I first heard the name Frank Foley in 1995. I was working on a book about Britain’s spies and interviewed two former MI6 officers who looked after the Service’s archives. At the end of our conversation, I asked them if there was anything they wanted to tell me, to bring out into the open.

There was. Two of their former officers deserved to be better known than they were – an unusual suggestion from an organisation as secretive as MI6. One was Sidney Cotton, who appears in the next chapter, the other was Frank Foley, the Service’s bureau chief in ’30s Berlin, who was still held up to new recruits as a brilliant agent-runner but whose main claim to fame was that he had saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

‘One of the most interesting things about Foley was that normally to be a good case officer you need to be a bit of a shit,’ one of the former MI6 officers said; agent-runners might sometimes have to drop an agent, or put him in a position where he was forced to do something he didn’t want to do, or worse. ‘But Foley managed to be a brilliant case officer and a near saint. Schindler pales into insignificance alongside his work on getting Jews out of Germany. He was a very able man, who never got the recognition he deserved.’

It seemed unlikely that someone might have saved tens of thousands of Jews and no one knew anything about him, but I set out to find out more about Foley and eventually wrote his biography, collecting first-hand testimony by a number of living witnesses which persuaded Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial organisation, to name him as Righteous Among the Nations.

It was well deserved. The cases here would have been relatively routine for Foley. He also went into concentration camps to get Jews out and in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, when all Jewish men were being taken to concentration camps, he hid four or five in his flat every night, providing them with the documentation they needed to escape, in most cases visas, in some false passports.

This remarkable testimony comes from one of Foley’s own agents. Hubert Pollack not only worked for MI6 but also with Mossad le Aliyah Beth, the Zionist organisation which smuggled Jews into Palestine.

MY WORK WAS for the most part secret and brought me into contact with political agents of different sorts. This limits my freedom of writing. I will therefore limit myself to giving a few sketches.

Captain Frank Foley, formerly British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, deserved the gratitude of tens of thousands of Jews whom he saved from Germany. He was one of the few Englishmen in Germany who was never taken in by Nazi trickery, and thus one of the few British officials in Berlin whose mission was a success.

Not all, but the more important British embassies have a section which has the nondescript title of British Passport Control Office. The role of this department is to oversee the granting of visas of entry into British territory for those without British passports. The British Passport Control Officer (PCO) completely controls who does and does not receive a visa, not the Consulate. An unhappy Consul-General cannot appeal the PCO’s decision; not to the ambassador, the Foreign Minister or even to the Prime Minister. He can of course try but no one is in a position to overturn a decision of the British Passport Control Officer or to demand that he must issue a visa.

The Passport Control Office does not have a completely free hand in the granting or refusal of visas. It has to abide by the visa regulations for the United Kingdom, its colonies, protectorates and mandates. These laws are not all the same. Their respective sympathy to immigrants is quite different and their management varies with respect to political developments. But this management is greatly influenced by the way in which a PCO deals with the cases that come in and then forwards them to the responsible central administrations (where their agreement is necessary).

It is probably commonly known that Captain Foley sent an urgent telegram to Mr Eric Mills, the Commissioner for Migration of the Palestine Government, pleading for a number of blank certificates for the most urgent cases, and that Mr Mills complied with this request. It is less well known, that Mr Mills, in confirmation of the receipt of these certificates, received a telegram that simply read: ‘God bless you. Foley.’

Thus did this man deal with his ‘cases’.

I have been too often in a position where I have had to tell men who effusively thanked me for a life-saving immigration visa to Trinidad, South Rhodesia, India or Great Britain: ‘Go to Tiergartenstrasse 17 and thank Captain Foley. You owe him your visa, not me.’ Did any of the men take this as seriously as it was meant to be taken? I doubt it. I was for them the Jew, and the ‘other guy’ was the Goy. And that was – very, very regrettably – true.

