How the Telegraph's Clare Hollingworth broke the news of World War II – and saved thousands from the Nazis

Up in my parents’ attic sits an old shipping trunk, plastered with foreign labels and stuffed with the leftover junk – remnants from the life of my great aunt Clare.

When I first began looking into her past, ahead of her 105th birthday last year (she sadly died on January 10 this year, at her home in Hong Kong, and today, on what would have been her 106th birthday, Google is dedicating its Doodle to her), I had assumed that I already knew all the main episodes in her action-packed century.

Clare Hollingworth, a former war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, is best known for getting the scoop of the century – the outbreak of the Second World War.

On August 29, 1939, 27-year-old Clare (29, if you believed her passport...) got her first front-page story in the Daily Telegraph. “1,000 tanks massed on Polish border,” shouted the headline, “ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke”. As a Telegraph colleague remarked later, there were in fact only nine divisions, but predicting the outbreak of the Second World War was still “not bad” for a cub reporter only three days into their first job in journalism.

Her long career with the paper would take in most of the major turning points of the 20th century – from El Alamein to Vietnam, from the Algerian civil war to China’s Cultural Revolution. But when I unlocked the trunk, I discovered an escapade that had hitherto been kept hidden.

Tucked inside a school-issue folder, I found a beautifully crafted certificate, handwritten in German, thanking Clare profusely for unspecified assistance rendered to a group of refugees in Poland in 1939. Also among the papers were two identity cards. One belonged to a woman in her late thirties, Waltraud Slansky, the other to a sallow-faced man by the name of Josef Pollak.

Both identities had been testified to by Clare and were countersigned and stamped by a British Consul General. What exactly had the young Clare done to warrant such a tribute?

When my great aunt published her autobiography, 26 years ago, it recounted most of the set-piece conflicts in her eventful life, but had little to explain what actually made her tick. It was, the Times Literary Supplement remarked, “a curiously impersonal book”, and contained only a passing reference to Clare’s charitable work in Poland, before she was taken on as a reporter by the Telegraph on the eve of the war.

But after much digging about in the National Archives, I discovered that Clare had in fact headed up an organisation that had saved a huge number of desperate souls – between two and three thousand – from the Nazis’ clutches.

It all began in September 1938 when Chamberlain’s fruitless “Peace for our Time” mission to Munich handed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region to Hitler. The Nazi takeover prompted frightened refugees to seek sanctuary abroad.

Many Brits were ashamed at Chamberlain’s appeasement, and new organisations sprung up to help the refugees, including the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), which in March 1939 urgently sought a volunteer for a daring mission. They needed someone to travel across Nazi Germany to the Polish port of Gdynia to rendezvous with a large party of high-risk refugees who were hurrying there from Prague.

Clare had a valid German visa in her passport, left over from a Christmas break in Kitzbühel, the Austrian ski resort popular both with wealthy Brits – among them the Prince of Wales and author Ian Fleming – as well as senior Nazis, due to its relative proximity to Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” retreat at Berchtesgaden. 

Already having a Nazi visa meant Clare could volunteer for the BCRC’s mercy mission, and she set off for Poland immediately. She was on the final leg of her mission, from Berlin to Poland’s Baltic coast, when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia. 

In Gdynia, 451 desperate men, women and their children awaited her. Most were known in Czechoslovakia as anti-Nazis – among them trade unionists, military men, writers and Jews, many who had previously fled Germany and Austria – and would have been high on Gestapo arrest lists. But without proper documents, tickets, funds or any guarantee of onward passage from Poland, many were in imminent danger of being sent back across the border into the waiting hands of the Nazis.

With her noted pushiness and ability for wrangling with officials, skills that would later stand her in very good stead as a foreign correspondent, Clare soon had the situation under control. The anxious and exhausted travellers were documented, housed, fed, and their onward passage from the port secured on foreign vessels.

But despite various promises of entry visas from sympathetic nations, Clare found that she was still two visas short, and so the unfortunate Zenker and Zimmerman, the final two names on her alphabetical list, were left behind. (Three days later, she secured papers for them, too.)

Her good deed done, Clare decided to remain in Poland to see what else she could do for the BCRC. In the south-western city of Katowice, refugees arrived each day from Czechoslovakia, seeking sanctuary at foreign consulates. Escaping from the Nazi “protectorate” was risky – they were frequently shot at from both sides of the border: by the Germans from whom they were fleeing, and by the Poles defending their frontier.

The British Consul General in Katowice was overwhelmed with applicants, and welcomed Clare’s assistance. She was soon interviewing 50 refugees a day, verifying their documents and their claims to British support. The BCRC already had secured prior visa approval for some prominent anti-Nazis who would be in particular danger. Clare was soon appointed the official BCRC representative in Poland, in charge of the welfare of over a thousand people at any one time, as they waited for approvals and hoped-for sea passages out, to ports from Scandinavia to South America, including Britain. 

The list of individuals who registered with BCRC and CRTF, the organisation that succeeded it, runs to more than 13,000 names; it includes a two-year-old named Madlena Koerbel, whose family escaped to resettle in the United States. Renamed Madeleine Albright, she would go on to become Secretary of State.

Around a quarter of those on the BCRC list escaped the Nazis thanks to the charity’s Katowice operation headed by Clare. As well as the two Poles whose identity cards I found in her trunk, she also secured passage for Richard Slansky, a Communist whose brother, Rudolf, later fell victim to Stalin witch-hunts and was executed following a show trial in the early 1950s.

Clare also helped Polish aristocracy to escape, notably Hans Heinrich XVII von Hochberg, a London-born Polish aristocrat who was the son of Daisy, Princess of Pless. In her autobiography, Clare recalls how Count Hochberg approached the British Consulate in Katowice for a visa, and when he was denied, “moaned a little and then said, ‘What a pity, as I was born in Berkeley Square and the King and Queen were my godfather and godmother’”.

Clare’s activities required a steady stream of frantic telegrams to London pleading for funds for food and lodging for the refugees’ upkeep. But they came at a time when concern was growing in Whitehall about the desirability of having so many German-speaking aliens arriving in Britain.

MI5 began an investigation into Clare’s past, and two officers, Dick White and Roger Hollis (who, coincidentally, would both go on to head MI5) arranged to interview her. Despite receiving high praise for her refugee work from the British ambassador to Poland, when in the summer of 1939 the BCRC was subsumed into a new organisation, Clare was not kept on; there were suspicions that the security services had blocked her re-appointment.

But no matter: back in London, she ran into the editor of the Daily Telegraph and convinced him to send her back to Poland as a stringer. Barely a week later, she filed a story about German tanks massing along the border…  

Back in the attic, I realised that the old trunk had opened a new window on Clare’s life. Inside she had stashed all of her greatest treasures – not jewels or works of art, but rather the tools and trappings of her trade; campaign medals, life-saving “laissez-passer” letters and accreditations, faded newspaper clippings, her “War Correspondent” epaulettes, dated permissions to be out after curfew, and a handful of torn and crumpled black and white prints from campaigns past.

She kept no family photographs or children’s drawings. Her entire life was defined by her work. To her, breaking news was all that really mattered.

Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, First of the Female War Correspondents, by Patrick Garrett, is published by Thistle (￡11.99, ebook ￡3.99). Twitter: @CelebrateClare