Vera Atkins facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Vera Atkins
|
|
|---|---|
Squadron Officer Vera Atkins, WAAF, in 1946
|
|
| Born |
Vera May Rosenberg
15 June 1908 |
| Died | 24 June 2000 (aged 92) |
| Occupation | SOE F Section intelligence officer |
Vera May Atkins CBE (15 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.
Contents
Early life
Atkins was born Vera May Rosenberg in Galați, Kingdom of Romania, to Max Rosenberg (d. 1932), a German-Jewish father, and his British-Jewish wife, Zefra Hilda, known as Hilda (d. 1947). She had two brothers.
Atkins briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern languages and a finishing school at Lausanne, where she indulged her passion for skiing, before training at a secretarial college in London. Atkins' father, a wealthy businessman on the Danube Delta, went bankrupt in 1932 and died a year after. Atkins remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Great Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in mainland Europe.
During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where Atkins lived on the large estate bought by her father at Crasna (now in Ukraine), Atkins enjoyed the cosmopolitan society of Bucharest where she became close to the anti-Nazi German ambassador, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (executed after the July 1944 plot). Later Atkins became involved with a young British pilot, Dick Ketton-Cremer, whom she had met in Egypt, and to whom she may have been briefly engaged. He was killed in action in the Battle of Crete on 23 May 1941. Atkins was never to marry, and lived in a flat with her mother while working for SOE and until 1947 when Hilda died.
While in Romania, Atkins came to know several diplomats who were members of British Intelligence, some of whom were later to support her application for British nationality, and to whom in view of her and her family's strong pro-British views, she may have provided information as a "stringer". Atkins also worked as a translator and representative for an oil company.
The surname "Atkins" was her mother's maiden name and itself an Anglicised version of the original "Etkins", which she adopted as her own. She was a cousin of Rudolf Vrba.
Atkins was recruited before the war by Canadian spymaster Sir William Stephenson of British Security Co-ordination. He sent her on fact-finding missions across Europe to supply Winston Churchill (then in the 'political wilderness') with intelligence on the rising threat of Nazi Germany.
First missions of the Second World War
The Polish Cipher Bureau broke Germany's Enigma ciphers from 1932 on, using Enigma-machine reconstructions which they also gave to their British and French allies, following a July 1939 Warsaw conference at which they gave their French and British cryptologist opposite numbers information on the Poles' decrypting techniques and the special-purpose equipment they had invented.
According to William Stevenson's The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2006), Atkins' first mission was to get Poland's cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski out of the country, and she was a member of the British military mission (MM-4), alongside Colin Gubbins, which arrived in Poland posing as civilians, by way of Greece and Romania, six days before the outbreak of the war. Atkins may have attempted to find the cryptologists and get them out of Poland, but as Rejewski describes (see "Marian Rejewski"), they were in fact evacuated to Romania by the Polish Cipher Bureau, and from Romania to France thanks to Gustave Bertrand of French intelligence; Rejewski makes no mention of ever having met or heard of Vera Atkins.
In the spring of 1940, before joining SOE, Atkins travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer, Hans Fillie, for a passport for her cousin, Fritz, to escape from Romania. Atkins was stranded in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded on 10 May 1940, and, after going into hiding, was able to return to Britain late in 1940 with the assistance of a Belgian resistance network. Atkins kept this episode secret all her life and it only came to light after her death when her biographer, Sarah Helm, tracked down some mourners at Atkins' funeral.
Atkins volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden in Chelsea in the period prior to working for SOE. During this time she lived at Nell Gwynn House in Sloane Avenue in Chelsea.
Special Operations Executive (SOE)
Though not a British national, in February 1941 Atkins joined the French section of the SOE as a secretary. She was soon made assistant to section head Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and became a de facto intelligence officer. Atkins served as a civilian until August 1944, when she was commissioned a Flight Officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). In February 1944, Atkins was naturalised as a British subject. She was later appointed F Section's intelligence officer (F-Int).
Atkins' primary role at SOE was the recruitment and deployment of British agents in occupied France. She also had responsibility for the 37 women SOE agents who worked as couriers and wireless operators for the various circuits established by SOE. Atkins would take care of the "housekeeping" related to the agents, such as checking their clothing and papers to ensure they were appropriate for the mission, sending out pre-written anodyne letters at regular intervals, acting as SOE's liaison with their families, and ensuring they received their pay. Atkins would often accompany agents to the airfields from which they would depart for France and carry out final security checks before waving them off.
Atkins always attended the daily section heads meeting chaired by Buckmaster, and would often stay late into the night at the signals room to await the decoded transmissions sent by agents in the field. She would usually arrive at F Section's Baker Street office around 10.00 am. Although not popular with many of her colleagues, Atkins was trusted by Buckmaster for her integrity, exceptional memory and good organisational skills. Tall at 5 ft 9 in., she typically dressed in tailored skirt-suits. She was a lifelong smoker, preferring the "Senior Service" brand.
Search for F Section's missing agents
After the liberation of France and the allied victory in Europe, Atkins went to both France, and later, for just four days, Germany, where she was determined to uncover the fates of the fifty-one still unaccounted for F Section agents, of the 118 who had disappeared in enemy territory (117 of whom she was to confirm had died in German captivity). Originally she received little support and some opposition in Whitehall, but as the horrors of Nazi atrocities were revealed, and the popular demand for war crimes trials grew, it was decided to give official support for Atkins' quest to find out what had happened to the British agents and to bring those who had perpetrated crimes against them to justice.
At the end of 1945 SOE was wound up, but in January 1946 Atkins, now funded on the establishment of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), arrived in Germany as a newly promoted Squadron Officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force to begin her search for the missing agents, including 14 women. Atkins was attached to the war crimes unit of the Judge Advocate-General's department of the British Army HQ at Bad Oeynhausen, which was under the command of Group Captain Tony Somerhaugh.
