The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust 3030559319, 9783030559311

Table of contents :
: Preface
Untitled
: Contents
: List of Contributors
: List of Figures
1 Britain and the Holocaust: An Introduction
Britain and the Holocaust
The ‘Holocaust’ in Britain
Reading This Volume
Conclusion
Part I Political Contexts
2 British Interwar Fascism and Anti-fascism
Proto-fascists and Parafascists
The Emergence of the British Union of Fascists
The BUF and Antisemitism: Challenging a Consensus
The East End Campaign and Anti-fascism
New Directions
3 The Agenda of British Refugee Policy, 1933–48
Context and Priorities
Pre-war Policy
Wartime Policy
The Response to the Holocaust
Post-war Policy
Conclusion
Part II Refugees in Britain: 1933–39
4 The Immigration and Reception of Jewish Refugees from the Third Reich
The Preconditions for Emigration to Britain
Emigration to Britain from the Third Reich, 1933–38
Emigration to Britain from the Third Reich, 1938–39
5 ‘I Remember Their Labels Round Their Necks’ Britain and the Kindertransport
Part III War and Holocaust
6 Knowledge in Britain of the Holocaust During the Second World War
Chronology of Knowledge
The Structured and Regular Arrival of Information
The Role of Information Gatekeepers
Explaining Response
Conclusion
7 The Unlikely Tale of a Hero Named Coward: Uncomfortable Truths and the Necessary War
Coward the Hero
The Evolution of Coward’s Story
Coward at the I.G. Farben Trial
The Password Is Courage
Coward in Context
Conclusion
8 Belsen and the British
The Military at Belsen
Medical Care After Liberation
‘the Search in Belsen’
Belsen as a Death Camp
Part IV Punishment and Memory
9 ‘Where, Exactly, Is Auschwitz?’ British Confrontation with the Holocaust Through the Medium of the 1945 ‘Belsen’ Trial
Initial Encounters with Belsen
Justice Delayed
Investigating Belsen
The Trial
The Belsen Verdicts
Conclusion
10 Campaigning for Justice: Anti-Fascist Campaigners, Nazi-Era Collaborator War Criminals and Britain’s Failure to Prosecute, 1945–1999
Nuremberg Trials and European Volunteer Workers
The Holocaust and Shifting Public Consciousness
Anti-Fascism and the War Crimes Campaign of the 1980s
Prosecuting the Accused
Conclusions: A Failure of Memory
11 Selective Histories: Britain, the Empire and the Holocaust
Selective History in British Memory
European Continuities of Violence
Extreme Violence in the British Empire
Concluding Remarks
Part V Cultural Representations
12 Beyond the Cesspit Beneath: The BBC and the Holocaust
13 British Cinema and the Holocaust
Belsen and the Liberated Camps
From the Postwar Period to the 1970s: Traces, Fragments and Co-financing
Into the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion
14 British Holocaust Literature
War-Crimes Trials
The Kindertransport
The Occupation of the Channel Islands
Testimony
Poetry
The Novel
Conclusion
Part VI The Holocaust in British Society
15 A Defining Decade? Swastikas, Eichmann and Arson in 1960s Britain
The “Swastika Epidemic”
A Far Right, or Another Conspiracy?
Eichmann
Synagogue Arson
Conclusion: A Defining Decade?
16 The Legacy of the Holocaust, Jewish History and British Antisemitism: The ‘Jew Murderer’ and the Murder of the Jews
17 ‘I Belong Here. I Know I Ought Never to Have Come Back, Because It Has Proved I’ve Never Been Away’: Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Documentaries of Return
The Evolution of Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Holocaust Testimony
Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Documentaries of Return
Part VII Public Pedagogy
18 Holocaust Education in England: Concerns, Controversies and Challenges
Teachers’ and Students’ Knowledge and Understanding of the Holocaust
Accounting for Limitations in Teachers’ and Students’ Knowledge and Understanding
Implications for Commemoration, Memory and Education
Final Thoughts: Securing the History and Memory of the Holocaust
19 Holocaust Representation in the Imperial War Museum, 2000–2020
The Imperial War Museum, the IWMHE, and Discourses of National Identity
Narrating the Holocaust in the IWMHE
Conclusion
20 Negotiating Memory and Agency: David Cesarani and the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition (2000)
A Public Appeal: Bringing the Holocaust Home
‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’
The Exhibition’s Opening Foyer: Defining the Holocaust
The Upper Floor: Tinkering at the Edges
The Lower Floor: The War Versus the Holocaust
Towards a Conclusion
Part VIII Institutional Memory
21 From Celebrating Diversity to British Values: The Changing Face of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain
Establishment and Early Years
HMD and Other Genocides
Changing the Agenda?
Conflict, Genocide and British Identity
From Active Citizenship to British Values 2010-Present
Conclusion
22 Visions of Permanence, Realities of Instability: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission and the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation
A Brief History of the Project to Date
One: Between the International and National
Two: Between the Unique and the Permeable
Three: Between Jewish and Non-Jewish Meaning
Four: Between the Memorial/Learning Centre and Its Surroundings
Conclusion
Part IX Postscript
23 Britishness, Brexit, and the Holocaust
‘New’ Labour, ‘New Britishness’
The Holocaust and Britishness in Labour’s Second and Third Terms
Institutionalising British Values and Commissioning Holocaust Memory
Brexit, Identity and Democracy
Britishness, the Holocaust, and ‘Democracy’
Coda
Index

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust Edited by Tom Lawson · Andy Pearce

The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust

Tom Lawson · Andy Pearce Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust

Editors Tom Lawson Northumbria University Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

Andy Pearce UCL Institute of Education London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-55931-1 ISBN 978-3-030-55932-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Christopher Hope-Fitch/GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This collection of essays entered into its final stages of collation and production in early 2020. At that time, the news cycle in Britain continued to be dominated by Brexit. The newly formed Conservative government, buoyant after a resounding victory in the General Election of December 2019, quickly moved through Parliament the necessary legislation that would enable its leader and Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to claim that he had ‘got’ ‘Brexit done’. On 31 January 2020, as a giant digital clock projected onto the front of 10 Downing Street completed its countdown to 11 pm—the moment at which Britain formally left the European Union and entered into a transition period—those inside watched Johnson ceremoniously bang a handheld gong in jubilant celebration. Hours earlier, Public Health England (PHE) announced it was ‘urgently trying to trace’ anyone who had possibly come into contact with two individuals who had tested positive for the novel coronavirus—which, by then, had already spread to 22 countries outside of China. As part of that announcement, the Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, sought to reassure the public that, though this news was unwelcome, the matter was in hand: ‘we have been preparing for UK cases’, Whitty said, ‘and we have robust infection control measures in place to respond immediately’. ‘The NHS’, Whitty asserted, ‘is extremely well prepared’.1 What happened next over the subsequent four months will be the subject of scrutiny, analysis, and lament for many years, and perhaps decades to come. The coronavirus pandemic which ravaged the world in 2020 had a particularly devastating impact in Britain. Arguably, failures in government were many and multiple: from specific errors in policy to mistaken approaches to public communications, all of which appears to have led to at least a breakdown in trust between government and the governed. With tens of thousands 1 Sarah

Boseley and Amy Walker, ‘Hunt begins for “close contacts” of the two UK coronavirus cases’, The Guardian, 31 January 2020.

