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British Spy Saved 10,000 Austrian Jews during WWII
(Jewish Chronicle-UK) British spymaster Col. Thomas Kendrick secured passports for 10,000 desperate Austrian Jewish refugees during WWII. Historian Dr. Helen Fry tells the story of Kendrick's Vienna operation in a new biography, Spymaster. Fry said Kendrick "was a senior member of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or what we know today as MI6." Posted to Vienna in 1925 as SIS station chief, Kendrick, assisted by secretary and fellow agent Clara Holmes, ran the most sophisticated spy network in Europe, under the cover of being the passport control officer at the British Consulate. On March 12, 1938, the Third Reich annexed Austria, changing the fate of Austria's 200,000 Jews almost overnight. By April, more than 7,000 Jewish men had been arrested and sent to concentration camps like Dachau. Working 15 hour days, Kendrick and his team processed up to 175 applications a day as hundreds of terrified families besieged the building. Just four days after the Nazis entered Austria, British cabinet ministers tightened visa restrictions to enter Britain. Visas were still not required for British dominions or self-governing colonies, so Kendrick began to send people to countries like Southern Rhodesia. 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." Forced to flee Vienna after being betrayed to the Gestapo by a double agent, Kendrick returned to Britain where, with the help of 100 German Jewish refugees, he secretly bugged the rooms of German prisoners of war, providing vital intelligence in the war.