Margaret Reid (intelligence officer)
Margaret Grant Reid MBE (2 August 1912, Nottingham – 20 April 1974, Nottingham) was a British intelligence officer and consular official in Berlin and in Norway. She received the MBE for her work during the 1940 German invasion of Norway. She was a posthumous recipient of the British Hero of the Holocaust award as, in 1938 and 1939, she had saved Jewish lives by issuing documents that permitted people to travel from Nazi Germany.
Early life
[edit]Born in Nottingham on 2 August 1912, Margaret Grant Reid was a daughter of surgeon Alexander Christie Reid and Ellen Jane Shaw née Grant, a daughter of John Charles Grant, minister of St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Nottingham. She was educated at Nottingham Girls' High School and studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge, graduating in 1934.[1]
Berlin, 1938–39
[edit]Reid joined the Civil Service and, in 1938, was posted to the British Embassy in Berlin to work in the passport control office under Frank Foley. Reid arrived in Berlin shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the passport office was overwhelmed with applications for visas from Jewish families seeking to leave Germany. The embassy's passport control office issued visas that allowed thousands of Jews to emigrate. Reid often bent the rules for issuing visas; this was deliberately overlooked by the British Consul-General George Ogilvie-Forbes.[2][3]
Norway, 1939–40
[edit]After the United Kingdom declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, Reid and Frank Foley were transferred to the Legation in Oslo. After Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Foley, first secretary, and Reid, his private secretary and cipher clerk, withdrew from Oslo on 9 April 1940 and travelled north to Lillehammer, then to Åndalsnes. Before leaving Oslo, Foley and Reid burned the documents in the UK legation. Foley had a radio transmitter that allowed Norway's commander-in-chief, General Otto Ruge to maintain communication with London, independent of Norwegian landlines. Reid was a cipher expert who coded the messages sent to Britain. As the codebooks had been destroyed, she laboriously used the MI6 emergency code, a book cipher based on an 1865 edition of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.[4][5][6] Foley and Reid were evacuated by the Royal Navy from Molde on HMT Ulster Prince on 1 May.[7][8][9]
Reid was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for "her gallantry and devotion to duty during the evacuation from Norway" in the 1941 Birthday Honours,[10] and she received the Norwegian Krigsmedaljen (War Medal) in 1942.[11]
Later life and legacy
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In 1942 she married Lt Col. Edward Cuthbert de Renzy Martin, a MI6 section head; both died in 1974.[citation needed]
Her journal from the Norwegian campaign is held by the Imperial War Museum[8] and was published in Norway in 1980.[7] Other papers are in the University of Leeds.[12]
In January 2018 both Reid and George Ogilvie-Forbes were recipients of the British Hero of the Holocaust award for saving Jewish lives.[2][3] Frank Foley was one of the first recipients in 2010. The Association of Jewish Refugees unveiled a plaque to honour the consular officials at the British Embassy in Berlin on 12 May 2020.[13]
References
[edit]- ^ Nottingham Journal 25 July 1942, page 4
- ^ a b Eytan Halon (28 January 2018). "Britain honors eight Holocaust 'heroes' for saving Jewish lives". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 9 May 2019.
Another recipient was Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, the Chargé d'Affaires at the British Embassy in Berlin from 1937-1939, who deliberately turned a blind eye to the issuing of the visas.
- ^ a b "Britain honours its Holocaust heroes". UK Government. 23 January 2018. Retrieved 3 July 2019.
Margaret Reid who worked in the Passport Control Office of the Berlin Embassy and issued visas that allowed thousands of Jews to emigrate. She often bent the rules for issuing visas, a practice that was deliberately overlooked by the British Consul-General Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, another recipient of the award.
- ^ Haarr, Geirr H. (2010). The Battle for Norway: April–June 1940. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-59114-051-1.
All codebooks had been destroyed before the legation in Oslo was evacuated on the morning of 9 April. Margaret Reid used an emergency code based on the book Sesame and Lilies with letter codes referring to page, paragraph, sentence, word and letter in that particular book.
- ^ Kramish, Arnold (2019). The Griffin: The Greatest Untold Espionage Story of World War II. Houghton Mifflin. p. 23. ISBN 0-395-36318-7.
The code used by Frank Foley and Margaret Reid during the retreat from Oslo was classic. An obscure book — in April 1940 the choice was Sesame and Lilies — is selected by the coders and decoders. Each letter of the message is described by three numbers that identify the page of the book, the line of that page and the position of the enciphered letter in that line.
- ^ Smith, Michael (2011). The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war. Biteback Publishing. ISBN 9780752221892.[page needed]
- ^ a b Reid, Margaret and Leif C. Rolstad (1980): April 1940: en krigsdagbok. Margaret Reids dagbok. Gyldendal forlag ISBN 978-82-05-12148-5[page needed]
- ^ a b "Private Papers of Miss M G Reid". Imperial War Museums. Retrieved 7 September 2023.
- ^ "ADMIRALTY WAR DIARIES of WORLD WAR 2 - ADM 199/427 HOME FLEET DESTROYER COMMAND - 1 March to 30 September 1940". naval-history.net. Retrieved 8 September 2023.
TARTAR and S.S. ULSTER PRINCE secured alongside Molde wharf at 2300 and embarked the base staff and other military details, proceeding at 0010, 1st May. No enemy aircraft had been sighted and the embarkation proceeded unhindered.
- ^ "No. 35184". The London Gazette (Supplement). 6 June 1941. p. 3292.
Miss Margaret Reid. For her gallantry and devotion to duty during the evacuation from Norway; now employed in a Department under the Foreign Office.
- ^ "Offisielt fra statsråd 19. juni 1942".
- ^ "Letters and papers of Margaret Grant Reid, mainly relating to the retreat from Oslo in 1940 and family life in war-time Britain". University of Leeds Library. Retrieved 7 September 2023.
- ^ "AJR unveils commemorative plaque at the British Embassy in Berlin". Holocaustremembrance.com. Association of Jewish Refugees. Retrieved 7 September 2023.