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PREFACE

of deaths, hundreds of thousands of infections, and millions of lives dislocated by the process of shutting down daily life in order to suppress the virus, the coronavirus exacted a toll on British social, cultural, and economic life which will only truly become apparent to a future generations of historians. Even so, the upheavals, rupture, and sheer human tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 have been such that it can be described as an event of considerable historical significance. For those of us who have lived through it, experiences were on the one hand shaped by factors like class, locale, occupation and family circumstances, and on the other by totally contingent forces such as coming into arbitrary contact with infected people, the amount of viral load in any exposure to the virus, the response of our immune systems, and our access to medical supplies and foodstuffs. In the face of a virus that we still know very little about, but which has completely overthrown Twenty-First Century ways of life, fears and uncertainties about what happens next inevitably bring about recalibrations in how we understand the relationship between past, present and the future. It says much, then, that in Britain the disorientation brought forth by the pandemic has been met in some quarters by a renewal of the nostalgic tendencies of the late Twentieth century. Whilst the likes of Prime Minister Johnson and the Queen have spoken in the cultural currency of the Second World War,2 sections of the media have doubled-down on imaginings of the past. As the Daily Telegraph put it in an opinion piece to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day in May 2020: during the coronavirus, the Prime Minister has been compared to Churchill, the lockdown to the Blitz, and the medical battle to Dunkirk. The search for historical analogy can result in inaccuracy; some historians find it irritating…But the past is the only roadmap we have: we don’t know the future and the present is clouded in fog, so we look backwards at where we’ve come from and draw lessons from what we can find. We return again and again to the Second World War because it was not only a formative experience but a moral one.3

Such recourse to memories of the Second World War would not surprise the contributors to this volume. Nor is it likely that the contributors would significantly alter the arguments they forward in light of the coronavirus pandemic. That being said, it is possible that some of the scholars gathered here may have taken a slightly different tack they were writing today. Moreover, whilst the substantive content of this collection still very much holds, the foundational shifts of 2020 do inevitably impact its complexion for a book which 2 Richard

Vaughan, ‘VE Day Celebrations’, iNews, 8 May 2020. Available: https:// inews.co.uk/news/ve-day-celebrations-boris-johnson-veterans-spirit-of-endeavour-425980. (Accessed 25 June 2020); BBC News, ‘The Queen’s coronavirus address’, 5 April 2020. Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52174772/the-queen-s-coronavirus-add ress-we-will-meet-again. (Accessed 25 June 2020). 3 ‘The

Second World War is Britain’s roadmap’, Daily Telegraph, 2 May 2020.

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works to contextualise the history of Britain and the Holocaust is unavoidably itself a product of its own historical context. Two further developments warrant noting in this regard. The first is that over the course of compiling this book, there has been a veritable growth in far-right politics across the Western world. This development has no singular genesis, but there have been significant milestone events. These have included the outcome of the UK referendum on the European Union and the election of Donald Trump in 2016; electoral success for groups such as the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Law and Justice party in Poland; and a general upsurge of right-wing populism, partly in the wake of the European migrant crises since 2015. As K. Biswas put it in February 2020, ‘once the far right was anathema. Now it is routine. Born outside the mainstream, its parties now operate as a powerful political force, pushing public debate and often government policy across the continent. How did this happen?’4 It is axiomatic of course to tie an upturn in the fortunes of the far right with economic crises. In this respect, the economic instability wrought by the coronavirus pandemic and the virtual certainty of severe economic depression on the horizon carries a looming portent for what may be to come. But the connections between the far right and the coronavirus extends beyond the possibility of support for the former increasing because of the financial instabilities caused by the latter. As Europe reeled from the initial wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, various observers indicated that those on the right of the political spectrum were ‘exploiting the coronavirus crisis to push their anti-minority agendas and win new support’.5 This included promoting conspiracy theories, which were quickly becoming enmeshed with a much broader ‘infodemic’ of fake news and misinformation stoked, in many cases, by leading populist statesmen and their surrogates.6 At the time of penning this Preface, the far right remains—in most democracies—outside the corridors of power. But at a more ephemeral, cultural level, the coronavirus pandemic has certainly helped to bring about a situation where the discourse that they look to shape and deal in has become increasingly mainstream. Escalating ethnic tension and social divisions do not of course furrow the way for state-sponsored persecution or continental genocide, but the atmosphere which is brought with and by them can—and does—lead to political 4 K.

Biswas, ‘How the Far Right Became Europe’s New Normal’, The New York Times, 4 February 2020.

5 Jamie

Doward, ‘Far right hijack coronavirus crisis to push agenda and boost support’, The Guardian, 25 April 2020.

6 Miranda

Christou, ‘Is the radical right spreading coronavirus?’, Open Democracy, 4 May 2020, available: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/rad ical-right-spreading-coronavirus/. (Accessed 25 June 2020); Nadia Naffi, Ann-Louise Davidson, Houda Jawhar, ‘5 ways to help stop the “infodemic”’, The Conversation, 21 May 2020, available: https://theconversation.com/5-ways-to-help-stop-the-infodemic-theincreasing-misinformation-about-coronavirus-137561. (Accessed 25 June 2020).

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crises which undermine collective security and increase the risk of inculcating hatreds and violence. This brings us to the second contemporary development that demands mention—that being, the global explosion in late May 2020 of protests and demonstrations against racial injustice. The tinderbox moment was the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota: an African American who, after being arrested by police, died after an arresting officer placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 min 46s—despite Floyd’s protestations that ‘I cannot breathe’. The death of Floyd was but the latest in a long line of incidents of police brutality towards African Americans in the United States, yet the response that followed was wholly unprecedented. In America, demonstrations spontaneously spread from city to city, as Floyd’s murder became the focal point for broader grievances at racial inequality. These protests rapidly acquired an edge—in part, because numerous authorities employed heavyhanded tactics to try and suppress them. With the world watching events unfold, protestors used their mobile phones to document repeated instances of unsolicited violence by police. Perhaps the most dramatic of these came in Washington D.C. in late May, when police officers and the National Guard used flash bang explosions and tear gas to disperse protestors gathered in Layfette Square—a public park—adjacent to the White House. The purpose, it emerged, was to allow President Trump to walk through the park in order to have his photograph taken by a Church damaged during the protests.7 The level of unrest in the United States could be gauged by how some 2000 towns and cities had seen protests and demonstrations by mid-June, with many imposing curfews and enlisting the support of the National Guard. Though the demonstrations originated within the African American community, they soon became a lightning rod for people generally disillusioned by racism in America and disaffected by broader developments in the country. Importantly tensions were further stoked by the response of right-wing media outlets and sections of the far right, who sought to depict the protestors as a threat to law and order. The authoritarian response of the Trump administration only served to further galvanise the movement, with Trump attempting to depict the unrest as the work of insurgent, left-wing anti-fascists. The Floyd protests began as a ‘local’ concern and saw anger around issues of race merge with wider dissatisfaction with the Federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and growing economic dislocation. What was most significant, perhaps, was that this movement quickly became transnational. Soon after protests began in North America, demonstrations—initially of sympathy—took place in other cities around the world. The phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’—taken from the name of one of the organizing movements

7 Katie

Rogers, ‘Protestors dispersed with tear gas so Trump could pose at Church’, New York Times, 1 June 2020.

