Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (73 page)

The fact that Vera had a relative who worked during the war as an Abwehr agent—albeit in circumstances of life and death—was incriminating enough to explain some of this protectiveness. But for history to
reveal, years after the event, that Vera herself had passed a large sum of money to the Abwehr to secure a passport would have been a bombshell indeed for SOE. History would almost certainly have judged Vera kindly. Friends and admirers, of course, would have viewed her mission to save a relative from the death camps as an act of extreme bravery and self-sacrifice. But as Vera knew, those whom she had worked so closely with during the war would not have seen it in that way.

When Vera joined SOE, she clearly took a decision not to avow her mission to the Low Countries, and having kept it secret, she had to keep it so all her life. All the time, though, she must have worried that it might leak out.

After the war Vera could never drop her guard. She constantly built up cover in case anyone should look too closely at her past, thus fending off any possibility that the few who knew anything of the story might talk.

The convention accepted by Vera's generation—that one didn't ask questions about other people's lives—clearly helped her. Occasionally individuals like Irene Ward MP posed a threat to Vera by challenging that convention, but Dame Irene was seen off. M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of SOE, was given unique access in the 1960s to SOE's personal files and could well have chosen to reveal that an influential F Section desk officer was an enemy alien. In fact, before the book was published, Foot was taken quietly aside by Vera and persuaded not to mention her Romanian roots.

But how long would it be before the record of an interrogation like that of Willi Goetz, sitting in a Whitehall file, would surface?

Vera adopted many techniques to divert people's interest from her past, and as a result some who came into contact with her were confused and drew surprising conclusions. Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts, who had helped her in Antwerp, sensed that Vera was leading a double life and, given the backcloth of her own war experience, concluded that she was a Nazi double agent. Jean Overton Fuller also sensed Vera's double life. At the outbreak of the Cold War, Jean's conclusion was that Vera was a Soviet spy.

Both Gilberte and Jean were right that Vera had something to hide but wrong about what she was hiding.

Those words of admiration, spoken by Karen and Fritz, “to us you will always be a heroine,” were treasured by Vera, all the more because they were the only recognition of her heroism that she would ever receive. Once Vera's mother, Ralph, and Guy knew, but after their deaths nobody else could ever be allowed to know the secret. Even the most important beneficiaries of Vera's heroism—the next generation of the Rosenberg family—were not allowed to find out.

Knowing that questions from the children, and the grandchildren, were certain to come sooner or later, Vera erected the only defence she could: she simply shut herself off from her Rosenberg family roots. For decades after the war she had no contact at all with Fritz or Karen, fearing that this would bring the story to life. When contact was made in the 1990s, it was limited to those dry little cards I had found and cold Christmas greetings.

I found no evidence either that Vera had ever sought to make contact with Fritz's surviving brother, George, who lived simply as a labourer in Romania until his death in 1988. Vera certainly never mentioned the second twin, Hans. From a Holocaust research group in Vienna I received confirmation that Hans was a victim of Nazi euthanasia, as Fritz had revealed in his papers. According to the registration books of the mental hospital, Am Steinhof, near Vienna, where he had been a patient, “Hans Israel Rosenberg [the name Israel was given by the Nazis] was deported from Steinhof to Hartheim Castle, in Alkoven, Austria, on 17 August 1940 where he was murdered.” Hartheim Castle was a “specialised euthanasia killing institution, where more than 18,200 handicapped and mentally ill patients were killed by gas.”

Similarly, Vera cut herself off entirely from the German branch of the Rosenberg family—even from her uncle Siegfried. Uncle Siegfried knew better than anyone the story of Fritz's rescue. “During this time I was supported by my uncle Siegfried and my English cousin Vera Atkins,” Fritz had written of his period in hiding. After the war Siegfried was the only one of Vera's father's brothers still alive. He returned to Cologne and struggled to get back on his feet. Vera, however, had almost no contact
with Siegfried, and when he died in Cologne in 1964, she was too busy to attend the funeral.

Vera's relatives in Stuttgart were also cut off entirely by her after the war. Her cousin Aenne Pahl, to whom both Vera and her mother had once been particularly close, had suffered appalling trauma at the hands of the Nazis during her imprisonment in Wedding jail. Yet as far as the family knows today, Vera made no attempt to contact Aenne or her daughter at any time after the war.

