Dan Snow's History Hit - The British Spy who Saved Jews from Hitler

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Thomas Kendrick was at the very centre of British Intelligence operations throughout the first half of the twentieth century. He combined a public face of an English gentleman whilst privately masterminding MI6's spy networks throughout Europe. Perhaps his finest hour came in the run-up to the Second World War when stationed in Vienna as a British passport officer he issued thousands of visas and passports to Austrian Jews enabling an estimated 10,000 people to escape the coming Holocaust. Betrayed by a double agent in 1938 he survived an assassination attempt and was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated before being expelled from Austria and returning to Britain. Once the Second World War broke out headed one of the most important intelligence operations of the war. Senior Nazi generals who had become POWs were installed in luxurious accommodation and allowed to speak freely whilst all the while being monitored on hidden microphones. The information they unwittingly revealed undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many thousands of lives. Historian Helen Fry returns to the podcast to tell Dan all about this extraordinary story that she has been researching for her new book Spymaster: The Man Who Saved MI6.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm very happy to have Helen Fry back on the podcast today. She's just one of these extraordinary historians. She just goes to the archives, she sits there, she puts in the work, she puts in the elbow grease, and she finds unbelievable stories from the Second World War that we should know, but that we don't, and that she rescues from obscurity. A proper historian's historian is our Helen Fry. In a recent book called Spy Master, The Man Who Saved MI6, she talks about a man called Thomas Kendrick. A proper historian's historian is our Helen Fry. In a recent book called Spymaster, The Man Who Saved MI6, she talks about a man called Thomas Kendrick. Now, you might have heard him mentioned before because she discovered Thomas Kendrick before when she came on the

podcast to talk about that extraordinary prison for senior Nazi generals in Britain during the Second World War. It was like a stately home. They were all encouraged to get drunk, have a good time, have debating societies, and the whole thing was wired for sound, including the outside, trees outside. And from that extraordinary intelligence gathering operation, Kendrick and his team were able to find out vital information about German war plans, particularly the V-weapons program. Now, she has researched more into Kendrick and come up with a remarkable backstory. He rescued thousands, thousands of Central European Jews when he was a

British passport officer in Vienna. So during and after the Anschluss, Hitler's invasion of Vienna, Kendrick managed to issue passports to thousands of Jews and they could escape, saying that they were in fact British. He also created over a thousand temporary visas to allow Jews to escape to Palestine, that young people could attend a sports camp in Palestine, knowing full well they would never come back. The Nazis tried to kill him. There was an ambush on the road. I mean, it's pretty exciting stuff.

This is the forgotten story of Britain's Schindler. We know about Nicholas Winton, who rescued tons and tons of Jewish children, the Kindertransport, but really Kendrick deserves to be remembered alongside him. It's a very, very special story. He is on the way, apparently now, as a result of this research, he's on the way to being recognised as a righteous Gentile by Israel's Holocaust Memorial Centre. We'll see how that works out. It's a really interesting story, everyone. Great to have Helen Fry back on the podcast. If you want to listen to other podcasts without the ads, it's Christmas. There's a lot of ads here. I get it. I get it. If you want to listen to them without the ads, simple. History Hit TV. You go on to our Netflix for History, the world's best history channel. You head on there. And for

the very small subscription, that's the cost of a pint of beer every month, you just subscribe to History Hit TV. HistoryHit.TV. Head over over, historyhit.tv and subscribe. But in the meantime, learn more about one of these extraordinary heroes from our history with Helen Fry. Enjoy. Helen Fry, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Oh, it's wonderful to be back, Dan. Thanks for having me. Well, I mean, you are a never-ending, you're a bottomless reservoir of amazing stories about British intelligence in the Second World War. It's extraordinary. Well, they are all interrelated and it has been the result of about 15, 20 years of research. But I love these stories. Okay, just quickly, who is Kendrick?

