Vera Atkins

Vera May Atkins CBE
Squadron Officer Vera Atkins, WAAF, in 1946
Born	(1908-06-16)16 June 1908 Galați, Romania
Died	24 June 2000(2000-06-24) (aged 92) Hastings, Sussex, England, UK
Occupation	SOE F Section intelligence officer

Vera Atkins, CBE (née Rosenberg; 16 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a British intelligence officer who worked in the French Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.

Atkins was born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Galați, Romania, to Max Rosenberg (d. 1932), a German-Jewish father, and his British-Jewish wife, Zeffro Hilda, known as Hilda, (d. 1947). She had four brothers.

She briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern languages and a finishing school at Lausanne, where she indulged her passion for skiing, before training at a secretarial college in London. Atkins' father, a wealthy businessman on the Danube Delta, went bankrupt in 1932 and died a year later. Atkins remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in Europe and the growing extremism and antisemitism in Romania.

During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where she lived on the large estate bought by her father at Crasna (now in Ukraine), Atkins enjoyed the cosmopolitan society of Bucharest where she became close to the anti-Nazi German ambassador, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (executed after July 1944 plot). Later she became involved with a young British pilot, Dick Ketton-Cremer, whom she had met in Egypt, and to whom she may have been briefly engaged. He was killed in action in the Battle of Crete on 23 May 1941. She was never to marry, and lived in a flat with her mother while working for SOE and until 1947 when Hilda died.