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Vera Atkins, CBE (née Rosenberg; 16 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the French Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during World War II. ==Early life== Atkins was born Vera-May 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).〔(Revealed: the secret female army that spied for Britain ) ''The Independent'', 11 May 2003〕 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 1944 July 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. While in Romania, Atkins came to know several diplomats who were members of British Intelligence, some of whom were later to support her application for British nationality, and to whom in view of her and her family's strong pro-British views, she may have provided information as a "stringer". She also worked as a translator and representative for an oil company. The surname "Atkins" was her South African-born mother's maiden name, itself an Anglicised version of the original "Etkins", which she adopted as her own. She was a cousin of Rudolf Vrba. In her 2005 biography, Sarah Helm has written that in the spring of 1940, before joining SOE, Atkins travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer for a passport for her cousin, Felix, to escape from Romania. Helm says that Atkins was stranded in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded on 10 May 1940, and, after going into hiding, she was able to return to England late in 1940 with the assistance of a Belgian resistance network. Atkins volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden in Chelsea in the period prior to working for SOE. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vera Atkins」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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