[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 75 Spring 2022]
Germans against the Nazis
The treatment of Afghan refugees has revealed both the incompetence and the deep-lying racism of the British state. But there is nothing new here. While we should not draw parallels too closely, it can be illuminating to compare episodes from the past. So it is interesting to look at the way the British state responded to the arrivals of refugees from Nazi Germany after 1933.
Merilyn Moos has already written a good deal on the topic of anti-Nazi German exiles. Some readers may know her fascinating semi-autobiographical novel The Language of Silence [http://grimanddim.org/cultural-writings/2012- the-language-of-silence/ ] , her biography of her father Siegfried Moos [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beaten-ButNot-Defeated-Siegfried/dp/1782796770 ] and her book on anti-Nazi Germans written jointly with Steve Cushion. [https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/04/09/review-anti-nazigermans/ ]
Now she has published, on her website [http://anti-nazi-resistance.net/. ], no fewer than three more books on the subject. Merilyn is the daughter of two exiles from Nazi Germany who came here in the 1930s. She herself is very much English. Her parents never taught her German, and she has had to rely on comrades and friends for translations of German-language material. She doubtless cheered for England when they beat West Germany in the famous World Cup final of 1966. She has spent her life active in the British labour movement, in particular helping to build a rank-and-file current in NATFHE which laid the foundations for today's UCU Left. Few people know that her distinctive surname should be pronounced mow-ss (to rhyme with gross) and not “moose”.
But national identity is a complex thing in a globalised world and Merilyn has been fascinated with getting a better understanding of her origins. In the first of the three books, Anti-Nazi Exiles: German Socialists in Britain and their Shifting Alliances 1933-1945, she looks at the reception given to anti-Nazi exiles. As she makes clear it wasn't much of a welcome. The British authorities did their best to limit the number of Germans admitted, even though they faced persecution and death in their native land. Those who were allowed in were subjected to intensive surveillance – indeed the fact that we can know so much about them is partly a result of MI5 archives. Even when at war with Hitler's Germany the British state found the time and resources to scrutinise the activities of those who had risked their lives to oppose Hitler. They were followed and observed even when researching in the British Library. For a time they were interned on the Isle of Man. Some were deported to Alabama, where they were kept in a concentration camp alongside Nazi prisoners, which put them in considerable physical danger; some anti-Nazis were actually murdered by fellow-prisoners. The camp commander simply stated: “For me you are all Germans”.
All this makes sense in the context of the British war aims. Contrary to later myths and pretences Britain was not fighting a war against fascism. The British ruling class had been quite sympathetic to fascism, as was shown by the policy of “non-intervention” in the Spanish Civil War, which feared communism more than fascism, and by Churchill's publicly expressed admiration for Mussolini.
For a significant section of the British ruling class their support for the war took the form of what is often called Vansittartism. Robert Vansittart, a leading civil servant, claimed that Nazism was a natural outcome of the German national character; so all Germans were ultimately the same and German refugees were all suspect. This view even infected the Labour Party. Denis Healey described Labour's International Secretary, William Gillies, as a “cantankerous Scot who distrusted foreigners and hated all Germans”.
In fact, as Merilyn shows, there were many courageous anti-fascists among the German exiles – they were much more consistent anti-fascists than those who were running the British state. As she reminds us, it was only two decades since the 1918-23 period, when Germany had come close to the brink of working-class revolution. The many thousands who had been active in those mass struggles had not gone over to Nazism – on the contrary a great many remained active in the opposition to Hitler.
Merilyn does not romanticise the German left. There were deep political divisions which weakened the resistance and often revealed a serious misunderstanding as to who was the real enemy. The absurd line that Social Democrats were “social fascists” was only a few years in the past, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 caused confusion and unnecessary antagonisms. Beyond that, as Merilyn points out, there were the divisions that are all too familiar on the left: “The struggles amongst and between the different groupings were vicious. Old political enmities were not overcome despite their being in a foreign land and with a common enemy. People within the same group fell out disastrously with each other: mistrust flourished and old friendships terminated.”
