Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
MI6 agent who was Britain’s Schindler
transit visa to France, from where they joined Hilde in New York. On crossing the border, Berthold threw his Iron Cross in the Rhine. Another was Emmy Hirschberg, and her elderly mother. They could only afford one visa between m. “My mother was 80 years old,” my said. “I was only 50, but I was pled and dependent on my mother.” hey waited for two years for a man lawyer’s help before finding y, who registered them as a married ple so they could travel together. ws were increasingly sent to concenon camps alongside political prisrs after Hitler came to power in 1933. oley told his bosses in London that offices were soon “overwhelmed with lications from Jews, many of them essional men of the highest standing, to proceed to Palestine, to England, to anywhere in the British Empire”.
Many sought sanctuary in the Jewish homeland of Palestine, which was administered by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations.
The mandate urged the British to help Jews to go there, but a series of Arab revolts led to strict limits on numbers.
Jews trying to flee the Nazis needed to deposit £1,000 in the Bank of Palestine before they could get a visa from Foley’s office. With the Nazis snatching businesses from Jews, it was impossible for most to raise the money.
Foley took what he saw as the only course possible, ripping up the rulebook to allow them to get out.
Hubert Pollack, a Jewish worker who helped him gain agents inside the Nazi regime and get Jews out, later recalled Foley saved “tens of thousands” of Jews but never chose the easy way out. He said: “He did not mind incurring the displeasure of top officials in the British Foreign Office and Home Office.
“On the contrary, he was not above deliberate deception if he could help Jews to emigrate.”
Foley, a British spy running agents into the heart of the Nazi war machine, had no diplomatic immunity and could have been arrested.
Helping the Jews was not designed to curry favour with either the Nazis or his bosses in London, under intense pressure to cut the number of Jews immigrating to Palestine and the UK.
Admiral Hugh Sinclair – who as C, the head of MI6, was clearly unaware his own man was behind the steady rise of Jewish refugees – wrote to the Home Secretary warning that they represented “a menace to national security”. On November 9, 1938, Hitler ordered a pogrom against Jews, which became known as the Night of Broken Glass. Businesses were wrecked, synagogues set on fire and Jewish men taken to camps. Many of the leading Jews were forced to go on the run. Foley and his wife Kay hid four or five different Jews in their apartment every night. His offices were turned into a place of refuge from the Gestapo. Foley, who