marriages. Some had British parents who had chosen to educate their children in local French schools. One was the son of a well-known Francophone family from Mauritius; he was the first, but by no means last, SOE recruit to come from the tiny British colony.
Introductions over, they were bundled into a small bus and driven out of London, along the A30 through Guildford to the little village of Wanborough, close under the northern flank of the Hog’s Back. Here they turned up a small farm track to a brick-built three-gabled Elizabethan house set about with outhouses, sheds and workers’ cottages.
Wanborough Manor (known by SOE as Special Training School No. 5) was in many ways an odd choice for a spy school. Plainly visible from the road only 200 metres away, and famed for having one of the largest medieval wooden barns in southeast England, it sat right in the middle of the small hamlet of Wanborough. The house had a cellar, used for indoor instruction, a kitchen, a substantial sitting room and a dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms on the top two floors dedicated to staff accommodation and a small church in the grounds, where interdenominational services were held to cater for the needs of SOE’s wide variety of students. Physical training was held on the two lawns, back and front, which during fine weather in the summer months were also employed as occasional outdoor classrooms.
SOE’s trainee agents were not the first unusual visitors to Wanborough. Gladstone’s parliamentary secretary had lived there and the Grand Old Man wrote his resignation speech in the Manor’s study. During Gladstone’s time as prime minister, Queen Victoria had also paid a visit to Wanborough, accompanied by Bismarck. The two marked the occasion by planting two giant sequoias on the front lawn, each adorned with a cast-iron memorial plaque recording the moment. What SOE’s new recruits thought about sitting in the shade of the Iron Chancellor’s memorial tree, while being trained to set Nazi-occupied Europe ‘ablaze’, is not recorded.
There was almost nothing in the hitherto quiet and fastidious life of young Roger Landes that could have prepared him for the next four weeks. Wanborough Manor was a French-speaking microcosm. Its students were cut off from the world, save for carefully vetted letters and occasional accompanied trips over the Hog’s Back to the local pub The Good Intent (Landes drank alcohol only very abstemiously), or to the nearby gravel pit for hand-grenade practice. Landes was woken at dawn every morning from a hard army bed and went straight into PT, followed by a run around the manor house grounds. Then lessons all day, most of them requiring hard physical exertion, which cannot have been made any easier for Landes by his habit (which continued unabated all his life) of smoking sixty cigarettes a day. Soon every muscle of his slight, city-softened body ached. He ate voraciously and without discrimination. And at the end of the day sleep came to him as swift as the click of a camera shutter.
Landes had never held, let alone fired, a gun in his life. But by the end of his four weeks’ intensive training he knew how to strip down and reassemble, even in the dark, every German, Italian, French, American and British small arm in common use. He knew how to fire them too – and found he was a surprisingly good shot. He also learnt how to move unseen across open country; how to prime and throw a hand grenade; how to find his way, even at night with a map and compass; how to kill a man without a weapon; how to disarm an enemy and how to dissemble convincingly in the face of inquisitive questions.
At the end of the Wanborough Manor stage of the course, two of the original ten ‘disappeared’. By this time Landes’s colleagues had begun to resolve themselves into personalities. Of the eight remaining, three would feature prominently both in SOE’s history and in Roger Landes’s life as a secret agent. ‘Clement Bastable’ (real name, Claude de Baissac) was ten years older than Landes. An imposing man with the air of someone who expected to be obeyed, he too was of dark complexion and had a neatly trimmed moustache in the style of many Hollywood actors of the time – Clark Gable, say, or Errol Flynn. He had indeed been a film publicist in France before the war. ‘Hilaire Poole’ (Harry Peulevé) was the same age as Landes, but he was taller and more powerfully built, with a finely chiselled, handsome face and deep, rather disconcerting eyes. ‘Fernand Sutton’ (Francis Suttill) was thirty-two, but looked much younger. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, clean cut, with the fresh-faced look of an English public school boy, he was, in the words of a fellow secret agent, ‘magnificent, strong, young, courageous and decisive, a kind of Ivanhoe; but he should have been a cavalry officer, not a spy …’.
