Michael Binyon

The Foreign Office is to erect a commemorative plaque to honour British diplomats who saved Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War.

The plaque will list between six and eight diplomats known to have helped Jews flee Germany before 1939 or from countries threatened by German invasion during the war. Most of those saved were issued with visas allowing them to escape to Britain or to Palestine, then under British mandate control.

By far the most prominent was Frank Foley, who was head of the Secret Intelligence Service operation in Germany, and was posted to Berlin in the 1930s as a passport control officer. He is thought to have saved at least 10,000 Jews, issuing visas, helping people forge passports and even hiding some Jews in his own home. Not having diplomatic immunity, he risked arrest by the Nazis and even went into internment camps to get Jews out.

Foley, who died in 1958, was posthumously honoured in 1999 by Israel with the status of Righteous Among Nations at Yad Vashem, and in 2004 Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, unveiled a plaque to “a true British hero” in Britain's new embassy in Berlin.

At least half a dozen other Britons will also be named on the plaque, and a space will be left to add others whose efforts to save Jews are now being investigated by Foreign Office historians. They did so at considerable personal and political risk: Britain enforced strict limits on the number of Jewish refugees admitted, and several diplomats found their careers stunted because of their willingness to bend the rules.

The plaque will be placed in a corridor near the Durbar Court, so that visitors to Foreign Office receptions will be able to see it. Consultations are being held with English Heritage on its design, as the FCO building is listed. The initiative for

the memorial came from the Three Faiths Forum, chaired by Sir Sigmund Sternberg. The Forum was also influential in the unveiling by the Queen

in 1997 of a memorial near Marble Arch, London, to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving at least 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Second World War.

The plaque may cost up to £3,000, and no decision has yet been taken on who will pay. The Foreign Office, arguing that its budget is stretched, has suggested that it should be privately funded.

It is hoped that the memorial will be unveiled next November, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Krystallnacht, the day of widespread Nazi destruction of Jewish premises and synagogues in Germany.