Summary of William Stevenson's Spymistress

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Vera Maria Rosenberg was a British woman who was born in Romania. She was a friend of the Rothschild family, and she was awarded the highest rank in the Legion of Honor by the French government. She died in 2006, and her life was opened up to the public.

#2 Vera’s mother, Hilda, was a daughter of Heinrich Etkins, who had fled from the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms and settled in South Africa in 1874. She registered herself as Hilda Atkins in 1902 at a London synagogue to become the wife of Max Rosenberg.

#3 Max was a Jewish Zionist who traveled with the peasant workers he employed. He had a mansion and lots of land in what was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He paved roads to isolated villages and built himself a popular rural base. His wife had the style of an English gentlewoman.

#4 In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard leader Octavian Goga echoed Hitler’s claim that the 1919 peace talks were a Jewish conspiracy to rearrange the map of Europe. Vera saw that what plagued Jews today would hurt all future dissenters of any faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jul 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822543454

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Vera Maria Rosenberg was a British woman who was born in Romania. She was a friend of the Rothschild family, and she was awarded the highest rank in the Legion of Honor by the French government. She died in 2006, and her life was opened up to the public.

#2

Vera’s mother, Hilda, was a daughter of Heinrich Etkins, who had fled from the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms and settled in South Africa in 1874. She registered herself as Hilda Atkins in 1902 at a London synagogue to become the wife of Max Rosenberg.

#3

Max was a Jewish Zionist who traveled with the peasant workers he employed. He had a mansion and lots of land in what was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He paved roads to isolated villages and built himself a popular rural base. His wife had the style of an English gentlewoman.

#4

In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard leader Octavian Goga echoed Hitler’s claim that the 1919 peace talks were a Jewish conspiracy to rearrange the map of Europe. Vera saw that what plagued Jews today would hurt all future dissenters of any faith.

#5

Stephenson, the man who would help Vera find her family, was a British agent within the Committee of Imperial Defence. He had learned about Vera through Sir Vernon Kell, who had fished for traitors in the national census.

#6

The Bucharest station was a window into Russia, and the ambassador was obsessed with the warning sounded by his hero, Otto von Bismarck: Avoid war with Russia at all costs. He took Vera to little restaurants, away from tiresome chatter-boxes.

#7

Schulenburg took Vera on long trips through narrow winding lanes while she continued to ask him about Nazi influence. He blamed rabble-rousers appealing to the despair of Germany’s unemployed soldiers.

#8

The next time she was in the embassy car, she told Schulenburg that she used to think adults were mostly too old to govern wisely. She said that the devilish energies of grown men should be poured into completely exhausting activities that left them with no time to fight wars.

#9

Ambassador Schulenburg told Vera that he was unhappy because he felt Berlin was not getting the peace it needed from Moscow. He explained that German industrialists and bankers were scared of the Red working classes and funded Hitler's mobs to attack Willi Münzenberg, the Red Millionaire of Berlin.

#10

The ambassador, Schulenburg, told Vera that many Germans were loyal to Britain’s enemies in the last war. He wanted her to visit Berlin and understand why many were loyal Germans.

#11

In 1933, Vera moved to London. She was advised to do so by Billy Stephenson, who was worried about the accelerating preparations for war. In a New Statesman article from 1924, the novelist D. H. Lawrence had written from Germany: Influences come invisibly out of Germany's flow away from civilized Christian Europe, back to the savage polarity of Tartary.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Max Rosenberg had warned Vera that her Jewish roots could be used against her, so she should become an English churchgoer and a Bright Young Thing. In London, Romanian bankers expressed surprise at the