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involved in the protests—became a global clarion call for demonstrators advocating racial justice, with the act of ‘taking a knee’ in peaceful protest against racism its visual equivalent.8 The ‘international clamour for racial equality’ which swept across the world in the early summer of 2020, found different forms of expression and different degrees of success from country to country—reflecting, in the words of David Pilling, how ‘what people have seen in the mirror held up by the Black Lives Matter movement has varied greatly, depending on which side of the history of slavery, police brutality and racial intolerance they are on’.9 In Britain, where the skeletons of Empire and the booty of the slave trade have been long unacknowledged ghosts in the machine, the impact was varied. At one end of the spectrum, the movement found dramatic, grass-roots expression in Bristol when protestors pulled down a statue erected to the slave trader Edward Colston before pushing it into the harbour waters. At the other, the government response to the groundswell of public emotion was somehow characteristically ‘British’: Prime Minister Johnson announced the creation of a cross-party commission into racial inequality, at the same time as asserting that people ‘need to…focus less on the symbols of discrimination or whatever’.10 Whilst the first of these measures was decried for how it duplicated previous enquiries and amounted to policy ‘written on the back of a fag packet’,11 the sophistry of Johnson’s argument was laid bare by his erroneous claims that protestors were trying to tear down a statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, and the decision to board up the statue to protect it during an organized demonstration.12 For some, Johnson’s policy amounted to little more than a barely concealed attempt at a new culture war designed, in effect, to draw attention away from his government’s failings during the pandemic.13 This may well be true, but his government’s rhetoric in response to the Black Lives Matter movement betrayed—amongst other things—a skewed understanding of what history and memory are and are not. Contrary to Johnson’s claim that to remove statues of

8 ‘Black

Lives Matter: Where does “taking a knee” come from?’, BBC News, 18 June 2020. Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53098516. (Accessed 25 June 2020).

9 David

Pilling, ‘“Everybody has their eyes on America”: Black Lives Matter goes global’, Financial Times, 21 June 2020.

10 Katie Devlin and Lizzy Buchan, ‘Black Lives Matter: Boris Johnson says “focus less on symbols”’, Independent, 19 June 2020. Available: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ uk/politics/boris-johnson-black-lives-matter-racism-protests-statues-swing-low-sweet-cha riot-a9575416.html. (Accessed 25 June 2020). 11 Peter Walker, ‘Johnson’s racism inquiry plan “written on the back of a fag packet”, says Lammy’, The Guardian, 15 June 2020. 12 Boris Johnson, ‘Rather than tear some people down we should build others up’, The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2020. 13 Robert

Shrimsley, ‘Boris Johnson cannot hide incompetence with culture wars’, Financial Times, 22 June 2020.

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controversial historical figures is ‘to lie about our history’,14 official narratives of British history (of which national monuments and memorials are an integral part) are, like all nation-states, consciously constructed so as to legitimise and legitimate a particular reading of the past. Accordingly, a movement which seeks to contest the nature and form of that past is not to be understood as an exercise in erasure, but rather as an attempt to engage and participate in its (re)construction. For a book such as this, which is concerned with history, with memory, and how these entities intersect and interweave, the Black Lives Matter movement has salience for how it has surfaced fault-lines and battlegrounds in Britain’s historical culture. Opening up national history to public review and debate is to be welcomed, but it is not a cost-free endeavour or one without risk. With both this and the subject matter of this book in mind, it is all the more troubling to see how movements to highlight historic racism in Britain have found their counterpoint in the actions of far-right groups. Though attempts within the far-right to mobilise so as to ‘protect’ statues from anti-racism protestors have not (as yet) led to large-scale confrontations and unrest, indications that this is animating both ‘cultural nationalists’ and ‘the moderate members of the public’ clearly demand close attention.15 Seen in this register, the cultural discourse around the past, the present and the future that some public figures are currently attempting to shape, becomes even more important. The same also applies to the role and responsibilities of academics, researchers, and educators. As this book rolls off the printing press it emerges into a world presently enveloped in uncertainty and wracked with insecurity. Whilst it cannot hope (and certainly does not attempt) to alleviate these issues, by prizing knowledge, understanding, and criticality it can— modestly—aspire to leave the reader more informed and more able to engage with the history and memory of Britain and the Holocaust specifically, and with the workings of the past and the present more generally. The debates about the way in which we engage with the past, and in particular with racism in the past, that the Black Lives Matter protests have sparked may themselves impact profoundly on the way the history and memory of the Holocaust is written and read in Britain. It may well be that when Colston fell everything changed. In the future we may look back on that as the moment which began a British coming to terms with the role of race, and racial violence in its past. Our volume suggests ways in which such a reckoning might impact our ways of engaging with the Holocaust. Such a discourse should certainly radically alter the ways the Holocaust is understood. Or it may well be that when Colston fell nothing changed. Britain’s memorial landscape may remain 14 Peter Walker, Alexandra Topping and Steven Morris, ‘Boris Johnson says removing statues is “to lie about our history”’, The Guardian, 12 June 2020. 15 Lizzie Dearden, ‘How the UK’s far right is trying to capitalise on the statues row’, The Independent, 12 June 2020.