Our work together rested on the basis of completely reciprocal trust. Of course, I had to earn this trust at first. Before my time at the Hilfsverein,11 when I was a practising independent emigration consultant, I never brought a case before Captain Foley that did not correspond to the appropriate regulations. With me, there were no falsified thousand-pound-accounts12 or similar tricks. As soon as Captain Foley was clear about that, our co-operation became easy. As I was then entrusted by the Hilfsverein with the handling of all of the questions concerning the British Passport position, Wilfred Israel13 inducted me in this capacity especially with Captain Foley. With that, I was a persona gratissima. That forced me, of course, to be particularly careful and thorough in the treatment of my cases, and my connections proved to be useful to me in more than one instance. There were also cases in which I did not deem it advisable to take the responsibility myself. I will recount two of them here, because the manner of their treatment by Captain Foley is characteristic. This is the way in which he treated all similar ‘problematic’ requests.

Dr H, a gynaecologist from an industrial city in Saxony, was introduced to me as someone who wanted to emigrate to Palestine by his relative, a Berlin Zionist. Everything was in the best order. The taxes were paid, the lift was packed. The currency acceptance was ready to be called up. One thousand pounds was allocated. The only black spot was the criminal record. He had been jailed for carrying out an abortion. A rather hopeless affair. I asked for the details. According to the doctor, who made a good personal impression, it was a biased judgment in order to eliminate a successful Jewish and socialist competitor. I reported to Captain Foley and stated the case to him without any taking any specific position on the case. He listened to everything, looked through the filled-out request papers, and asked me if I had the impression that the man regularly performed abortions as a business practice. When I said no, he asked me to leave the application with him and to get him a copy of the judgment, which I did. When I went to the Passport Office on another matter two days later, Captain Foley asked me into his office: ‘This is undoubtedly a clear anti-Semitic motivated judgment without any certain proof. I would like to see your client, but alone.’ After a very thorough discussion with Captain Foley, Dr H returned. A few weeks later he went to Palestine. Today, he practises somewhere in that country. In spite of his time in prison for giving an abortion he had no problem obtaining both permission to immigrate and a licence to practise medicine. That was how Captain Foley worked.

The second is a Hilfsverein case. Fräulein N came to my office direct from prison, having been held for communist activity. She was a lovely, lively girl of about twenty years. Not one of those unbearably hysterical or intellectually warped female ‘communists’ who could be found in the different youth organisations, including Zionist clubs. The father of her child, who was born in prison, had obtained permission for her to join him in Southern Rhodesia. He had a residence permit and sufficient income to live on. But she still needed a visa. Inquiries to the Hilfsverein’s Hamburg office, which originated the case, and unofficial inquiries elsewhere confirmed the excellent personal impression. Unfortunately that cost us a couple of days, and there was a Gestapo deadline on emigration. The concentration camp was beckoning.14 So the papers were completed and sent to Captain Foley along with the letter from the authorities in Southern Rhodesia. But the issuing of a visa is at the discretion of the Passport Control Officer. I brought the papers out and laid them on the table.

‘How old is the young lady today?’

‘Twenty.’

‘She was in prison for two years, therefore she was eighteen when she was sentenced. How do you say it in German? Jugendeselei [the folly of youth]. That’s what it looks like to me. Or do you believe that the young woman will be active as a communist in Rhodesia?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Then send her to me. Is the child written down in the passport?’

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent. Goodbye.’

After a very long discussion with Captain Foley, Fräulein N came back to me with a passport with a visa. Twelve hours before the expiration of the Gestapo deadline she departed from Bremen.

The day after she left, at around 1 p.m., my telephone rang at the Hilfsverein. Since during office hours all calls from government officials or representatives of other Jewish organisations were passed to me, I was not surprised when my secretary handed me the telephone with the announcement:

‘Gestapo.’

‘Yes?’

‘This is the secret police. Are you personally responsible for the case of N?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where is the woman?’

‘On board Dutch steamship so-and-so somewhere between the Bremen docks and Rotterdam. But if you have to know precisely you should ask the Grenzpolizei at the Bremen docks. They will obviously know much far better than I.’

‘Departed yesterday from Bremen. The report is of course in front of me. I wanted just to be convinced that everything is in order and see if you were nervous. Heil Hitler.’

We worked under such conditions – and became accustomed to them.

Both of the cases mentioned above contain the ‘problematic’ elements: a) a prison sentence for something that is also a crime under British law, b) communist activity. Both times a Passport Control Officer of less humane disposition would not have taken the responsibility or risk of granting a visa and would have stuck to the letter of the law and denied the request, leaving the unfortunate applicant to be sent to a concentration camp. Captain Foley took the responsibility. What drove him to that was that nobility of origin, disposition, and education, which makes a man in such a post feel that power was given to him in order to help the helpless: noblesse oblige.

People who do not know Captain Foley, or only know him superficially, might think that I am exaggerating or that, from some sort of reasons, I am celebrating him in an unjustified manner. This would be a huge miscalculation. The number of Jews saved from Germany would be smaller by tens of thousands of people – yes, that’s right, tens of thousands – if instead of Captain Foley, a ‘diligent official’ had sat in his position. There is no word of Jewish gratitude to this man that would be exaggerated.

After the November Pogrom of 1938 and the mass arrests, a wild rush on all of the foreign representatives set in. Everyone was hoping for a miracle and a visa. The British Passport Control Officer was so overrun for two days, that the work became impossible. Then Captain Foley created order. He was not only a man who, like all of his personal co-workers, worked often and thoroughly. He could also organise.

The three night commissionaires from the embassy on the Wilhelmstrasse were transferred to Tiergartenstrasse. They organised the visitors in rows of four, queuing from the street, through the front garden, up the staircase and into the waiting room. The commissionaires could not speak German. They were very polite – but also energetic. They wore uniforms decorated with many medals from the previous war and they were ‘Goys’.

As a result, an exemplary order took hold, although the November and December weather was horrible and the anxiety of the visitors very high. For people who had no time to wait, Captain Foley wrote Laisser-Passer with his own hand. In this way, we, the representatives of the Jewish organisations, could move quickly and freely.

Captain Foley saw the Nazis not only at official or semi-official luncheons, parties and parades. He often walked or used the tram instead of taking his car to his office, and thus in half an hour saw more of real Nazi-dom than in hours spent at official dinners. From his windows, he could watch the constant growth of the German War Office buildings. Finally, the crowds of both German and Jewish victims of the Third Reich who came to him were most instructive. He knew the Nazis and how to handle them.

One morning when I entered the waiting room of the British Passport Control Office there was a tall, well-dressed, intelligent looking German who presented his passport and an application for a visa to Captain Foley. He spoke fluent English without the least trace of a German accent. Captain Foley looked at the man closely and looked at the passport. Then he took a pencil, put a line through the application, wrote ‘Refused’ on it and said in German ‘Sorry. I am unable to grant you a visa.’

The German, still in English, began to bluster and showed a letter from a well-known English firm, adding that he understood that the British Home Office had granted a permit on his behalf. Capt. Foley replied: ‘Yes, I have received the permit. It entitles me to grant you a visa, but it does not bind me to do so.’ He declined, in all civility, to give any reason why he would not issue the visa. But as the door of his room closed behind the German, he commented in an undertone. ‘We do not want spies in England.’

Then Capt Foley turned to the matter in hand, and forty-eight hours later a young Jew left Sachsenhausen concentration camp for a British colony.

11 Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, literally the Assistance Organisation for German Jews, helped Jews to get out of Germany.

12 Anyone emigrating to Palestine had to deposit £1,000 in a bank account to provide sufficient funds for living expenses when they initially arrived there. Ironically, Foley himself frequently found ways around this rule.

13 Wilfred Israel was the owner of one of the largest Berlin department stores and prominent member of the Hilfsverein. He was the model for Bernhard Landauer in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.

14 Jews released from jail were normally taken straight to a concentration camp.