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.
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.