Kendrick: the MI6 Spy who Saved Austria’s Jews
Helen Fry

Thomas Joseph Kendrick was one of MI6’s most senior spymasters in the 20th century. From tracking Communist agents across Europe in the 1920s to Nazi spies in the 1930s, Kendrick was placed as SIS head of station in Vienna. During the 1930s Vienna was at the heart of Europe’s espionage hub - and one of SIS’s most important stations. In Vienna he crossed paths with the British spy and (later) traitor Kim Philby and Edith Tudor-Hart, figures that would go on to rock the core of the British Secret Service. After Hitler’s annexed Austria in March 1938, Kendrick and his staff worked in 12 hour shifts to save up to 200 Austrian Jews a day. Dubbed “the elusive Englishman” by Hitler’s Secret Service, Kendrick’s real identity eluded the Abwehr for over a year until he was finally denounced by a double agent.

Kendrick’s arrest by the Gestapo in August 1938 caused panic in Whitehall because it was feared that the whole the European network of British spies was at risk. He was unceremoniously thrown out of Austria and returned to Britain with a cloud of espionage charges hanging over him. Kendrick disappeared from public view but not from the ranks of the British Secret Service. He re-emerged during the Second World War, operating a clandestine spy unit against Nazi Germany, first at the Tower of London and then 3 other country estates. Bugging the conversations of German prisoners of war and Hitler’s captured generals, Kendrick masterminded one of the longest and most comprehensive intelligence operations against Nazi Germany. A new revised and expanded biography provides a major reassessment of one of the greatest MI6 spymasters of the 20th century.