Vera Adkins (1908-2000)

DOSSIER:

Vera-May Rosenberg, daughter of Max Rosenberg and Zeffro Hilda Adkins, was born on 16 Jun 1908 in Galati, Romania. After the death of her father, Vera and her mother emigrated to Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in Europe and the growing extremism and antisemitism in Romania.

CODE NAMES:

None Known

During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where she lived on the large estate bought by her father at Crasna (now in Ukraine), Vera enjoyed the cosmopolitan society of Bucharest where she became close to the anti-Nazi German ambassador, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (executed after 1944 July Plot). Later she 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. She was never to marry, and lived in a flat with her mother until 1947 when Hilda died.

While in Romania, Vera 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'. She also worked as a translator and representative for an oil company.

In the spring of 1940, Vera travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer for a passport for her cousin, Felix, to escape from Romania. She was stranded in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded on 10 Mar 1940, and, after going into hiding, she was able to return to England late in 1940 with the assistance of a Belgian resistance network.

In February 1941, despite not being a British national, Vera joined the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), originally in a secretarial capacity, but soon as assistant to section head Colonel Maurice Buckmaster and a de facto intelligence officer. Her primary role was related to the recruitment and deployment of British agents in occupied France. She was also given responsibility for the 37 female SOE who would later work as couriers and wireless operators for the various circuits established by SOE. Vera also would take care of the 'housekeeping' related to the agent, such as ensuring they received their pay, checking that their clothing and papers were appropriate for their mission and acting as SOE liaison with their families, which included the sending out at regular intervals of anodyne pre-written letters.

She would often accompany agents to the airfields from which they would depart for France, and would carry out final security checks before waving them off. She did this for almost all of the women agents, each of whom she regarded as one of her 'girls', and to whom she felt a close affinity despite never herself serving in the field or undergoing military or signals training.

Vera did not usually arrive at F Section's Baker Street office until around 10 a.m., but always attended the daily section head meetings, and would often stay late in the signals room to await the decoded transmissions sent by agents in the field. Although not a popular officer with many of her colleagues, especially in view of her inability to admit to mistakes, she was trusted for her integrity, good organizational skills and exceptional memory. She was 5' 9" tall, liked to dress elegantly in tailored skirt-suits and was a lifelong smoker, preferring the 'Senior Service' brand.

Controversy has arisen as to why clues that one of F section's main spy networks had been penetrated by the Germans were not picked up, resulting in the failure to pull out agents at risk. Instead, several more were sent in. A radio operator for the Prosper circuit, Gilbert Norman, had sent a message omitting his true security check - a deliberate mistake. So why didn't Vera challenge Buckmaster when other signals from captured radios came in without checks? 

Vera, it is alleged, was negligent in letting Buckmaster repeat his errors at the expense of agents' lives, including 27 who the Germans arrested upon landing and later killed. Her biographer, Sarah Helm, believes that Vera, who still had relatives in Nazi occupied Europe, may have travelled to the Netherlands in 1940 and helped a cousin to escape by bribing Abwehr officials, and then later escaped from occupied Belgium through a resistance 'lifeline'. She did not tell SOE of this when she joined in 1941, and kept it secret for the rest of her life. Whatever the truth, Buckmaster was Vera's 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 recklessly sent a reply to the message supposedly sent by Norman telling him, and thus the actual German operator, that he had forgotten his 'true' check and to remember it in future.

It was not until after the end of the war that Atkins learnt of the almost total success the Germans had had by 1943 in destroying SOE networks in the Low Countries by playing the Funkspiel (radio 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 in France) officers could impersonate the agents and play them back against HQ 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.

Notice should also be taken of the well-organised and skillful counter-espionage work of the Sicherheitsdienst at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris under Hans Josef Kieffer, who built up a deep understanding of how F Section operated in both London and France.

It has been suggested that Vera's 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 that 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 Dericourt, 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 Sicherheitsdienst in Paris. What is not completely clear is whether Dericourt was, as is most likely, simply a traitor, or, as he was to claim, working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) (unknown to SOE) as part of a complex deception plan in the run-up to D-Day. However, it is beyond doubt that Dericourt was at least a double agent, and that he provided, first his friend, Karl Boemelburg, head of the Sicherheitsdienst 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 the 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 that few individuals were culpable.

Vera 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) Sonya Olschanezky, as the fourth woman executed at Natzweiler-Struthof on 6 Jul 1944.

After the liberation of France and the allied victory in Europe, Vera went to both France, and later, for just four days, Germany, where she was determined to uncover the fates of the 51 still unaccounted for F Section agents, of the 118 who had disappeared in enemy territory (117 of whom she was to confirm had been murdered 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 her quest to find out what had happened to the British agents, and to bring those who has perpetrated crimes against them to justice.

At the end of 1945 SOE was wound-up, but in January 1946 Vera, now funded on the establishment of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 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. She was attached to the war crimes unit of the Judge Advocate-General's department of the British Army HQ at Bad Oeynhausen, which was under the command of Group Captain Tony Somerhaugh.

Until her return to England in October 1946, Atkins searched for the missing SOE agents and other intelligence service personnel who had gone missing behind enemy lines, carried out interrogations of Nazi war crimes suspects, including Rudolf Hoess, ex-commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and testified as a prosecution witness in subsequent trials. In November 1946 her commission was extended so that she could return to Germany to assist the prosecution in the Ravensbrueck Trial which lasted into January 1947. She used this opportunity to complete her search for Noor Inayat Khan, who she now knew had not died at Natzweiler-Struthof, as she had originally concluded in April 1946, but at Dachau.

As well as tracing 117 of the 118 missing F Section SOE agents, Vera established the circumstances of the deaths of all 14 of the women, 12 of whom had been murdered in concentration camps: Andree Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonya Olschanezky (whom Atkins did not identify until 1947, but knew as the fourth woman to be killed) and Diana Rowden executed at Natzweiler-Struthof by lethal injection on 6 Jul 1944; Yolande Beekman, Madelaine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan and Eliane Plewman executed at Dachau on 13 Sept 1944; Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo executed by shooting at Ravensbrueck on 5 Feb 1945; and Cecily Lefort gassed at Ravensbrueck sometime in Feb 1945. Yvonne Rudelat died of Typhus on 23 Apr 1945, 8 days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Muriel Byck had died of meningitis in hospital in Ramorantin, France, on 25 May 1944. 

Vera had also persuaded the War Office that the 12 women, technically regarded as civilians, who had been executed, were not treated as having died in prison, as had been originally intended, but were recorded as Killed in Action. Her efforts in looking for her missing girls meant each now have a place of death. By detailing their bravery before and after capture, Vera also helped to ensure that each (except Sonya Olschanezky, unknown to Atkins until 1947) received official recognition by the British government. To her death, Vera a strong defender of F Section's wartime record, and ensured that each of the 12 women murdered in the three concentration camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau and Ravensbrueck were commemorated by memorial plaques close to where they were killed. She also supported the memorial at Valençay in the Loire Valley, unveiled in 1991, which is dedicated to the agents of SOE in France killed in the line of duty.

Vera Atkins died in a nursing home in Hastings on 24 June 2000, shortly after contracting MRSA in hospital and breaking her hip.