Portraying a kind, dignified gentleman with serenity etched on his lined face, they could be images of any accomplished man in his twilight years.
But this photograph, published for the first time, is a portrait of the “British Oskar Schindler”, Thomas Kendrick, the elusive spymaster who saved more than 10,000 Austrian Jews in 1938 but lived most of his life in the shadows.
Remarkably, it was taken by Lotte Meitner Graf, a photographer and Holocaust survivor whom Kendrick saved from the Nazis.
It was taken in June 1967, a few months off Kendrick’s 86th birthday, while he was visiting Meitner Graf’s studio. Meitner Graf knew Kendrick from his days as the British passport control officer in Vienna.
In the 1930s, she was part of his social circle of intellectuals, European aristocrats and musicians who frequented the cocktail parties in his smart apartment in the trendy Hietzing district of Vienna.
She was married to Walter Meitner, the renowned scientist and organic chemist. Walter was brother of the famous Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, one of the team responsible for the discovery of nuclear fission.
Survivor and photographer Lotte Meitner Graf (Photo: THE LOTTE MEITNER-GRAF ARCHIVE)
After Hitler annexed Austria on 12 March 1938, chaos surrounded the British passport office for months as hundreds of Jews queued daily inside and outside the building to gain papers to leave. Kendrick and his staff worked up to 15 hours a day.
His rescue efforts — which extended to forging visas, papers and marriage certificates to get Jews out — is estimated to have saved more than 10,000 Austrian Jews.
One of them was Lotte Meitner Graf, who made a visit to the British passport office one day.
Kendrick and his secretary Clara Holmes were shocked to see her there and asked what she was doing. That is when Lotte revealed to them that she was Jewish and at risk from the Nazis.
With the help of Kendrick and Holmes, Meitner Graf was given papers to leave Vienna, along with her husband Walter. They escaped in August 1938.
Their son, the late Philip Franz Meitner, recalled, in the only known interview he gave during his lifetime: “One night the British military attaché in Austria turned up at our house and informed my father that the British government wanted him to come to England.
"He was told a job awaited him. An RAF aircraft was waiting at the airport to transport him and my mother Lotte, and he had only two hours to get his stuff together.”
Once in England, Meitner Graf continued a successful career as a portrait photographer.
Ten of her photographs survive in the National Portrait Gallery and her subjects include famous figures such as Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin and Hollywood actress Elizabeth Taylor.
Meitner Graf passed away in 1973 — a year after Kendrick, who died at the age of 91 in 1972. Kendrick left little by way of any paper trail of his clandestine world and that is not surprising given that he worked for the British Secret Service.
Meitner Graf left behind a unique and special resource — the Lotte Meitner-Graf Archive. Finding these photographs of Kendrick has given us a special and privileged view of the spymaster, but it also means that the work and extraordinary archive of Meitner Graf herself have been rediscovered.
The JC is backing the campaign to have Kendrick recognised as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem.
Helen Fry is the author of ‘Spymaster: The Man who Saved MI6 — the biography of Thomas Kendrick’. Published by Yale University Press, 2021
