WOMEN IN WAR: The Real-life Agent Carters

22. VERA MAY ATKINS | aka VERA MARIA ROSENBERG [1908-2000]

WWII - F-Section Intelligence Officer, Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.)

A power behind the SOE's operations in wartime France, she combined loyalty, brains and a seraphic smile

By: Julian Jackson, The Guardian

Vera Atkins, who died aged 92, was a powerful figure in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up in 1940 to "set Europe ablaze" in Winston Churchill's words by sabotage and subversion.

Atkins worked in Section F, its extremely important French section which sent 470 agents into France, of whom 39 were women. The head of Section F's London HQ was Major Maurice Buckmaster, but for many people Vera Atkins was the brains behind him.

Born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Bucharest, she moved to England with her parents in 1933, and later adopted her English mother's maiden name. She read modern languages at the Sorbonne and attended a finishing school in Lausanne. Joining SOE in February 1941, she was Buck master's assistant and soon became, as he said, indispensable to him. The eight-strong London HQ was not in any conventional way hierarchical and there was no part of its work in which Atkins was not involved: interviewing recruits, organising and participating in their training, planning their reception in France. Often she would also help interpret seemingly indecipherable or badly scrambled messages, which had defeated all the efforts of official decoders.

The SOE agents came from all walks of life - they included a music hall drag artist, a racehorse trainer, a banker, a chef - but they all had to speak perfect French. Atkins built up detailed knowledge of conditions in occupied France - curfews, rationing, transport problems, police regulations - so that the agents were briefed on every detail of daily life. She helped provide each agent with a convincing cover story and furnished them with mementos, letters and photos to keep in their wallets, adding verismilitude to their new identities. She sent one to the dentist in order to have his teeth refilled in the French manner.

Atkins's remarkable efficiency and intelligence was accompanied by deep humanity and sense of responsibility to those whom she was sending to possible death. She was often businesslike and even severe - "immaculate, every hair in place" with a "detached and seraphic smile" as one agent put it. Sometimes she was mocking: one agent who admitted that he had fallen in love produced the riposte "oh the bloody English... We never have this sort of bother with the French...They copulate and that is that".

But there was no doubting her loyalty to, and fondness for, her agents. She saw them all off in person, and as she recalled years later: "the burden of stress was probably on the person who was seeing them off. The realisation that they were going out on a very dangerous mission, and this was probably the last glimpse they would have of the lovely countryside through which you were travelling with them, while you remained quite safely at the end. There was a considerable strain on one at this time. I think I must have been extraordinarily tough - I was extremely exhausted by it."

She also kept in contact with the agents' next of kin, and organised coded messages on the BBC so that they were kept informed about people they had left behind. This solicitude continued even after the war when Atkins, as a member of the British War Crimes Commision gathering evidence for the prosecution of war criminals, set about tracing the fate of the 118 agents who had never returned.

After a year visiting concentration camps and interrogating the German guards, she established how and when the missing agents had perished. (The only unresolved case concerned one agent who had been sent to Marseilles with three million francs in his pocket and was unable to resist the temptation of betting this sum at Monte Carlo: it was never established whether he had won and was secretly living on the proceeds or whether he had lost and committed suicide.)
Atkins displayed formidable skills as an interrogator. Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr officer who had reaped havoc among the French Resistance, judged her interrogation the most skilful to which he had been subjected by his captors. In March 1946 she also interrogated Rudolf Hoess, the German Commandant of Auschwitz, who had been living disguised as a farmer. When asked whether it was true that he had caused the deaths of 1.5m Jews, he indignantly protested that this was wrong: the real figure was 2,345,000.

The French government appointed Atkins a commandant of the Legion of Honour in 1987 (this tardy recognition was because General de Gaulle had never approved of SOE having its own separate French section independent of his London based operations). Eventually she settled in Winchelsea, Sussex, and, although she never wrote her memoirs, her infallible memory was of priceless benefit to historians. It would be a pity if this remarkable figure was remembered only because of the myth that she had inspired.

Vera May Atkins (Vera Maria Rosenberg), intelligence agent, born June 16 1908; died June 24 2000

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BIOGRAPHY

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RECOMMENDED BIOGRAPHY (SHORT FILM)

"Into the Dark", by Genevieve Simms

https://vimeo.com/33965059

"Short film about Vera Atkins, Intelligence Officer with Special Operations Executive, during World War II. She was involved deeply in the secret work of inserting secret agents into Occupied France, and was particularly responsible for the welfare of the female agents - her 'girls'.

Using original sound recordings of an interview with Vera Aktins, Into the Dark recounts the last journey of agents through the countryside, before their flight into France.

Awarded the Judges' Commendation Prize at the Imperial War Museum's Film Festival, 2005."

(Video not compatible for Wattpad)