Sarah Helm

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

  Here in this file I now found evidence that the family had been in direct contact during these terrifying months with their old friend—the highest German contact they could have—Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, whom they had known as Germany's ambassador in Bucharest in the early 1930s and who had moved on to be ambassador in Moscow. How they reached Schulenburg, now back in Berlin, after the German assault on the Soviet Union, was not clear. But he was swift to intervene. He had not forgotten his former friends and hosts from Vallea Uzului and wrote in person to the German embassy in Budapest with the all-important instruction: “Die Rosenbergs sind als Deutsche zu betrachten” (The Rosenbergs are to be regarded as Germans). However, I had not yet found what I was really hunting for: evidence that Vera had somehow also played a role.

  I asked Karina and her brother, Peter, if they had ever heard about Vera's intervention to help their father. They had heard nothing definite, but Karina, for one, had always wondered if Vera had helped. Perhaps, if she had, it would explain why she was always spoken of in such hallowed terms.

  Had she ever been here to visit? I asked. They said she hadn't, which seemed strange given that Vera did visit friends and other relatives in Canada from time to time. But the family here had been shown all the photographs of Vera, and they had read every book that mentioned her name.

  “So you never met Vera?” I asked Karina.

  Yes, she had, she replied. She had visited London once as a teenager during a tour of Europe, and Vera had invited her to her flat at Rutland Gate. Karina found Vera distant but impressive. “She told me very little. But she had such a presence. And, you know, she really surprised me one day with something she said. We were having dinner—just the two of us—and afterwards she sat down next to me and said: ‘Karina, did your mother ever tell you what a brave woman she was during the war?' ” Karina had been taken aback and said no, she hadn't. Vera then said something very general about how brave Karen had been, before making clear that she wanted to say nothing further.

  When Karina got home to Canada, however, she asked her mother about the story and learned a little more. She learned that her father had been in terrible danger when the Hungarians took over, because he was a Jew. Karen had therefore gone to the husband of a German friend of hers, a lawyer in Berlin named Hans Fillie, and asked him to help secure a new passport for Fritz. Fillie had got the passport, and the couple had managed to escape to Istanbul. In Istanbul they were tracked down by German secret agents, and Karen was blackmailed into agreeing to provide information to the Germans. Karina explained: “She said these German ‘bloodhounds' had come to her and talked about the accidents that could happen to her family back in Germany and to her baby boy. She went to the British and told them everything about it, and the British got my parents and Peter out of Istanbul to Palestine. On the way my mother was debriefed by the British in Cairo.”

  The story was intriguing. But what interested me most was why Vera had so very deliberately raised this episode with eighteen-year-old Karina all these years later. It seemed most unlike her to have risked opening up a chapter from the past that could so easily have been left closed. Karina had also clearly been left a little uneasy by Vera's question. And to me, she suddenly expressed the view more confidently than before that Vera had indeed had some role in helping Fritz. Perhaps it was something her father had said to her. Or perhaps there was some mention of it in the files. I returned to check.

  As I continued to read through Fritz's papers, I looked out carefully for any trace of this story. At first it seemed that Schulenburg's intervention in 1941 might have eased Fritz's plight, as records showed he was released from prison in October 1941. But within weeks Uncle Siegfried had been arrested at the Romanian-Hungarian border and, after talking his way out of trouble, went into hiding in Romania. Arthur, Fritz's father, whose health was failing badly, was by now back in Bucharest, hiding in a Catholic seminary.

  Fritz and Karen remained in hiding in Budapest “to avoid deportation to an extermination camp.” Fritz wrote: “My wife and I had to be extremely careful not to be arrested in the streets, and we had to find new sleeping quarters on every second day. I need not mention the cost.”

  Then he added, almost as an aside: “During this time I was supported by my uncle Siegfried and my English cousin Vera Atkins.” I hunted through the papers to find any more mention of “my English cousin Vera Atkins.” How had she helped him? She was thousands of miles away in London, on the other side of Nazi-occupied Europe.