Among these fellow students, Landes was the exception – perhaps sufficiently even to feel, and appear, a little out of place. Most of his colleagues were, like SOE itself, ex-public school and from the upper echelons of British society. Claude de Baissac was of course French – or to be precise Mauritian French. But he too had been to one of the best schools, the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. His family were not by birth from the upper reaches of French society, but they aspired to be so, adding the aristocratic ‘de’ in front of their name when de Baissac’s mother accompanied her son to Paris to begin his education, in the late 1920s. Landes’s Wanborough Manor colleagues were also, in one way or another, strong characters, bursting with charisma and natural leadership. Landes, the little clerk from the Architectural Department of London County Council, son of an immigrant Jewish jeweller from Paris, who had managed to educate himself at night school, was none of these things. His SOE reports refer to him, somewhat dismissively, as a ‘cheery little Frenchman’; he was less impressive, less significant and much, much less noticeable than his fellow recruits. Qualities which, whether SOE valued them or not, were precisely those he would require to be a successful secret agent.
In early 1942, the eight students caught the train north for Scotland and four weeks’ intensive training at Meoble Lodge, beside Loch Morar in Inverness-shire. Here, where moor and mountain sweep down to the back door, they marched long distances carrying heavy loads, spent nights in the open under rough shelters made of bracken and fir branches, learnt how to set a snare for rabbits and how to skin, gut and cook them afterwards. Two ex-Shanghai policemen taught them how to kill a man noiselessly with the SOE’s specially designed fighting knife, and an ex-chartered accountant showed them how to pick a lock and blow a safe. They also learnt the strange artefacts and sacred rituals of explosives: how to place the primer, just so; how to crimp (but gently) one end of the fuse in the detonator so it wouldn’t pull out, and how to scarf the other end at an angle, waiting for the match. How to light it, even in a gale, by holding the match end against the scarfed face of the fuse and striking it with the box, rather than the other way round. Why, with the fuse lit, you should always walk away, never run.
Parachute training at Ringway near Manchester followed, after which, in early May, Landes and his colleagues attended SOE’s ‘finishing school’ at Beaulieu, Hampshire. Here they learnt, among other things, codes and cyphers; disguise; how to follow someone and know if you were being followed; how to hide in a city; and how to place an explosive charge in just the right manner to cut a rail, slice through a bridge girder or blow the giant flywheel off a power station turbine, causing a hurricane of damage to everything it careered into.
After Beaulieu, most of Landes’s colleagues were given leave, while waiting for an aircraft and a full moon to parachute into France. In Claude de Baissac’s final report he was assessed as ‘an excellent operator’ destined for leadership. Not seeing the same qualities of ‘leadership’ in Landes, SOE marked him out for a radio operator and sent him to their wireless school at Thame, near Aylesbury. Here he met another fellow student, destined to join him in France. Gilbert Norman, also an ex-public school boy, was an imposing figure whose regular features, permanent suntan and moustache gave him the air of an actor who specialised in playing cads – or perhaps army captains – in a seaside repertory company. In fact, he was a chartered accountant from Llandudno. In July 1942 the two men passed out as fully qualified SOE wireless operators.
Roger Landes had done well. ‘He has the eye of a marksman … works well with others … liked for his keenness … very fit and tries hard … did exceptionally well on his own,’ his trainers wrote on his various reports: ‘a pleasant little man who takes great interest and trouble in what he does …’. Of all Landes’s attributes it would be his ability to work alone and his unobtrusiveness which would make him a truly great secret agent.
But Roger Landes was now much more than the sum of his good reports.
He had been transformed – and he had transformed himself – from a young Jewish refugee from Paris, working as an architect’s clerk in the LCC, into a fully capable secret agent and radio operator, ready to take the fight to the enemy in occupied France. To be sure, he still looked as he had always done: small, pleasant, unremarkable. But inside, he was now something completely different. Something hard, uncompromising, focused – even a little cold; always alert, always suspicious, always watchful. Above all, he was confident of his own strength and his ability to survive and to endure.
3
On 26 January 1942, a fortnight or so before Roger Landes saw the message on the company noticeboard at Prestatyn, a young German officer stepped down from a first-class carriage at Saint-Jean station in Bordeaux. His Gestapo uniform, if anyone had glimpsed it, might have attracted attention, for few if any of these had been seen in Bordeaux at this time of the war. But muffled and greatcoated against the exceptional cold that had gripped France that January, he would have seemed to most to be just another German officer making his way in the throng that pressed towards the checkpoint at the station exit. Yet, over the next few years, twenty-eight-year-old Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Dohse would come to dominate the city and shape its events more than any other German who had come to Bordeaux since the occupation.