In the 1960s Aenne s sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Iris, turned up at Rutland Gate on her first trip to England, eager to meet her aunt Vera, who—although she never visited—had always been spoken of with awe in Iris's family. Young, pretty, and highly intelligent, Iris had been told nothing of her own background—“only tales.” Away from home for the first time, she looked forward to meeting her English aunt, hoping she would tell her more about her Rosenberg roots. Vera, though, was deeply fearful of the questions this young girl might ask and presented her very coldest face, which deterred Iris from asking any questions at all. Iris, now a child psychologist, recalled the meeting in chilling terms. “Vera certainly had an aura, and I was quite impressed. But she was also very distant, and I found her very cold. I remember thinking all the time I was there, I mustn't let my teacup fall off this saucer. I never saw her again. In later years when I came to London, I always called but she was always busy or not available. For me Vera was a completely blank screen.”

27.
Secrets That Don't Die

O
ne day in the early 1960s another pretty young woman arrived for tea at 34 Rutland Gate. This woman was not a member of Vera's family, but Vera was nevertheless fearful once again about the questions her visitor might ask.

Now in her early twenties, Tania Szabo had been living with her grandparents in Australia since the age of eight, when the family emigrated, in part to avoid the publicity surrounding Violette. Vera had never been in contact with Tania during this time.

When she arrived back in London, everyone wanted to see Tania, remembered as the little girl who had received her mother's George Cross. But the person Tania most wanted to meet was Vera Atkins. “I don't remember why I wanted to see her or how I found her,” said Tania, now sixty-three, in a flowing skirt and trailing scarf. “But I do remember I wanted so much to please her. Then when we met it was all rather formal, and she seemed distant and cold. I think Vera disapproved of me.”

In the 1960s there had been a further attempt to lay the SOE story to rest with the publication of the official history SOE in France by M.R.D. Foot. For most the book became the long-awaited authoritative account of SOE, although not for Vera, who was angered that anyone should claim to know more about the subject than she. When I met her in 1998, she
expressed her opinion: “Some consider it the Bible. It's about as accurate as the Bible.” For some critics the history simply raised more questions than it answered. Though Foot meticulously analysed the disasters and the treachery, he found no conspiracies and blamed few, concluding that the errors were largely due to the fog of war. “To the question why people with so little training were sent to do such important work, the only reply is the work had to be done, and there was nobody else to send,” he wrote. Foot also blamed “sensation mongers” for making “ghastly imputations” about what happened to women agents, who, he said, would have wanted no special treatment.

No history, though, official or otherwise, could provide answers for the young Tania Szabo, the first of the offspring of SOE agents to arrive at Vera's door in the hope of finding out more about what really happened to parents, or in some cases uncles or aunts. Immediately after the war the questions Vera faced were largely from writers, MPs, or former SOE agents themselves, but from the 1960s on she faced questions from the children of the dead, and these were much harder to answer. I suggested to Tania that perhaps the reason Vera appeared so cold and distant at their first meeting was not because she “disapproved” of Tania but because she feared the questions she might be asked. Perhaps Vera feared Tania would blame her in some way.

“She certainly didn't want to get too close to me,” said Tania. “That's why I thought she disapproved.”

“What was it you felt she disapproved of?” I asked.

“Oh well, you know, it was the sixties, and I was young and doing not very much. I think she expected more of me. And I think I had a feeling that she didn't want me to be bothering her. Here I was in London, alone—perhaps she thought I would always be at her door. It must have been very difficult for her. She thought she might have me on her hands.”

Had there been any contact while she was in Australia?

“None at all,” said Tania. Tania and her grandparents had not even been invited to attend the launch in 1958 of the film about her mother, Carve Her Name with Pride.

I asked Tania if she did blame Vera in any way for what happened. “Oh, no,” she said. “Of course I didn't blame her. It was war.” Then she
added: “Though she might have thought I would blame her. It was understandable she should think that, I suppose. She certainly didn't open the gates, as it were. But I had the impression she was somebody who didn't want to open the gates. Ever.”