Ah, Thomas Kendrick worked for nearly 40 years for what we today call MI6. So he was an incredibly instrumental intelligencer in the 20th century. And most people have never heard of him, but he has a huge legacy. Well, that we now know about, thanks to you in large part. How did you discover it? Is he known about within your intelligence history community? Or did you discover it? Is he known about within your intelligence history community? Or did you kind of discover him? He is known. I mean, there's a couple of paragraphs about him in the official MI6 history. But those are the figures we have to kind of start probing,

the ones that don't have very much written about them. But yes, he's known in the intelligence core. He's legendary in those circles. But I came across him because of a book written by Michael Smith about 20, 25 years ago. He wrote a book on Frank Foley, one of Kendrick's colleagues. And because there's so much written about Foley, I thought, can we do the same for Kendrick? And I was just inspired by his story. The Second World War, obviously, it looms very large here, but tell me a little bit about his career before then. Before the First World War, he's involved in intelligence in Southwest Africa.

He's working in the diamond mining community. He's a stockbroker. He's travelling. So he begins to He begins to establish spy networks that go right through the 20th century, including Vera Atkins. We all know it's a household name. She sent those agents behind enemy lines in France in the Second World War. Well, her father and grandfather worked for Kendrick and Kendrick knew Vera as a child. So these networks are beginning already, the German threat is being watched by the British, Kendrick is part of that, and then of course the First World War sees him back in uniform, again involved in intelligence, latterly in France with German prisoners of war and gaining intelligence from over 5,000 prisoners of war

who are being processed in Amiens at that point in 1918. So he's well established by now in intelligence. You're very interested in spy networks in the 1920s and 30s. So tell me about a post-war. Well, it becomes quite a threat from Russia after the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. So Kendrick is posted to Vienna as the British passport control officer in 1925. That is a cover for his espionage work. And as the official MI6 history says, that station in Vienna, the secret intelligence service,

SIS's station in Vienna, was its most important because Vienna has now replaced Paris as a centre of espionage and you have spies of all countries moving in and out of Vienna. So Kendrick's posting is absolutely crucial. And so for the 20s and 30s, he starts establishing this whole network of agents, of spies. He has a lot of close aristocratic friends across Europe who attend his cocktail parties. It's the typical kind of human intelligence. He's gathering contacts and running networks to spy on the Russian threat, really, which is very real in the 1920s. And also, as I pick up in my book, there are concerns about the development of chemical weapons by the late 1920s. And so he's passing intelligence back to London about the threats in Europe. He's

a really sophisticated spy master, but he has to learn on the job effectively. I love the fact that his wife, Nora, who's the daughter of a German businessman from South Africa, she really knows nothing about his operations. She hosts these cocktail parties with him and they attend opera right through the 20s and 30s. And she's just used to mixing now in high society, never questions. She thinks he's doing passport work because he's not. He's actually running these incredible networks. And some of his spies and agents are attending their parties

and she has no idea. running these incredible networks and some of his spies and agents are attending their parties and she has no idea but that ultimately will save her when kendrick's later arrested by the gestapo but i love that kind of double life how he managed to live that double life even keeping it from his wife but also there's a royal reveal tell us about the royal reveal yeah i had to keep quiet about this for a year it It was quite tricky. But as you know from research, there are stories out there which are just incredible. And so listeners can read at the end of the book,

the afterword, where an unidentified source that can't be named has actually revealed that the mother of Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent actually worked for Kendrick in the 30s. And I just think that's incredible, given the bad press that Her Royal Highness and her brothers had over their father's involvement with the SS. So there's more to the story, but I love that fact that her mother actually worked for Kendrick and was on the right side of the Allies. So now we can begin, hopefully, to understand a little of what she did. That's amazing. And as you say, so the focus goes from sort of Communist Soviet Union to Germany. And then that's when Kendrick does this most extraordinary thing.

