In March 1938, Austria was annexed to Germany and a further 183,000 Jews came under Nazi rule. Captain Frank Foley, the British passport control officer in Berlin, was active in seeking means to expedite the escape of Jews from what, after the annexation, had become Greater Germany.

His work was often clandestine and risky. When a Jew arrived in Berlin from Palestine in early 1938 to help others to leave, Captain Foley provided him with a British passport, replacing his Palestinian Mandate passport – from which it might have been deduced that he was Jewish – with one that enabled him to cross frontiers without trouble.

On July 6, 1938, an international conference opened at Evian, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to discuss the future reception of refugees. Afterwards, Captain Foley redoubled his efforts to arrange Jewish emigration to Palestine.

On Kristallnacht 1,000 synagogues and houses of prayer throughout Germany were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jewish homes and businesses ransacked. At least 90 Jews were killed, and 60,000 Jewish men were taken to the Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps.

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, confided in a private letter: “No doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care for them myself – but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.”

In the days after Kristallnacht, Robert Smallbones, the British Consul-General in Frankfurt, and his deputy, Arthur Dowden, made extraordinary efforts to process as many British entry visas as possible. Mr Smallbones went to see the local head of the Gestapo to arrange that Jews would be released from the camps if they produced the promise of a British visa and if they had been interned only because they were Jewish.

“We had a fierce argument,” he later recalled, “and I started shouting in the proper German manner. When I said that my proposal to help Germany to be rid of some of their Jews was off, the Gestapo bully collapsed and we made an agreement. I know of no case in which a promise of a visa given by me did not lead to the immediate release of the interned.”

On December 14, 1938, responding to the outcry after Kristallnacht, the Cabinet agreed to allow 10,000 German Jewish children to enter Britain. Some 5,000 were to receive immediate permits. There would be at least 5,000 more in the second wave.

Only the outbreak of war eight months later prevented many more from making the journey to safety.

In Berlin, Captain Foley continued to combine humanity and imagination. In one instance he granted an immigration visa into a British Dominion to a young girl of 19, although the girl came to him straight from prison, having served two years for Communist activities. She did not deny having been a Communist, even though that would automatically prevent her being given the visa. Having talked to the girl, he decided: “The girl is now 19. When she was a Communist she was 17. At that age everyone is liable to commit a youthful stupidity without being aware of the consequences.”

What was Captain Foley’s motivation? Benno Cohn, who negotiated with him for several thousand Palestine Certificates, later wrote: “Foley was a real Christian for whom help to others was the first commandment. He often told us that, as a Christian, he wanted to prove how little the Christians, governing Germany then, had to do with real Christianity . . . He hated the Nazis and considered them as the realm of Satan on Earth. He despised their mean actions and he felt responsible to extend help to the victims. He, nevertheless, acted as a good Englishman. From quite near by, he was able to witness the crimes of the regime, and he knew better than the ministers in London that it was impossible to be in peace with these people.”

On July 2, 1943, the War Cabinet agreed that “any Jew who might escape to Turkey or other neutral countries would be regarded as eligible for onward transport to Palestine”. As a result, several thousand Jews were able to reach Palestine during the last two years of the war, having arrived in Istanbul by sea from Romania.

Their transit through Istanbul, and their collective British passports – with up to 400 names pasted into a single passport – was organised by A. H. Whittall, the British passport control officer in Istanbul. The first such collective passport was issued on April 8, 1944, for 244 Romanian Jewish refugees. Two days later they were in the train crossing Turkey for Palestine and safety.

Sir Martin Gilbert is honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and Winston Churchill’s official biographer. He wrote The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy

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