Six foot three and of athletic build, with sharp grey eyes deep set under a heavy brow in a pale oval face; chestnut, but fast vanishing hair; an easy smile and regular features (apart from rather small a mouth) – Dohse (pronounced ‘dosuh’) was a man who commanded attention quite as much as Roger Landes deflected it.
His journey to this moment had been a long one. Although his grandfather had been a peasant farmer in Silesia, his father, Hinrich, had risen to become a French teacher in the little Schleswig-Holstein town of Elmshorn, north of Hamburg. Here, Friedrich was born in July 1913. His family was respectable, bourgeois, Lutheran and of moderate political views (which he shared). Like his sisters and brother, he attended the local secondary school, before moving on to commercial college in Hamburg, where he excelled in French. Leaving school at seventeen, he travelled the short distance to the city’s port where he joined the merchant marine, serving on passenger liners to South America and East Africa. In 1933, at the height of the German Depression and finding himself unemployed, the twenty-year-old Friedrich joined the Hamburg police and local Nazi party. Later he would insist that he became a Nazi because it was the only way to get a job, though it was often remarked that, on the rare occasions he wore his Gestapo uniform, he never failed to emblazon it with the ‘Golden Party Badge’, awarded only to those in the Nazi party of ‘special merit’, or who had been amongst the first 100,000 to join.
Whatever Dohse’s motives, becoming a Nazi seems to have worked, for after five months as an ordinary policeman he was offered a job with the criminal police in a Hamburg suburb. Dohse soon transferred to the Gestapo in Kiel, where he was employed in counter-espionage against marine saboteurs. He continued his progress into the hierarchy of Hitler’s Germany by joining the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary wing, on 1 June 1934. Just weeks later Hitler destroyed the organisation in the great ‘blood purge’ of 30 June. Nothing daunted, two years after this reverse, Dohse became a member of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Hitler’s ‘protection squadron’, and wore its badge, with the letters SS in the form of two jagged lightning bolts, for the rest of his wartime career. In 1937, Dohse completed his eight weeks’ infantry training and on the outbreak of war was called up, quickly rising to the rank of sergeant. It is difficult not to see the young Dohse during these years as a man of ambition and strong patriotic convictions, dedicated to serving his country, while scrambling up the Nazi ladder as fast as he could.
After brief spells first in the army, and then the Luftwaffe, Dohse was posted back to the Gestapo as a sergeant in the spring of 1941. Now married and with two young children, he was sent on 15 June to Paris. Here he was seconded to the counter-espionage section of the newly established German directorate of security (the BdS), headquartered at 82–84 Avenue Foch – an address which was already becoming one of the most feared in France. At the time the Gestapo was not formally permitted to operate in France, making Dohse one of the first Gestapo officers to work on French soil.
It was this posting, more than any other event of his young life, which transformed Dohse from a junior up-and-coming member of the Gestapo into a subtle, cunning and accomplished counter-intelligence operator. For it was here that he met the man who would become both the mentor from whom he learnt his skills and the protector who would cover his back in the dangerous times ahead.
Karl Bömelburg, aged fifty-six in 1941, was the son of a pastry cook and a man of many skills, disguises and aliases (including ‘Charles Bois’, ‘Herr Bennelburger’ and ‘Colonel Mollemburg’). According to both Paris rumour and British intelligence records, he was also – very unusually for a high-ranking Nazi – known to have homosexual proclivities. Elegant and cultivated, Bömelburg was a notable bon viveur, fluent in French, an enthusiastic Francophile and a master of the art of spying. ‘Though not a political Nazi,’ according to his superior in Berlin, ‘he was completely loyal and a committed anti-communist.’ According to one account, he had spent eight years before the war operating undercover as a silk merchant in Lyon. Other records suggest that he was part of the German embassy in Paris in 1938, where, with the knowledge of the French government, he was tasked with rooting out communist subversives from the German immigrant population in France. During these interwar years, under the cover of his anti-communist work, Bömelburg built a German spy network which extended deep into French society and commercial life.
