Robert Townsend Smallbones

Robert Townsend Smallbones (born March 19, 1884 at Velm Castle , Austria ; † May 29, 1976 in São Paulo , Brazil ) was a British diplomat .

Life and activity

Early career

Smallbones was the second son of Paul Smallbones. After attending school and studying at Trinity College, Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree, he entered the British diplomatic service in 1910. On October 13, 1910, he was officially appointed Vice Consul.

Smallbones was first used in the diplomatic service on January 1, 1911 at the British Mission in Luanda (Angola) in what was then the colonial territory of Portuguese West Africa.

During the years 1911 and 1912 he acted several times, during periods when the regular consul was absent from the consulate, as executive consul in this representation. On January 1, 1913, Smallbones was transferred to a commission as Vice Consul within the consular district of the consul in Luanda.

On December 24, 1914, Smallbones was transferred to Stavanger in Norway.

On January 11, 1920 Smallbones was entrusted with the post of British consul in Munich . He was the first British representative in Bavaria since the end of the First World War. On July 16, 1922, he moved to Bratislava. There he stood out because of his sharp criticism of the policy of the Slovak government towards the minorities living in its government area. From 1922 to 1926 Smallbones was also a member of the International Danube Commission as a British delegate.

With effect from January 5, 1926, Smallbones was then appointed British consul for the Republic of Liberia, based in the capital Monrovia . On August 11, 1927, Smallbones was sent again to Luanda in Portuguese West Africa, where he served as the British consul until 1931. on June 21, 1931 Smallbones then took over the task of the British consul in Zagreb .

Activity in Germany (1932 to 1939) and late career (1939 to 1945)

From 1932 until the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Smallbones served as British Consul General in Frankfurt am Main . In this position, in November 1938, he witnessed the violent riots, known as Reichskristallnacht , carried out by members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and other supporters of the Nazi system on the instructions of the state leadership in a coordinated action across the country against Jewish persons and property were. Together with his deputy Arthur Dowden , Smallbones took the events of Kristallnacht as an opportunity - disregarding the wording of his service regulations - in the following months generously to issue Jewish persons who intended to leave the German Reich to issue exit permits to Great Britain. In this way, around 48,000 Jewish residents of the German Reich were able to leave the German territory shortly before the start of the Second World War and thus to evade the access of the executors of Nazi terror. In addition, Smallbones succeeded in obtaining the release of several Jews who had been deported to concentration camps after Kristallnacht - who at that time were still pursuing a policy aimed at expelling Jews from German domination and "digging out" his negotiating partners assured that the persons concerned would be issued visas for emigration to Great Britain.

After the severance of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the German Empire in the course of the British declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Smallbones was evacuated to Great Britain. In December 1939 he was sent to São Paulo , Brazil, as the British Consul General . He began his service there in January 1940 and held his post until the end of the war. Even after his retirement in 1945, Smallbones remained in Brazil.

After the start of the war, Smallbones was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police forces: In the spring of 1940 he was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht, would be assigned the following special commands by the occupying forces The SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

The plaque commemorates the help that the two English diplomats Smallbones and Dowden made from their consulate in Frankfurt to Jewish people to enable them to escape from Nazi Germany after November 9, 1938.

Aftermath and honors

Due to his services to the rescue of tens of thousands of Jews, whom he made possible to escape from the German sphere of influence through his actions in 1938 and 1939 - whereby many of them with high probability saved from the various persecution and killing measures that the Nazi regime during the War in the context of the Holocaust brought to fall victim - Smallbones was posthumously honored many times: On November 20, 2008 a plaque was unveiled at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London , which he and seven other British diplomats who asked for support of Jewish refugees from the European continent. In 2013 he was symbolically awarded the medal of a British Hero of the Holocaust . In the same year, a commemorative plaque commemorating the achievements of Smallbones and his colleague Arthur Dowden for the benefit of the Jews, whose departure from Germany they made possible in 1938 and 1939, was erected by the then Chairman of the House of Commons, John Bercow , on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery at Golders Green , the largest Jewish cemetery in London. A similar commemorative plaque in honor of the two men was placed on the building of the former British consulate in Frankfurt am Main - the house at Guiolettstrasse and the corner of Feuerbachstrasse - and on May 8, 2013 by the British Ambassador to Germany Simon McDonald and the Mayor of Frankfurt Peter Feldmann revealed.

family

Smallbones was married to Inga Gjertson (1890–1988) from Norway, with whom he had a son and a daughter (Irene). Smallbone's son Robert Peter (* 1919 in Stavanger) died on May 17, 1941 as a member of the British Africa Corps in combat operations in Egypt.

literature

• British Diplomatic and Consular Year Book , 1922 and 1949.
• Who was Who. 1971-1980 , Vol. 7, p. 735.
• Petra Bonavita: Quakers as saviors in Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , Schmetterling Verlag, Stuttgart, 2014, ISBN 3-89657-149-4 .

Web links

• Short biography of smallbones on the website of the Federal Archives
• “Men first” - the “smallbones scheme” of the British consul in Frankfurt am Main

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Compare this to the detailed description of the activities of Smallbones and Dowden in Petra Bonavita: Quäker als Retter in Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , p. 158 ff., And on the website “Men first” - the “Smallbones scheme” of the British consul in Frankfurt am Main