Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (72 page)

Goetz was also questioned about his informants. Among a list of twenty-one such people in his network he named Karen Rosenberg. “Karen Rosenberg is a German Aryan woman who was married to a German Jew,” he told his interrogator.

He had learned about Frau Rosenberg early in 1942 and was told she was anxious to leave Hungary as her husband was Jewish. Goetz learned that Karen Rosenberg had already spoken with Fillie, whose wife Liselotte, he was told, happened to be a close friend of hers. Fillie had said he could provide new passports for her and her husband as long as they left for Turkey and gathered information for the Abwehr from Istanbul.

Goetz was instructed to obtain the passports, which he did. Before the couple left Budapest, Goetz met Karen Rosenberg. He informed her that in Istanbul she would be contacted by somebody who would collect any information she had obtained and send it back to Hungary.

Goetz then explained that he arranged with “a man called Klatt” that Klatt would transmit Frau Rosenberg's material on to Fillie in Berlin.

So Karen Rosenberg had not simply been exposed to a few smalltime German blackmailers as she sought to secure her husband's escape; she had been drawn into close contact with one of the most infamous intelligence networks run by the Abwehr in Europe.

The interrogation report then said that once Goetz had handed over the new passports to the Rosenbergs, they made their way to Turkey. Here Goetz himself made contact with Karen Rosenberg in the Hotel Novotny in Istanbul, where they were staying, to receive her information.

The Abwehr was swiftly disappointed by Karen Rosenberg's failure to provide anything useful. It knew of her contacts with the British
consulate in Istanbul. Specifically, the Abwehr knew of her contacts with two people at the consulate, one of whom was a Mr. Atkins. Willi Goetz told his interrogator: “In Turkey, Frau Rosenberg was in touch with Mr. Atkins and Mr ———.” The second name had been removed either deliberately or accidentally from the paper, but “Mr. Atkins” was clearly a reference to Vera's brother Ralph.

Details of Ralph's war service had proven impossible to obtain and seemed to have been deliberately kept secret. Ralph Atkins never breathed a word of his war years to his son, Ronald. I had established, however, that Ralph remained in Istanbul at the outbreak of war with his oil company and that, like almost every other British expatriate in Istanbul during the war, he had become informally involved with intelligence work for the British consulate. Nothing more was said by Goetz about those contacts with “Mr. Atkins,” whose role in the Karen Rosenberg affair was left extremely unclear. But Ralph Atkins had evidently been a good contact for the newly arrived Rosenbergs in Istanbul. Furthermore, Ralph almost certainly had means of communication with London throughout this period and hence with Vera.

Soon Karen's failure to produce useful information led to threats from her Abwehr minders. Goetz was sent to the Hotel Novotny to tell Frau Rosenberg that Fillie had been sent to the Eastern Front as she had “not provided a single item of information.” Goetz stated that Fillie had been charged with accepting a sum of fifty thousand Hungarian pengos from Karen in return for the new passports. The Abwehr severely punished any of its officers who took bribes, particularly if the bribe helped a Jew escape. Frau Rosenberg was now asked to come up with better information, in order to get her friend's husband back from the Eastern Front and restore his credibility. “She promised and subsequently gave Goetz a few titbits which were incorrect (e.g. Britain's intention to invade Turkey).”

The British then arranged for Karen to be sent on to Palestine to remove her from Goetz's threats. But before the Rosenbergs left Istanbul, Goetz gave her another mission for Palestine, where Fritz had been promised a job on a British military base. She was to send information on shipping in Haifa and on troops in that district. “This she was to write down
in the form of a simple code (e.g., Dear aunt = ships; chocolate = destroyers etc.) and send the letter through the post to a man called Amenak Seutyan whom Mr Rosenberg had once met on business.”

Goetz emphasised that it was clear to him that Frau Rosenberg undertook to supply information only because of her need to help her Jewish husband escape persecution in Germany. “She was definitely not a pro-Nazi. Furthermore, her husband knew nothing of his wife's mission.”

