TAKING advantage of his cover in passport control, Foley defied Foreign Office policy and issued some ten thousand visas to German Jews who did not meet the legal criteria, allowing them to escape to Mandatory Palestine, Britain and other parts of the Empire. Miriam Posner, sixteen at the time, remembered him well: “He just paced up and down a little and then asked for my passport and put the visa stamp on it.” Foley called into internment camps and took inmates, clutching forged papers, home to his wife Katharine before smuggling them away. Several such house guests were with them during the Kristallnacht pogrom on the night of November 9th, 1938.*
When war was declared and British subjects were evacuated in 1939,* Foley left behind in Berlin a thick wad of ready-stamped visas, with instructions for their use. After Germany’s defeat in 1945 he returned briefly to help root out war criminals before retiring home to England in 1949, where he died nine years later.
Another Berlin resident who was helping Jews escape to Mandatory Palestine was London-born department store owner Wilfrid Israel. Israel, Foley and another secret service agent named Hubert Pollack worked together, with Israel bankrolling Foley’s activities. “The number of Jews saved from Germany” said Pollack “would have been tens of thousands less if an officious bureaucrat had sat in Foley's place.”
See The Outbreak of the Second World War. Foley left after the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany on August 22nd, 1939, which left Poland exposed and meant that war was inevitable.