Review: Spymaster: The Man who Saved MI6

 

In her latest book, Spymaster: The Man Who Saved MI6, historian and biographer Helen Fry, author of a number of books on intelligence, brings to life the fascinating and hitherto mysterious character Thomas Kendrick, described recently in this newspaper as “The British Shindler”.

Kendrick was quite an obscure person who led a secret life, serving in the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is now MI6. Posted to Vienna in 1925 as SIS station chief, Colonel Kendrick, with a very small team around him, and operating under the guise of a British passport control officer, ran spy networks across Europe, sending intelligence to London.

All, however, changed dramatically on March 12 1938, when Germany invaded and then annexed Austria. This so-called Anschluss also sealed the fate of Austria’s 200,000-strong Jewish population. By April, more than 7,000 of them had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Kendrick had many Jewish friends, was aware of the severity of the situation and, as Helen Fry puts it, “embarked on a humanitarian mission that was rooted in a sense of social justice…” to save the Jewish community.

Prior to the Anschluss, Austrian citizens didn’t need a visa to enter Britain. But, following the German annexation of Austria, the British cabinet, expecting a wave of immigrants to arrive in the UK, tightened visa requirements. Now, all visas had to be for full emigration with a named guarantor to vouch that the refugee would not be a drain on the state.

Kendrick introduced a series of creative measures to bypass these and other new restrictions. He issued visas for Jews to go to Palestine, then under British Mandate, to attend “sport camps”; added names of children to the passports of British businessmen travelling to the UK; and also issued totally false passports. Official records, as Fry explains, showed that Kendrick helped between 175 and 200 Jews a day.

He even struck a deal with Adolf Eichmann, executor of the “final solution”, who was sent to Austria in March 1938, with instructions to “rid Austria of her Jews”. Kendrick went to see Eichmann at his Central Office for Jewish Emigration, where he managed to broker an agreement with Eichmann under which a thousand Jews were given visas to go to Palestine.

Among those saved by Kendrick were some of Austria’s most prominent businessmen, artists, musicians and doctors. They included George Weidenfeld, who, as a successful publisher and philanthropist, made a prominent name for himself in Britain. Fry’s powerful conclusion that “Kendrick and his staff saved a generation of Austrian Jews” is not an exaggeration.

Eventually, Thomas Kendrick and his wife Norah were themselves forced to flee Vienna from the Gestapo. Later, he instigated new operations in the UK, where, with the help of German Jewish refugees functioning as translators, he secretly bugged the rooms of German prisoners of war to gather intelligence.

Fry’s achievement in Spymaster is a considerable one. She tells a remarkable story, exploring both the private and public life of Thomas Kendrick; not an easy task given that Kendrick lived most of his life in the shadows and spent his retirement in Surrey. He died in 1972, leaving little detail about his heroic life.

 

Ahron Bregman teaches War Studies at King’s College, London. He is the author of ‘The Spy who Fell to Earth’.