Gavin Mortimer tells of an SOE recruiter’s campaign for justice after the brutal murder of four brave female agents by Hitler’s henchmen.
Vera Atkins had always felt like an outsider in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). To all intents and purposes she was very much the cool, suave upper-middle class Englishwoman, but in fact Atkins had been born in Romania to a wealthy German father, Max Rosenberg. He, like her British mother, were Jews, an impediment to being accepted into polite British society in the late 1930s.
She had an impeccable upbringing, going from a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, to read modern languages in Paris at the Sorbonne. She arrived in Britain in 1937 aged 29, boasting an impressive CV that included employment as a translator and as an agent for an oil company. After her father died, she adopted her mother’s maiden name of ‘Atkins’, a new persona to go with the cut-glass English she worked hard to perfect so that she could fit in among her Chelsea neighbours.
The outbreak of war was Atkins’ chance to prove herself to her new country. In February 1941 she joined the SOE and was employed as a secretary in the French [F] Section, answering to Colonel Maurice…