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the same and the ghosts of imperial violence may return to the shadows. In which case the memory and meaning of the Holocaust will itself be unaffected. Whatever turns out to be the case, and the latter seems unlikely, we as scholars have been impacted by the extraordinary events of the first half of 2020 and this book needs to be read in that context. The future appears radically uncertain, and we hope that the essays brought together here demonstrate that the past is no more secure. London, UK Morpeth, UK

Andy Pearce Tom Lawson

Contents

1

Britain and the Holocaust: An Introduction Tom Lawson and Andy Pearce

Part I

1

Political Contexts

2

British Interwar Fascism and Anti-fascism Daniel Tilles

37

3

The Agenda of British Refugee Policy, 1933–48 Louise London

57

Part II Refugees in Britain: 1933–39 4

5

The Immigration and Reception of Jewish Refugees from the Third Reich Anthony Grenville

75

‘I Remember Their Labels Round Their Necks’ Britain and the Kindertransport Andrea Hammel

93

Part III 6

War and Holocaust

Knowledge in Britain of the Holocaust During the Second World War Michael Fleming

115

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CONTENTS

7

The Unlikely Tale of a Hero Named Coward: Uncomfortable Truths and the Necessary War Russell Wallis

8

Belsen and the British Dan Stone

Part IV 9

10

11

153

Punishment and Memory

‘Where, Exactly, Is Auschwitz?’ British Confrontation with the Holocaust Through the Medium of the 1945 ‘Belsen’ Trial Caroline Sharples Campaigning for Justice: Anti-Fascist Campaigners, Nazi-Era Collaborator War Criminals and Britain’s Failure to Prosecute, 1945–1999 Siobhán Hyland and Paul Jackson Selective Histories: Britain, the Empire and the Holocaust Michelle Gordon

Part V

135

181

201

219

Cultural Representations

12

Beyond the Cesspit Beneath: The BBC and the Holocaust James Jordan

243

13

British Cinema and the Holocaust Barry Langford

261

14

British Holocaust Literature Sue Vice

281

Part VI 15

The Holocaust in British Society

A Defining Decade? Swastikas, Eichmann and Arson in 1960s Britain Nigel Copsey

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CONTENTS

16

17

The Legacy of the Holocaust, Jewish History and British Antisemitism: The ‘Jew Murderer’ and the Murder of the Jews Tony Kushner ‘I Belong Here. I Know I Ought Never to Have Come Back, Because It Has Proved I’ve Never Been Away’: Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Documentaries of Return Isabel Wollaston

Part VII 18

19

20

22

347

Public Pedagogy

367

Holocaust Representation in the Imperial War Museum, 2000–2020 Hannah Holtschneider

389

Negotiating Memory and Agency: David Cesarani and the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition (2000) Chad McDonald

Visions of Permanence, Realities of Instability: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission and the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation David Tollerton

429

449

Postscript

Britishness, Brexit, and the Holocaust Andy Pearce

Index

405

Institutional Memory

From Celebrating Diversity to British Values: The Changing Face of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain Kara Critchell

Part IX 23

325

Holocaust Education in England: Concerns, Controversies and Challenges Stuart Foster

Part VIII 21

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469

507

List of Contributors

Nigel Copsey School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK Kara Critchell University of Chester, Chester, UK Michael Fleming Polish University Abroad, London, UK Stuart Foster UCL Institute of Education, London, UK Michelle Gordon The Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Anthony Grenville University of London, London, UK Andrea Hammel Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK Hannah Holtschneider University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Siobhán Hyland University of Northampton, Northampton, UK Paul Jackson University of Northampton, Northampton, UK James Jordan University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Tony Kushner History Southampton, UK

Department,

University

of

Southampton,

Barry Langford Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK Tom Lawson Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Louise London Honorary Research Fellow, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK Chad McDonald University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Andy Pearce UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Caroline Sharples University of Roehampton, London, UK Dan Stone Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK Daniel Tilles Pedagogical University of Krakow, Krakow, Poland David Tollerton Exeter, UK Sue Vice University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK Russell Wallis Independent Scholar, Hertfordshire, UK Isabel Wollaston University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Supplement to British Zone Review, 13 October 1945 ‘Convoy of political prisoners 4.4.45’, from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen (5.3.3/84619448_1, ITS DAWL)

159 173

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CHAPTER 1

Britain and the Holocaust: An Introduction Tom Lawson and Andy Pearce

The Holocaust has become central to Britain’s historical memory. It is the only specific subject which all of our children will learn about in their school history lessons for example. The government directly funds projects that enable thousands of school children to visit Poland and learn the ‘lessons from Auschwitz’ every year. There is a Holocaust gallery in the Imperial War Museum, which is as close as Britain comes to a national history museum. Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated with increasing intensity each year and again is directly funded by government; and now all political parties are committed to the funding and building of a Holocaust memorial to stand next to the Houses of Parliament at the centre of our democracy. As historians of the Holocaust, we believe there is much that is commendable in the role that the Holocaust has come to play in our national life. However, we are also concerned that the Holocaust story we are telling ourselves and our children is not as complex as it might be and especially that it does not always reflect as critically as it might do on Britain’s own national past. This volume of essays seeks to do that critical work, by reflecting both upon the presence of the Holocaust in the British past and indeed accounting for the role that the Holocaust plays in the British present. T. Lawson (B) Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Pearce UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_1

1

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T. LAWSON AND A. PEARCE

And let us be in no doubt, the past matters in the present. In 2020 we may be at the beginning of a new era in the history of public discussion of the past in Britain. The violence of Britain’s imperial history, in particular the central role that slaves, slavery and the slave-trade played in the shaping of modern Britain, is at the forefront of public discourse. A crowd inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, but protesting against enduring racial inequalities in Britain, tore down the statue of Edward Colston whose riches were earned from slaves and which built much of the city of Bristol in which the statue stood. The statue of Cecil Rhodes outside Oriel College, Oxford may follow, and the Mayor has launched a review of the memorial landscape of London. What is clear from the protests and the commentary surrounding them, however, is that different constituencies and communities take sharply divergent views about who or what is commemorated in our present and the picture it paints of who we are. Why in that context are we concerned about the presence of the Holocaust in our present? Debates around memorials to slavers see some concerned that the memory of the victims is forgotten by statues of men like Colston. The memory of the victims of the Holocaust is alive, so put colloquially—just what is the problem? Let us begin with a discussion of the most recent developments and initiatives around Holocaust memory in the UK in an effort to flesh out some of the problems we perceive. In September 2014 the editors of this volume visited 10 Downing Street to give evidence to the then Prime Minister David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission. Cameron had established the commission in order to ‘investigate what further measures should be taken to ensure Britain has a permanent and fitting memorial to the Holocaust, along with sufficient education and research resources for future generations’. Such an exercise was, according to the terms of reference under which the commission was set up, necessary because ‘The Holocaust is unique in man’s inhumanity to man and it stands alone as the darkest hour of human history’. The terms of reference also insisted that any proposals would ‘include a clear focus on the role that Britain played through, for example, the Kindertransport [and] the liberation of Bergen-Belsen’.1 There seemed much that was problematic in the Commission’s founding assumptions, and a group of scholars, teachers and museum professionals (of which we were part) wrote to the commission to raise our concerns. We wrote: The Terms of Reference … make a number of assertions that are out of step with current research and debate. Statements such as the ‘Holocaust is unique’ and represents the ‘darkest hour of human history’ may adequately reflect the horror that we feel in response to this set of events, but they do not articulate the complexity of the Holocaust’s history or its legacy. The foundational idea 1 ‘The

Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission: Terms of Reference’, available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/275198/Terms-of-Reference-PM-Holocaust-Commission.pdf.

