Frank Foley: The Spy who Saved 10,000 Jews by Michael Smith

www.amazon.co.uk

Frank Foley has been called the ‘Oskar Schindler of Great Britain’, so why have most people never heard of him? Probably because there is no movie telling his story and there is still only this one book about Frank Foley’s efforts to save Jewish people during the Nazi Third Reich. In fact, Foley was able to save a lot more people than Oskar Schindler ever did. He was stationed in Berlin as a British spy at the end of WWI posing as a passport control officer. It was a front to hide his true mission in Berlin but it gave him the power to provide British passports and visas to Jewish people, which allowed them to legally relocate to Great Britain and British occupied Palestine. In that way, Foley saved at least 10,000 lives even before WWII even started. He left Berlin shortly before WWII started, made it to Norway and continued to work in British intelligence during the war years. In fact, he was called back to England following the capture of Rudolf Hess because he spoke German so well and that’s why Foley became one of Hess’s chief interrogators. Foley was a fascinating man and this book, essentially a work of investigative journalism written by a British journalist, tells the whole story.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

Picture provided by Buecher.de

If you know who Günter Guillaume is; if you know who Willy Brandt is why his political career ended then you will definitely enjoy Michael Frayn’s play about the intense relationship between the two men and the effects of that relationship. A play is always meant to be seen performed on stage, but even reading plays can be enjoyable especially this one with all of the psychological thrills of a Hollywood movie. I only wish I had seen it performed on stage in London when it was a hit in 2003. If you don’t know who Günter Guillaume is or Willy Brandt, you may want to familiarize yourself with the story before starting on this play. It all happened in 1974 when Willy Brandt was the chancellor of West Germany. (He is actually still one of the most celebrated chancellors in West Germany’s history.) Well, little did anyone know that his personal private assistant was a top-secret agent working full-time for the East German Stasi, a man known as Günter Guillaume. The play is based on truth but takes lots of liberties into the psychology of both men. It may not be a story about Berlin, in fact, the action takes place in Bonn which was the capitol of West Germany, but of course Guillaume was reporting to his superiors in East Berlin where the Stasi HQs were located.

This Must be the Place by Anna Winger

Picture by Barnes and Noble

Perhaps I enjoyed this book so much because it is about an American woman living in a neighborhood in Berlin where I used to live at a time when I used to live there. I could see the streets in my head and remember all those same thoughts I had had when I was new in the city. So I am not the only one who looks at the walls around me and wonders who once lived here and stared at these same walls. Who lived here and died here; who survived here and didn’t survive. Sometimes my imagination runs wild just walking down the street in Berlin and looking into the faces of the people I pass by. Anna Winger though was able to put down here thoughts in book form and have them make sense.

The book is a fictional novel but I am sure the author took much of the content from her own experience and observations as an expatriate in Berlin. It is a new addition to the collection of books about Berlin, just published in 2008 and it is an enjoyable read.

Berlin Downfall 1945 by Anthony Beever

World War II in Europe ended in Berlin. It ended dramatically with the Battle of Berlin. It ended with the complete destruction of Berlin. Those final few weeks of WWII are accurately documented in Anthony Beevor’s book, which reads like a fictional novel but which is very very true. Beevor made a name for himself with his book about the battle of Stalingrad and with his second work about the Battle of Berln he does not disappoint. The details are all so fascinating, I wish I could remember every single one.

Berlin Then and Now by Nick Gay

I admit I love this book just for the pictures. It is actually mostly pictures, but they are great. Walking around Berlin today in 2009 it is nearly impossible to imagine what it all used to look like. The city is changing so much and so fast. That is where this book comes in. On one side is an original picture from back then and directly opposite is a picture of the same location from the same angle taken several decades later, usually more recent in the 1990s or 2000s. Without this book it would be impossible to image the changes that have taken place at Potsdamer Platz or other corners of Berlin. Each picture is a look into the past, a moment captured still on film, luckily, since those moments in Berlin were fleeting.

