Wilfrid Israel
Wilfrid Israel used his Berlin department store as cover for smuggling thousands of Jewish children to safety in Britain.
1933-1943
King George VI 1936-1952
Wilfrid Israel used his Berlin department store as cover for smuggling thousands of Jewish children to safety in Britain.
1933-1943
King George VI 1936-1952
This post is number 3 in the series Holocaust Resistance
Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943) was a wealthy German retailer, who used his business as a cover to bring thousands of Jewish children to Britain in the run-up to the Second World War, saving them from ‘deportation, extermination and annihilation’ - words thought too melodramatic at the time, but only too accurate.
EVEN before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Wilfrid Israel was helping Jews escape to Britain, America and the British Mandate for Palestine.*
As manager of a flagship Berlin department store, Wilfrid had a peculiar kind of influence. After the SS arrested some of his employees during Kristallnacht on 9th November, 1938, Wilfrid secured their release by offering the commander at the Sechsenhausen camp free shopping over Christmas.
Wilfrid’s report on the camps, passed covertly to Herbert Samuel in London, led directly to the Kindertransport, which smuggled some ten thousand Jewish children to Britain. In 1939 he followed them, advising British Intelligence and the Foreign Office on refugees and resistance movements, and widening his operations to include Spain and Portugal.
On a flight home from Lisbon on June 1st, 1943, his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.** But this secretive man, whose struggle had been ‘to reach out and touch the world’, had already saved it, ten thousand times over.*
Next in series: Leslie Howard
The State of Israel was not founded until 1948. The Mandate was created by the League of Nations in 1922 from what had been Ottoman Syria, with the express purpose of providing a homeland for Jewish people at some stage. See British Mandatory Palestine.
** On the same plane was actor Leslie Howard, who had been doing war-work in Spain and Portugal. See Leslie Howard.
See also Wilfrid Israel Museum (Kibbutz Hazorea, Israel); and The Kindertransport Association.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was Kindertransport designed to do?
To evacuate Jewish children from Nazi Germany.
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.
Wilfrid presented a report to the British Government. It described the situation of German Jews. It led to the Kindertransport programme.