‘British Schindler’ who saved 10,000 Jews deserves honour
As new testimony emerges about Thomas Kendrick, the spy who ‘saved a generation’, the JC calls for his formal recognition as a Righteous Gentile
FRESH EVIDENCE of the bravery of a British spy who saved 10,000 Austrian Jews during WWII, and who may have helped Sigmund Freud escape Vienna, has prompted a JC campaign to have him honoured by Yad Vashem.
Spymaster Thomas Joseph Kendrick’s dangerous, last-ditch operation to secure passports for thousands of desperate refugees is well known and has earned him the title “Austria’s Oskar Schindler” – but he has not been recognised as a Righteous Gentile by Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre, Yad Vashem.
A key reason for the omission has been Yad Vashem’s consistent refusal to accept evidence on potential Righteous Gentiles from sources other than eyewitnesses.
Now historian Dr Helen Fry, who tells the story of Colonel Kendrick’s Vienna operation in a new biography, Spymaster, says the Holocaust memorial has changed its rules and will accept documentary evidence.
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 espionage 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 12 March, 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 such as 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 illprepared. In the coming weeks and months he and his staff would be pushed to breaking point.”
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. 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 the 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 such as 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 accept refugees on humanitarian grounds.
When these efforts were frustrated, the spymaster deployed different ruses.
He stamped 1,000 visas to Palestine for young men to “attend a sports camp”, added children to the passports of businessmen returning to the UK, issued false passports and handed out permits to Jews who had received “fake baptisms”.
In August 1938, 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 check
Kendrick and his team worked 15 hours a day as terrified families besieged the building
point 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 Dr Fry. His story prompted her discovery of the spymaster’s bravery.
Dr 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.”
Dr Fry’s research revealed how Col Kendrick saved some of Austria’s most prominent businessmen, artists, musicians and doctors. Publisher, philanthropist and 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.
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 Dr 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.”
Dr Fry believes Col Kendrick, who lived out his retirement in Surrey and died in 1972, 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.”
His long service for UK Armed Forces made him a prime target