Yom HaShoah
Who was Wilfrid Israel? - An Approach.

When KLM Flight 777 was shot down by German fighters over the Bay of Biscay on 1 June 1943, few knew that the abbreviation W.I. stood for the passenger Wilfrid Israel. Then as now, the role he played during the Shoah remains largely unknown to most. A “Stolperstein” at Spandauer Str. 26-32 in Berlin commemorates him as heir to a department store and rescuer of Jewish children. Who was Wilfrid Israel, who had been on friendly terms with people like Albert Einstein, Adam von Trott (one of Hitler's assassins), Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Chaim Weitzman, Lord Samuel, and Mahatma Gandhi's friend C.F. Andrews? Who was this sole heir of the "Harrod's of Berlin", art collector, reformer, pacifist, and savior of thousands of lives?

Israeli artist Nevet Itzhak is currently addressing this question. To mark the 70th anniversary of the Wilfrid Israel Museum in Kibbutz HaZorea, Nevet Itzhak is preparing an exhibition with the support of the German Federal Foreign Office, where she seeks to bring Wilfrid Israel's art collection into a new artistic context. On the occasion of this exhibition’s opening in mid-June we would like to commemorate Wilfrid Israel, the great humanist, who dedicated his life and sacrificed his fortune in order to stay true to values such as courage, compassion, and humanity.

For Wilfrid Israel, sole heir of one of the most prominent department stores and holder of both German and British citizenship (2), it would have been easy to take himself and his assets to safety by quickly liquidating the company in 1933. He had realized early on that Jews would no longer have a future in Germany and within the first months after the Nazi seizure of power, the SA arrested him twice. First, when during a search of the Anti-War Museum in Berlin the SA found his letters to museum director Ernst Friedrich (Wilfrid Israel was a pacifist during the First World War), and a second time for participating in a meeting of the “Werkleute”. (3)

Instead of leaving Germany, however, "he saw a purpose in the N. Israel department store that lay beyond commerce and patronage. “... if the tradition of the House of N. Israel had any meaning, it was to take responsibility not only for the lives of its own employees but also for the lives of those who worked in less established Jewish firms." (4)
 

OFFICIALLY A BUSINESSMAN - UNOFFICIALLY AN UNDERGROUND EMISSARY

In the early years after the Nazi seizure of power, Wilfrid Israel was monitored by the Gestapo and repeatedly interrogated. At the same time, as a businessman who neither held public office nor was known to officially represent any institution or organization, he enjoyed certain freedoms. During his frequent detours on business trips abroad, he routinely escaped the usual questioning and even his meetings with foreign visitors went unnoticed at first. This special status made Wilfrid Israel’s double life possible during these years: Officially, he was a businessman; unofficially he worked as an emissary in the underground and tirelessly pointed to the urgent situation of the Jews in Germany abroad. Surviving associates later reported that he had been one of the main intermediaries between Jewish leaders in Germany and the outside world and that foreign visitors who wanted information about the situation of German Jews always came to him.

In August 1936, the notes of the British diplomat Robert Vansittart contain an account of an encounter with Wilfrid Israel, who had been smuggled into the British embassy "completely terrified" through the back door. Israel immediately informed Vansittart that this visit could cost him his life. He also warned him that another outbreak of anti-Semitic violence was imminent if Britain did not intervene on the Jews’ behalf. All Vansittart could offer was to put in a "moderating word". Vansittart noted that this did not reassure Israel, who left the embassy through the back door "trembling and dejected". (5) 


"... for year and day, I have been urged to let you know with what self-evidence and immediate feeling of closeness ... I think of you. Since ... [then] ... I have tried to live up to my own standard." (6)
Wilfrid Israel in a letter to Albert Einstein, 1939. 


In 1937, Wilfrid Israel began to work unofficially for the Hilfsverein, which had developed into an efficient German-Jewish emigration office and organized the passage of Jews to many foreign countries except Palestine. Israel soon played a leading role here. Corder Catchool, Wilfrid Israel's British Quaker friend, introduced him in a letter to Lord Halifax in 1938 as the "...most important director of the Jewish Hilfsverein". When Wilfrid Israel began working there, the first thing he did was to reorganize the requirements for an application so that Christians of Jewish descent and other "non-Aryans" could also apply.