Until her return to Britain in October 1946, Atkins searched for the missing SOE agents and other intelligence service personnel who had gone missing behind enemy lines, carried out interrogations of Nazi war crimes suspects, including Rudolf Höss, ex-commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and testified as a prosecution witness in subsequent trials. In November 1946, Atkins' commission was extended so that she could return to Germany to assist the prosecution in the Ravensbrück trial which lasted into January 1947. She used this opportunity to complete her search for Noor Inayat Khan, who she now knew had not died at Natzweiler-Struthof, as she had originally concluded in April 1946, but at Dachau.
As well as tracing 117 of the 118 missing F Section agents, Atkins established the circumstances of the deaths of all 14 of the women, twelve of whom had perished in concentration camps: Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky (whom Atkins did not identify until 1947, but knew as the fourth woman to be killed) and Diana Rowden executed at Natzweiler-Struthof by lethal injection on 6 July 1944; Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan and Eliane Plewman executed at Dachau on 13 September 1944; Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo executed by shooting at Ravensbrück on 5 February 1945, and Cecily Lefort executed in the gas chamber at the Uckermark Youth Camp adjacent to Ravensbrück sometime in February 1945. Yvonne Rudellat died of typhus on 23 or 24 April 1945, eight or nine days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and Muriel Byck had died of meningitis in hospital in Romorantin, France, on 25 May 1944. Atkins had also persuaded the War Office that the twelve women, technically regarded as civilians, who had been executed, were not treated as having died in prison, as had been originally intended, but were recorded as killed in action.
Atkins' efforts in looking for her missing "girls" meant not only did each now have a place of death, but by detailing their bravery before and after capture, she also helped to ensure that each (except Sonia Olschanezky, unknown to Atkins until 1947) received official recognition by the British Government, including the award of a posthumous George Cross to both Violette Szabo in 1946 and, especially due to Atkins's efforts, Noor Inayat Khan in 1949. (Odette Sansom, who survived Ravensbrück, also received the GC in 1946.) However, when Atkins did confirm that Sonia Olschanezky had died at Natzweiler-Struthof, she failed to pass the information to Sonia's family.
After the Second World War
Atkins was demobilised in 1947, and although nominated for an MBE, was not awarded a decoration in the postwar honours lists.
Atkins went to work for UNESCO's Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, as office manager from 1948, and director from 1952. She took early retirement in 1961, and retired to Winchelsea in East Sussex.
In 1950, Atkins was an advisor on the film Odette, about Odette Sansom (by the then wife of Peter Churchill), and in 1958 on the film of Carve Her Name With Pride, based upon the biography of the same name of Violette Szabo by R. J. Minney. She also assisted Jean Overton Fuller on her 1952 life of Noor Inayat Khan, Madelaine, but their friendship cooled after the author revealed the success of the German Funkspiel against F Section in her 1954 book, The Starr Affair, and Overton Fuller later came to believe that Atkins had been a Soviet agent.
Atkins was also suspected by some former SOE officials of working for the Germans, but Sarah Helm dismisses these claims of her being a Soviet or Nazi spy and suggests that Atkins' less straightforward behaviour and secrecy can be explained by her determination not to reveal her 1940 mission to the continent. Her position as a woman, a Jew and a non-British national in SOE would also explain Atkins' defensiveness during and after the war. Nevertheless, especially given her pre-war contacts and activities, her position does not rule out the possibility either.
Atkins persuaded M.R.D. Foot, SOE's official historian, not to reveal her Romanian origins in his history. She remained to her death a strong defender of F Section's wartime record, and ensured that each of the 12 women who had died in the three Nazi concentration camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau and Ravensbrück are commemorated by memorial plaques close to where they were killed. Atkins also supported the memorial at Valençay in the Loire Valley, unveiled in 1991, which is dedicated to the agents of SOE in France killed in the line of duty.
In 1996, Atkins wrote to The Daily Telegraph to defend the decision to send Noor Inayat Khan to France, writing of Noor's initial success in evading capture, her two escape attempts, and her detention in Pforzheim prison manacled in chains as a dangerous prisoner: "This is the record of Noor Inayat Khan and her answer to those who doubted her."
Honours and decorations
Atkins was appointed CBE in the 1997 Birthday Honours. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1987.
In 2022, a historical plaque was placed at Nell Gwynn House, near Sloane Square, London, where Vera lived during WW2, by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, U.K. Branch and the (British) Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, Stamford Hill Branch.
Death
Atkins died at a hospital in Hastings on 24 June 2000, aged 92. She had been in a nursing home recovering from a skin complaint when she fell and broke a hip. Atkins was admitted to the hospital where she contracted MRSA.
Her memorial plaque, which is shared with her brother Guy, is in the northern wall at St Senara's churchyard in Zennor, Cornwall where her ashes were scattered. The inscription reads "Vera May Atkins, CBE Légion d'honneur Croix de guerre". An attempt by AJEX Archivist (Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women of the UK) and author, Martin Sugarman, who interviewed Vera in Winchelsea for his chapters on Jews in SOE in his book 'Fighting Back', on 24 April 1998, to have a Star of David metal peg placed at her memorial at Zennor on a visit in 2012, was refused by the family via the vicar of the church when Sugarman visited the church and plaque. Vera also refused to allow Sugarman to tape her interview at the time and even though she understood fully why he was interviewing her as having known all the agents, and the two – Bloch and Byck, he was specifically writing about, she never revealed she was Jewish and he did not discover this till her obituary was published two years later. Leo Marks, the Jewish Chief of Codes at SOE, who Sugarman also interviewed the same year, 1998, also never let on that Vera was Jewish.
