Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  The last connecting train had left without them. Not to be thwarted, Vera marched off with Annie to the office of Bill Rogers, manager of Steaua Romana, the father of her friend Ann Eagle, and, using her already considerable powers of persuasion, managed to secure from him a car and driver, which she ordered to catch up with the train before Darmanesti, where a tiny valley train was to carry the party up a single-gauge railway to the house.

  As Ion stopped the car outside Darmanesti station, it was easy to see how, if they had not caught that valley train, Vera and Annie would have been in trouble. For the two of us there was no way at all of getting farther. The Rosenbergs' rail track had long since disintegrated. A tarmac road running through the valley had been built by foresters some years earlier, but we were told that potholes now made it impassable. Ion did not want to risk the Merc, especially as locals said they knew nothing of a house or a timber mill up at the end of the valley. When I took my photograph out to show them, they just shook their heads unhelpfully. Then a teenage boy came out of a house and said he climbed on old ruins farther up the valley. Ion looked interested.

  Somehow the bigger potholes were easier to get across than the smaller ones: the Merc just tipped its nose down into them as if descending a moon crater and then climbed out on the other side. With the stream of the Uzu running below us, the forest gradually thickened into anaemic greys and browns. In the spring, when Annie and Vera came here, the valley would have been bursting into colour.

  We passed a little shrine to the Virgin Mary, and then the valley opened out wide, its slopes still forested. Arthur and Siegfried must have celebrated on finding this valley, and within a short time they had brought workers here, built a house and timber mill, and established an entirely self-sufficient community, connected to the world beyond by the railway.

  The Rosenbergs' home in Vallea Uzului was not a château like Crasna but a luxurious mountain chalet with pitched roofs and verandas on every floor, rooms for countless visitors, a large and diverse library, paintings, tapestries, linen imported from Antwerp, and a large wine cellar. The house was run by a housekeeper, usually brought in from a high-class German household, and staffed mostly by local girls who also served the sexual appetites of the “wicked uncles,” as they were known in the family, as well as their three sons, Hans, George, and Fritz. The sexual promiscuity of Rosenberg men was legendary, as I had heard from several people, among them Annie Samuelli. “That first night Vera came to my bedroom and said: ‘Lock the door, because, you know, Fritz is a man who likes girls, and he will certainly make a pass at you.' And afterwards I realised that Fritz was making love to Karen, who was the housekeeper.”

  We drove on until Ion stopped, climbed down, and signalled to me to come and look. Below the road were four large man-made caves, built, he said, as charcoal-burning ovens. Above them was an inscription: “S 1932 R,” which obviously stood for Siegfried Rosenberg 1932. So as late as 1932 the brothers were not only hosting parties but also investing in the future.

  Of course, Arthur and Siegfried knew as well as anyone that fascism was now inexorably on the rise across mainland Europe. The family had relatives in Hanover and Berlin who were already starting to consider leaving Germany should Hitler come to power. Closer to home, in Romania, the popularity of the fascists was spreading. Corneliu Codreanu, leader of Iasi's League of Christian National Defence, had recently formed the Legion of the Archangel St. Michael, popularly known as the Iron Guard.

  Even so, the brothers saw no reason to believe their own lives would be affected. Arthur had by now been baptised a Catholic, taking Franciscus as a middle name. All his sons were similarly baptised, and none were circumcised. Their security, they believed, was assured by excellent political and diplomatic contacts in Berlin and other capitals of central Europe.

  Ironically, so elevated were the Rosenbergs' connections thought to be that in Vallea Uzului in the late 1930s their workers believed that Arthur and Siegfried were related to the influential Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

  In a crisis the brothers knew that they could depend on friends like their guest this weekend, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, a German diplomat of considerable stature to whom National Socialism was personally abhorrent.

  But the purpose of the gathering was not to discuss politics but to fish, hunt, and eat. And the young women were also expected to play a part in a spring ritual: the sacrifice of the lambs.

  Annie Samuelli had described to me what happened in tones of horror. She and Vera and the other women had spent the morning fishing for trout in the streams, while the men went off hunting boar in the woods. Afterwards they all rode back up through the woods on their mountain ponies for a meal laid out on tables with white tablecloths under large awnings.

