Commemorating Robert Smallbones on Holocaust Memorial Day

In honour of Holocaust Memorial Day, Trinity’s community gathered to commemorate the role of alumnus Robert Townsend Smallbones, who arranged the issue of visas to persecuted Jewish people in Germany before the Second World War.

Paul Robert Townsend Smallbones (b. 1884) came up to Trinity to read Modern History in 1903.  Always known as Robert, he joined the British Foreign Office in 1910, and went on to many diplomatic postings. He was appointed Consul-General at Frankfurt-am-main in Germany in 1932 just before the Nazi Party gained power.

When the Nazis went on the rampage during Kristallnacht in November 1938, Robert was visiting London. His wife Inga called him to say the British Consulate-General was being besieged by hundreds of desperate Jews.

Robert met with a senior official at the Home Office that day.  He asked the Home Office to provide a temporary UK haven for Jews living in Germany who would eventually go to the United States under the US immigration quota system. The next day in the Savoy Hotel in London, along with Otto Schiff of the Jewish Relief organization, Robert drafted the documents, which were authorised that same afternoon to introduce this system across Germany. It was kept hidden from the British Parliament.

Robert returned to Frankfurt that night and, with his staff, began to issue visas, working eighteen hours a day. He suffered a nervous breakdown after a few months, but continued to issue visas until September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. After his return to Britain, Robert learned that some 48,000 individuals had benefited from the ‘Smallbones Scheme’ and that another 50,000 cases had been under consideration when the war broke out.

British officials feared an outcry if the public knew how many people had been admitted to the country under the scheme; they insisted that Robert and others involved in the scheme keep it a secret. It was not revealed until 2009.

Robert was posthumously awarded the medal of a British Hero of the Holocaust.

Robert’s son Peter also studied at Trinity (PPE 1935), and is commemorated in the War Memorial Library. He was killed on active service in Egypt in the Second World War on 17 May 1941.

At the College’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, President Dame Hilary Boulding dedicated a plaque to Robert Smallbones that will go outside the War Memorial Library in recognition extraordinarily humane contribution to the German Jewish Community in their hour of need. It reads:

‘As consul-general in Frankfurt 1938, Trinity graduate Robert Smallbones MA (Modern History, 1903) established the “Smallbones scheme”, whereby German Jews could obtain temporary visas to come to the UK. Between November 1938 and September 1939 he worked 18-hour days signing every individual’s documents. It is estimated he saved over 48,000 lives. He died in 1976 and was posthumously awarded the Medal of British Heroes of the Holocaust in 2013.’

The plaque was dedicated at a ceremony in college that featured several readings and reflections by college Fellows, staff and students, with performances from the College Choir of the songs Shtiler, Shtiler (a song of the Vilna ghetto with melody composed by an 11-year-old boy) and Zot Nit Keyn Mol, a Yiddish song and anthem of Holocaust survivors inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.