Atkins 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 remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Great Britain in , a move made in response to the threatening political situation in mainland Europe.
During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where Atkins 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 the July plot. He was killed in action in the Battle of Crete on 23 May 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".
The surname "Atkins" was her mother's maiden name and itself an Anglicised version of the original "Etkins", which she adopted as her own. She was a cousin of Rudolf Vrba. He sent her on fact-finding missions across Europe to supply Winston Churchill then in the 'political wilderness' with intelligence on the rising threat of Nazi Germany.
The Polish Cipher Bureau broke Germany's Enigma ciphers from on, using Enigma-machine reconstructions which they also gave to their British and French allies, following a July Warsaw conference at which they gave their French and British cryptologist opposite numbers information on the Poles' decrypting techniques and the special-purpose equipment they had invented.
Atkins may have attempted to find the cryptologists and get them out of Poland, but as Rejewski describes see " Marian Rejewski " , they were in fact evacuated to Romania by the Polish Cipher Bureau , and from Romania to France thanks to Gustave Bertrand of French intelligence; Rejewski makes no mention of ever having met or heard of Vera Atkins. In the spring of , before joining SOE, Atkins travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer, Hans Fillie , for a passport for her cousin, Fritz, to escape from Romania.
