Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (29 page)

Sometime in 1932 Max Rosenberg again went bankrupt and was forced to sell Crasna. The world financial crash must have precipitated his plight, but his brothers had not been so badly affected, and there was a certain mystery about Max's latest bankruptcy. Perhaps he simply ran up higher debts than his brothers, possibly by taking more risks.

At the same time Max had fallen seriously ill, and by early 1932 he had no money to pay for care in any of Vienna's famously lavish sanatoria. Instead he was consigned to the shabby Purkersdorf Sanatorium in the Vienna Woods, and he died on October 3 that year.

Like his bankruptcy, Max's final illness was something of a mystery to everyone. No doubt brought on in part by his financial worries, his illness and death became a taboo subject, and his family rarely spoke about him again. Only in later years would Vera sometimes fondly recall her father's loving kindness—for example, the present he gave her on her twenty-first birthday: that luxury trip on a steamship to Alexandria.

A schoolgirl named Ann Rogers, the daughter of an oil manager in Bucharest, caught a glimpse of the dying Max when she visited the Rosenberg family in an apartment in Vienna in 1932 on her way back to school in England. “I saw Vera's father lying on a bed of some sort, quite covered up in bandages. He was wrapped from head to toe, all white. I could only see his face.” According to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium records, Max suffered arteriosclerosis and died of a pulmonary embolism. There was nothing shameful in such a death. Yet the records showed that not one member of his family ever visited him there. Perhaps Max's death was taken as the moment to bury and obliterate their German-Jewish roots for good. His father gone, Wilfred for one, hastily changed his name by deed poll from Wilfred Rosenberg to Guy Atkins, acquiring his British naturalisation just one year later, in 1933. Yet the taboo about Max's death and bankruptcy still seemed unexplained.

What was clear, however, was that with Max's death the dreams that the family had begun to see realised at Crasna were now shattered. Any
prospect Vera had of marrying a man like Prince Wittgenstein—had she ever wished to—fell away. Harsher realities now suddenly had to be faced.

The family were not left destitute. Vera's mother, Hilda, always had her own money, provided by her wealthy father, Henry Atkins, in South Africa. Money was still available in 1931 to send Vera to London for a shorthand-typing course at the fashionable Triangle Secretarial College (where she learned to type to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”) and, the following year, to send Guy to Oxford.

Nevertheless, on returning to Romania from her training in London, Vera immediately looked for work, finding a post as a secretary with the Polish representative of a small American-owned oil company, Vacuum Oil. And by the early 1930s she and her mother were living modestly in a small apartment in Bucharest.

The young woman who was heading to the Whitsun picnic in Vallea Uzului in 1932 was therefore very different from the girl in the debutante pictures at Crasna. Although still only twenty-three, Vera had turned herself almost overnight into a self-reliant working woman who would endeavour never to depend on another's money or patronage again—a trait that was remarked upon throughout her later life. “There was something strange about Vera,” a South African cousin, Barbara Ho-rak, recalled. “She never wanted anything that she had not chosen herself. She once told me she had sixteen ball gowns in her wardrobe, and she never wore them because each was chosen by her mother. I think she reacted against this.”

Vera was enjoying her newfound independence. In Bucharest she was no longer chaperoned around but chose her own networks of friends. And for their part, Vera's uncles considered their niece quite mature enough to play the lady of the house in Vallea Uzului (Arthur's wife was seriously ill and Siegfried was unmarried), where she could not only choose the menu but also ski, fish, ride, and no doubt stalk deer alongside the men.

Vera, however, nearly didn't make it to the picnic that Whitsun
weekend, as Annie Samuelli told me. Vera had invited Annie, also by then a working girl, to join her for the weekend, and the two had arranged to leave their offices early and meet at Bucharest station in time for the last train north. “We were to leave late on Friday morning and to meet on the platform. I was ten minutes late. Vera didn't lose her temper often, though she could often be extremely cutting. But on this occasion she was in a rage. As soon as she saw me, she said, ‘Get your stumps moving or we'll miss the train.' But I was too slow and we missed it.”