I now compared Goetz's matter-of-fact report with the story of terror and flight told by Fritz. In some respects the two versions meshed perfectly—the provision of the false passport, the escape from Budapest, and the harassment by German intelligence agents in Istanbul. When Karen had talked years later to her family of German “bloodhounds” sent to threaten her, she was evidently referring to Willi Goetz.

But the differences between the two stories were also glaring. Although Fritz made reference to the fact that his wife had been blackmailed into promising information to the Germans in Istanbul, at no stage did he say that Karen had promised to give information in return for his new passport. He made no mention at all of a large sum of money being paid to the Abwehr in return for his passport. And most important of all, he made no mention of the fact that his wife's friend Hans Fillie was himself an Abwehr agent, the very same Abwehr agent who had taken money from his wife for his passport. Fifty thousand pengos was worth the equivalent of $150,000 in today's terms.

It seemed that Goetz was correct, Karen kept the truth about her dealings with the enemy hidden from her husband. Karen had also kept key elements of the story hidden from her own children. When I spoke to them, Karina and Peter Rosenberg certainly knew about Hans Fillie, as the man who came to their father's aid by securing a new passport. But they had no idea that he was an Abwehr officer and were never told that their mother paid him a large sum for the passport. So where had Karen obtained the money? Vera's comment to her niece Karina now rang very loud in my ears: “Did your mother ever tell you what a brave woman she was during the war?” It was as if Vera had been sounding out Karina to see what her mother might have told her.

Karen had certainly been brave. She had dealt with the enemy at dangerously
close quarters in order to save her husband's life. And she had done so without ever telling him the whole truth, holding on to hope as she collected four-leafed clovers.

And yet Vera's question to Karina begged a series of other, far more disturbing questions. How much of Karen's bravery had Vera herself known about? Did Vera know, as she worked in Baker Street at the heart of British secret intelligence, that her close relative had done a deal with the Abwehr to help her cousin Fritz?

There was no reason why Karen should have known that, through her dealings with Fillie, she had been put in touch with one of Germany's biggest spy networks. Perhaps the infamous Herr Klatt transmitted some of Karen's “titbits.” Perhaps they were intercepted at Bletchley, read by Philby, and passed on to Moscow.

But did Vera know how exposed Karen had been? If she did, she also knew how devastating it would be for her if the facts of the episode ever came out. All the time Vera was working for SOE, she had a relative who was on the books of enemy intelligence, making Vera herself a prime target for German blackmail.

But was Vera perhaps implicated in Fritz's affair far more deeply than this?

Already there was evidence from Zenna that Hilda had provided a large sum of money to help a relative when he or she was facing deportation to a concentration camp. In his papers Fritz stated that he received “support” in his difficulties from “my English cousin Vera Atkins.” Quite possibly the large sum of money Zenna had heard about was raised to pay Fillie for Fritz's new passport. According to Zenna, the money was delivered by Vera. But how did Vera secure such a large amount of cash? And how did she pass it over to the Abwehr?

Fritz's peril was evident from early 1940 as the future of Vallea Uzu-lui hung in the balance, and negotiations to secure a new passport for him could have begun from then. Vera's movements throughout 1940 had always been hard to pin down.

I had found no evidence about how Vera might have reached the Continent at this time. Her Romanian passport was missing from her papers, and she had no other. Possibly her old intelligence contacts—particularly
those now in Section D who had known her family—offered help. But in any event it was most likely that she left England before the Germans seized the Low Countries and France, in May 1940, and then found she could not easily get back.

What I had found were the compelling stories, told independently by two women, of Vera's appearance in Holland and Belgium early in the war.

Beatrice's memory was certainly confused, but much of what she had told me had proved quite accurate. I spoke to Beatrice's sister and her very elderly father, who both lived in Holland, and established that her parents did live precisely where she had indicated, as did the family of Jehovah's Witnesses. And Beatrice's family did have a barn, and they did hide Jews during the war, although they did not know their names.

Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts's credentials as a heroine of the resistance in Antwerp could not be faulted. But why would Vera have taken the money for Fritz to Holland or Belgium?

Willi Goetz had now provided a possible answer. Hans Fillie and his partner Hans Schmidt used their Rotterdam- and Antwerp-based cover company, Afropan, to allow them to travel incognito all over central Europe, making visits to Budapest every six weeks.