The extent to which Israel was aware of the situation of the Jews and his commitment to them is evident in a letter he wrote to Lord Samuel just one week after the first mass arrests and deportations to Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen:

"You will no doubt have heard of the plight into which many of our fellow believer have fallen since their arrest last week (there maybe 2-3,000 of them). They are now enduring hellish tortures in one of the new concentration camps and its so-called death quarries. Most of them are made to hew and haul stones like slaves for 14 to 16 hours a day. Their supervisors are only too happy to use the whip on one pretext or another. Discipline is ensured by strapping the young and old to a wooden trestle and beating them, while the others have to watch this torture.  ... Many see only one way out of this ordeal and run into the high-voltage wire enclosure. ... Don't lose a minute and see that a British troopship is chartered to leave for Hamburg and take these lost creatures under British escort and Red Cross supervision, ..., to some island." (7)

People came to Wilfrid Israel and asked him for help so that their relatives would be released from the camps. "Israel handed over the necessary means to his assistant Hubert Pollack to obtain documents, and Captain Frank Foley, head of the passport department of the British Consulate [and undercover Head of British Intelligence in Berlin (M16)], issued visas to those whom Israel and Pollack assured were respectable people falsely accused by the Gestapo. This procedure had apparently become standard practice some time before the Kristallnacht pogroms. All three were indispensable links in the chain: Pollack had contacts with the Gestapo, Wilfrid Israel had money and direct connections to patrons abroad, and Foley was responsible for issuing visas." (8)

 

After the Kristallnacht pogroms, most Jewish leaders were in camps or in hiding. They had been silenced in public and their influence suppressed. Wilfrid Israel himself never again stayed a night at the same place. It was at this point that Wilfrid Israel took on the central role of holding everything together. With the help of the Jewish-German Women's League, the Quakers, and leading British Jews, he initiated the exodus of 10,000 children to England. He pushed relentlessly for the establishment of a transit camp to house younger people from the concentration camps which saved the lives of another 8,000 people. He and his colleagues at the Hilfsverein did the utmost to help Jews to reach any corner of the world, including Shanghai. (10)

Following the Kristallnacht pogroms the Hilfsverein received up to 2,000 requests per day and in total helped 52,000 people to leave Germany before the outbreak of the war. More than any other organization. (11)

The decree on the forced administration of Jewish property ultimately led to the forced sale of the N. Israel department store at a fraction of its value. The 125-year long era of the House of N. Israel ended and the family’s assets were lost. The Jewish employees who had been paid a bonus of two years' salary, had all left the country by then. With only a few Reichsmarks in his pocket, Wilfrid Israel left for England on 15 May 1939.

In a letter dated 7.6.1939, Albert Einstein wrote to Wilfrid Israel: "I was immensely pleased with your kind letter and especially with knowing you were safe at last. What you did was really heroic, but I could not shake off the feeling that you were too good for this world, but mainly for that environment in which you have persevered so long." (12)  

In Britain, Wilfrid Israel continued his humanitarian work, helping Jewish refugees in internment camps. In March 1943, Israel traveled to Portugal to distribute 200 entry certificates to Palestine to Jewish refugees. His return flight from Lisbon to Bristol on 1.6.1943 never reached its destination.
 
 

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Israel
(2) Wilfrid Israel was both a German and a British citizen. He did not inherit the British citizenship from his mother. He was a British citizen because he was actually born in London.
(3) The “Werkleute” were a Jewish socialist organization. Its members emigrated to Palestine and founded Kibbutz HaZorea. Wilfrid Israel bequeathed his art collection to this Kibbutz shortly before his death.
(4) Naomi Shepherd, Wilfrid Israel, Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, S.148, in the following quoted as N. Shepherd. (This Biography was translated from English to German by Eike Geisel. The English original edition was published 1984 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) under the title: „Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador“. 
(5) Wilfrid Israel had been warned to refrain from visiting the British Embassy as he was constantly shadowed. Vansittart's account of the visit is in: A busman's Holiday, September 1936, Churchill College, Cambridge, Vnst 1/17. N. Shepherd, p. 173.
(6) Wilfrid Israel 1939 in a letter to Albert Einstein, N. Shepherd, S. 246.   
(7) House of Lords, Samuel Papers. General political papers, A 155X
(8) N. Shepherd, S. 195.
(9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Israel
(10) N. Shepherd, S. 222.
(11) ibid., S. 13
(12)  The letter was originally written in German. It is published in: https://archive.org/details/israelfamily_01_reel01/page/n353/mode/2up