Wilfrid Israel

Wilfrid Berthold Jacob Israel (11 July 1899 – 1 June 1943) was an Anglo-German businessman and philanthropist, born into a wealthy Anglo-German Jewish family, who was active in the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany, and who played an important role in the Kindertransport.

Described as "gentle and courageous" and "intensely secretive", Wilfrid Israel avoided public office and shunned publicity, but had, according to his biographer Naomi Shepherd, an "almost hypnotic" ability to influence friends and colleagues. Martin Buber described him as "a man of great moral stature, dedicated to the service of others".

He was killed when his civilian passenger plane, en route from Lisbon to Bristol, was shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter patrol over the Bay of Biscay.

Wilfrid Israel's family owned Israel's Department Store in Berlin, one of the largest and oldest stores in pre-World War II Germany. From early in the Nazi period, Wilfrid Israel used the business as a base from which to engineer the release of prisoners from German concentration camps: many in the Nazi leadership had accounts at the store and were never charged. Israel also financed the emigration of his Jewish employees (roughly a third of the staff) by paying them two years salary at the time they left Germany.

Philanthropy was only a small part of his rescue activities. Though arrested and beaten, and followed on his journeys abroad by the Gestapo, he attempted through influential contacts in Britain, to gain admission to transit camps in Britain for Jews released from the camps; eight thousand young men were saved in this way. He also lobbied the Foreign Office directly for this purpose through visits to the British embassy (recorded in the British National Archives). Less officially, he formed a working partnership with Frank Foley, the British intelligence agent who was Passport Officer at the British consulate in Berlin, vouching for the characters of Jews in line to emigrate, while warning Foley of German agents who attempted to infiltrate.

Wilfrid Israel played a significant role in the Kindertransport, the rescue of ten thousand German Jewish children after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. By this time, most of the Jewish leadership had been arrested, and Israel took over the running of the Hilfsverein, the German Jewish welfare and emigration organisation established at the turn of the century. He urged the rescue of children without parents to the Anglo Jewish leadership, which organised a deputation to the British prime minister; but in the aftermath of the pogrom, no Anglo Jew was prepared to visit Germany, and the British government was initially dubious about the willingness of parents to part with their children. But a Quaker delegation, all of whose members had previously worked with Wilfrid Israel on relief matters (a link going back to the post World War I era) was sent out, and directed by Israel and, together with the German women's organisation the Frauenbund, met with the parents and provided the British government with the necessary reassurance.

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