Soon Karen's failure to produce useful information led to threats from her Abwehr minders. Goetz was sent to the Hotel Novotny to tell Frau Rosenberg that Fillie had been sent to the Eastern Front as she had “not provided a single item of information.” Goetz stated that Fillie had been charged with accepting a sum of fifty thousand Hungarian pengos from Karen in return for the new passports. The Abwehr severely punished any of its officers who took bribes, particularly if the bribe helped a Jew escape. Frau Rosenberg was now asked to come up with better information, in order to get her friend's husband back from the Eastern Front and restore his credibility. “She promised and subsequently gave Goetz a few titbits which were incorrect (e.g. Britain's intention to invade Turkey).”
The British then arranged for Karen to be sent on to Palestine to remove her from Goetz's threats. But before the Rosenbergs left Istanbul, Goetz gave her another mission for Palestine, where Fritz had been promised a job on a British military base. She was to send information on shipping in Haifa and on troops in that district. “This she was to write down in the form of a simple code (e.g., Dear aunt = ships; chocolate = destroyers etc.) and send the letter through the post to a man called Amenak Seutyan whom Mr Rosenberg had once met on business.”
Goetz emphasised that it was clear to him that Frau Rosenberg undertook to supply information only because of her need to help her Jewish husband escape persecution in Germany. “She was definitely not a pro-Nazi. Furthermore, her husband knew nothing of his wife's mission.”
I now compared Goetz's matter-of-fact report with the story of terror and flight told by Fritz. In some respects the two versions meshed perfectly—the provision of the false passport, the escape from Budapest, and the harassment by German intelligence agents in Istanbul. When Karen had talked years later to her family of German “bloodhounds” sent to threaten her, she was evidently referring to Willi Goetz.
But the differences between the two stories were also glaring. Although Fritz made reference to the fact that his wife had been blackmailed into promising information to the Germans in Istanbul, at no stage did he say that Karen had promised to give information in return for his new passport. He made no mention at all of a large sum of money being paid to the Abwehr in return for his passport. And most important of all, he made no mention of the fact that his wife's friend Hans Fillie was himself an Abwehr agent, the very same Abwehr agent who had taken money from his wife for his passport. Fifty thousand pengos was worth the equivalent of $150,000 in today's terms.
It seemed that Goetz was correct, Karen kept the truth about her dealings with the enemy hidden from her husband. Karen had also kept key elements of the story hidden from her own children. When I spoke to them, Karina and Peter Rosenberg certainly knew about Hans Fillie, as the man who came to their father's aid by securing a new passport. But they had no idea that he was an Abwehr officer and were never told that their mother paid him a large sum for the passport. So where had Karen obtained the money? Vera's comment to her niece Karina now rang very loud in my ears: “Did your mother ever tell you what a brave woman she was during the war?” It was as if Vera had been sounding out Karina to see what her mother might have told her.
Karen had certainly been brave. She had dealt with the enemy at dangerously close quarters in order to save her husband's life. And she had done so without ever telling him the whole truth, holding on to hope as she collected four-leafed clovers.
And yet Vera's question to Karina begged a series of other, far more disturbing questions. How much of Karen's bravery had Vera herself known about? Did Vera know, as she worked in Baker Street at the heart of British secret intelligence, that her close relative had done a deal with the Abwehr to help her cousin Fritz?
There was no reason why Karen should have known that, through her dealings with Fillie, she had been put in touch with one of Germany's biggest spy networks. Perhaps the infamous Herr Klatt transmitted some of Karen's “titbits.” Perhaps they were intercepted at Bletchley, read by Philby, and passed on to Moscow.
But did Vera know how exposed Karen had been? If she did, she also knew how devastating it would be for her if the facts of the episode ever came out. All the time Vera was working for SOE, she had a relative who was on the books of enemy intelligence, making Vera herself a prime target for German blackmail.
But was Vera perhaps implicated in Fritz's affair far more deeply than this?
Already there was evidence from Zenna that Hilda had provided a large sum of money to help a relative when he or she was facing deportation to a concentration camp. In his papers Fritz stated that he received “support” in his difficulties from “my English cousin Vera Atkins.” Quite possibly the large sum of money Zenna had heard about was raised to pay Fillie for Fritz's new passport. According to Zenna, the money was delivered by Vera. But how did Vera secure such a large amount of cash? And how did she pass it over to the Abwehr?
Fritz's peril was evident from early 1940 as the future of Vallea Uzu-lui hung in the balance, and negotiations to secure a new passport for him could have begun from then. Vera's movements throughout 1940 had always been hard to pin down.
I had found no evidence about how Vera might have reached the Continent at this time. Her Romanian passport was missing from her papers, and she had no other. Possibly her old intelligence contacts—particularly those now in Section D who had known her family—offered help. But in any event it was most likely that she left England before the Germans seized the Low Countries and France, in May 1940, and then found she could not easily get back.
What I had found were the compelling stories, told independently by two women, of Vera's appearance in Holland and Belgium early in the war.
