Vera Atkins

Intelligence officer of the French Section of the Special Operations Executive, who after the war established the fates of its missing agents. Born on 15 June 1908 in Galati, Romania, into a Jewish family named Rosenberg; her mother was a British subject. She grew up in Romania and was educated in Switzerland and France, speaking several languages fluently. In 1937 she moved to Britain, taking her mother's maiden name. She did not obtain British citizenship until 1944 — that is, she worked for the secret service for most of the war without being a subject of the country she served. She joined SOE in 1941 and from 1944 was intelligence officer of F Section. She prepared agents for insertion: cover stories, documents, and the small details of life in occupied France by which an agent could be spotted as a stranger. Almost every woman agent of the section passed through her hands, among them Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom. After the war she took up the question of those who had not come back. One hundred and eighteen F Section agents were missing. Atkins obtained official standing as an investigator and travelled through Germany looking for traces. She established what had happened to 117 of them, including the executions at Dachau, Natzweiler and Ravensbrück, and gave evidence at the trials. The work was no part of her duties and was carried out largely against an official preference to let the matter rest. She was appointed CBE and received the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. She died on 24 June 2000.