EXCLUSIVE: ‘British Schindler’ who saved 10,000 Jews deserves honour

As a result, Dr Fry submitted an application late last month to Yad Vashem, featuring new written testimonies — ­which the JC can reveal — about Col Kendrick’s actions.

They include statements by Eric Sanders who, after escaping to the UK with the help of Col Kendrick, was trained to go back into Austria with British special forces; and Susan Gompels, who discovered how the British officer saved her family in a chance conversation with her father.

Fresh documentary evidence about how Col Kendrick helped 2,000 Jews flee to Rhodesia and Kenya was also sent to Yad Vashem last month.

According to Dr Fry, Col Kendrick saved a “generation of Austrian Jews”, including people who became household names in Britain after the war, such as the publisher George Weidenfeld, pianist Peter Stadlen, lawyer Hans Schick and psychologist and activist Trude Holmes.

Despite his remarkable achievements, Col Kendrick never spoke about what he had done after the war.

Dr Fry said: “This was a man who lived in the shadows. I have come to appreciate through writing this 
biography just how significant he was. He was a senior member of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or what we know today as MI6, but this was just the tip of the iceberg for the men and women whose lives he saved.”

Posted to Vienna in 1925 as SIS station chief, Col Kendrick, assisted by secretary and fellow agent Clara Holmes, ran the most sophisticated spy network in Europe, feeding crucial intelligence back to the Foreign Office under the cover of being the passport control officer at the British Consulate on Vienna ’s Metternichgasse.

Cultivating an extensive network of contacts among Vienna’s high society and running agents across Europe, Col Kendrick fed back information from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Germany.

All that changed on March, 12, 1938 when the Third Reich annexed Austria.

The Anschluss was to change the fate of Austria’s 200,000 strong Jewish population almost overnight. Anti-Jewish slogans were painted on the windows of Jewish-owned businesses, shops hung signs banning Jews and Jewish men were rounded up by Brownshirts and the SS. By April, more than 7,000 Jewish men had been arrested and sent to concentration camps like Dachau.

“Kendrick faced a human catastrophe of immeasurable proportions,” the book says, “Many of his Jewish friends were now at risk. The massive volume of applications from Jews seeking to emigrate was something for which the passport office was ill prepared. In the coming weeks and months he and his staff would be pushed to breaking point. Kendrick embarked on the path of a rescuer becoming the Oskar Schindler of Vienna.”

Working 15 hour days, Col Kendrick and his team would process up to 175 applications a day as hundreds more terrified families besieged the building, queuing out of the door and waiting hours to be seen. In the chaos, he pleaded for more staff and saw his workforce double to cope with the disaster now on his doorstep.

Prior to the Anschluss, German and Austrian citizens did not need a visa to enter Britain. However, just four days after Nazis entered Austria, British cabinet ministers met to discuss the anticipated Austrian Jewish refugee crisis. The result was tighter visa restrictions to enter Britain. All visas had to be for full emigration and with a named guarantor who would vouch that the refugee would not be a drain on the state.

Col Kendrick wrote dozens of letters to officials pleading for help and began to look for loopholes in the system to help families escape from Austria.

Visas were still not required for British dominions or self-governing colonies, so he began to send people to countries like Southern Rhodesia. He wrote to colonial governors seeking positions for refugees with professional qualifications and wrote to the Secretary of State for India, imploring him to consider refugees on humanitarian grounds.

When these efforts were frustrated, the spymaster deployed different ruses to help Jews escape. He stamped 1,000 temporary visas to Palestine for young men to “attend a sports camp,” added children to the passports of British businessmen returning to the UK, issued false passports and handed out permits to Jews who had received “fake baptisms”.

In August, Col Kendrick and his wife Norah were themselves forced to flee Vienna after being betrayed to the Gestapo by a double agent. The couple narrowly avoided being driven off the road in an assassination attempt as they sped to the border.

Arrested by the Gestapo at the checkpoint in the border town of Freilassing, Col Kendrick was later freed and returned to Britain to set up new operations at Latimer House and Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire and Trent Park near Cockfosters in north London.

With the help of 100 German Jewish refugees, Col Kendrick secretly bugged the rooms of German prisoners of war so conversations could be translated, providing vital intelligence in the war.

Fritz Lustig was one of the Jewish “secret listeners” at Latimer House who was to recount his first meeting with Col Kendrick to Ms Fry. His story prompted her discovery of the spymaster’s role as rescuer.

Ms Fry said: “In that first meeting, Col Kendrick told Fritz: ‘What you are doing here is as important as firing a gun in action or fighting on the front line.’

“Fritz said: ‘That was terribly important to us, we wanted to fight, this was our war and we never really understood what we did that made a difference.’ I promised Fritz I would look at the declassified files, the whole legacy of the bugging operation at the heart of the German Jewish secret listeners. I also wanted to understand Kendrick, this man who lived in the shadows.”