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of Holocaust ‘uniqueness’, for example, is at odds with much scholarly thinking and it seems unfortunate to found an educational initiative on an assumption that is contested and highly partisan. This is especially the case when we note that the Terms of Reference take for granted that the term the Holocaust has a fixed and universal meaning. It does not. The Commission must therefore make an effort to define what it means by the Holocaust. Does this term refer only to the genocide of the Jews, or to other Nazi genocides (of the Roma and Sinti for example), and/or the regime’s mass crimes against many other victim groups? If the Holocaust is extended to include all of these groups then important differences can be overlooked; if the term is used exclusively to mean the genocide of the Jews then the crimes against other groups may go unacknowledged. It is only when the Commission has adequately confronted the question of what the Holocaust was that it will be able to confront the equally difficult question of what it has become and why we need to remember. We are also concerned that the Terms of Reference seem to make assumptions which perpetuate common myths and misconceptions as to Britain’s response to the Holocaust. There has been a great deal of research into pre-war and wartime refugee policy for example, and it is not at all clear that programmes such as the Kindertransport were representative of British reactions to the Holocaust, especially at the level of government policy. If the Holocaust Commission is to be a success then it must make an effort to review and represent the full range of British experiences and responses, including those we would perhaps prefer not to remember, and not just those we can remember positively. This is particularly important given the complexity and diversity of what constitutes Britain and Britishness today, and therefore of the audiences the Commission seeks to reach.2

As a result of the letter, we were invited to meet with the commissioners to discuss our concerns more fully. In the course of our meeting in Downing Street that September, one of the commissioners became evidently exasperated with our scepticism about the worth of their project. They demanded that we imagined ‘what it would say about us as a nation’ if we had a national Holocaust memorial, what it would say about our values, our morality if we placed a Holocaust memorial at the centre of our national life in order to state loudly and clearly never again. And that is what the Holocaust Commission recommended—a Holocaust memorial in the very heart of London, encapsulated as ‘Britain’s Promise to Remember’. Planning consent for that memorial is now being sought and it will be built next to the Houses of Parliament in Victoria Gardens. Some of the objections to the planned memorial involve it overshadowing, ironically, the anti-slavery memorial currently in the Gardens. There is little sign that the concerns we raised have been addressed in the proposals thus far. Take for example our concern that the uncomfortable aspects of Britain’s response to the Holocaust be fully investigated and acknowledged. The commission’s report did recognize that ‘Britain’s story 2 Extract

from a letter sent to the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission, 12 May 2014. In possession of the Editors.

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T. LAWSON AND A. PEARCE

was not wholly positive’ because ‘Britain, like most democratic governments in Europe, turned a blind eye to the growing persecution in Germany’. Yet it passed over these concerns quickly stating that ‘it is easy to make judgment in hindsight’ before using Ian Austin’s (former Labour and then independent MP) words to incorporate the Holocaust into a very familiar myth of Britain’s heroic second world war: Whilst Britain could have done more, no one can deny that when other European countries were rounding up their Jews and putting them on trains to concentration camps, Britain provided a safe haven for tens of thousands of refugees. In 1941, with Europe overrun and America not yet in the war, just one country – Britain – soldiered on, against all odds, fighting not just for our freedom but for the world’s liberty too. I believe this period defines what it means to be British. It is Britain’s unique response to the Holocaust and its unique role in the war that gives us the right to claim a particular attachment to the values of democracy, equality, freedom, fairness and tolerance.3

Nor did Britain’s Promise to Remember do much to complicate the original assertion that the Holocaust was ‘unique’ or take much trouble to define what was meant by the term Holocaust in the first instance. Instead the commissioners attempted to assert that the Holocaust was both incomparable and held resonances for our understanding of other events (while somehow remaining morally distinct from them): ‘while the Holocaust was unprecedented and should never be seen as equivalent to other genocides, we see many of the same steps from prejudice to persecution in other atrocities’. What was at stake was clearly the genocide of the Jews rather than other any other victims of Nazi persecution. While the report recommended that a future memorial reflect on the memory of victims from ‘the Roma community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, homosexuals and people with mental and physical disabilities’, it also stated that this would be done without impinging on ‘the centrality of the Holocaust’ which it defined as ‘the planned, systematic, industrialised murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children during the Second World War’. For good measure the commission added that ‘the Holocaust is unprecedented as the most extreme form of genocide ever planned, contemplated and executed in the history of mankind’.4 In some ways a book about Britain and the Holocaust is not really the place to discuss whether or not the Holocaust is uniquely important. However, the very act of enquiring as to British responses to that event or set of events, does itself presuppose both a shared understanding of the events in question and their importance. There is unlikely to be a Palgrave reader on Britain and the Armenian Genocide very soon for example, precisely because there exists no shared understanding of those events or their meaning in the public sphere. 3 Britain’s

Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: Cabinet Office, 2015), p. 24.

4 Britain’s

Promise to Remember, p. 6.

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BRITAIN AND THE HOLOCAUST: AN INTRODUCTION

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In Britain for example, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust deliberately avoids using the term genocide to refer to what it calls the ‘Armenian atrocities’.5 Of course there is a scholarly literature on Britain and the Armenian question, but it remains a discourse largely confined to academia. Whereas the question of responses and reactions to the Holocaust has a much wider public resonance, precisely because there exists no realistic debate as to the centrality of the Holocaust as a moral, historical event. As such, the debate about the uniqueness or otherwise of the Holocaust, its importance relative to other atrocities, is really what justifies asking what were responses to these atrocities in the first instance. However, if the editors of this collection reject the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, is this exercise not just doomed from the outset? Or if not, is it just rank hypocrisy? Evidently our answer to that is a resounding no—it is precisely because there exists this debate about the meaning of the Shoah and its definition that this collection is so important. Britain’s Promise to Remember the Holocaust was also founded on the assumption of the universal significance of the genocide of the Jews which the Holocaust commission proclaimed was not ‘purely a Jewish tragedy; [but] a lesson and warning to all people of all faiths and lands for all times.’6 As such these are a set of events which some, now, award with a significance that goes beyond that of ‘normal’ history. They are not just a set of historical events at all but a moral touchstone or ‘foundational past’.7 We may as editors balk at that rhetoric, but the very fact that others use it suggests that these are questions worth asking. And what is more, it was of course not forever thus. The Nazi genocide of the Jews was not always regarded as uniquely important or challenging. It was, for example, self-evidently not the most important event to the officials in British government departments that lampooned schemes of rescue during the Second World War. In the war’s aftermath the prosecution of war criminals did not prioritise (whatever we remember now) judicial accounting for the murder of Jews; historians did not prioritise the genocide of the Jews in their reconstruction of the recently ended war in the 1950s.8 Such an observation is crucial to the collection presented here, because we are attempting not just to chart the history of Britain and the Holocaust, as it were, but the history of the idea and conceptualisation of the Holocaust in Britain too. It is difficult to overstate the scale of the shift that has taken place. Writing about the USA, Alan Mintz argued that the Holocaust had gone from ‘silence

5 See

for example: https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/ what-is-genocide/ (accessed 2 January 2020).