Goetz does not tell us how Karen Rosenberg set about raising the fifty thousand pengos to give to Fillie, and he probably did not know. Karen's own family were certainly not wealthy enough to have produced that much money, but messages urgently asking for cash could well have been passed to Vera in England. Whoever raised the alarm must have carried great authority, given the seriousness with which Vera and her mother took the warning.

In any event, the quickest way of getting the money to Karen and Fritz would have been through Fillies company, Afropan, and probably through his associate Hans Schmidt, who travelled so regularly from Antwerp to Budapest. And if, as Annie Samuelli had speculated, Hilda's cash was tied up in diamonds stored safely in an Antwerp bank, it would have made all the more sense for the bribe to be handed over in Antwerp.

When I first heard of a mysterious Belgian lady who appeared at Vera's funeral telling a tale of Vera's “escape” from Antwerp during the war, it was hard to piece the episode together with the known facts of Vera's life. Gradually, however, the weight of evidence had accumulated, so that I now felt sure it must have happened. Though certain details of the story remained hazy, the outline was clear. Sometime early in the war, probably before she joined SOE, Vera travelled in dangerous circumstances through Holland to Belgium in order to pass over money to a contact, to buy Fritz Rosenberg a new passport that would save his life.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I found more corroboration. During my research I had asked Zenna to think again whether Vera ever mentioned Antwerp in any context. When she was growing up, did Antwerp feature in any conversation at all?

“Oh, yes,” Zenna suddenly said as a memory was triggered. “When you put it like that, it did.” Vera had certainly been to Antwerp, she told me. She remembered this because Antwerp had come up in the course of another story Vera had told her as a child.

Food was another subject that provoked anecdotes about Vera. Vera, it was often said, would eat almost anything—even raw eggs. One day when Vera had taken Zenna out for a special meal, she told a story about all the different foods she had once eaten on a long and dangerous journey. “It began with how Vera had had nothing to eat but raw eggs for a long time. She was in a barn, hiding somewhere, and it was all a big adventure, is how I remember it. They lived on nothing but these raw eggs that they found in the barn. Then they had to get somewhere, and it was exciting and took a long time.

“And after this long, exciting journey the whole story ended with a delicious meal in Antwerp. They had friends in Antwerp, and they met up and finally sat down together for this meal.”

Zenna didn't recall Vera mentioning anything dangerous about her journey to Antwerp—“but it was a story told for a child.” What she did remember, however, was the excitement with which her aunt spoke about having to “hide out” and “get away.” Every place on the journey had a connection with a certain food, and the denouement was definitely in
Antwerp. “If I could remember the other food we talked about, I might be able to remember where else she had been,” said Zenna.

So Vera had not been able to bury the story of her mission entirely; she had passed it on, safely disguised as an adventure, in a tale she told to her young niece, who had no reason to make anything of it. And then I realised that Vera had also told the story to somebody else.

The story of Vera's mission and Fritz's final escape to Canada must have been the same story that spilled out in bits and pieces, over dying embers of a fire, into the failing ears of Vera's elderly neighbour Alice Hyde.

As Alice had already told me, she used to keep Vera company in their old age in the evenings in Winchelsea, and often Vera would tell her a long “heartbreaking” story that came to a conclusion in Canada. Alice could remember almost no details of the story and believed that Vera talked to her about her past only because she was “too muddled and deaf to hear or remember anything.

But Alice did remember that the story always ended in Canada, and she remembered the ringing words with which Vera always concluded: “The family told me not to be afraid. They said I would always be remembered by them as a heroine.” And she remembered those words because Vera uttered them over and over again, after the story was over. The words must have been spoken to Vera by Fritz and Karen, who would always remember Vera as a heroine because she had helped save Fritz's life.

The revelation of Vera's secret mission rang true for another reason. It explained, for the first time, the cause of her excessive secrecy. It was quite natural that Vera should have been defensive about her past; after the war many Jewish refugees chose to pull down a curtain and never spoke of their losses or the horrors they had experienced. Yet Vera protected her early life as if she were protecting a wound. Nobody, but nobody—even in her old age—was allowed to even get close to it.