Vera Atkins

Vera Atkins was born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Bucharest, Romania, on 16th June, 1908. Her family moved to England in 1933 but after a couple of years moved to France. She studied modern languages at the Sorbonne in Paris and went to finishing school at Lausanne. The surname 'Atkins' was her mother's maiden name which she adopted as her own.

Atkins returned to England when France was invaded by the German Army in May 1940 and she joined the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in February 1941, serving as assistant to Maurice Buckmaster, the head of the French Section.

Her work for SOE included interviewing recruits, organizing their training and planning the reception in France. One of her major tasks was to create cover stories for all the special agents who were about to be sent into territory occupied by Nazi Germany. During the Second World War she sent 470 agents into France including 39 women.

After the war Atkins spent a year interrogating German officials and guards who worked at the concentration camps to discover what had happened to the 118 special agents that had not returned to Britain. These included Yolande Beekman, Andrée Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, Vera Leigh, Gilbert Norman, Sonia Olschanezky, Eliane Plewman, Diana Rowden, Francis Suttill and Violette Szabo.

She was appointed a Commandant of the Légion d'honneur in 1987.

She retired to Winchelsea, Sussex and although she never wrote her memoirs she gave numerous interviews to those writing about the history of the Special Operations Executive.

She died on 24th June, 2000, aged 92.