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Heydrich interrupted the stenographer. ‘Perhaps I did not make myself entirely clear, my dear young woman,’ he said patiently. ‘I asked you to read out only the salient points. What I meant was that it will save a great deal of time if you omit all mention of when the prisoner refused to answer a question.’

The stenographer coloured a little. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Now continue.’

‘Yes sir.’

Question: How did you go about establishing contact with UVOD?

Answer: I made contact with an old friend from university called Friedrich Rose in Dresden, a Sudeten German communist, who put me in contact with a Czech terrorist organization that is part of the Central Leadership of Home Resistance – UVOD. I am part Czech myself and I speak a little Czech and I was pleased when, having investigated my background, they accepted me into their organization. They said a native German could be very useful to their cause. Which is all that I wanted. After my husband died on a U-boat all I wanted was for the war to be over. For Germany to be defeated.

Question: What did they ask you to do?

Answer: They asked me to leave Dresden and to undertake a special mission on their behalf. In Berlin.

Question: What was this mission?

Prisoner refused to—.

‘Sorry, sir . . .’

After a short pause, while she tracked down the transcript with a well-manicured fingernail, the stenographer started reading again.

Answer: At the request of UVOD I joined the Berlin Transport Company in the autumn of 1940 and worked for the BVG director, Herr Julius Vahlen, as his personal secretary and sometime mistress. It was my job to monitor Wehrmacht troop movements through Berlin’s Anhalter Station and to report on these movements to my Czech contact in Berlin. This I did for several months.

Question: Who was your contact?

Answer: My contact was a former Czech German Army officer I knew only as Detmar. I didn’t know his surname. I would give him a list of the troop movements on a weekly basis. The troop movements were passed on to London, I think. Detmar would give me some more instructions and some money. I was always short of money. Living in Berlin is so much more expensive than Dresden.

Question: What else did Detmar tell you to do?

Answer: At first I had to do very little. Just give him the troop movement reports. But then in December 1940 Detmar asked me to help the Three Kings organization in Berlin to plant a bomb in the station. This was much more important work and much more dangerous, too. First of all I had to obtain a plan of the station building; and then, when the bomb was ready, I had to prime it and put it in a place where it had been decided it would cause the most damage.

Question: Who taught you how to prime a bomb?