He starts to get Jews out of Central Europe. Yeah. So things are very tricky in 33, 34. You've got fights and clashes on the streets of Vienna from the far left, the right, the communists are being driven underground. It's a very dangerous time. And four years later, Hitler, as we know, dangerous time. And four years later, Hitler, as we know, annexes Austria. And that's when Kendrick's intelligence work struggles because he's overwhelmed by this humanitarian crisis, because the persecution of Jews happens overnight in Austria, as soon as Austria is annexed by Nazi Germany. And so there is a crisis, and he goes on to save up to 200 Jews a day, and that's in official Foreign Office files, for which he has yet to be recognised. And there is a campaign now to try and get him recognised

at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, because he's saved a whole generation of Austrian Jews. And we hear a lot about Britain and America not allowing visas for this, that and the other. Is he just printing out passports and just handing them out to people? What's going on, though? Is he acting on his own? He is, largely, and he gets wrapped fingers when he's trying to smuggle people out on illegal visas to Palestine, as it then was, and out through Yugoslavia. He did work within the visa regulations up to a point, but the restrictions that were coming in once Austria was annexed by Germany,

far stricter. And so he started to forge documents to issue false visas, to issue illegal visas, for example, a thousand teenagers to attend a sporting event in Palestine. Of course, he knew they weren't going to come back. I mean, that was his way of getting them out. And then one of the other things he does, which I'm not sure if anyone else was doing this across Europe, he put, and there were a number of cases of this, a seven-year-old boy, Jewish boy, added him to the passport of a British businessman and got him out. We don't know the young lad's name. It'd be nice, actually, if he was still alive and came out of the woodwork. But Kendrick also got a whole generation of Jews into Africa and into Kenya, into Namibia, southern Rhodesia, as we know. So that's an incredible legacy. He's forging marriage certificates, anything to get people out.

And the other thing that sticks in my mind, this story that he smuggled Jews occasionally over the border in the diplomatic car. So he had a sign in the back of the window saying corps diplomatique and the vehicle wasn't stopped. We don't know how many he got out that way, but that's a reliable source that's told us about that. So anything for the rescue efforts, incredible. And if we think about who he saved, yes, ordinary communities, intellectuals, musicians. I'll just put in a couple of household yes, ordinary communities, intellectuals, musicians. I'll just put in a couple of household names which might be helpful for your listeners. The second wife of Jeremy Thorpe, Marion Stein, the concert pianist, she was rescued thanks to Kendrick. And Lord George Weidenfeld, the founder of the famous publishing company

Weidenfeld & Nicholson. And when I interviewed him, he said to me, what happened to the man who saved my life? I didn't qualify for emigration. I had the wrong papers. I didn't qualify. I was 19 years old and Kendrick just stamped the papers. And without him, I wouldn't have got out, he said, because my father was in a concentration camp. My mother was crying that we weren't going to survive. And that was a very touching moment for me during the writing of the book when the late George Weidenfeld said, you know, what happened to the man who saved my life? And he had no idea for 70 years what happened to Kendrick. You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Britain's Schindler in Vienna. More coming up.

Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And you've estimated what, he rescued hundreds of people or more? Yeah, he rescued, the Foreign Office files say between 175 and 200 Jews a day. Wow. So that's quite a legacy. Before his expulsion, he was arrested eventually by the Gestapo,

betrayed by a double agent. It's all kind of spoiler carry stuff, this, isn't it? But, I mean, these were very dangerous times. He was arrested, had a pretty nasty time at the hands of the Gestapo for four days and was expelled. This is middle of August 38. So from middle of March to the middle of August 38, you can probably do the numbers. It's thousands that he's rescued. In particular, Austria. Yes. But we also know that he did facilitate for Czech Jewish families to come out as well.

We're still learning, you know, even after 15 years of research on this, there are still families who are now just discovering that they were helped by Kendrick. It's just extraordinary. So tell me more about how he got betrayed and arrested. Yeah, this is quite dramatic in the book. There are a couple of chapters. Traditionally, our intelligence histories talk about a character in SIS called Dick Ellis. And it was thought that this SIS officer, who was married to a white Russian, was penetrating Russian circles. It was thought that he had betrayed Kendrick to the Germans. That now has been proven to be incorrect. And it was actually a Czech double agent by the name of

Carl Tusek. And Kendrick, I suppose, on the instructions of London, makes a final meeting with Tusek, the one and only actually meeting with a double agent, because he was very careful with his security. And that meeting turned out to be devastating for him because Tusek was in the pay of the Germans as a double agent. The Germans knew that the British had this senior intelligence officer working in Vienna, but they just couldn't work out who it was. And so Kendrick was dubbed the elusive Englishman. And what would have happened if he hadn't been betrayed? Who knows, ultimately. Britain and Germany weren't at war, though, were they?