Regarded by his close colleagues as a ‘little God’, Bömelburg seems to have immediately spotted something unusual and appealing – a kindred spirit perhaps – in the new arrival from Schleswig-Holstein. He dispatched Dohse first to the Berlitz school in Paris to perfect his French, and then on a month’s detachment to each of the departments in the Avenue Foch to get him acquainted with every part of the German security apparatus in Paris. His initiation complete, Bömelburg appointed his young protégé as his personal secretary and, though Bömelburg would not have needed it, his official interpreter.
It was in this capacity that, in July and August 1941, Dohse accompanied his chief and another senior SS intelligence officer on a two-month tour across occupied and Vichy France and into Italy. The three men travelled in some state in Bömelburg’s pride and joy, a requisitioned armour-plated Cadillac chauffeured by his personal driver. The main purpose of the tour was for Bömelburg to reactivate and debrief his old spy network, but the trio did not ignore the opportunity to have fun as well. Their itinerary included Vichy, Dijon, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Montélimar, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, Ventimiglia, San Remo and Monte-Carlo, where Dohse won 25,000 francs at the gaming tables (enough to have a fur coat made up in Paris and sent to his wife in Elmshorn).
What Bömelburg taught Dohse during their escapade of the summer of 1941, and in the months which followed at BdS Paris, is that counter-espionage is an art in which the techniques of subtlety and persuasion are more important, and usually more successful, than those of brutality and threat. Dohse was neither squeamish about torture, nor morally opposed to it. He argued that ‘enhanced interrogation’ – a euphemism used by the Nazis which is still in active use today – could be ‘necessary … in situations where the lives of German soldiers were at imminent threat’. Dohse had, moreover, no qualms at all about leaving brutality to others if it meant that he could use the techniques of persuasion, personal charm and the disarming power of an act of kindness to better effect. In his own words: ‘I didn’t need to dirty my hands – others did that.’ Later, after the war, Dohse was to invest this way of working with moral principle, claiming that it was all intended to ‘humanise’ (his word again) the struggle against Resistance ‘terrorists’.
What, above all, Dohse the interrogator learnt from Bömelburg was the importance of knowing his subjects and their psychologies, weaknesses and desires, the better to turn them to his purpose. As one commentator later put it, Dohse ‘did not terrify, he demobilised’.
Neither these more subtle skills – nor Dohse’s habit of easy superiority, nor his elegant style of dress, nor his cultivated tastes, nor his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to his task; nor his Francophilia, nor his preference for French company over that of many of his German colleagues (he was referred to disparagingly as ‘half French’); nor the high level of protection he enjoyed in Paris made the young, pushy, newly arrived Gestapo officer at all popular amongst his more hardline colleagues in Bordeaux. He was, in many ways, a man apart amongst the more traditional Nazis who dominated the German security structures of the time. His loyalty to the German cause was unchallenged – and unchallengeable – at this stage of the war. His pride in his professionalism as a police officer, his sense of personal honour and his duty of loyalty to his superiors made it easy for him to be ambivalent to the excesses of National Socialism. Nazi politics and prejudices held no interest for him, beyond the point that they were necessary for the pursuit of his ambition and his ability to serve his country. Dohse was not intelligent in the intellectual sense of the word. But he was wily and clever and quick to win people to his point of view. Nor was his spirit a heroic one. He liked Bordeaux because it was congenial, and because he liked France. But he liked it most of all because it was not the Russian front.
Dohse’s arrival in Bordeaux in January 1942 coincided with the centralising of the city’s security structure – chiefly the SS and the police – into the one new grouping known for short as ‘KdS Bordeaux’. The organisation would eventually grow to around a hundred German officers, assisted by a large number of French men and women in various supporting roles. They were housed in four large requisitioned residential properties in what was virtually a KdS colony, stretching along a 200-metre section of the Avenue du Maréchal Pétain in the northern Bordeaux suburb of Bouscat. The new office was split into seven departments: I: Administration; II: Liaison with the French authorities and Jewish matters; III: Political affairs (also including Jewish matters); IV: Intelligence-gathering and the suppression of the Resistance; V: Economic crime and the black market; VI: Internal security; and, last but not least, Department VII: Archives and Records. The site also boasted a canteen converted from an old casino, indoor and outdoor recreation areas and staff accommodation.
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