Beatrice's memory was certainly confused, but much of what she had told me had proved quite accurate. I spoke to Beatrice's sister and her very elderly father, who both lived in Holland, and established that her parents did live precisely where she had indicated, as did the family of Jehovah's Witnesses. And Beatrice's family did have a barn, and they did hide Jews during the war, although they did not know their names.
Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts's credentials as a heroine of the resistance in Antwerp could not be faulted. But why would Vera have taken the money for Fritz to Holland or Belgium?
Willi Goetz had now provided a possible answer. Hans Fillie and his partner Hans Schmidt used their Rotterdam- and Antwerp-based cover company, Afropan, to allow them to travel incognito all over central Europe, making visits to Budapest every six weeks.
Goetz does not tell us how Karen Rosenberg set about raising the fifty thousand pengos to give to Fillie, and he probably did not know. Karen's own family were certainly not wealthy enough to have produced that much money, but messages urgently asking for cash could well have been passed to Vera in England. Whoever raised the alarm must have carried great authority, given the seriousness with which Vera and her mother took the warning.
In any event, the quickest way of getting the money to Karen and Fritz would have been through Fillies company, Afropan, and probably through his associate Hans Schmidt, who travelled so regularly from Antwerp to Budapest. And if, as Annie Samuelli had speculated, Hilda's cash was tied up in diamonds stored safely in an Antwerp bank, it would have made all the more sense for the bribe to be handed over in Antwerp.
When I first heard of a mysterious Belgian lady who appeared at Vera's funeral telling a tale of Vera's “escape” from Antwerp during the war, it was hard to piece the episode together with the known facts of Vera's life. Gradually, however, the weight of evidence had accumulated, so that I now felt sure it must have happened. Though certain details of the story remained hazy, the outline was clear. Sometime early in the war, probably before she joined SOE, Vera travelled in dangerous circumstances through Holland to Belgium in order to pass over money to a contact, to buy Fritz Rosenberg a new passport that would save his life.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I found more corroboration. During my research I had asked Zenna to think ag
ain whether Vera ever mentioned Antwerp in any context. When she was growing up, did Antwerp feature in any conversation at all?
“Oh, yes,” Zenna suddenly said as a memory was triggered. “When you put it like that, it did.” Vera had certainly been to Antwerp, she told me. She remembered this because Antwerp had come up in the course of another story Vera had told her as a child.
Food was another subject that provoked anecdotes about Vera. Vera, it was often said, would eat almost anything—even raw eggs. One day when Vera had taken Zenna out for a special meal, she told a story about all the different foods she had once eaten on a long and dangerous journey. “It began with how Vera had had nothing to eat but raw eggs for a long time. She was in a barn, hiding somewhere, and it was all a big adventure, is how I remember it. They lived on nothing but these raw eggs that they found in the barn. Then they had to get somewhere, and it was exciting and took a long time.
“And after this long, exciting journey the whole story ended with a delicious meal in Antwerp. They had friends in Antwerp, and they met up and finally sat down together for this meal.”
Zenna didn't recall Vera mentioning anything dangerous about her journey to Antwerp—“but it was a story told for a child.” What she did remember, however, was the excitement with which her aunt spoke about having to “hide out” and “get away.” Every place on the journey had a connection with a certain food, and the denouement was definitely in Antwerp. “If I could remember the other food we talked about, I might be able to remember where else she had been,” said Zenna.
So Vera had not been able to bury the story of her mission entirely; she had passed it on, safely disguised as an adventure, in a tale she told to her young niece, who had no reason to make anything of it. And then I realised that Vera had also told the story to somebody else.
The story of Vera's mission and Fritz's final escape to Canada must have been the same story that spilled out in bits and pieces, over dying embers of a fire, into the failing ears of Vera's elderly neighbour Alice Hyde.
As Alice had already told me, she used to keep Vera company in their old age in the evenings in Winchelsea, and often Vera would tell her a long “heartbreaking” story that came to a conclusion in Canada. Alice could remember almost no details of the story and believed that Vera talked to her about her past only because she was “too muddled and deaf to hear or remember anything.
But Alice did remember that the story always ended in Canada, and she remembered the ringing words with which Vera always concluded: “The family told me not to be afraid. They said I would always be remembered by them as a heroine.” And she remembered those words because Vera uttered them over and over again, after the story was over. The words must have been spoken to Vera by Fritz and Karen, who would always remember Vera as a heroine because she had helped save Fritz's life.
The revelation of Vera's secret mission rang true for another reason. It explained, for the first time, the cause of her excessive secrecy. It was quite natural that Vera should have been defensive about her past; after the war many Jewish refugees chose to pull down a curtain and never spoke of their losses or the horrors they had experienced. Yet Vera protected her early life as if she were protecting a wound. Nobody, but nobody—even in her old age—was allowed to even get close to it.
The fact that Vera had a relative who worked during the war as an Abwehr agent—albeit in circumstances of life and death—was incriminating enough to explain some of this protectiveness. But for history to reveal, years after the event, that Vera herself had passed a large sum of money to the Abwehr to secure a passport would have been a bombshell indeed for SOE. History would almost certainly have judged Vera kindly. Friends and admirers, of course, would have viewed her mission to save a relative from the death camps as an act of extreme bravery and self-sacrifice. But as Vera knew, those whom she had worked so closely with during the war would not have seen it in that way.