  In the early hours of the morning I was still opening files. Fritz had rehearsed the story of his flight from Romania many times in statements for various legal actions. Each statement contained slightly different details and I hoped still to find something more about Vera's “support.” I did not. Instead I stumbled on the answer to a quite different question.

  Opening yet another brown folder—this one contained statements in support of Fritz's Swiss claims—I found a newspaper cutting clipped to a single piece of paper.

  It was from the New York Times of 1999 and was about new evidence that the United States government had ignored warnings of euthanasia in mental asylums in Germany and Austria at the start of the war. “In the fall of 1940 death notices started appearing in suspicious numbers and the families who placed them used strikingly similar phrases about the fates of their loved ones who were in mental asylums,” said the piece. “The notices would all say something like: ‘we received the unbelievable news of the sudden death of… or we heard the incredible story of the unexpected death of…' ” The accumulation of thousands of these notices was noticed by U.S. officials in Germany but ignored.

  The paper attached to the cutting was an affidavit, which had been translated:

  “I the undersigned Fritz Rosenberg declare that my brother George and myself are the only surviving children and heirs of my deceased parents Arthur and Nina Rosenberg. My second brother Hans (the second of three children) having been liquidated in 1941 whilst a patient in the Sanatorium am Steinhof near Vienna, Austria.”

  I looked further in the file for any more information about Hans's death. When did the family learn of it? As Fritz himself faced the possibility of deportation to a concentration camp, did he have any idea about what had become of Hans? Could Vera conceivably have heard of it? But Fritz made no further mention of his brother's death. Only because Swiss lawyers wanted proof of who the rightful claimants in the family might be, should any compensation be agreed, was Fritz forced to refer in writing to the gassing of Hans, or as he put it, to his brother's “having been liquidated.”

  By now I had been reading so long that a watery pink dawn was beginning to break across the frozen lake. I copied the document word for word for fear that this pathetic little piece of paper might somehow get lost; it was the only evidence of what had happened to the good-looking boy (if it was not his identical twin) sitting on a horse, next to Vera in the photo of the Whitsun picnic in Vallea Uzului in 1932. Hans, the slightly taller one, was the one who, Annie Samuelli first told me, had had a nervous breakdown. He was also the boy with the broad smile, the boy Uncle Siegfried put his arm around. Hans Rosenberg was gassed by Hitler, and his family had never spoken about him again.

  The next morning I took up Fritz's story. On November 25, 1941, Fritz and Karen's position became even more perilous when a law was passed under which German Jews outside their country would lose their German nationality forthwith without regard to their religion. From now on Fritz's German passport was useless except as proof that he was stateless and a Jew.

  He wrote: “Due to the intervention of a friend in Berlin, new German passports were issued in Budapest with the condition that we leave at once for Istanbul.” This “intervention” appeared to be a reference to the episode described to me by Karina the previous day. She said that one of her mother's oldest friends, Liselotte, had been married to a German lawyer, Hans Fillie, who had offered to help Fritz get a new passport. On September 3, 1942, Fr
itz miraculously received his new passport.

  And here, in another box, were Fritz's old and new passports. On the front of each were the words Deutsche Reich Reisepass. The first passport, Reisepass no. 418, was issued on April 23, 1939, and on May 23, 1939, it had had a large redy stamped on it. The bearer was stated to be Fritz Rosenberg, a businessman, born in Galatz on November 16, 1911. A stamp inside said Fritz went to Budapest in May 1941 with permission to stay until May 22, 1942.

  The second passport was issued in Budapest and dated September 2, 1942. In this one, the bearer, Fritz Rosenberg, was born in Munich. The stamps showed that in September 1942 he left Budapest and travelled through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and over the Turkish border and on to his destination, Istanbul.

  That hair-raising journey from Budapest to Istanbul, through German-occupied Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, had left an impression on Peter Rosenberg, though at the time he was only four years of age. Peter told me that even today he remembered his parents' fear each time they stopped at a station. And later in life his parents talked of how Fritz had been hauled up by a German train patrol and accused of being a Jew and nearly ejected from the train there and then. “Only when they made him drop his pants did they let him go,” said Karina. “Because my father was baptised a Catholic, he was never circumcised. Otherwise none of us would be here today.”

