Vera May Atkins (15 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who was the Deputy Director of the France Section (F Section) of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.
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 youth in Romania, Atkins 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
Atkins' first mission was to get Poland's cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski out of the country. The trio were part of the Polish Cipher Bureau that broke Germany's Enigma ciphers from 1932 on, using Enigma-machine reconstructions. In July 1939, they had provided French and British cryptologists information on their decrypting techniques and the special-purpose equipment they had invented. Atkins 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 Second World War.
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. This was kept secret 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 Special Operations Executive 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 as 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 39 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.
Controversy
Controversy has lasted in certain circles as to how and why clues that one of F section's main spy networks had been penetrated by the Germans were not picked up, and Buckmaster and Atkins failed to pull out agents at risk. Instead, they sent in several more. A radio operator for the Prosper circuit, Gilbert Norman ("Archambaud"), had sent a message omitting his true security check – a deliberate mistake. Atkins, it is alleged, was negligent in letting Buckmaster repeat his errors at the expense of agents' lives, including 27 arrested on landing whom the Germans later killed.
Sarah Helm suggests Atkins, who still had relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe, may have been defensive about her involvement with the Abwehr in the 1940 rescue of her cousin Fritz Rosenberg, something she kept secret from SOE. Furthermore, as a Romanian who had not yet obtained British citizenship, Atkins was legally an enemy alien and highly vulnerable. Whatever the truth, Buckmaster was Atkins' superior officer, and thus ultimately responsible for running SOE's French agents, and she remained a civilian and not even a British national until February 1944. It was Buckmaster who sent a reply to the message supposedly sent by Norman telling him, and thus the actual German operator, he had forgotten his "true" check and to remember it in the future.
On 1 October 1943, F-Section received a message from "Jacques", an agent in Berne, passing on information from "Sonja" that "Madeleine" and two others had had "a serious accident and were in hospital" – code for captured by the German authorities. "Jacques" was an SOE radio operator, Jacques Weil of the Juggler circuit, who had escaped to Switzerland, "Sonja" was his fiancée, Sonia Olschanezky, who was still operating in Paris, and "Madeleine" was Noor Inayat Khan, a wireless operator of the Cinema circuit. This accurate information was not acted upon by Buckmaster, probably because "Sonja" was a locally recruited agent unknown to him, and F-Section continued to regard "Madeleine's" messages as genuine for several months after Noor's arrest. There is no evidence that Atkins was aware of this message, and as she was later to misidentify Sonia as Noor because she was unaware the former was an SOE operative, the responsibility for ignoring Sonia's communication and continuing to send agents to the blown Prosper circuit and sub-circuits in Paris, and so to their capture and often death, must lie with Buckmaster and not Atkins, as with the case of "Archambaud" above.
It was not until after the end of the war where Atkins learned of the almost total success the Germans had had by 1943 in destroying SOE networks in the Low Countries by playing the Englandspiel ("England game"), by which radio operators were captured and forced to give up their codes and "bluffs", so that German intelligence (Abwehr in the Netherlands; Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in France) officers could impersonate the agents and play them back against in London. For some reason, Buckmaster and Atkins were not informed of the total collapse of the circuits in the Netherlands (N Section) and Belgium (T Section) due to the capture and control of wireless operators by the Abwehr.
This may have been a result of inter-departmental or service rivalry, or just bureaucratic incompetence, but the failure of their superiors to tell F Section officially of these other SOE disasters (although rumours about N and T Sections circulated at Baker Street) may have led Buckmaster and Atkins to be overconfident in the security of their networks and too ready to ignore signals evidence that questioned their trust in the identity of the wireless operator.
It has been suggested Atkins' diligence in tracing agents still missing at the end of the war was motivated by a sense of guilt at having sent many to deaths that could have been avoided. It is also possible she felt it her duty to find out what had happened to the men and women, each known personally to her, who had died serving SOE F Section in the most dangerous of circumstances.
In the end, what caused the complete collapse of the Prosper circuit of Francis Suttill and its extensive network of sub-circuits, were not errors in London, but the actions of Henri Déricourt ("Gilbert"), F Section's air-landing officer in France, who was at the heart of its operations, and who was literally giving SOE's secrets to the SD in Paris. What is not completely clear is whether Déricourt was, as is most likely, simply a traitor, or, as he was to claim, was working for the Secret Intelligence Service () (unknown to SOE) as part of a complex deception plan in the run-up to D-Day. However, it is beyond doubt Déricourt was at least a double agent, and had provided, first his friend, Karl Boemelburg, head of the SD in France, and then Kieffer, with large amounts of written evidence and intelligence about F Section's operations and operatives, which ultimately led to the capture, torture and execution of scores of British agents.
The conclusions of M.R.D. Foot in his official history of F Section are that errors made by Atkins, Buckmaster and other London officers were the products of the "fog of war", that there were no conspiracies behind these failings, and few individuals were culpable. Sara Helm's conclusions are the errors were due to "terrible incompetence and tragic mistakes".
Atkins never admitted to making mistakes, and went to considerable lengths to hide her errors, as in her original identification of Noor Inayat Khan, rather than (then unknown to Atkins) Sonia Olschanezky, as the fourth woman executed at Natzweiler-Struthof on 6 July 1944. Indeed, Atkins never informed Sonia's family that Sonia had died at Natzweiler, although she did later protest against the decision of the organizing committee of the SOE memorial in Valençay not to include Sonia's name because she was a local agent and not one sent from England.
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 to Germany for four days, 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 (), 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 at Bad Oeynhausen, which was under the command of Group Captain Tony Somerhaugh.