Thomas Hildebrand Preston
Thomas Hildebrand Preston, 6th Baronet (born June 2, 1886 ; died December 30, 1976 ) was a British diplomat .
Life and activity
Preston was the eldest son of William Thomas Preston and his wife Alice Mary Stevens. After attending the Westminster School in London , Preston studied at the University of Cambridge , the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris and the University of Munich.
Around 1910 he entered the British Diplomatic Service. On May 23, 1913, he was appointed British Vice Consul in Yekaterinburg , Russia. On July 29, 1916 he was appointed consul of his government for Perm, the West Siberian government in Tobolsk and the Akmolinsk Territory - still with headquarters in Yekaterinburg. When this city was evacuated on July 13, 1919 during the Russian Civil War, Preston also left it. In October 1919 he was transferred to Vladivostok to perform intelligence duties there. On October 30, 1919 he was appointed as the new consul there. He then worked temporarily in the overseas trade department of the British Foreign Office in London.
On August 4, 1922, Preston was assigned to the British trade mission then sent to Moscow . After completing the same, he was appointed as the new British consul in Petrograd / Leningrad in November 1922 . After the temporary break in diplomatic relations between his homeland and the Soviet Union in 1927, he left it on June 3, 1927. Instead, he was transferred to the post of consul in Turin , which he held from September 23, 1927 to July 3, 1929.
On July 31, 1929 (entering service on December 7, 1929) Preston took over the post of British consul with the Lithuanian government in Kaunas (Kovno), which he retained for ten years. In this position he was promoted to second degree secretary on February 10, 1930, first degree secretary on July 17, 1935, and on December 1 to counselor in the diplomatic service. On June 12, 1940 he was promoted to extraordinary envoy and ministerial plenipotentiary (Minister Plenipotentiary). In this position, he helped four hundred (according to other sources, one thousand two hundred) Lithuanian Jews to flee to Palestine in 1940 by illegally issuing the relevant papers to them and thus enabling them to travel to the Middle East via Turkey.
In September 1940 he was transferred to Istanbul on the occasion of the dissolution of his previous office in connection with the military development of that time . From June 18, 1941 to 1948 he held the post of Legation Councilor (Counselor in the Diplomatic Service) at the British Embassy in Cairo .
In the event of a successful invasion of Great Britain, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin Preston put on the special wanted list GB , a list of persons who were to be automatically and primarily arrested by special units of the SS in the event of a German occupation of the country.
Fonts
- Before the Curtain , 1950.
literature
- Jonathan C. Friedman : The Routledge History of the Holocaust , 2010. Therein the essay xxxx, by yyyy
- The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book , 1949, p. 322.
Web links
- Sir Thomas Hildebrand Preston, 6th Bt. On thepeerage.com , accessed September 15, 2016.
Individual evidence
- ^ Entry on Preston in the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum) .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Preston, Thomas Hildebrand |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British diplomat |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 2, 1886 |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 30, 1976 |