  Before the meal, however, the young women were taken to an enclosure to look at the newest lambs. “They asked us each to choose one. We didn't know why we were choosing them and didn't ask, I remember, and we chose the ones we thought the cutest. We were enjoying ourselves. It was a lovely spring day. Then we rode back slowly down the hill, but about halfway down the field to the house we heard the most terrible piercing screaming. It went on and on and on. It wouldn't stop and was the most awful sound I have ever heard. Vera was horrified too. She said: ‘Come on, let's go.' It was as if the screams echoed through the whole mountains. We learned later, of course, what it was. They were carrying out a ritual slaughter of the lambs. I have never ever forgotten that noise,” said Annie, trembling now in her Paris flat at the memory.

  She said that it was after that, before they sat down to eat, that the photograph was taken, somewhere near the house.

  Annie had then helped me identify the picnickers in the picture. There was Mr. Pow, an elderly man, manager of the Bank of Romania, and next to him was his deputy, an Englishman named Charles Robinson, who later became commercial attaché at the British legation and was “in intelligence,” Mrs. Pow was there, and so was Arthur Rosenberg—fair, unlike his brothers—and Annie was also able to pick out Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, balding, with closely cropped hair and a moustache, looking distinguished, with a large overcoat spread over the rump of his horse. And here was Vera in tweed riding jacket, holding her mount steady, and a tall, good-looking boy whom at first Annie did not recognise. Then she identified him as one of Arthur's twin sons. Arthur had three boys: twins, George and Hans, and then Fritz. George and Hans were identical, she said. The next young man, small and dark, was Fritz. Annie was beside him, looking pert and nervous at the end of the line.

  I said that the ambassador looked a little old for Vera and Charles Robinson looked more eligible, but Annie told me I was quite wrong. Schulenburg had far greater stature than Robinson, who was just a deputy in a bank. Vera was much more interested in the ambassador, who was unattached. Schulenburg had divorced years earlier after a brief marriage and often sought out attractive women to act as hostess at his embassy functions. After noticing Vera's impeccable manners and grace, he requested that she take this role, which she had agreed to do at lunches but not at dinner, as she felt this would be compromising.

  In any case, said Annie, Schulenburg was attractive to women not so much for his appearance as for his kind nature and attentiveness. “He was a charming man. Not patronising. He listened and was highly intelligent. He respected Vera and vice versa. I think there was a mutual attraction.”

  The ambassador was evidently a marvellous escort for Vera. At the very least, being taken around Bucharest in the German ambassador's chauffeur-driven car (as long as the swastika was not flying) must have been something of a thrill for a young shorthand secretary. And for a young woman keen to build new networks, as Vera was, Schulenburg also offered an immediate entrée to the highest level of Romania's diplomatic society. Anyone regularly invited to the German embassy was in demand by diplomats all over town, each of them eager to find out what the Führer was up to in Berlin.

  If Vera had felt deeply for Schul
enburg, however, why did she not accompany him to Moscow when he left Bucharest? Vera confided in her friend Barbara Worcester, many decades later, that he had invited her to go with him to Moscow when he was appointed ambassador there in 1934. Perhaps Vera sensed that Schulenburg would only ever want an elegant and intelligent “hostess” at his beck and call. But then she also told Barbara that it was the greatest regret of her life that she did not go.

  It was not clear to Vera or anyone else at the time the photograph was taken just how closely the fate of the Rosenbergs pictured in it would be linked to Count von der Schulenburg just a few years later. As Germany's ambassador to Moscow, Schulenburg was much acclaimed for drafting the 1939 agreement between Moscow and Berlin known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was this agreement that began the dismemberment of Romania and led to the disastrous transfer of northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940 and the consequent expulsion of the Rosenbergs from this very piece of land.

  As the war progressed, Schulenburg grew more and more dismayed by the Nazi aggression that he was being asked to help enact. He was particularly shocked by the invasion of Poland—a country he loved—and horrified by the slaughter of the Jews. By the summer of 1944 he had joined the conspiracy to kill Hitler with his cousin, Hans Dietloff von der Schulenburg, and he was one of two men who might have become foreign minister had the plot succeeded. On July 20, 1944, the coup failed spectacularly, and Schulenburg, along with many others, was hanged.

  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

  Ayoung 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.”