No, they weren't at war. Kendrick was expelled very publicly for spying. It's not dissimilar to these incidents in contemporary times, that certain countries suspected of various personnel of spying are expelled. And so the Germans were really shooting across the bow, I think, just to warn ahead of Munich, just to warn the British. But it was devastating for SIS because he's their most senior officer. His spy networks are penetrating those parts of Europe and actually into Nazi Germany and looking at the rearmament, the building up in the ports,

what U-boats are being constructed, what battleships. But also he's running these networks. Who else is going to do that? SIS has to recall urgently all its personnel working out of the passport control offices. It's now fighting blind, if you like, against a threat that we know war is coming. It's just a question of when it's going to break up. That sense is very clear from studying the files. And Kendrick knew war was coming. It was just, could we delay it long enough to be ready? war was coming. It was just, could we delay it long enough to be ready? So the threats were real. And with Kendrick absent, also, as an intelligence report I've uncovered says, we couldn't cover Italy. We struggled to get intelligence on the Italian buildup in the ports and the threat from Mussolini. So it was devastating. It was described as the most significant thing to befall

SIS in its first 30-year history. It was the most serious event to have occurred. I think that puts it in perspective and just gives us an idea of Kendrick's significance. He managed to extract himself. Tell me about the dramatic story of him and his wife getting away. Well, yeah, his manager who helped him to run some of the spy networks was arrested just a couple of days before Kendrick. And that was the warning sign. Kendrick thought, I'm next. So very early in the morning, he and his wife, a chauffeur-driven, because Kendrick couldn't drive, a chauffeur-driven,

they're just towards the border at Freilassing. They're going to get out. They're heading for Kitzbühel. And there's an assassination attempt, an attempt to drive the car off the road. All the boarders are alerted that he's on his way out. They're alerted to look for him. And the Gestapo get him. He's arrested just, he doesn't quite make it out. His SIS secretaries do make it out. But during the interrogation, we know the Germans were looking for them because they asked Kendrick, where are the secretaries? But fortunately, they'd already made it out over the border and were safe in France. Very dangerous times, you get a sense of that. And then he's dragged back to Vienna.

His wife is not arrested. Clearly, she knows nothing about what's going on and is confused as anyone, really. He's given a pretty rough ride at Gestapo headquarters, four days of Soviet-style interrogation, according to foreign office files. So pretty nasty for him. Eight-hour interrogations under bright lights. But we understand he didn't break. He did not give the network away. But SIS didn't know that at the time. What did he go on to do through the rest of the war? So he's expelled from Vienna for spying, which he disavows. And he comes back to MI6 headquarters at Broadway. And from there, SIS MI6 is preparing for war. And as I think we've talked about before with my book, The Walls Have Ears, Kendrick goes on to establish, with no blueprint, an incredible industrial scale intelligence gathering organisation,

which would see the eavesdropping on German prisoners of war and eventually Hitler's top commanders. So he becomes a really significant wartime commander and, as now is recognised, gained intelligence across three secret sites, which made a material difference to the outcome of the war. For those people who haven't listened to that podcast or read the book, it's such a brilliant story of senior German officers given lots of alcohol, treated very nicely, and everything being eavesdropped on with the latest technology. Completely extraordinary.

What have you learned since writing that book, now that you've been researching Kendrick? Have you got anything to add to the walls have ears? Yeah, so in Spymaster, I've been careful just to give a little bit of background of the operation, because people can read sort of part one, the walls have ears. But I've done a deep dive into some of the intelligence, and it is extraordinary. And I'll give you a couple of examples. I mean, people can read in The Walls Have Ears and new stuff in this book about the V-Weapon Programme. But for example, one of the most important prisoners we gained at Latimer House in Buckinghamshire was a senior German officer who was the leading expert on tanks. We charmed him, we took him for walks around the fields

around Latimer. And we asked him, you him, basically, how do you develop all this technology? And he said, well, we just looked at British tank designs from the First World War and developed those. So he was a leading expert. But due to some of the intelligence he gave up, his brother had died on the Russian front and he now decided to turn anti-Nazi and work with us. As a result of his intelligence, he was taken for a posh lunch with Whittle because Whittle developed the jet engines. And as a result of this intelligence, Whittle was given authorization to develop at that point, the jet engine stuff. So do have a look at that in my book. It's really significant.

