by Clay Lane

Frank Foley

A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.

1938-1939

King George VI 1936-1952

Introduction

This post is number 2 in the series Holocaust Resistance

By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.

by Clay Lane

IN 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine saw Britain take control of parts of former Ottoman Syria, and commit herself to establishing a Jewish state there.* But rising Muslim jealousy culminating in the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 panicked the Foreign Office into capping Jewish immigration to the Holy Land and restricting the right to buy property. Opposition at home was vocal, but even as Nazi Germany entered its most sinister phase German Jews found it harder to leave, and many who did were turned back or ushered into Cyprus by the Royal Navy.

All this made the position of quiet, bespectacled clerk Frank Foley, a passport control officer at the British Embassy in Berlin, especially significant; but there was more to Frank than met the eye. In fact, he was head of MI6’s Berlin station, and a former soldier and intelligence officer in the Great War, who was now recruiting agents and monitoring Germany’s rapidly developing political and military scene for his superiors in London.

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See British Mandatory Palestine. The Ottoman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), had been a vast and repressive Islamic empire reaching in its heyday from the Middle East across to North Africa and up to Serbia. The Sultan backed the German Empire in the Great War of 1914-1918; following Germany’s defeat, Turkish Nationalists under Kemal Ataturk overthrew the Sultan and established the Republic of Turkey on October 29th, 1923.

A colleague in the Intelligence Corps was John Buchan, novelist and later Governor of Canada, and a committed supporter of the Zionist cause. See John Buchan.

Précis

Frank Foley was a passport control officer at the British Embassy in Berlin in the late 1930s, a time when Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies were reaching their height. In a cruel twist, Arab hostility to Jewish immigration to the Holy Land had induced the British Government to restrict numbers, making Foley’s responsibility for awarding visas all the more important.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

Why did the British government restrict Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine in the 1930s?

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

The Ottoman Empire backed Germany in the Great War. Germany lost the war. Britain took over part of Ottoman Syria in 1923.

Clay Lane The Copybook