When Vera joined SOE, she clearly took a decision not to avow her mission to the Low Countries, and having kept it secret, she had to keep it so all her life. All the time, though, she must have worried that it might leak out.
After the war Vera could never drop her guard. She constantly built up cover in case anyone should look too closely at her past, thus fending off any possibility that the few who knew anything of the story might talk.
The convention accepted by Vera's generation—that one didn't ask questions about other people's lives—clearly helped her. Occasionally individuals like Irene Ward MP posed a threat to Vera by challenging that convention, but Dame Irene was seen off. M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of SOE, was given unique access in the 1960s to SOE's personal files and could well have chosen to reveal that an influential F Section desk officer was an enemy alien. In fact, before the book was published, Foot was taken quietly aside by Vera and persuaded not to mention her Romanian roots.
But how long would it be before the record of an interrogation like that of Willi Goetz, sitting in a Whitehall file, would surface?
Vera adopted many techniques to divert people's interest from her past, and as a result some who came into contact with her were confused and drew surprising conclusions. Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts, who had helped her in Antwerp, sensed that Vera was leading a double life and, given the backcloth of her own war experience, concluded that she was a Nazi double agent. Jean Overton Fuller also sensed Vera's double life. At the outbreak of the Cold War, Jean's conclusion was that Vera was a Soviet spy.
Both Gilberte and Jean were right that Vera had something to hide but wrong about what she was hiding.
Those words of admiration, spoken by Karen and Fritz, “to us you will always be a heroine,” were treasured by Vera, all the more because they were the only recognition of her heroism that she would ever receive. Once Vera's mother, Ralph, and Guy knew, but after their deaths nobody else could ever be allowed to know the secret. Even the most important beneficiaries of Vera's heroism—the next generation of the Rosenberg family—were not allowed to find out.
Knowing that questions from the children, and the grandchildren, were certain to come sooner or later, Vera erected the only defence she could: she simply shut herself off from her Rosenberg family roots. For decades after the war she had no contact at all with Fritz or Karen, fearing that this would bring the story to life. When contact was made in the 1990s, it was limited to those dry little cards I had found and cold Christmas greetings.
I found no evidence either that Vera had ever sought to make contact with Fritz's surviving brother, George, who lived simply as a labourer in Romania until his death in 1988. Vera certainly never mentioned the second twin, Hans. From a Holocaust research group in Vienna I received confirmation that Hans was a victim of Nazi euthanasia, as Fritz had revealed in his papers. According to the registration books of the mental hospital, Am Steinhof, near Vienna, where he had been a patient, “Hans Israel Rosenberg [the name Israel was given by the Nazis] was deported from Steinhof to Hartheim Castle, in Alkoven, Austria, on 17 August 1940 where he was murdered.” Hartheim Castle was a “specialised euthanasia killing institution, where more than 18,200 handicapped and mentally ill patients were killed by gas.”
Similarly, Vera cut herself off entirely from the German branch of the Rosenberg family—even from her uncle Siegfried. Uncle Siegfried knew better than anyone the story of Fritz's rescue. “During this time I was supported by my uncle Siegfried and my English cousin Vera Atkins,” Fritz had written of his period in hiding. After the war Siegfried was the only one of Vera's father's brothers still alive. He returned to Cologne and struggled to get back on his feet. Vera, however, had almost no contact with Siegfried, and when he died in Cologne in 1964, she was too busy to attend the funeral.
Vera's relatives in Stuttgart were also cut off entirely by her after the war. Her cousin Aenne Pahl, to whom both Vera and her mother had once been particularly close, had suffered appalling trauma at the hands of the Nazis during her imprisonment in Wedding jail
. Yet as far as the family knows today, Vera made no attempt to contact Aenne or her daughter at any time after the war.
In the 1960s Aenne s sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Iris, turned up at Rutland Gate on her first trip to England, eager to meet her aunt Vera, who—although she never visited—had always been spoken of with awe in Iris's family. Young, pretty, and highly intelligent, Iris had been told nothing of her own background—“only tales.” Away from home for the first time, she looked forward to meeting her English aunt, hoping she would tell her more about her Rosenberg roots. Vera, though, was deeply fearful of the questions this young girl might ask and presented her very coldest face, which deterred Iris from asking any questions at all. Iris, now a child psychologist, recalled the meeting in chilling terms. “Vera certainly had an aura, and I was quite impressed. But she was also very distant, and I found her very cold. I remember thinking all the time I was there, I mustn't let my teacup fall off this saucer. I never saw her again. In later years when I came to London, I always called but she was always busy or not available. For me Vera was a completely blank screen.”
27.
Secrets That Don't Die
One day in the early 1960s another pretty young woman arrived for tea at 34 Rutland Gate. This woman was not a member of Vera's family, but Vera was nevertheless fearful once again about the questions her visitor might ask.
Now in her early twenties, Tania Szabo had been living with her grandparents in Australia since the age of eight, when the family emigrated, in part to avoid the publicity surrounding Violette. Vera had never been in contact with Tania during this time.
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