  Fritz claimed that when he reached Istanbul in November 1942, he “worked for the intelligence section of the British embassy,” though he did not say in what capacity.

  He also wrote that his persecution by the Germans did not stop when he left Budapest. On arriving in Istanbul he was tracked down by German agents and harassed. He was also told that Karen's friend Hans Fillie had been sent to the Eastern Front as a punishment for helping the family escape. Fritz and Karen were then advised by the British embassy to leave for the safety of Palestine, which they did on June 6, 1943, finally emigrating to Canada in 1948.

  Before packing the files back in the boxes, I spent some time reading letters sent to Fritz by relatives and friends in the immediate postwar years. These were always in a guarded code, as the writers did not always know who knew what about what had happened, or what others in the family might have gone through in the war. In the case of senders still in Romania, the letters showed the full force of the postwar Communist rule was taking effect. A relative, Daisy Mendl, writing to Fritz from London in 1951, had received a letter from another relative, Nora, in Bucharest, which had come via Italy and in which Nora asked people to write to her on postcards and not mention names or addresses. “It is all terribly sinister and distressing,” said Daisy.

  Fritz had evidently spent time in England, utterly destitute, before emigrating to Canada. There were packets of kind letters here from friends and family in England offering him blankets, cutlery, children's clothes, and advice. Writing to Fritz at this time, Vera's brother Ralph asked: “Have you thought of changing your name, old boy? I only mention it as it does complete the assimilation and will help your children no end.” But there were no kind letters from Vera, of if there had been they had disappeared. In fact there was no further mention of Vera in any of Fritz's papers until the early 1990s, when, sparked by an approach from Fritz, a correspondence started between the elderly cousins, but even now Vera's letters to Fritz were only scraps—dry missives with no personal touch at all.

  One of the newsiest letters was among the last, written in 1997: “I have had a strenuous year selling Northden [Vera's first Winchelsea house], landing in hospital twice, making two short visits to France, receiving a CBE [Commander of the Order of the British Empire] investiture at Buckingham Palace and now Christmas!”

  I packed some of the documents I had not had time to read properly into a suitcase to bring back to England. Among the items I had not read were pocket diaries kept by Karen between 1932 and 1951. The writing was in old German Sütterlin script, which could hardly be read, even by her daughter. When I opened the years 1940–43 to see if I could make anything out, several four-leafed clovers pressed inside fell out.

  I also brought back with me an old wallet belonging to Karen stuffed with tickets and cards dating back to the war, as well as lists with words I could just make out, like Schokolade and Kartoffeln. Curiously, it appeared that Karen had kept dozens of very old shopping lists.

  On my return I asked the SOE adviser whether there was any trace of Karen or Fritz Rosenberg's contacts with British intelligence, as mentioned in Fritz's files. There was none, I was told, but the name Karen Rosenberg had come up in a different context. A German intelligence officer who was interrogated by the British in 1944 had named Karen Rosenberg as one of his contacts. The German was named Willi Goetz (no relation to Dr. Goetz of Avenue Foch) and said Karen had worked for him in Budapest and Istanbul.

  From the summary given to me on the phone, it seemed that Willi Goetz was telling the same story that I had read about in Fritz's files, but from a very different angle and with one or two significant differences.

  A few days later a document came through my letterbox that stated: “SIME (Security Intelligence Middle East) Report (no. 1, 21 November 1944). Interrogation of Dr. Willy [sic] Goetz, an agent/employee of Ab-wehr Department I/T or IH/T (Espionage against foreign countries— Military Technical Intelligence).”

  The three pages of typescript provided a snapshot of the lives of German spies operating in and around Nazi-occupied Europe during the war. Willi Goetz was a German radio operator, based in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Middle East. At some point in 1944 he came over to the British side for a “chat” and was subsequently arrested, interned, and interrogated.

