A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE
Sarah Helm
Language: English
Pages: 302
ISBN: B01N0DII4A
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
During World War Two the Special Operation Executive's French Section sent more than 400 agents into Occupied France -- at least 100 never returned and were reported 'Missing Believed Dead' after the war. Twelve of these were women who died in German concentration camps -- some were tortured, some were shot, and some died in the gas chambers. Vera Atkins had helped prepare these women for their missions, and when the war was over she went out to Germany to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines.
But while the woman who carried out this extraordinary mission appeared quintessentially English, she was nothing of the sort. Vera Atkins, who never married, covered her life in mystery so that even her closest family knew almost nothing of her past. In A LIFE IN SECRETS Sarah Helm has stripped away Vera's many veils and -- with unprecedented access to official and private papers, and the cooperation of Vera's relatives -- vividly reconstructed an extraordinary life.
more likely than anyone, other than Suhren, to know the fate of her three girls. When Vera arrived at Tomato, Schwarzhuber was marched into the small interview room and immediately declared he was ready to talk. Within minutes he had positively identified two of the three girls as Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch. He not only recognised the third girl from the photograph but also remembered that “she had the name of Violette.” After just a few brief questions from Vera, he recalled all the details
and their luggage in the hall of the station in Karlsruhe. They were handcuffed two together. We took the express train as far as Strasbourg and then got a local train. During the journey the prisoners asked where they were going, and Wassmer said they were being taken to a camp and that they would be expected to work. They talked about how they would be glad to get away from peeling potatoes now they had left Karlsruhe prison. The surrounding country was lovely, and the women enjoyed it and
each other. The various episodes led the MI5 man handling the case to say: “This leads one to wonder whether Bodington was himself an agent in the pay of the Germans.” Particular suspicions arose directly out of Bodington's trip to Paris in the summer of 1943, during which several puzzling things had happened, including the capture of Agazarian and Colonel Heinrich's startling claim at the time to the SOE agent called Henri Frager that the Gestapo knew all along of Bodington's presence in Paris.
wrote the woman. “I do hope she lived to know the camp was liberated so she rested quietly knowing her work had been of use and rewarded.” Vera urgently sought information on Rudellat from the Red Cross and from British forces now scouring the camp. Locating her was urgent, “not least because she is an important witness to the Prosper collapse.” For all the horror now emerging, Vera still clung to hope wherever she could. There had already been miraculous escapes. “Southgate, possibly alive,”
was only because, according to the rules, Becker was not supposed to hold prisoners of their category that she had protested and asked to be relieved of them. “I interrogated staff at the women's jail at Akademiestrasse,” noted Vera in her report on the meeting. “While they are all very anxious to be helpful, their information cannot be relied upon.” I had not expected to find many traces of Vera's investigation in Karlsruhe. There is no prison in Akademiestrasse today, and I was told there