The Good German by Joseph Kanon

This novel is not necessarily a work of great literature, in fact, the writing leaves much to be desired, but it is one of the most honest reports on Berlin in the summer of 1945 that I know. The war has only just ended weeks before and it is a desperate situation. Kanon describes the city in disturbing detail complete with war-torn buildings, corpses lining the streets and clogging the canals, the stench and utter darkness of Berlin after the fall, and reminds us that desperate people are likely to take desperate measures. Opening up with the Potsdam Conference, where Stalin, Churchhill and Truman are present, you are thrown right into the middle of a murder mystery when a body washes up on the shore of the river during the conference. It is not just any body; it is the body of an American soldier with a bullet through his chest and his pockets full of money. It is much more than a murder mystery though. If you can get beyond the dialogue, you’ll find yourself in a complicated love story and hate story about war and peace and, even more so, everything in between.

The File by Timothy Garton Ash

“‘You have a very interesting file.’ And there it is, a buff-colored binder, some two inches thick, rubber-stamped on the front cover: OPK-Akte, MfS, XV 2889/81. Underneath is written in a neat, clerical hand: ‘Romeo.’

Romeo?

‘Yes that was your code name,’ says Frau Schulz, and giggles.”

Germany’s law allowing any person access to their Stasi file is unique in the world. This is Germany’s way of coming to terms with the past. Over 2 million people have read their own files, files collected over the years by East Germany’s own secret police known as the Stasi. There are actually people spread out all over the world who have Stasi files in Germany’s archive though, people who visited the DDR from the West, politicians, spies, tourists, and journalists. Timothy Garton Ash is one of them. He took up residence in Berlin as a young man in 1978.  About 15 years later  he opened up the file the Stasi had compiled on him. Not only did he see his former self through the eyes of the Stasi, but he was able to discover where the Stasi had acquired their information, namely who was informing on him. He then took it one step further and revisited the places from his past. He confronted the people who had played a role, and he asked them ‘why did you do it?’ And then he wrote a book about it.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

A fictional thriller/spy novel that is rooted in a very real time and place: Berlin 1955. The Cold War is already up and running. The Americans, British, French and Soviets are standing their ground. A Wall has not yet entered anyones mind, instead they’re building tunnels – the Americans and British, that is. Operation Gold was a secret spy tunnel built in Berlin jointly by the CIA and MI6. They successfully tapped into underground Soviet communication lines used by the Red Army and the KGB to communicate between Berlin and Moscow. One of the most famous double agents in history, George Blake, betrayed the project. And that’s just the beginning. McEwan uses the back drop of the tunnel project to tell a gripping story of love, betrayal, deception, and murder with plenty of his own trademark twists and surprises that you won’t soon forget. This truly is the loss of innocence. Prepare yourselves.

“It was impossible for a young Englishman to be in Germany for the first time and not think of it above all as a defeated nation, or feel pride in the victory…”

Moonless Night by Jimmy James

Jimmy James has a story to tell and he does it well. He escaped the hold of the SS twice, was recaptured twice and miraculously lived to tell about it. In his book he details his time spent deep inside the Nazi Third Reich both as a prisoner-of-war and on the run. He tells his first person account of his involvement in the now famous, mass ‘Great Escape’ from the Stalag Luft III POW camp in Sagan, Poland and later his daring escape from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which was located just 35 miles north of Berlin in Oranienburg. He remains so modest in his telling though that it is easy to forget the extreme danger he was constantly in as well as the atrocious conditions he survived under. The lives that touched his own at that time, including those of many fellow prisoners of war, are also described in amazing detail. Jimmy James continued to make a name for himself after the war when he was able to return home to England. He made regular visits to the memorial site that was once Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and told his story many times. His book was recently republished in a new edition, shortly before his death in January of 2008.

Stasiland by Anna Funder

“…the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists but here I am on a train hurtling through it – its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.”

She did what perhaps at the time no one else could have done: in the 1990s, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an Australian journalist living in Berlin convinced both victims as well as former Stasi agents to open up to her. They shared their stories with her, perhaps because no one else would listen at the time. They gave Anna Funder what she needed to write an outstanding account of East Germany’s surveillane techniques, recruitment procedures, spying, controlling, suppressing, plus how the secret police, the Stasi, were able to control every aspect of life in East Germany (either directly or indirectly) and how easily lives could be torn and even destroyed in the process.