Part of a passport validated on August 24th, 1934, issued in Warsaw for a one-way trip to British Mandate Palestine. It was shortly after this that a nervous Foreign Office took fright at festering Arab discontent in the former Ottoman Empire, and began to restrict immigration to what is now Israel. Yet free movement was precisely the purpose for which an altogether more visionary generation of British statesmen had set the region aside a decade earlier, as European hostility to Jewish people took a yet darker turn.
Part 1 of 2
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.
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. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
Francis Edward Foley CMG (1884-1958). Frank was born in Highbridge, Somerset, a railwayman’s son. A scholarship allowed Frank to attend Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic public school, and his first inclination was to enter the clergy. He dropped out of seminary, however, and after graduating from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1917 he enlisted in the British Army at the height of the Great War, and following a move into the Intelligence Corps a remarkable career in espionage beckoned. He died in 1958 in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, aged 73, and was survived by his widow Katharine.
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.
Précis
Foley, despite working the Embassy and for MI6, went against Foreign Office policy and awarded visas to German Jews who did not legally qualify, and to provide camp internees with forged papers, allowing some ten thousand to escape to Britain and her Empire. After the war, he returned to Berlin once more to help bring war criminals to justice. (59 / 60 words)
