The Secret Intelligence Service, Passport Control and Jewish Refugees from the Third Reich, 1938–1939

Abstract

The role of members of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in helping Jewish refugees flee Nazi persecution in the 1930s has garnered wide interest. It has been claimed that SIS officers, in their cover role as Passport Control Officers (PCOs), helped ‘save’ thousands of Jews from the Third Reich by issuing immigration visas. The focus, however, has been on individual SIS officers, rather than the collective effort of the many passport control staff involved in issuing visas. There has also been a tendency to devolve the matter into a process of producing crude balance sheets of numbers of Jews ‘saved’. This article seeks to understand how SIS came to exploit passport control work as cover for its activities and to assess the impact of the refugee crisis on SIS operations. It also aims to make sense of some of the statistics regarding visas issued by individuals such as Captain Frank Foley and Captain Thomas Kendrick, identifying some wild over-estimates. The article suggests that the humanitarian work carried out by SIS/PCO personnel should not be rendered as a competition as to who ‘saved’ the most refugees. It is important to research the subject forensically without a partisan attitude towards the personalities involved in order to uncover the truth and understand what happened.