6 Britain’s

Promise to Remember, p. 22.

7 Alon

Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

8 See

Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 17–51.

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to salience’ and a similar process has taken place in Britain.9 Kitty Hart famously wrote in one of her memoirs that her inability to discuss her experiences in Auschwitz meant that her first years in Britain after the war were the most miserable of her life. Of course she could not talk about her experiences because nobody wanted to listen.10 Kitty’s memory is a personal reflection on a national picture where outside Jewish communities the Nazi genocide, while known about, was not much discussed and certainly not regarded as centrally important. Fast forward to today and the experiences recounted above regarding the Holocaust commission, and the Holocaust is considered so central to our understanding of the world that knowledge of it is considered potentially transformative. Again in the words of Britain’s Promise to Remember: ‘we reach for the ultimate prize of building a nation of empathetic citizens with tolerance for the beliefs and cultures of others’.11 These are lofty goals, and throughout this volume we subject the claims made for Holocaust education and remembrance to critical scrutiny, as on the face of it we are a long way from achieving them. Not only, after decades of the Holocaust being prominent in our education system and memory rituals, do not many people have a great deal of knowledge or understanding of the Holocaust,12 but our troubled present is increasingly beset by racism, xenophobia and antisemitism. In recent years reports of race and hate crime have gone up, there has been an exponential increase in the prominence of the discourse of the radical right in British politics, and the UK Labour Party is currently under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for institutional antisemitism. When the Holocaust commissioners asked what a memorial would say about us they were in fact drawing on a rich tradition of using the Holocaust as a lens through which we are invited to look at our past and our present, the means with which we see ourselves. Scholarship dealing with the question of Britain and the Holocaust—either in terms of studying British responses to the Holocaust at the time, or studying the development of British Holocaust memory and understanding—has been explicitly concerned with using the Holocaust as a mirror in which we see often sharply divergent views of the British nation, its culture and its politics. This introduction now turns to a summary of the scholarship on which this collection hopes to build and in doing so offers a brief survey of the history of British responses to the Holocaust too.

9 Alan

Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

10 Kitty

Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: HarperCollins, 1983), p. 17.

11 Britain’s 12 Stuart

Promise to Remember, p. 24.

Foster et al., What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust: Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Institute for Education, 2016).

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Britain and the Holocaust As the Holocaust commission and the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation show us, much of the concern for Britain and the Holocaust is actually interested in the experience of Jews long before the ‘Final Solution’. A significant proportion of scholarship concerned with both government and popular responses to Nazi persecution actually looks at the period prior to the war and mass murder through the treatment of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany (or indeed those that were unable to find a way out). We will summarise that scholarship in a moment, but the level of interest in refugee policy is a good example of the methodologically complex terrain in which we are operating. British immigration policy as it pertains to Jews in the 1930s has become of prominent interest because of what came after. The moral historical question of how British officials reacted to German Jewish children in 1938 is made more urgent by our knowledge that their parents were often later murdered. In other words the very act of considering refugee policy in the 1930s in the shadow cast by the death camps is already to operate under the influence of hindsight in a way that historians might usually be nervous of. This interplay between history and memory then exists in a kind of perpetual circle: in that either positive or negative interpretations of refugee policy gain their moral potency from events that were not visible to officials at the time. The Kindertransport programme was no more a reaction to the murder of Jews than the refusal to ease visa restrictions after the Anschluss was. And yet when politicians point to the Kindertransport as evidence of British generosity, or when critics use it as a means to highlight the limits of that generosity, both do so using the rhetorical power of the Holocaust and their knowledge that the murder of Jews followed. While there is disagreement as to why, and indeed what this means, it is universally acknowledged that British governments changed little about their refugee policies as a response to Nazi persecution during the 1930s. The Evian conference is often used as a symbol for the response to the refugee crisis, in that the conference participants met on the understanding that they would not be required to make policy changes.13 This disinclination to change policy reveals a reluctance to provide a haven for Jewish refugees from Nazism based, in large part, on cultural and economic fears about their ability to absorb large numbers of Jewish refugees and the assumption that the provision of a universal haven for the persecuted would only lead to the expulsion of more Jews.14 That said, it is also universally acknowledged that after Kristallnacht extraordinary measures were taken, for example in the shape of the Kindertransport programme which brought several thousand Jewish children 13 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (London: Blackwell, 1994), p. 50. 14 William

D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 41.

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to Britain.15 However, as Andrea Hammel and Anthony Grenville highlight in their essays in this volume, these refugee schemes were in themselves also problematic in many ways. Regarding the war itself, historians have largely concentrated on both the continuing policies of the Allies towards refugees from Nazi Europe—notwithstanding the increased difficulties of escape—and on their willingness, or otherwise, to enact schemes of rescue. Britain worked, for example, to make Jewish emigration to Palestine more rather than less difficult, because this was believed to be the best way of maintaining security in the region.16 Knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ did, although originally suppressed,17 eventually force the Allies into a public acknowledgement, on 17 December 1942, that the Nazis were attempting the extermination of the Jews of Europe.18 Despite this however it is widely accepted that rescuing the Jews of Europe was never one of the major priorities of war, although it was often argued (self-evidently) that the defeat of Nazism was understood as the best way to ensure Jews’ liberation: For the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States, the rescue of Jewry was not a priority … all three were concerned with the war … the entire territory behind enemy lines was viewed primarily as a complex of production, mobilisation and supply. Very little else invited Allied curiosity. The veritable decimation of populations subjugated by Germany and its partners was at best a subordinated interest … the currency of the Second World War was the bullet, shell and bomb; those who did not have these means were the war’s forgotten poor. With weapons one could obtain praise and often additional arms; with plight one could buy neither care nor help.19

Despite this widely accepted narrative, the historiography of Britain and the Holocaust remains sharply divided. It has been traditionally split between those who wish to indict failure in the face of the moral challenge of the Holocaust, and those who have sought to rehabilitate the British government from what is perceived as both a scandalous attack and an attempt to find moral equivalence between Nazism and the liberal democracies which defeated it. The context for history writing about the British government’s response to the Holocaust was established in the USA by the approach of David Wyman and others to US reactions to Jewish plight both before and then during the Second World War. US historiography can ultimately be summarised by the

15 Ibid.,

p. 19.

16 Ibid.,

p. 102.

17 Ibid.,

p. 86.

18 Ibid.,

p. 126.

19 Raul

Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–45 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 249.

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BRITAIN AND THE HOLOCAUST: AN INTRODUCTION

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title one of Wyman’s works: The Abandonment of the Jews.20 Such work, along with in particular accounts of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican response, helped create the sense which has endured in some public representations of the Holocaust that the ‘world did nothing’ to alleviate the suffering of Jews at Nazi hands. The first detailed study of responses in Britain was Andrew Sharf’s account of the British press. Sharf argued, in an account which still influences historiography today, that British journalists feared Jewish refugees as much as they feared Nazi antisemitism. Indeed they feared Jewish refugees in part because they thought, as did officials in government, that those refugees would bring antisemitism with them.21 Ten years later A.J. Sherman would develop one of the counter arguments that Britain’s was not an entirely negative record, and that refugee policy had been ‘comparatively … generous’ in that more refugees had reached British shores than had reached the US.22 It is this idea of generosity that underpins the approach of much public memory focusing on the idea of Britain as a haven for the oppressed. In the 1980s Bernard Wasserstein and Martin Gilbert published the first book length studies of British government responses and reached similar conclusions to those that David Wyman had about the US government. They presented a pitiless picture of ministers and officials attempting to prevent Jewish immigration to Britain and British controlled territories in the face of Nazi terror. Wasserstein particularly focused on the White Paper of 1939 which restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and symbolised the victory of strategic over humanitarian priorities in policy-making.23 The White Paper formed the basis of Palestine policy throughout the war. Gilbert developed this further and demonstrated that it was used to argue against pursuing offers to ransom Jews in 1944. Officials suggested that if negotiations were successful this would have led to large-scale immigration to Palestine, in contravention of the White Paper.24 By concentrating on the future Israel, Wasserstein set the policies of the British state in the context of attitudes to the wider ‘Jewish problem’. Although he did find individual instances of anti-Jewish prejudice, not least Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s now famous quip that ‘I prefer Arabs to Jews’,25 Wasserstein did not however seek to explain the lack of British sympathy through antisemitism. In part it was engendered by the inevitable ‘xenophobia and hysteria’ of war. However, in the main Wasserstein cited a culture of ‘bureaucratic indifference’ whereby officials were separated

20 Ref

Wyman.

21 Sharf,

The British Press and the Jews, pp. 180–85.

22 A.J.

Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933–39 (Berkeley, 1973), p. 267. 23 Bernard 24 Martin

Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (Oxford, 1988), p. 28.

Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London, 1981), pp. 241–42.

25 Wasserstein,

Britain and the Jews of Europe, p. 34.

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by an imaginative gulf from the Jews of Europe, and where crucially they could not entirely see the consequences of their actions. Martin Gilbert also tackled the contentious issue of the potential Allied bombing of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Gilbert discusses at length the request from Jewish organisations to the British government that Auschwitz-Birkenau be bombed in an effort to halt the destruction of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Gilbert finds a merry-go-round of official correspondence looking, it would appear, for reasons not to bomb the death camp or the approach to it. A final decision to not pursue this policy was communicated in the late summer of 1944 on the grounds of ‘technical difficulties’. As Gilbert notes however, a sentence had been deleted from the final memorandum that might have better summarised British official thinking: the bombing would be a ‘diversion … of necessary material of vital importance at this critical stage of the war’.26 The author of the memo was Richard Law under-secretary of state in the Foreign Office. Law was no stranger to government intransigence. He had been the British representative at the Bermuda Conference in the spring of 1943 when the British and Americans had decided that no war material could be diverted to the cause of Jewish refugees despite pressure from rescue campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic. While both British and American governments remained impervious, Law reminded the Foreign Office that there was a moral imperative at work too. He wrote: ‘is it really beyond the bounds of possibility that we should find one ship [on which to transport refugees]? I know all the arguments, but I believe too, that bread does come from the waters and the story of the Good Samaritan is still valid’.27 In adopting a Christian discourse Law was repeating the protests in favour of rescue that came from Churches in Britain. Most famously the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, berated the government in the House of Lords that their response to Jewish suffering was inadequate. Temple also referred to the good Samaritan suggesting government responses ‘neglect[ed] the opportunity of showing mercy’ and suggested that they would be judged for doing so: ‘we stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God’.28 Gilbert, Wasserstein (and Wyman in relation to the USA) demonstrate that historians have indeed judged government intransigence harshly. British and American politicians, it was argued, had failed in the face of the challenge of the Holocaust. All of the scholars discussed here essentially argued that liberal governments failed on their own terms, in that they failed to uphold the traditions of liberalism that ironically they had gone to war to defend. Writing in the 1990s, Tony Kushner led a new generation of Anglo-Jewish historians, no less critical of Allied policies, that argued that this was not a failure of liberalism at all, but a consequence of its own inherently exclusionary 26 Gilbert,

Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 306.

27 Quoted

in Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), p. 90. 28 Lawson,

The Church of England and the Holocaust, p. 86.

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tendencies.29 Kushner’s The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination explained the failure to provide either a haven or rescue for Jews as a consequence of the modern liberal nation states’ inability to cope with Jewish and indeed any ethnic difference. As such there was an essential ambivalence about AngloAmerican responses to the Holocaust, which combined a genuine anguish at the plight of the victims with a fear that those victims would destabilise Britain and the USA if they were allowed unfettered access. Hence the oft repeated argument of officials that large-scale Jewish immigration would bring antisemitism in its wake. Such was this fear of Jewish particularity that across British society there was a reluctance to acknowledge that Jews were suffering as Jews at Nazi hands; instead the Third Reich was seen as a universal threat which of course then justified the argument that victory in war was the only conceivable form of rescue. This tendency to universalise the Third Reich, and thus deny the particularity of the Jewish experience endured in the post-war world too.30 That liberalism prescribed an inadequate response to the crisis of European Jewry was also the main thesis proposed in Richard Bolchover’s study of the British Jewish community and the Holocaust. Bolchover found a community, and especially its leadership, which strove to demonstrate its own liberalism and thus its assimilation with the British way of life. Remarkably the Jewish leadership, Bolchover argued, was also ambivalent about schemes of rescue, lest legions of foreign Jews destabilise both the Jewish community, its relationship with society as a whole and thus social cohesion.31 At the same time this led Jews to conceive of the conflict with the Third Reich in universal terms, as an ‘attack on civilisation as a whole, not an explicit war against the Jews’. Inevitably then, Bolchover argues, many Jews supported the notion that victory was the only form of liberation and rescue.32 Perhaps the most forceful contribution to the field is Louise London’s exhaustive study of Whitehall and the Jews which she continues with an essay in this volume. London repeats the arguments first developed by Wyman et al. that the reason schemes of rescue, or negotiations over Jewish lives, were not pursued vigorously by the Allied governments was because of a fear not of their failure but of their success. As the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison wrote to his counterpart at the Foreign Office in July 1944 ‘it is essential that we should do nothing at all which involves the risk that the further reception of refugees here might be the outcome’.33 Ultimately Whitehall and the Jews 29 Cesarani

and Levine, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.

30 See

Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London, 1997) which highlights the struggle that Jews had to be recognised as Jews, rather than Poles or even Germans, by the British forces that took over the running of the camp. 31 Richard

Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1993), see the conclusion for a summary, pp. 144–56.

