Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (30 page)

Annie continued looking at the picture. She thought the Rosenberg twin she could not identify was probably George. Hans, she now recalled, had suffered from a mental illness or breakdown of some kind and might already have been in hospital or an asylum. She believed the breakdown happened while he was a student in Munich. He never fully recovered. She was not sure what became of him, but she had heard a suggestion
that he might have been gassed during the Nazis' programme of euthanasia.

I said I had not heard Hans's story before. None of the family had ever mentioned it. It was not surprising, said Annie. “Mental illness was something to hide. And for the Rosenbergs to be Jewish was a matter of shame. Hans would have been seen as a double shame. The Rosenbergs wanted nobody to know that they had mental illness in the family or that they were Jewish, so they would want nobody to know that they had relatives who died in the Holocaust.”

Along the valley floor Ion and I were looking up and still trying to identify the site of the photograph when a woman in bright scarves appeared from one of the two tumbledown cottages there and said excitedly that we should talk to her mother. She pointed to a shack, and we walked towards it across a field, scattering a flock of early lambs. The roof of the little one-room building appeared to have half slipped off; it was held in place by a few plants.

We peered in the door, and there a thin little lady, very old, was sitting all alone, in her neatly ironed apron. She turned and smiled. It was as if history had thoughtfully left her behind to talk to us. The scrubbed house had nothing in it except a wooden bench that was also the bed, a bucket, a small table, and a warm wood-burning stove with an iron sitting on it. One saucepan hung from a nail in the wall. The woman was wearing very thick glasses. Her name was Maria Novac, and she was ninety-two, she told us. I noticed a different dialect, and Ion explained that she was speaking a variant of Hungarian. He talked to her gently and learned that she had been born in the valley. Her husband worked as the cobbler when the Rosenbergs ran the factory. What did she remember of the family?

“Arthur and Siegfried,” she said immediately. “I remember their names.”

Did she remember what they looked like at all?

“No. Except that Arthur had red hair.” All the village was made by
the Rosenbergs, she said. There were about three hundred people living here, she added proudly.

Did she remember the spring festival?

Yes, she did, and many people came in those times. She took us out to the front door to point to where the big house was, just up the hill a little. “It was all destroyed in the war so nobody could come back,” she said.

“Where had everyone gone?”

She didn't know where the Rosenbergs went, but the villagers all fled over the mountains when the area was given back to Hungary. Gradually one or two came back. She had returned with her husband.

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

“It was my home.”

We wandered back to the site of the house and found the foundations and the remains of what had been a wine cellar, but there was nothing more. Driving back, I read a passage of Siegfried's diary to Ion. He was describing what happened at another dinner held here the following year, when other important guests, mostly Germans, were being entertained:

One evening in 1933 we had many guests for dinner, including lots of Germans, and we heard the Reichstag was on fire. Goebbels said they had already found out who lit the fire, but I said in my opinion it could only have been started by the Nazis themselves, as it would be crazy for the socialists to do such a thing. Especially now that the Nazis were so powerful, it would have been suicide for socialists to have started the fire.
So all the Germans left the house, and my brother said it was my fault as I should not mention these opinions of mine. During this debate my nephew, my brother's son, Fritz, said you are absolutely right, you can't have any other opinion when you hear what Goebbels says.

13.
Spy Gents

A
young British diplomat arriving in Bucharest in 1934 wrote home to his parents about his trip to Romania:

My journey was on the whole comfortable except that as we jolted through the continent the food got worse and worse reaching its nadir at dinnertime in Poland. My impression of Poland was deplorable, it rained solidly all through Germany and Poland and the Silesian district is like County Durham at its worst. The train was filled, corridors and all, with the most incredible Polish Jews about 4 feet high with immense black beards and greasy curls, who gibbered like monkeys and stank like badgers.

Romania was a refreshing change, he said.

John Coulson had left Cambridge with a double first just eighteen months before being catapulted from Whitehall to the edge of the Orient. Once he arrived in Bucharest, he was entranced by the European mêlée he found there: quasi-royals, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, hangers-on, and spies.

“On Tuesday night there was a dinner at the legation where I met a nice girl with the ghastly name of Vera Rosenberg,” wrote Coulson a few days after arriving. And in a letter a few weeks later he told his parents:

People I meet a lot here, and who I have not I think described, are two sisters Mrs. Mendl and Mrs. Rosenberg, both of whom (as is obvious) have married Jews. They are fair themselves—about 45 I suppose—and I simply cannot tell whether they are Jewesses or not. On the one hand they look so essentially Aryan; on the other, it seems strange that both should marry Jews. Mrs. Rosenberg is a widow, and has one daughter, who, strangely enough, is also fair, but obviously a Jewess. All these women have attractive—extremely attractive—voices.

I had found it puzzling why Vera stayed on in Bucharest after her father's death. Having completed her secretarial course in London in 1931, she could easily have found work in London and sought British citizenship, like her brother Guy; yet she returned to Romania for six more years.

John Coulson's letters home gave one possible answer. Vera was enjoying herself in Bucharest, and for some time she flitted gaily in and out of Coulson's prose. A curious replacement for Count Schulenburg, this gauche young diplomat became Vera's new escort about town. She in turn became Coulson's guide as he muddled through streets smelling of raw sheepskin and full of jostling hawkers to reach the seductive ambience of the Capsa or the Melody Bar. “I met fifty people last night, and haven't been to bed before four a.m. for days,” he wrote to his parents, and a little later in the same letter: “On Wednesday I dined with the Rosenbergs and played bridge until a late hour.” If Coulson was not accompanying his minister to the Danube “to watch him miss some duck and to drift about in his new motor boat all over the Delta,” he was rushing to bridge or golf or tennis at the Bucharest Country Club, where Vera Rosenberg was to be found, or to a lecture on “An Englishman's View of the World” at the Anglo-Romanian Society, where Vera and her mother might be, although Vera was just as likely to be found at the bar of the Athenée Palace.

Vera's detachment from political change as these years passed seemed unreal. In 1935 her own relatives in Germany became subject to the anti-Semitic Nürnberg Laws, whereby German citizenship could belong only to a “national of German or kindred blood.” Vera's uncles Arthur and
Siegfried, still in Romania, could no longer export to their own company in Cologne. Vera could perhaps ignore the daily jibes that a “Jewess” attracted even in polite society. But as time went by it could not have been easy to ignore mass demonstrations in Bucharest in support of the Iron Guard. Vera could see for herself the desperate wish of other Jews to flee each time she visited the Black Sea port of Constanza, from where many were already leaving for Palestine, among them Vera's own friends and relatives. “Vera and I to Constanza, saw M off to Palestine,” noted her mother in a pocket diary on one such occasion.

Yet in Vera's privileged circle the threat still seemed distant. Far from feeling afraid about her future, the Vera Rosenberg whom Coulson encountered was at ease in this bustling, cosmopolitan world of prewar Bucharest. She had her influential patrons, such as Bill Rogers, the doyen of the expatriate community here. The longtime manager of Steaua Ro-mana in Bucharest, “Uncle Bill” was an admirer of Vera's. His daughter Ann Rogers (now Eagle), who knew Vera at this time, said: “Daddy was one of the only people who could tease Vera and say: ‘How are your coreligionists?' Mummy was not so sure. People used to ask her why she had so much to do with those awful Jews. And when Daddy let them send their furniture back to England in one of his tankers, Mummy was furious.”

Searching for more of Vera in Coulson's letters, I noticed that her name suddenly vanished. But flicking through Hilda's pocket diaries, I saw that the moment Vera disappeared from his world, he started appearing in hers. In his letters home Coulson was now disguising Vera's presence in his life, but the initials J.C. appeared frequently in Hilda's diaries: “Vera to dinner J.C.;” “Vera to club with J.C.” Hilda noted down her own appointments with sad monotony: “Morning massage; tea Gladys; evening film.” If she did anything of interest, it was with Vera: “Vera to supper. Very nice.” Occasionally others, including Siegfried and Arthur, popped into Hilda's life, and Hilda reported: “Wilfred [Guy] leaves Oxford” and “Ralph leaves for Istanbul via Sophia.” But more regularly came entries such as: “Vera for drive with J.C.” and “Vera to concert with J.C.”

If I wanted more detail of Vera's outings, I could check by referring
to Coulson's letters to his parents. For example, after the concert he had written to them to say that he had enjoyed a performance by the director of the Berlin Opera. Hilda wrote on another day, “Vera to ball at Athenée Palace,” and Coulson told his parents, without mentioning Vera's name, that “there were five hundred for dinner and we danced till four in the morning.” He added that there had been 15 to 20 degrees of frost as the Crivat wind was blowing down from the Russian steppes.

When Vera went away, Hilda's life was empty. “Supper alone,” “film alone,” she wrote. Then for days on end it could be: “Vera away.” Where was she? For Hilda it was “Morning massage. Afternoon film alone, Scarlet Pimpernel. Tea at Samuellis.” Then “V returned with J.C.”

In counterpoint, Coulson's letters and Hilda's diaries provided some of the texture of Vera's life. They also contained names of all the many friends and contacts who now peopled Vera's busy world. Reading on, I became familiar with those names—Kendrick, Boxshall, Gibson, Humphreys, Chidson—and began to recognise individuals from Vera's later papers and even from official files. They were businessmen, diplomats, or journalists, and many of them were also spies. My material showed that Vera met them all at dinners, at dances, or on skiing trips. A regular contact was the commercial attaché in Bucharest and also an MI6 man, Leslie Humphreys. Humphreys was referred to by Coulson as “the Hump” and “a bit grim.” One of his colleagues described him as “A funny chap. A homosexual. You wouldn't recognise him from one day to another. No extrovert character at all.”

“The Hump” seemed an unlikely companion for Vera, but she was evidently at ease with such shadowy figures, and they enjoyed her charms. Montague “Monty” Chidson, another MI6 man in Bucharest, was another fervent admirer of Vera's, and in later years he related how he had once proposed to her in a Bucharest bar in the small hours.

The “spy gents,” as they were known, certainly enjoyed the revelry of Bucharest as much as anyone, as was evident from several photographs, including one that showed Leslie Humphreys, his sister Dot, Montague Chidson, John Coulson, Vera, and other revellers on a stage at the Targul Mosilor, a market in Bucharest, with a famous puppet theatre.

But there was good reason to suppose that Vera's contacts with the
intelligence world were already more than social, and they may even have been the most important reason she chose to stay on in Romania in the 1930s. In 1934, now aged twenty-six, she acquired a more responsible job, as a “foreign correspondent” with the Pallas Oil Company, which involved working as an interpreter and intermediary dealing with foreign clients. The job gave Vera access to useful information about the oil industry and required her to travel widely, so that she was now in a good position to pass on titbits to a man like Humphreys. At the time Humphreys s task was to provide the Department of Trade in London with intelligence reports on German economic policy throughout the region, and of paramount interest was Germany's policy towards Romania's large oil reserves. Vera's access to the German embassy of Count Schulen-burg certainly would not have gone unnoticed by the British intelligence community in Bucharest or anyone else who had interests in the region.

And providing intelligence to the British was already a Rosenberg and Atkins family tradition: names listed among Vera's referees on her Home Office naturalisation papers revealed as much. She had four referees, all contacts she had made in Romania. The first two names were familiar: Arthur Coverley-Price had been a diplomat in the legation in Bucharest in the early 1930s, and George Swire de Moleyns Rogers was Bill Rogers. The third and fourth referees were at first more difficult to place. There was a Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick, who said on his testimonial that he had known Vera and both her parents (until her father's death) for fifteen years, but he gave no indication of how or where.

The fourth was a Major Reginald George Pearson, who stated he had known Vera for twenty-two years. “I have known Miss Vera Atkins since she was a little girl and have no hesitation in stating that she is in every way suitable for naturalisation. She is British to the core as are and were also her parents and grandparents—all of whom I knew well for many years in South Africa and here.”

Both Kendrick and Pearson turned out to have been spies. Reginald Pearson had indeed known Vera's grandparents in South Africa in the early years of the century, and it seemed highly likely that this contact came about through intelligence circles. From the earliest days of the
Boer War, British intelligence officers were building up wide networks of informers in South Africa, and even the famous Claude Dansey, later deputy head of MI6, cut his teeth as a spy in Africa in the early part of the century. Henry Atkins, a staunch British patriot, onetime owner of the Lace Diamond Mine and a powerful figure in the Cape, would have been a useful person for any British intelligence officer to know.