Monday Nov 1st 5.30pm Judy Meewezen 'Turtle Soup and Cato Street 1820'
Register for the seminar here:
https://www.history.ac.uk/events/turtle-soup-and-cato-street-1820
Cato St was an attempt to violently overthrow the Government in February 1820. It failed and in the Johnsonian version of British history is written off as the work of a few deluded conspirators. In fact, post Peterloo, it had considerable support.
The 200th anniversary in 2020 has sparked a considerable amount of new research of which Judy Meewezen’s historical novel 'Turtle Soup for the King: The Cato Street Chronicles' is an important part.
Peter Linebaugh wrote in Counterpunch:
The Cato Street Chronicles, to give the subtitle to this historical novel, is as fully faithful to the historical record as may be empirically possible. Based largely on the documentation of spies, police, informers, turncoats, and provocateurs, on the one hand, and on the other the documentation, of the trade union movement, the reform politicians, and radical press, an archive that was already censored or in peril of extinction.
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Monday Nov 15th 5.30pm Merilyn Moos 'German Socialists in Britain and their Shifting Alliances 1933-1945'
Register for the seminar here:
https://www.history.ac.uk/events/anti-nazi-germans-1933-45
Merilyn Moos will introduce her 3 books celebrating the lives and struggles of left-wing Germans who opposed the Nazis from exile. These may be freely downloaded below.
| Anti-Nazi Exiles | German Socialists in Britain and their Shifting Alliances 1933-1945 by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details… | |
| Hans Jahn | Biography of an Anti-Nazi Trade Unionist by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details… | |
| German Anti-Nazis and the British Empire | The Special Operations Executive, Deserters from the German Army and Partisan Movements in Occupied Europe by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details… |
The refugees Merilyn will be discussing almost all fled Germany as political activists, most from a working class background. They risked their lives again and again in Germany, often escaped arrest and probable death without knowing where they would end up.
Most survived. But, once in Britain, organising an anti-Nazi struggle became very difficult and there was much disagreement as to the best means. Merilyn will examine the details of a few of these refugees. One example is Hans Jahn, President of the German Railway Union. Faced with the Nazis’ attempt to break working class organisations, he tried to organise anti-Nazi resistance amongst railway workers, even when, later, he was exiled here. He was to say that “one of the greatest tragedies is that German unions did not fight to prevent Hitler taking power in 1933”.
More ferociously anti-Nazi than many at the time in the UK, some anti-Nazi German exiles risked their lives all over again in an often uneasy alliance with sections of the British military. Some worked with SOE. A small group, almost all of whom had fought in Spain, fled to France and then were sent by the French Government to camps in Algeria. They also ‘volunteered’ to fight with the British. Thousands of Germans were conscripted into the 999 ‘Death battalions’, a sub-section of the Wehrmacht, made up largely of political prisoners. Many of them either deserted to the partisans in Greece or clandestinely supported them. Upon the partisans' defeat, a few of the German deserters escaped to Albania and supported their partisans. The tensions within British policy between being anti-fascist and pro-imperialist, are sharply exposed during the Greek civil war when the German deserters who first were fighting with the partisans alongside the British against the Nazi forces, then fought with the partisans against the British.
It is a good time for such stories of courage and resistance to be heard.
