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