Nonetheless she gives us a vivid picture of what the resistance to Hitler was able to achieve. Despite repression oppositional literature was circulated quite widely and she describes various means by which it was smuggled into Germany and circulated. 3 inches square newspapers were printed and distributed. A manifesto was got into Germany disguised as a promotional booklet for razor blades. One pamphlet was printed on specially thin paper that could be swallowed in an emergency. Railway workers deposited smuggled pamphlets in the sleeping cars of express trains; local activists pulled the pamphlets out when the train stopped.
The second volume, Hans Jahn: Biography of an Anti-Nazi Trade Unionist, deals with one individual, Hans Jahn. To my shame I had never heard of him; his remarkable story should be more widely known. Jahn was a central figure in organising the anti-Nazi underground struggle amongst railway workers. As Merilyn points out, the railways were indispensable to the Nazi regime: “the railways became the crucial transport for deportations as well as of military equipment. The railway carried Jews, political prisoners and others to the ghettoes and the camps, and shuttled soldiers and supplies to the front.” At the very beginning of the war he was involved in launching balloons from Luxembourg which carried leaflets into the occupied territories.
At the end of 1940 he came to Britain. In 1943 he helped to organise an international railway workers' conference in London. Amazingly in wartime conditions, it was attended by 46 trade unionists from fourteen European countries.
The third volume is German Anti-Nazis and the British Empire: The Special Operations Executive, Deserters from the German Army and Partisan Movements in Occupied Europe. It deals with German anti-Nazis who did not come to Britain, but who fought alongside British forces in various parts of the world. As Merilyn points out, this involved a clash of loyalties. Many anti-Nazis considered themselves revolutionaries; to agree to cooperate with the British imperialist state was a serious compromise, though one whose necessity they recognised.
Some German anti-Nazis had gone to fight on the republican side in Spain; when Franco triumphed they fled to France. Here I note one of the very few significant errors of fact in Merilyn's account. She writes that in April 1939, “many had fled to France where the Vichy Government quickly interned them, often in appalling conditions”. But this was over a year before the pro-Nazi Vichy regime was established. The (brutal) camps for veterans of the Spanish war were set up by the French Popular Front parliament, which had been elected with such high hopes only three years earlier.
Some of these German exiles went on to fight alongside British forces in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up to promote sabotage and subversion in enemy occupied territory. Here they were able to contribute to the British war effort.
But a conflict of loyalties came in Greece. As the war drew to a close, Churchill was more concerned to preserve British influence in Greece than to fight fascism. Some Germans had deserted from the Wehrmacht to fight alongside the Greek partisans. But then British forces were turned against the Greek anti-fascist partisans who were seen as having communist sympathies. This was too much for the German anti-Nazis, some of whom fought with the Greek partisans.
Merilyn only touches on developments after 1945; there is a whole further book to be written there. Some German anti-Nazis stayed in Britain; others returned to their now divided country, becoming either members of the ruling Communist Party in East Germany, or turning to the rightward-moving Social Democratic Party in the West. A few moved to the right. And as she also notes, some exNazis went to work for the American CIA. Within a few years everything would change. With NATO, Korea and the Cold War, West Germany had to be brought into the military alliance against the USSR. Vansittartism was forgotten; suddenly everything German was to be made attractive and West Germany welcomed into the ranks of Britain's allies.
If Vansittartism survived, it was in that home of lost causes, the British Communist Party. I remember attending a Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in about 1963 and being shocked to find it flooded with placards of the Young Communist League with the slogan “No German finger on the trigger”. I had been attracted by the generous internationalism of the nuclear disarmament movement, and was appalled by the suggestion that German nuclear weapons were somehow worse than British or American.
Merilyn is cautious about drawing parallels with the present but some are obvious. Thus we read of one German Jew who got to France from Italy “on an overcrowded fishing boat from which several passengers fell and drowned”. In her conclusion she warns of the dangers of the re-emergence of fascism, quoting Brecht: “The bitch that bore him is in heat again.” I am sceptical. There are some very unpleasant and dangerous trends in contemporary politics. But they may not lead to a rerun of fascism, but rather to something new and unprecedented if equally nasty.
But overall Merilyn has made a very useful contribution to our understanding of the Second World War. Her research, in the National Archives and elsewhere, is extensive and meticulous – even if one might have wished for a somewhat more orderly presentation. But there is much to be learned here, and these three books should be widely read and discussed.
Ian Birchall
