A very small group of anti-Nazis escaped to Britain and even fewer settled here. While around 55,000 people fled Germany in 1933 alone, only about 2000 came to the UK: Britain gained from Germany’s loss; amongst the refugees were a galaxy of leading scientists and many cultural figures. But, out of the roughly 10,000 political refugees who fled in 1933, probably only a few hundred active anti-Nazis of any political hue came here.
An interview with Prisoner Number 12,909
by Graeme Atkinson
first appeared in Searchlight No 281, November 1998
WERNER HÄNDLER was born in 1920 in Bismarckhütte, Upper Silesia, which became part of Poland under the terms of the post-First World War Versailles Treaty.… read on...
by Merilyn Moos
A figure who has received surprisingly little attention in the UK is Ernst Toller. (The honourable exception is Richard Dove’s ‘He was a German. A biography of Ernst Toller’, from which I draw.) Toller was a leading figure in the failed German revolution of 1918/19 and later became a strong campaigner in the UK against the Nazis.… read on...
by Irena Fick
It is well documented that Nazis who held high office during the Third Reich were reintegrated and continued to work as judges, in police forces, in the Foreign Office and in the secret service of the Federal Republic of Germany.… read on...
by Merilyn Moos
While it was not the subject of our book, we thought it would be interesting to note what happened to the anti-Nazis mentioned in our book, ‘Anti-Nazi Germans’, who fled Germany and ended up, even if temporarily, in the UK.… read on...
by Steve Cushion
I have been involved in producing 4 pamphlets with the Socialist History Society and Caribbean Labour Solidarity that roughly fall under the heading of “People’s History”. Today I want to look at how they fit with Howard Zinn’s approach.… read on...
Introduction
Although history does not repeat itself, the rise of popular ultra-right nationalist movements across Europe and Johnson’s various attempts to side-line Parliament, to label opponents as close to traitors to the nation (to be read as England), and to present himself as a man (sic) of the people, backed by a baying right-wing press, rings some nasty historical bells.… read on...
Writing about ones father can be problematic but Siege’s life has a significance: it coincided first with the tragic failure of the German revolution of 1918/19 and then the rise to power of the Nazis, events which framed the C20th. I am going to focus here on a group who are generally ignored by both historians and politicians: those who actively opposed the rise and early ascendency of Nazism in Germany and who then fled for their lives to Britain.… read on...
by Merilyn Moos
This paper is drawn from my interviews with twelve members of the second generation, that is the children of refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere, who settled in Britain, leaving family behind. It is also drawn from my own experience as I too am a member of the second generation.… read on...
I am going to start by talking about myself and how I came to call my semi-autobiographical novel: ‘The Language of Silence’.
I am the child of parents who fled Nazism in 1933, my father on the night of the Reichstag fire.… read on...
by Merilyn Moos
What is distinctive about the children of refugees from Nazism is the absence of memory. Although the Holocaust is now part of the understanding of the consequences of Nazism, the images and meanings are general. But the British second generation were told almost nothing about what had happened to their own grandparents and wider family.… read on...