Friday, November 26, 2004

Berlin Honors a True British Hero | Germany | Deutsche Welle |

Berlin Honors a True British Hero | Germany | Deutsche Welle |: "Frank Foley helped thousands of Jews escape the Nazi crackdown in 1930s Berlin. On Wednesday, a plaque was unveiled at the British embassy in the German capital in honor of the work he did and the lives he saved.


He was known as the 'Scarlet Pimpernel of Berlin' and in recent years has been given the moniker �Schindler from Stourbridge,� although in reality he was just plain old Frank Foley. However, there was nothing remotely plain about the actions or the life of this apparently unassuming Englishman.

To those who worked around him at Berlin's British embassy during the 1930s, Foley was just a passport control officer. But behind the facade of the bespectacled, middle-aged bureaucrat was a real life World War II hero in the making. Foley was, in reality, the head of British intelligence in the German capital, a post he held until the outbreak of hostilities in 1939."