Frank Foley

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Statue commemorating Frank Edward Foley in bridge (England)

Frank Foley (actually Francis Edward Foley ; born November 24, 1884 in Highbridge ; Somerset , † May 8, 1958 in Stourbridge ) was a British intelligence officer at MI6 . In the 1930s he made it possible for many Jews to flee Germany.

Life and activity

At the time of the outbreak of World War I, Foley was studying philosophy in Hamburg. In order to avoid being arrested as a citizen of a hostile power, he fled to Emden, from where he was able to flee to neutral Holland with the help of some fishermen. When he returned to his homeland, he joined the British Army. He was sent to the Western Front as a second lieutenant, where he was badly wounded. After his recovery, he took over the supervision of a spy network in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

In the 1930s, Foley was sent to Germany as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, the British foreign intelligence service, in Berlin. To camouflage his work, he officially held the function of a passport control officer at the British diplomatic mission in the German capital, with the MI6 operations center in Berlin hidden behind the passport department of the embassy.

After his position was primarily concerned with monitoring the movements of Soviet spies and agitators in Central Europe, the increasingly aggressive politics of his host country moved into the focus of Foley's activities in the course of the 1930s.

After 1945, he was particularly recognized for his efforts to support Jews living in Germany to evade persecution by the National Socialist system: he helped them in particular by interpreting the visa regulations of the Foreign Office very generously and even by forging papers issued to enable Jews to leave the German territory. Although he did not enjoy diplomatic immunity , he even took Jews out of concentration camps and hid them in his own apartment.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Foley was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police forces : In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht SS special commandos that followed the occupation forces were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

During the Second World War, Foley was entrusted with the unmasking of German agents in Great Britain. He also made efforts to "turn around" enemy agents. H. to make German agents double agents who, in the perception of the German authorities, were working for them against Great Britain, but actually for Great Britain against them. In 1941 he was the first British SIS employee to interrogate Nazi politician Rudolf Hess after he fell into British hands.

Honors

In 1959, a memorial grove was laid out on a hill near Jerusalem in honor of those who were saved . In 1999, Foley received the title “ Righteous Among the Nations ” and a plaque in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial . In 2004 a plaque was placed in Foley's hometown of Stourbridge ; in the same year a memorial stone was erected on the grounds of the British embassy in Berlin. In 2018 a statue of him was unveiled there by Prince William .

literature

  • Michael Smith's biography Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews , Hodder & Stoughton 1999. (Hardcover, abridged softcover edition published the same year)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on Foley on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).
personal data
SURNAME Foley, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Foley, Francis Edward (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British spy, employee of the British secret service MI6
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Highbridge , Somerset
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1958
Place of death Stourbridge