 

Her research revealed how Col Kendrick saved some of Austria’s most prominent businessmen, artists, musicians and doctors.

Publisher, philanthropist and newspaper columnist George Weidenfeld was among those who owed their lives to the spymaster. Despite orders from the British government to stop issuing temporary visas, Col Kendrick stamped the then 19-year-old boy’s passport with a three month stay in the UK.

“Decades later, when speaking about it, Lord Weidenfeld was absolutely clear that without Kendrick he would have perished in the Holocaust,” Spymaster states.

Eric Sanders also owed his life to Kendrick’s operation, receiving a temporary visa when he was just 17-years-old.

After arriving in Britain, Mr Sanders was among the many Jewish refugees who signed up to fight joining the Pioneer Corps then the Special Operations Executive, where he was trained to be dropped behind enemy lines in Austria.

Mr Sanders died in August aged 101 but his written testimony forms part of Ms Fry’s application to Yad Vashem and details how one of Col Kendrick’s agents working in the passport office illegally stamped a visa on his passport so he could join his mother in Britain.

He wrote: “It was obvious to me that Mrs Holmes has Col Kendrick’s authority for granting illegal permits. Even still today I do not know whether any alternatives would have been available to me. I have recently celebrated my 100th birthday. I’ve enjoyed a rich and interesting life and, as far as I am concerned, I largely owe that to Col Kendrick and Mrs Clara Holmes.”

Ms Fry said there were many parallels between the story of Col Kendrick and that of Frank Foley, a British intelligence officer whose cover was working at the passport office in the British embassy in Berlin. Mr Foley helped thousands of Jews escape Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations for his heroism.

Ms Fry believes Col Kendrick, who lived out his retirement in Surrey and died in 1972, risked his life and went above and beyond to save Austria’s Jewish population.

“It was his human compassion that I most admire,” she said, “He was completely selfless. He could have just towed the bureaucratic line and saved a few people, going through the days on a normal schedule but he chose not to.

“The Jewish people I have spoken to about this think it is right and proper that he should get recognition for saving lives. It is not about how many lives but this man has received no recognition for quite literally saving Austria’s Jewish community – I think it is as simple as that.

“That is why I think it is important that people know his story. It has not fully come out yet and that is why it is marvellous that the JC is running this campaign to get him the recognition he deserves. It is long overdue, it really is.”

Rescued: a generation of geniuses 

On 13 March, 1938, 17-year-old Eric Sanders stood on a road not far from where he lived in Vienna and watched the German army march into Austria.

Even as a teenager, Mr Sanders knew that while many Austrians welcomed the annexation, the SS men and the stormtroopers of the Third Reich marching down the road would change his life for ever.

“The next day my family, like thousands of others, began the process of fleeing from Austria,” he wrote.

That was how the fate of Mr Sanders and his family landed in the hands of British spy Thomas Joseph Kendrick, who was running the British embassy’s passport office as a cover for his espionage work.

And there were many, many others.

The famous pianist Peter Stadlen and his family, lawyer Hans Schick and his wife Mary, and psychologist and activist Trude Holmes all escaped Nazi-occupied Austria with Col Kendrick’s help.

Baroness Daisy Weigelsperg escaped to Paris on a Kendrick visa and changed her name to Daisy Carol, while famous photographer Lotte Meitner-Graf and her husband, scientist and chemist Walter Meitner, built new lives in Britain thanks to Col Kendrick’s intervention. Portraits of everyone from Benjamin Britten to Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor shot by Lotte still hang in the National Portrait Gallery.

The spymaster also saved the lives of distinguished Austrian musician, writer and conductor Erwin Stein, along with his wife Sophie and daughter Marion – who went on to become a concert pianist and later the wife of infamous Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe.

In his biography, publisher George Weidenfeld recalls his one, life-saving meeting with Col Kendrick. Lord Weidenfeld’s father was a prominent Austrian Jew arrested by the Gestapo on 15 March. Together with his mother, the then 19-year-old Weidenfeld joined the queue of desperate families seeking salvation at the British Embassy passport office. His mother burst into tears when Col Kendrick said the rules would not allow him to issue a visa to Britain. Regardless of the rules, the spymaster then grabbed the passport from the teenager’s hand and stamped it with a three-month permit, saving his life.

Among the first to receive a false passport from Col Kendrick was British opera singer Marjorie Wright, who married an Austrian Jew, Stephen Eisinger, in 1932 – which, under the rules of the time, cost her dual nationality. Her husband fled on the first day of the Anschluss. Marjorie and her children needed papers to follow him to Britain.

