British diplomats who rescued victims of Nazi oppression
Read the speech
I want to welcome you all here today. Although it is invidious to pick out individuals I am sure you will understand if I single out those who were helped or whose families were helped by British diplomats in the 1930s.- Mr Klaus Neuberg, whose father, Max Neuberg, was sent to Sachsenhausen during Kristallnacht along with three of his nephews. Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, Counsellor and Charge d’Affaires at the British Embassy in Berlin, ensure that all of them, together with their wives and children, got immigration visas for New Zealand.
- Also here is John Cooke, grandson of Hans and Lotte Sachs, two Frankfurt Jews who were given visas by Robert Smallbones, Consul-General in Frankfurt, in November 1938 – days after Kristallnacht – and who settled in Dublin.
- Also Ruth Weyl, advisor to the Three Faiths Forum, whose father was offered shelter by Frank Foley, Passport Control Officer in Berlin, when he tried to escape imprisonment by the Nazis, and who herself received a student visa.
- George Weidenfeld, co-founder of publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, who as an 18 year old was issued a visa to enter Britain by Thomas Kendrick, Passport Control Officer in Vienna.
- And Alec Shapiro, whose father-in-law was helped to emigrate to the UK with his wife and two children by British Vice-Consul of Munich Frank Fulham. I am pleased to welcome you all.
I also want to thank profoundly Sir Sigmund Sternberg for his vision and perseverance, Sir Martin Gilbert for his support and his remarkable pamphlet, and FCO historians led by Professor Salmon for their hard work.
We are here today to pay tribute to the men and women who understood more than most the depths of the Talmudic phrase 'he who saves just one life is considered as if he has saved an entire world'. It seems so simple but in the 20th century, it was sometimes deemed impossible.
In the 1930s, concern about stability in Palestine, then under the British mandate, made many Foreign Office officials nervous about issuing Palestinian visas to more European Jews. And when the Home Office confirmed that Robert Smallbones, Consul-General in Frankfurt, had managed to get thousands of people into the UK under his visa scheme, they told him 'They did not want the numbers to be made known ... partly because the Home Office might be attacked for having admitted such numbers as an administrative measure without the specific sanction of Parliament'.
But the fact these diplomats pushed back against the Foreign Office’ slowness to respond, and even broke some rules to do something they knew was right – rules which limited when they could issue visas, for example – only underscores their courage and humanity. As a survivor recalled of Frank Foley, 'In the conflict between official duty and human duty ... he unreservedly decided to fulfil his human duty.'
Each story is stirring. Robert Smallbones offered shelter to hundreds of Jews, as many as could fit within the Consulate building, whilst he organised transmigration visas.
Smallbones worked long and hard, knowing that every hour he worked meant more visas issued and more lives saved. He once fell asleep at his desk after working from early in the morning until midnight; he went to bed but 'After two hours sleep', he recalled, 'my conscience pricked me. The feeling was horrible that there were people in concentration camps whom I could get out and that I was comfortable in bed. I returned to my desk and stayed there until the next midnight'.
The terrible truth is that of those who queued at British consulates, more perished than were helped. For Smallbones it was too much. 'The last straw that broke my back', he wrote, 'was the case of a person who died in a concentration camp because one of my staff had failed to get my signature and to dispatch the promise of a visa which was in order'.
The contacts made with survivors and their relatives in preparing to unveil this plaque have brought some amazing stories to light. Mrs Gertraud Murray, whose mother was granted a visa by the British Consul in Vienna, told our researchers a few weeks ago she had always wanted to express her gratitude but never had the opportunity: 'It was the British Consul in Vienna who was able to issue the visa and saved my life. I have always wanted to express my thanks'. Finally, more than 60 years after the war, she is able to do so through this plaque.
Reading Martin Gilbert’s pamphlet I was particularly struck by one passage. Benno Cohen, one of the beneficiaries of Frank Foley’s courage, reports asking himself why Foley acted like this. The question struck home for a personal reason.
I was brought up by refugee parents who escaped the Holocaust. Many of the family did not. But amongst those who did the role of a Belgian Catholic family who lived South of Brussels was critical to their survival. They sheltered a large number of Jews in their village for several years.
I visited the family in the 1980s and asked M. Maurice, the head of the family, the same question as Benno Cohn: “why did you do it?”. His answer, provided with a shrug of the shoulders, was simple and stays with me twenty years later: 'one must'.
That is the human spirit, often submerged but never extinguished, and kept alive by people like those we honour today.
The Italian writer Primo Levi was a survivor of Auschwitz. On his release he wrote a book of his time in Nazi Europe, one of the great books of our age and he prefaced it with a poem;
You who live safe in your warm houses
You who find, returning in the evening hot food and friendly faces
Consider if this is a man who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or of a no
Today there remain many people around the world whose life depends on a yes or a no. As we leave the century of the Holocaust, at a time when religious intolerance still threatens the world, we remember with gratitude these diplomats who did so much to rescue hope from despair, humanity from brutality, and who taught us that while courage on the field of battles wins wars, it’s another kind of courage – the gift of refuge in times of danger – that gives human hope a home. If we learn from them as well as remember them, then the purpose of this plaque will have been fulfilled.
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