That day at Rutland Gate Tania must have been about the same age as her mother was when Vera first met Violette. We wondered if Vera might have seen a likeness. I showed Tania a tribute to Violette, written by Vera after the war. It read:

I first met Violette in the early autumn of 1943 when she volunteered for work in occupied France with the French resistance. She was twenty-two, recently bereaved, her daughter little more than a year old. She was beautiful with great natural gaiety and vitality but she had been deeply hurt. Often her eyes would have a hooded look and there would be little silences, small leaks in her brave armour. She sought an outlet in action, preferably exciting and demanding.

Tania read the little piece carefully, then said: “I think there was always something particular between Violette and Vera. There was an understanding. I had a sense of that. It was an instinct. It had to do with the way she talked about Violette. I think it was why she went out to Germany: to find out what had happened to Violette. And if she hadn't done it we would never have known.”

After Tania came many others. As the offspring of the dead agents grew up, many suddenly discovered they knew nothing about their parents, whose mission, capture, and death were doubly hard to learn about because they were officially secret. Who could they ask? Letters usually found their way first to the Historical Sub-Committee of the Special Forces Club, and then to Vera.

“All these letters would come in, and she just squirrelled them,” said the former agent Tony Brooks, doing a squirrelling action—a kind of pawing—with his hand. “She squirrelled every single one of them,” he
said, doing the action again. “Never told the rest of us what was even in them. Wanted them all for herself.”

I found these letters, still hidden away, in lots of brown envelopes in Vera's files. In their first approaches to Vera, most of the sons or daughters, nephews or nieces, sought names of people and places, any clues, however slight, about how to begin their search back in time. Some found in Vera a conduit to the past or a source of guidance and advice. Others, like Alain Antelme, nephew of France Antelme, who was dropped into the hands of the Gestapo, were treated warily by Vera. “She kept her discretion,” Alain told me.

Many of Vera's correspondents then started to make their own enquiries and wrote to Vera to check a detail, and that detail was also squirrelled away here. The more I opened envelopes, the more I realised that among this mass of little notes and cards were vital snippets of new information, and the more I realised that the story could not yet be laid to rest because it was still being told. Not only did relatives write, but so did others who had known the agents yet never spoken up before. A prisoner who shared a cell at Fresnes with Violette Szabo, before her deportation to Germany, suddenly wrote years later with vivid memories. “When she arrived in Fresnes jail, she was wearing the same dress as when she left London: a new one, in crêpe de Chine, with blue and white flowers. She was also wearing a shirt in black crêpe georgette with yellow lace.” The writer also recalled that Violette had talked in prison of a traitor in London who had betrayed her. Letters also came from people who had read the many books about SOE now published and had still more new information. One of these correspondents was a man named Wickey.

There was nothing on the envelope to indicate who Wickey was, and at first sight the contents were puzzling. On top of the papers was an official-looking letter. It was from the Canadian High Commission in London and was addressed to Vera. The letter was dated May 9, 1975, and said: “Dear Miss Atkins, Thank you for your query about Colonel H. J. Wickey, which has been passed to National Defence Headquarters Ottawa. You will be advised once we are in receipt of their reply.” There was no sign of a reply. Underneath was another letter—this time a faded
copy—dated April 1958. The address of the sender was given as “Stony Mountain, Man,” and the letter was addressed to “The Editor” of Pan Books in London.

Dear Sir, Some time ago when browsing through the book section in one of the large departmental stores in Winnipeg I chanced to see one of your books entitled Born for Sacrifice. I picked up the book and glanced through it. Immediately I recognised some of the names in it and so purchased the book.
From perusal of the book I can see there is still some doubt about how the wireless operator, Miss Inayat Khan (code-name Madeleine, cover name Jeanne-Marie Renier), was disposed of after being taken from Karlsruhe prison. Thinking that the enclosed document may be of some value, I would greatly appreciate if you would be good enough to pass it on to Miss Jean Overton Fuller, the author of the said book, as I do not know how I could contact her except through your office.
Yours truly H. J. Wickey. Lt Col OC Intelligence Coy, Winnipeg Manitoba.
Cc: War Office, London, England.