Ottawa family donates Holocaust hero's medals to Britain
By all accounts, Frank Foley wasn't one to broadcast his accomplishments.
So perhaps it's fitting that the awards he was given for his service as a British spy have been lying low for decades.
A fluent German speaker, Frank Foley was assigned to gather information about what was happening in Germany — a job which became especially crucial after the Nazis took power in 1933.
But he also helped Jews flee the country, and that's the story his family in Ottawa hopes to spread by donating his medals to the U.K. government.
Exploited passport officer job to help Jews
Michael Foley grew up with the medals from his dad's great-uncle in the house, but knew few details of Frank Foley's accomplishments as an agent posted to Britain's embassy in Berlin in the 1930s.
"[My dad] talked about meeting him, and he said he was quite reserved and rather quiet," he told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning last week.
"We joked about the fact that I guess if you're a spy, that's a good thing."
The cover for Frank Foley's clandestine activities in Germany was his day job as a passport control officer, issuing visas for people wishing to leave Germany for Britain or its empire.
He exploited his position to get visas for Jews, sparing more than 10,000 from death at the hands of the Nazis, according to a 1999 book by journalist Michael Smith.
He also helped forge passports and even hid people in his own home, according to the BBC. However, because many of the people he helped would not have known about his role in their escape, Foley's achievements never became common knowledge.
Honoured by Yad Vashem
Foley's work to save Jews wasn't directed by head office but was his own initiative, said historian Mark Seaman, also speaking on Ottawa Morning.
More than four decades after his death in 1958, Foley was given the honour of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's national authority for Holocaust remembrance.
When the Second World War started and Foley left Germany, Foley left behind "a thick wad of already approved visas with instructions that they should be distributed to those fleeing the Nazi terror," Yad Vashem's testimonial notes.
The authority also notes Foley didn't have diplomatic immunity in Berlin, and if the Nazis discovered what he was doing, "he would have suffered a much worse fate than being persona non grata."
Foley was also honoured in 2004 with a plaque outside the British embassy in Berlin.
Medals were going to be kept in the family
Michael Foley said he had previously intended to keep the medals in the family, passing them down to his own sons.
That changed after the family was contacted by the British High Commission in Canada, which asked to see the medals and other artifacts such as the Yad Vashem certificate and some photos.
Now both the Foley family and Seaman are looking forward to more public servants learning Foley's story through those artifacts.
"Frank Foley had two families. He had the Foleys and he had the secret intelligence service," Seaman said.
"One hopes that maybe his medals are going to be an inspiration to those new officers, for future generations to follow his values."
The story should inspire those outside the service as well, Seaman said.
"This is one of the biggest parts of my work, is to make people put [fictional spies like] George Smiley and James Bond to one side and pay due credit to this truly great man," Seaman said.
Foley's intelligence work was also exemplary, Seaman said, which is why he was chosen to interrogate Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess when he turned up in the U.K. in 1941.
"Sad to say that [Hess] was so befuddled they didn't get an awful lot out of him," Seaman said. "Not even Frank Foley managed it."
