Frank Foley

Major Francis Edward Foley, known to his colleagues at MI6 as Frank Foley, was the British Secret Intelligence Service station chief in Berlin from 1923 to August 1939. His public role was passport control officer at the British Embassy. The role was the standard MI6 cover at every British embassy of the period, an open secret in the diplomatic community. Foley used the cover, and the discretionary authority that came with it, to issue British visas to Jews trying to leave Germany after 1933, often outside the rules he was supposed to enforce, often by signing documents he should not have signed, and at considerable personal risk.

The British rules in the 1930s required a German Jewish applicant for a Palestine visa to demonstrate either a thousand pounds in savings or a confirmed offer of employment in Palestine, or, for a British visa, to prove some form of independent means or a confirmed sponsor. The rules excluded the great majority of German Jews after 1933. Most had had their assets stripped under the Reich’s emigration tax, the Reichsfluchtsteuer, and the various subsequent expropriations, and could not produce the certificates of finance the British rules required. Foley issued the visas anyway. He drafted the financial guarantees in his own hand. He accepted assurances from rabbis and community leaders that the applicants would be supported on arrival. He signed Palestine entry certificates beyond his quota and trusted that London would not check too closely. He visited Jewish applicants who had been arrested at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald and presented forged or improvised paperwork to secure their release on the grounds that they had British visas and were leaving the country. Some of those releases happened. The men walked out of Sachsenhausen with Foley’s papers and reached England.

The estimate of how many Jews Foley directly saved is between ten thousand and as high as the number who could plausibly have used a Foley-issued document to escape, a figure that some historians have put at over thirty thousand. The lower figure is the firmest. The higher figure is the working consensus of the postwar testimony of the rescued. Foley personally did not keep records of his irregular visa work, on the principle that records would have given the Gestapo and his own service something to investigate.

Foley spoke fluent German and worked in the city without diplomatic immunity for sixteen years. The Gestapo had a thick file on him. He met regularly with Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr, who was running his own anti-Hitler resistance and who tipped Foley off on more than one occasion when an arrest was about to be made. The two men exchanged information on the German order of battle in the late 1930s. Foley reported back to London on what he was hearing. The reports went into the British file on Hitler’s intentions in 1938 and 1939 and were among the more accurate intelligence of the period, although the British government did not always act on them.

Foley left Berlin on the day before the war started, on 24 August 1939. He spent the war working for MI6 in Norway, the Netherlands and on counter-espionage operations against the German services. After the war he played a small role in interrogations of senior German officers and in the screening of refugees. He retired to Stourbridge in the West Midlands and died there in May 1958 at the age of seventy three.

The recognition came after his death. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1999, after a campaign by the British Jewish journalist Michael Smith, whose biography Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews, published in 1999, brought the case to public attention. The British state was slower. A statue of Foley was unveiled at his home town of Highbridge in Somerset in 2010. A bust at the British Embassy in Berlin was unveiled in 2005. The intelligence services have acknowledged him as one of theirs in declassified materials over the past two decades. The full file on his Berlin operations remains, in part, classified. The British honours system has not awarded him a posthumous knighthood despite repeated petitions, on the standard rule that posthumous honours are not given. The state Israel has named a forest after him. The state Britain has not.

Foley’s case is the case that most directly contradicts the standard account of British official indifference to the fate of European Jewry in the late 1930s. He was a British official. He worked from a British government building. He used British government paper to issue the visas. The work was done with the discretionary authority his position gave him and without any specific authorisation from London, but it was British work. The case is, alongside the Kindertransport, the part of the British record that does the country credit.

See also

Sources

  • Michael Smith, Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews, Hodder and Stoughton, 1999
  • Michael Smith, Six: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Dialogue, 2010
  • Yad Vashem, file on Francis Edward Foley, Righteous Among the Nations, 1999
  • The National Archives, Kew, FO 371 series on the British Embassy Berlin, 1933, 1939
  • Werner Rosenstock, Exodus 1933, 1939: A Survey of Jewish Emigration from Germany, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1956
  • Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew, Princeton University Press, 2012, on the wider context of Jewish emigration