ee Speech Foley helped Paul Rosbaud send his Jewish wife, Hilde, and their only daughter, Angela, to the safety of the UK..
London, Saturday September 22 2007 Campaigners demand recognition for Austrian who exposed Nazi nuclear plans Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried heroic exploits of agent ‘Griffin’ by Owen Bowcott The Guardian THE mystery of how one of Britain’s longest-serving and best-placed spies smuggled scientific documents about Hitler’s nuclear weapons programme out of Nazi Germany are concealed, it is alleged, within the secret service’s archives.
David Irving comments: THE more that one hears about these Germans who were Jews or had Jewish wives, and spied or committed treason for the enemy — in England we too have only to think of Klaus Fuchs , or the Krogers (Cohens), or ” George Blake ” (real name still unknown) — the more intelligible becomes Adolf Hitler ‘s cruel rationale in ordering them all quarantined during World War II, in the national security interest, and urging all his coalition partners (e.g.
Admiral Miklos Horthy ) to do the same. The case of Paul Rosbaud is particularly poignant, as he was widely trusted and respected by the German scientific community. Here is a passage from my memoirs, my 1965 interview with Professor Otto Hahn , who had discovered atomic fission in December 1938 (and is referred to in this article). I CURIOUSLY asked him when he had made the actual discovery. “Oh, that would have been January 1939, nicht wahr ?” I politely corrected him.
He and the chemist Fritz Strassmann had published their scientific paper
on January 9, 1939, which would surely indicate some date in the preceding months for the laboratory experiment. What counts is the first scientist to get his discovery into print. “I remember,” he agreed. “When we finished the paper I phoned Rosbaud.” Dr. Paul Rosbaud , the editor of the German scientific journal Naturwissenschaften , was a close friend. He came hurrying round that same evening.
The two chemists had completed their paper, claiming proof that the uranium nucleus had “burst asunder,” only minutes earlier. “I told him to chuck out somebody else’s paper to make room.” He grinned at the memory. Several others were working along the same lines as he, Enrico Fermi for one.
The next edition of the journal was already in proof, but Rosbaud ordered the Hahn&endash;Strassmann paper set up in type at once bearing that day’s date as its date of receipt — December 22, 1938. “It was the solstice,” I concluded my chapter in The Virus House . “The world’s winter had begun.”
Cherie Booth QC , the former prime minister’s wife, appeared in court yesterday in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Paul Rosbaud – reputedly the longest-serving and best-placed spy working for Britain during the second world war – from oblivion.
In a test case that could force the service to disclose more of its archives, Ms Booth argued that the heroic role of Rosbaud, who died in 1963, should be widely appreciated, and accused the intelligence service of resisting the culture of open government. Yesterday’s hearing, at the offices of an employment tribunal in central London, was the culmination of years of campaigning by Vincent Frank-Steiner , the nephew of the Austrian-born secret agent who was a trained physicist.
Although hundreds of MI5 and GCHQ files have been released to the National Archives at Kew, none has been intentionally handed over by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – commonly known as MI6. Ms Booth was representing the surviving Rosbaud family in their application to the investigatory powers tribunal, a body established in 2000 to inquire into complaints of alleged misconduct by the intelligence services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
Three years ago documents were published detailing the extraordinary acts of espionage and bravery carried out by Major Frank Foley, right , the MI6 station chief in Berlin in the run-up to the war. Foley used his official position as passport control officer in the embassy to save thousands of Jews from the death camps [ Website comment: The embassy was closed in September 1939; there were no death camps at that time ].
He helped Paul Rosbaud send his Jewish wife, Hilde , and their only daughter, Angela , to the safety of the UK. But Rosbaud, who worked as a scientific journalist, insisted on remaining in Germany to fight Hitler’s regime from within. BORN in Graz in 1896, he served in the Austrian army during the first world war. Rosbaud’s experience of being captured by British forces, and his appreciation of their civility, created an enduring impression.
After completing a doctoral thesis in Germany, his skill and personal charm enabled him to gain access to Germany’s leading physicists – including those attempting to build an atomic bomb. Foley appreciated the privileged position he occupied within the Nazi scientific community and recruited him as a British agent. Codenamed Griffin, he soon began providing London with detailed information on Hitler’s weapons programme.
One of his first coups, in January 1939, was to publish in his scientific journal, Naturwissenschaften , work on nuclear fission by the physicist Otto Hahn [ Website comment: See panel at right ] Its publication alerted the international physics community and encouraged Albert Einstein to write to President Roosevelt warning that the Germans had begun a nuclear programme.
Rosbaud is also believed to have supplied British intelligence with information about V2 rocket bombs and confirmation that Nazi efforts to construct an atom bomb had been unsuccessful. Much of his information was smuggled out through Norwegian and French resistance networks. Coded messages were sent using numerical references to pages, lines and words in commonly available textbooks. Three weeks after the end of the war he was brought