  He told a story to his interrogators of how he and his Abwehr colleagues moved between capitals—Istanbul, Budapest, Sofia, and Berlin— under false names and using false cover companies, meeting informants in hotel lobbies, and sending scraps of secret information about enemy movements on postcards in letter codes.

  Asked who he had worked for, Goetz named several senior Abwehr officers, including a certain Dr. Hans Fillie. Fillie, he said, was a barrister from Berlin who worked for the Abwehr Department I/T.

  Dr. Hans Fillie travelled widely, recruiting agents and passing on information. He was able to move about in the guise of a businessman, and he had a cover company, Afropan, based in Antwerp and Rotterdam. His partner in this company was a Dutchman named Hans Schmidt, who had a German passport. Schmidt also travelled widely in Holland, Switzerland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.

  Dr. Fillie visited Budapest almost every six weeks, and it was on one such occasion that he recruited Goetz to provide military intelligence in Turkey. He was to transmit his intelligence through another Abwehr agent, code-named Klatt, who was based in Vienna.

  Klatt, actually a Jewish businessman named Richard Kauders, I later learned, was one of Germany's most notorious spymasters, who ran a huge espionage network for the Abwehr stretching across Europe to the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Oddly, his network was code-named “Vera” and was based in Vienna, Sofia, and Budapest. After the war British counterintelligence was baffled by Klatt because nobody seemed sure if he had been a German double agent or had really been working for the Russians. In any event, his transmissions had troubled the best brains in Britain throughout the war. Intercepted and cracked by the British, his messages were often passed on to Moscow by Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

  Goetz was also questioned about his informants. Among a list of twenty-one such people in his network he named Karen Rosenberg. “Karen Rosenberg is a German Aryan woman who was married to a German Jew,” he told his interrogator.

  He had learned about Frau Rosenberg early in 1942 and was told she was anxious to leave Hungary as her husband was Jewish. Goetz learned that Karen Rosenberg had already spoken with Fillie, whose wife Liselotte, he was told, happened to be a close friend of hers. Fillie had said he could provide new passports for her and her husband as long as they left for Turkey and gathered information for the Abwehr from Ista
nbul.

  Goetz was instructed to obtain the passports, which he did. Before the couple left Budapest, Goetz met Karen Rosenberg. He informed her that in Istanbul she would be contacted by somebody who would collect any information she had obtained and send it back to Hungary.

  Goetz then explained that he arranged with “a man called Klatt” that Klatt would transmit Frau Rosenberg's material on to Fillie in Berlin.

  So Karen Rosenberg had not simply been exposed to a few smalltime German blackmailers as she sought to secure her husband's escape; she had been drawn into close contact with one of the most infamous intelligence networks run by the Abwehr in Europe.

  The interrogation report then said that once Goetz had handed over the new passports to the Rosenbergs, they made their way to Turkey. Here Goetz himself made contact with Karen Rosenberg in the Hotel Novotny in Istanbul, where they were staying, to receive her information.

  The Abwehr was swiftly disappointed by Karen Rosenberg's failure to provide anything useful. It knew of her contacts with the British consulate in Istanbul. Specifically, the Abwehr knew of her contacts with two people at the consulate, one of whom was a Mr. Atkins. Willi Goetz told his interrogator: “In Turkey, Frau Rosenberg was in touch with Mr. Atkins and Mr ———.” The second name had been removed either deliberately or accidentally from the paper, but “Mr. Atkins” was clearly a reference to Vera's brother Ralph.

  Details of Ralph's war service had proven impossible to obtain and seemed to have been deliberately kept secret. Ralph Atkins never breathed a word of his war years to his son, Ronald. I had established, however, that Ralph remained in Istanbul at the outbreak of war with his oil company and that, like almost every other British expatriate in Istanbul during the war, he had become informally involved with intelligence work for the British consulate. Nothing more was said by Goetz about those contacts with “Mr. Atkins,” whose role in the Karen Rosenberg affair was left extremely unclear. But Ralph Atkins had evidently been a good contact for the newly arrived Rosenbergs in Istanbul. Furthermore, Ralph almost certainly had means of communication with London throughout this period and hence with Vera.