43 Facts About Vera Atkins

Vera May Atkins was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.

Vera 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.

Vera Atkins was killed in action in the Battle of Crete on 23 May 1941.

Vera Atkins was never to marry, and lived in a flat with her mother while working for SOE and until 1947 when Hilda died.

Vera Atkins worked as a translator and representative for an oil company.

The surname "Vera Atkins" was her mother's maiden name and itself an Anglicised version of the original "Etkins", which she adopted as her own.

Vera Atkins was recruited before the war by Canadian spymaster Sir William Stephenson of British Security Co-ordination.

Vera Atkins sent her on fact-finding missions across Europe to supply Winston Churchill with intelligence on the rising threat of Nazi Germany.

Vera 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.

Vera Atkins kept this episode secret all her life and it only came to light after her death when her biographer, Sarah Helm, tracked down some mourners at Vera Atkins' funeral.

Vera Atkins volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden in Chelsea in the period prior to working for SOE.

Vera Atkins was made assistant to section head Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and became a de facto intelligence officer.

Vera Atkins served as a civilian until August 1944, when she was commissioned a Flight Officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

In February 1944, Vera Atkins was naturalised as a British subject.

Vera Atkins was later appointed F Section's intelligence officer.

Vera Atkins had responsibility for the 37 women SOE agents who worked as couriers and wireless operators for the various circuits established by SOE.

Vera 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.

Vera Atkins always attended the daily section heads meeting chaired by Buckmaster, and would often stay late into the night at the signals room to await the decoded transmissions sent by agents in the field.

Vera Atkins was a lifelong smoker, preferring the "Senior Service" brand.

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 Vera Atkins failed to pull out agents at risk.

Vera 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.

Furthermore, as a Romanian who had not yet obtained British citizenship, Vera Atkins was legally an enemy alien and highly vulnerable.

For some reason, Buckmaster and Vera Atkins were not informed of the total collapse of the circuits in the Netherlands and Belgium due to the capture and control of wireless operators by the Abwehr.

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 Sonia Olschanezky, as the fourth woman executed at Natzweiler-Struthof on 6 July 1944.

Indeed, Vera Atkins never informed Sonia's family that Sonia had died at Natzweiler, although she did later protest against the decision of the organising committee of the SOE memorial in Valencay not to include Sonia's name because she was a local agent and not one sent from England.

Vera Atkins 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 Britain in October 1946, Vera 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 Hoss, ex-commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and testified as a prosecution witness in subsequent trials.

In November 1946, Vera Atkins' commission was extended so that she could return to Germany to assist the prosecution in the Ravensbruck trial which lasted into January 1947.

Vera Atkins 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.

Vera Atkins had persuaded the War Office that the twelve 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.

Vera Atkins was demobilised in 1947, and although nominated for an MBE, was not awarded a decoration in the postwar honours lists.

Vera Atkins went to work for UNESCO's Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, as office manager from 1948, and director from 1952.

Vera Atkins took early retirement in 1961, and retired to Winchelsea in East Sussex.

In 1950, Atkins was an advisor on the film Odette, about Odette Sansom, and in 1958 on the film of Carve Her Name With Pride, based upon the biography of the same name of Violette Szabo by R J Minney.

Vera Atkins assisted Jean Overton Fuller on her 1952 life of Noor Inayat Khan, Madelaine, but their friendship cooled after the author revealed the success of the German Funkspiel against F Section in her 1954 book, The Starr Affair, and Overton Fuller later came to believe that Atkins had been a Soviet agent.

Vera Atkins was suspected by some former SOE officials of working for the Germans, but Sarah Helm dismisses these claims of her being a Soviet or Nazi spy and suggests that Vera Atkins' less straightforward behaviour and secrecy can be explained by her determination not to reveal her 1940 mission to the continent.

Vera Atkins remained to her death a strong defender of F Section's wartime record, and ensured that each of the 12 women who had died in the three Nazi concentration camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau and Ravensbruck are commemorated by memorial plaques close to where they were killed.

Vera Atkins supported the memorial at Valencay 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 was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1987.

In 2022, a historical plaque was placed at Nell Gwynn House, near Sloane Square, London, where Vera Atkins lived during WW2, by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, UK Branch and the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, Stamford Hill Branch.

Vera Atkins died at a hospital in Hastings on 24 June 2000, aged 92.

Vera Atkins had been in a nursing home recovering from a skin complaint when she fell and broke a hip.

Vera Atkins was admitted to the hospital where she contracted MRSA.