Accomplished atleading a double life, Col Kendrick not only provided the singer with the taxi fare to the passport office and instructed his team to issue a false passport, he coached her on a cover story. If stopped by the Gestapo, she was to tell them she was the wife of a British Indian Army officer and was on holiday in Vienna with her two sons.

One Jewish doctor who Col Kendrick helped was Erwin Pulay, a skin allergy expert. Along with his close friend Sigmund Freud, Mr Pulay’s name was in the Black Book of prominent Jews to be rounded up by the Nazis. Mr Pulay was given the lifeline of a false passport supplied by Col Kendrick and continued as a specialist in his field in Britain. He is the grandfather of well-known British actor Roger Lloyd-Pack, who played Trigger in Only Fools and Horses.

Karl Seemann, the Jewish director of a coal distribution company, was arrested by the Gestapo and released a few days later. It was clear both Mr Seemann and his family were in grave peril. Col Kendrick suggested a visa to East Africa, one of the loopholes in the British visa crackdown that the spy exploited.

Mr Seeman and his wife Fritzi fled Austria with their sons Robert and William in July 1938, setting sail for Mombasa, East Africa. They would later move to Britain and settle in Surrey.

Decades later it was Mr Seeman’s granddaughter Susan Gompels who discovered the role of Col Kendrick in saving her family from the death camps, in a chance conversation with her father, William.

“One day my father made a casual comment: ‘Isn’t it strange that Captain Kendrick ended up living just down the road from us here in Surrey?’

“So who is Captain Kendrick?’ I asked. My father replied: ‘He’s the amazing passport officer who saved our lives.’”

Her testimony forms part of the application that has been submitted to Yad Vashem by Dr Fry to see Col Kendrick properly honoured for his role in rescuing so many.

Col Kendrick was also asked to determine the fate of high-profile Austrians after the Foreign Office began to receive calls for help from those worried about Jewish friends.

Sir Philip Sassoon wanted to know about the wife of world-renowned Austrian pilot Robert Kronfeld. She had been rumoured to have been arrested by the Nazis.

Arrangements were also made to locate and assist Adele Fraenkel, sister of Sir Henry Strakosch. Frail and elderly, British friends flew out to help Ms Fraenkel on the journey once she had been found.

A “temporary” visa was also issued to Dr Paul Koretz, an Austrian Jewish lawyer working for Hollywood filmmakers 20th Century Fox after the US movie giant pleaded with the British Foreign Office for help.

Col Kendrick also fed back information on some of Austria’s key public figures, such as former Chancellor Schuschnigg and Baron Louis Rothschild. Held under house arrest, the spy chief informed the Foreign Office that Mr Schuschnigg had smashed up two radios after the Gestapo had installed them to broadcast Nazi speeches. A third had been put in the room in a place where the former Chancellor could not reach it.

Baron Rothschild had been arrested at Vienna airport as he tried to board a flight to Venice. Held on trumped-up charges at the Gestapo’s headquarters at the Hotel Metropole, Baron Rothschild’s valet turned up on the first day with carpets, lamps, linen, fruit and even orchids from the greenhouse. The guards who let him in were soon replaced and the luxuries confiscated. In retaliation, Baron Rothschild learned by heart huge sections of Mein Kampf which he would quote back to his captors in an act of defiance.

Even though the Final Solution was not devised until 1942, it was clear by 1938 that Jews were “being disappeared” in huge numbers.

The book explains: “There was knowledge of the concentration camps. Pressure mounted on Kendrick to save more Austrian Jews and he faced difficult decisions.”

In the first few weeks of the Anschluss, the emigration of the country’s Jews was supported by Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. Eichmann was sent to Austria in March, 1938, under orders to “rid Austria of her Jews”.

Col Kendrick went to see Eichmann at his Central Office for Jewish Emigration to, in effect, broker a deal with the devil that would save the lives of 1,000 Austrian souls.

Under British mandate, Palestine was subject to strict visa quotas by the British government. In 1937, the year before the Anschluss, Col Kendrick and his team issued just 214 legal permits to Palestine. With Eichmann seeking one objective and Col Kendrick another, the two men struck an unlikely deal in which 1,000 illegal visas were issued to Palestine.

Dr Fry believes the extraordinary endeavours of Kendrick quite simply saved a generation of Austrian Jews.

She said: “Much of his career parallels that of Frank Foley, (who has been recognised as ‘Righteous Amongst the Nations’) they were close friends and colleagues and many of the people I have spoken to cannot understand why he has not received the same recognition. It has taken a decade to 15 years to research because he has led such a secret life – you can’t just pop his name into the National Archives and ‘ping’, up he pops, so it has meant years trawling through obscure Foreign Office files. But I was meant to write this book and I really believe that this man needs honouring.”

 

Helen Fry’s new biography, ‘Spymaster’, is out this month, Yale University Press