And it was something I was not expecting to find. And I think the other thing to mention of importance, we think of this operation, quite rightly, as spying on Nazi Germany, of gaining intelligence to win the war. But what bothered me when I was writing The Walls Have Ears, there's tons and tons of stuff on the Russian situation. And then it dawned on me, up until 1943, we had not been tracking the Russians. We hadn't been spying on our allies. And so the intelligence which we're getting from Kendrick's side, and particularly from the generals, is preparing us ahead of the Cold War. We are analysing and gathering intelligence on the Russian military capability. And then finally,

on that aspect, at the end of the war, a General Dornberger comes through Kendrick's sights, and he's described to me behind the scenes as the most important interrogation ahead of the Cold War. So what Kendrick's unit is doing is not only winning the intelligence war or helping alongside Bletchley Park and RAF Medmanum, not only helping to win the war, but preparing us for the Cold War. And that's an angle we've not appreciated before. Is that why you make the big claim that he saved the organisation? He saved MI6, yes, because up until 1942, SIS was starved of funds, was really fighting blind. And I have a section on the Venlo incident in November 39, where two of stage a coup against Hitler. It's actually a ruse by the German intelligence services. And these two men are captured. Again, the whole SIS network goes down. They spend the rest of the war in concentration camps. They do survive, actually, fortunately for them. But this is Venlo on the border between Holland and Germany. And so where are we going to get the intelligence? And one of the

intelligence reports on the state of SIS that I uncovered says that without the special intelligence coming from Kendrick's sites, and incidentally from Letchley Park, prior to the end of 42, we really would have struggled and could have lost the war. So he puts in place the whole mechanism of intelligence and intelligence training and techniques that go forward and ultimately save MI6. And in fact, the subtitle down wasn't mine. I know it sounds quite sexy, and it wasn't the publishers either. It was the person, we don't know who it was, that reviewed the book to say, yeah, yeah, we should publish this book. That academic reviewer at the end said, oh my goodness, this man saved MI6. And that was the inspiration for the title.

Wow. That's superlative, but I'm glad to hear it's not exaggeration. Absolutely not. And I'm very careful in my argumentation throughout the book. And I'd like people to read it and make their own judgment. But what we can't deny is this man's legacy is absolutely enormous in the history of intelligence during the 20th century. It is amazing how you keep coming up with these people, Helen. And you know, it's funny because people are out there at the moment, so you mustn't rewrite history, but you're rewriting history. And it's just an astonishing example.

You're putting people back into the story, these stories that are just essential. They are. And you've got wartime commanders like Kendrick that absolutely made a difference. And I always think of this quote from the letter that Norman Crockett, who is the head of another branch of military intelligence, MI9, wrote to Kendrick towards the end of the war and said, you have managed this whole tri-services, so it's army, air,

naval intelligence, and they hadn't cooperated together beforehand. And he says, you've managed this without a single inter-service fracas. He had to manage those egos of heads of departments, but he was the right man at the right time. And Norman Crockett goes on to write to Kendrick, you've done a Herculean task. A grateful nation ought to thank you, but I don't suppose it will. Well, it couldn't because MI6 didn't officially exist until official history was published. Kendrick worked for MI6 and all the files

were classified. Even the wartime files only came out within about the last decade. So we as a nation couldn't recognise his incredible legacy alongside the likes of Denison of Bletchley Park and those other commanders, intelligence commanders. Well, it's a wonderful story. Thank you very much, Helen Fry. Come and talk about it. The book is called The Man Who Saved MI6. Go and get it, everybody. Thank you, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of dance notes history as i say all the time

i love doing these podcasts they are the best thing i do professionally i feel very lucky to have you listening to them if you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors.

That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tr Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well. Dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods.