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a note from a friend promising the money. As war approached and the situation of German Jews became more perilous, Foley began to obtain forged visas and hide people in his Berlin apartment pending the arrival of the documents.
The personal risk was enormous as he did not have diplomatic immunity, but he still took ever-increasing chances. By 1939, Foley was travelling to concentration camps, convincing the Nazis that Jewish prisoners had been granted visas but had been interned before they could receive it. One survivor of Sachsenhausen, Gunter Powitzer, recalls being summoned from a group who were later led to the firing squad, allowed to shave and clean up by the SS and taken to meet a small man with round glasses, who produced a visa he had never even applied for.
In August 1939, days before war was declared, Foley was evacuated from Berlin along with the remainder of the embassy staff. He is estimated to have personally saved over 10,000 people. Employed during the war as a major in the Intelligence Corps, he interrogated Rudolf Hess after his flight to Britain and ran agents working in Germany, convincing Hitler that the Allied landings would take place on the Pas-de- Calais. Retiring in 1949, he died in relative obscurity in Stourbridge in 1958. Only in recent times has Foley’s contribution as the ‘British Oskar Schindler’ been recognised.
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