The last connecting train had left without them. Not to be thwarted, Vera marched off with Annie to the office of Bill Rogers, manager of Steaua Romana, the father of her friend Ann Eagle, and, using her already considerable powers of persuasion, managed to secure from him a car and driver, which she ordered to catch up with the train before Darmanesti, where a tiny valley train was to carry the party up a single-gauge railway to the house.

As Ion stopped the car outside Darmanesti station, it was easy to see how, if they had not caught that valley train, Vera and Annie would have been in trouble. For the two of us there was no way at all of getting farther. The Rosenbergs' rail track had long since disintegrated. A tarmac road running through the valley had been built by foresters some years earlier, but we were told that potholes now made it impassable. Ion did not want to risk the Merc, especially as locals said they knew nothing of a house or a timber mill up at the end of the valley. When I took my photograph out to show them, they just shook their heads unhelpfully. Then a teenage boy came out of a house and said he climbed on old ruins farther up the valley. Ion looked interested.

Somehow the bigger potholes were easier to get across than the smaller ones: the Merc just tipped its nose down into them as if descending a moon crater and then climbed out on the other side. With the stream of the Uzu running below us, the forest gradually thickened into anaemic greys and browns. In the spring, when Annie and Vera came here, the valley would have been bursting into colour.

We passed a little shrine to the Virgin Mary, and then the valley opened out wide, its slopes still forested. Arthur and Siegfried must have celebrated on finding this valley, and within a short time they had brought workers here, built a house and timber mill, and established an entirely self-sufficient community, connected to the world beyond by the railway.

The Rosenbergs' home in Vallea Uzului was not a château like Crasna but a luxurious mountain chalet with pitched roofs and verandas on every floor, rooms for countless visitors, a large and diverse library, paintings, tapestries, linen imported from Antwerp, and a large wine cellar. The house was run by a housekeeper, usually brought in from a high-class German household, and staffed mostly by local girls who also served the sexual appetites of the “wicked uncles,” as they were known in the family, as well as their three sons, Hans, George, and Fritz. The sexual promiscuity of Rosenberg men was legendary, as I had heard from several people, among them Annie Samuelli. “That first night Vera came to my bedroom and said: ‘Lock the door, because, you know, Fritz is a man who likes girls, and he will certainly make a pass at you.' And afterwards I realised that Fritz was making love to Karen, who was the housekeeper.”

We drove on until Ion stopped, climbed down, and signalled to me to come and look. Below the road were four large man-made caves, built, he said, as charcoal-burning ovens. Above them was an inscription: “S 1932 R,” which obviously stood for Siegfried Rosenberg 1932. So as late as 1932 the brothers were not only hosting parties but also investing in the future.

Of course, Arthur and Siegfried knew as well as anyone that fascism was now inexorably on the rise across mainland Europe. The family had relatives in Hanover and Berlin who were already starting to consider leaving Germany should Hitler come to power. Closer to home, in Romania, the popularity of the fascists was spreading. Corneliu Codreanu, leader of Iasi's League of Christian National Defence, had recently formed the Legion of the Archangel St. Michael, popularly known as the Iron Guard.

Even so, the brothers saw no reason to believe their own lives would be affected. Arthur had by now been baptised a Catholic, taking Franciscus
as a middle name. All his sons were similarly baptised, and none were circumcised. Their security, they believed, was assured by excellent political and diplomatic contacts in Berlin and other capitals of central Europe.

Ironically, so elevated were the Rosenbergs' connections thought to be that in Vallea Uzului in the late 1930s their workers believed that Arthur and Siegfried were related to the influential Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

In a crisis the brothers knew that they could depend on friends like their guest this weekend, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, a German diplomat of considerable stature to whom National Socialism was personally abhorrent.

But the purpose of the gathering was not to discuss politics but to fish, hunt, and eat. And the young women were also expected to play a part in a spring ritual: the sacrifice of the lambs.

Annie Samuelli had described to me what happened in tones of horror. She and Vera and the other women had spent the morning fishing for trout in the streams, while the men went off hunting boar in the woods. Afterwards they all rode back up through the woods on their mountain ponies for a meal laid out on tables with white tablecloths under large awnings.

Before the meal, however, the young women were taken to an enclosure to look at the newest lambs. “They asked us each to choose one. We didn't know why we were choosing them and didn't ask, I remember, and we chose the ones we thought the cutest. We were enjoying ourselves. It was a lovely spring day. Then we rode back slowly down the hill, but about halfway down the field to the house we heard the most terrible piercing screaming. It went on and on and on. It wouldn't stop and was the most awful sound I have ever heard. Vera was horrified too. She said: ‘Come on, let's go.' It was as if the screams echoed through the whole mountains. We learned later, of course, what it was. They were carrying out a ritual slaughter of the lambs. I have never ever forgotten that noise,” said Annie, trembling now in her Paris flat at the memory.

She said that it was after that, before they sat down to eat, that the photograph was taken, somewhere near the house.

Annie had then helped me identify the picnickers in the picture. There was Mr. Pow, an elderly man, manager of the Bank of Romania, and next to him was his deputy, an Englishman named Charles Robinson, who later became commercial attaché at the British legation and was “in intelligence,” Mrs. Pow was there, and so was Arthur Rosenberg—fair, unlike his brothers—and Annie was also able to pick out Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, balding, with closely cropped hair and a moustache, looking distinguished, with a large overcoat spread over the rump of his horse. And here was Vera in tweed riding jacket, holding her mount steady, and a tall, good-looking boy whom at first Annie did not recognise. Then she identified him as one of Arthur's twin sons. Arthur had three boys: twins, George and Hans, and then Fritz. George and Hans were identical, she said. The next young man, small and dark, was Fritz. Annie was beside him, looking pert and nervous at the end of the line.

I said that the ambassador looked a little old for Vera and Charles Robinson looked more eligible, but Annie told me I was quite wrong. Schulenburg had far greater stature than Robinson, who was just a deputy in a bank. Vera was much more interested in the ambassador, who was unattached. Schulenburg had divorced years earlier after a brief marriage and often sought out attractive women to act as hostess at his embassy functions. After noticing Vera's impeccable manners and grace, he requested that she take this role, which she had agreed to do at lunches but not at dinner, as she felt this would be compromising.

In any case, said Annie, Schulenburg was attractive to women not so much for his appearance as for his kind nature and attentiveness. “He was a charming man. Not patronising. He listened and was highly intelligent. He respected Vera and vice versa. I think there was a mutual attraction.”

The ambassador was evidently a marvellous escort for Vera. At the very least, being taken around Bucharest in the German ambassador's chauffeur-driven car (as long as the swastika was not flying) must have been something of a thrill for a young shorthand secretary. And for a young woman keen to build new networks, as Vera was, Schulenburg also offered an immediate entrée to the highest level of Romania's diplomatic
society. Anyone regularly invited to the German embassy was in demand by diplomats all over town, each of them eager to find out what the Führer was up to in Berlin.

If Vera had felt deeply for Schulenburg, however, why did she not accompany him to Moscow when he left Bucharest? Vera confided in her friend Barbara Worcester, many decades later, that he had invited her to go with him to Moscow when he was appointed ambassador there in 1934. Perhaps Vera sensed that Schulenburg would only ever want an elegant and intelligent “hostess” at his beck and call. But then she also told Barbara that it was the greatest regret of her life that she did not go.

It was not clear to Vera or anyone else at the time the photograph was taken just how closely the fate of the Rosenbergs pictured in it would be linked to Count von der Schulenburg just a few years later. As Germany's ambassador to Moscow, Schulenburg was much acclaimed for drafting the 1939 agreement between Moscow and Berlin known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was this agreement that began the dismemberment of Romania and led to the disastrous transfer of northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940 and the consequent expulsion of the Rosenbergs from this very piece of land.

As the war progressed, Schulenburg grew more and more dismayed by the Nazi aggression that he was being asked to help enact. He was particularly shocked by the invasion of Poland—a country he loved—and horrified by the slaughter of the Jews. By the summer of 1944 he had joined the conspiracy to kill Hitler with his cousin, Hans Dietloff von der Schulenburg, and he was one of two men who might have become foreign minister had the plot succeeded. On July 20, 1944, the coup failed spectacularly, and Schulenburg, along with many others, was hanged.