32 Bolchover, 33 Quoted

British Jewry and the Holocaust, p. 146.

in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 240.

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goes further than many histories by explaining that the inherent inability of nation states to provide succour for the Jewish victims of Nazism was a result of the same ‘Jewish problem’ that haunted the Nazi imagination. Those British officials who wished to keep Jews from Britain understood the nation as a homogenous ethnic unit. Jews threatened that homogeneity. As such London suggests that while the method of the Nazi solution to the Jewish problem was alien to British policymakers or bureaucrats, their goal of a singular ethnic state was not—indeed it was the goal they sought too. This is a long way from the understanding of Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust enshrined in ‘Britain’s promise to Remember’. The suggestion that the British and the Nazis shared a conception of a Jewish problem has manifold implications—the British become part of the study of the destruction process itself because they helped ‘create a world in which genocide was possible’.34 This is a challenging argument, but for many scholars encapsulates the flaws of this historiography too. At face value the argument that the British were the passive accomplices of Nazi genocide is logically indefensible as by definition the British actively opposed and indeed defeated the very perpetrators of that genocide. Some critics of this historiography allege therefore that instead of recognising this essential fact, historians of the British response to the Holocaust are attempting to prove that the British were themselves, if only in part, responsible for the ‘Final Solution’.35 This was the argument put forward by William Rubinstein in The Myth of Rescue. Rubinstein attacks what he sees as the counter-factual arguments of Wasserstein, Kushner et al. with (ironically) one of his own that the British could not have rescued any more Jews from the Holocaust. Indeed he argues that they did what they could, and in pursuing military victory the Allies ensured the survival of the remnant of Jewish Europe by liberation. For Rubinstein the idea that the democracies, including Britain, did little in the face of the refugee crisis of the 1930s is nonsensical—Jews did leave Germany and Austria, Jews did find haven in Britain and the USA. The idea that Jews could have been rescued from Nazi Europe stretches the boundaries of credulity even further. Jews were slated for extermination and thus were not able to escape. As such the argument that the Allies should (or indeed could) have provided a haven for Jews is seen as absurd—Jews did not perish in Nazi Europe because they had nowhere else to go, they died because of a genocide which would not let them go: ‘the Nazis and the Nazis alone, bear total responsibility for erecting these barriers to Jewish emigration, obviously in preparation for genocide’.36 How then do we account for the sharpness of this interpretative divide, especially over what is effectively an agreed narrative of events? This is actually 34 Barnett,

Bystanders, p. 59.

35 This

is the argument proposed in John Fox’s review of Wasserstein’s Britain and the Jews of Europe, which appeared in International Affairs 56, no. 1 (1980): 143–44. 36 Ibid.,

p. 80.

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a discourse about the past concerned with the present. It is about us and about the extent of our responsibilities to one another. From the outset these histories have had a clear political purpose. Kushner’s critique of liberalism, and identification of the difficulty that the nation state has in coping with ethnic differentiation can be applied to today. Louise London’s critique of British refugee policy in the past is also a part of an ongoing discourse on British refugee and asylum policy in the present.37 London and Kushner’s opponents may claim more political neutrality, but this is hardly the case. Rubinstein’s defence of British and American immigration restrictions is based on his clearly articulated belief that nation states should limit the number of refugees that cross their borders. Rubinstein does not deny that British immigration policy in the 1930s attempted to limit entrance to those that were economically useful, indeed he believes that this was (and is) a political necessity.38 As such these understandings of the British past are part of a battle around values in the British present. They may say some something rather different about ‘us as a nation’ to that which was intended by the Holocaust Commission or the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, but they do demonstrate that this past has consistently been used as means to understand and indeed attempt to shape our present. And this interaction between past and present is at the core of this volume too. That this volume devotes more attention to the shape and the texture of the idea of the Holocaust in Britain than it does to the responses to the destruction of European Jewry as it was being enacted is a reflection of the way that scholarship on Britain and the Holocaust has developed. Debates on British policy seemed to play themselves out in the early 2000s. In part this is of course the consequence of a discipline in which the focus has become much more about those on the receiving end of these histories. Just as studies of the Holocaust have themselves become much more interested in its victims—to the point where following Saul Friedlander historians cite a moral obligation to the write the history of the Holocaust’s victims rather than perpetrators39 —historians of the British responses to the Holocaust have begun to concentrate on the life histories of, for example, those that sought refuge from Nazism.40 There has been some focus on other British institutions,41 and an overwhelming interest

37 See for example Louise London, ‘Whitehall and the Refugees: The 1930s and the 1990s’, Patterns of Prejudice 34, no. 3 (2000): 17–26. 38 Rubinstein,

The Myth of Rescue, p. 42. See also Pamela Shatzkes, Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry 1938–1945 (London, 2002), p. 239.

39 See the discussion in Jurgen Matthaus, Martin Shaw, Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, and Donald Bloxham, ‘Review Forum: Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 1–2 (2011): 107–52. 40 See

for example Tony Kushner, Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).

41 See for example Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006).

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in the way the Holocaust has been represented (discussed below), but political histories of British responses to the Holocaust have dwindled. As Michael Fleming’s essay in this collection demonstrates this is not because there is nothing left to say, and a re-examination of the archives of the British government in response to the Holocaust is overdue. Michael Marrus argued for just that at the beginning of the twenty-first century when he called for the response to the Holocaust to be considered in the context of humanitarian intervention. While Marrus was keen to situate this within the British past, it is notable that he was writing not long after the rise, and fall, of the new liberal interventionism that had led to the disastrous US/UK invasion of Iraq.42 Perhaps it was the failure of the new century’s doctrinaire solution to ‘a problem from hell’ that ensured that political historians did not take up Marrus’ call for a new historiography.43 As editors of this volume we have not managed to fill the historiographical gap. We were unable to commission a new political history of British responses to the Holocaust. That we failed does, as we say, reflect the shape of the field at this point. And yet there are a number of contexts in which British policy reactions towards Jews and Jewish suffering could and perhaps should be re-examined. Michael Marrus pointed the way towards one of those in the history of humanitarian intervention. How, for example, was the history of British responses to the Holocaust impacted by British responses to other acts of mass violence and indeed genocide? Let us consider the Armenian Genocide as an example. Winston Churchill thought that the British bore some responsibility for Turkish crimes against the Armenian population because of the failure of the Gallipoli campaign. If the British had achieved their military objectives at Gallipoli, Churchill believed that the Turks would not have had the opportunity to enact their plan to ‘clear’ the Armenian ‘race from Asia minor’. This might well provide a valuable context for British understandings of their obligations to Jews in the Second World War—where the government never wavered from the view that their first obligation was to win the war as the means to succour the suffering.44 Such a comparative approach may offer some ways forward for historians in this area. Michelle Gordon’s essay in this volume suggests another context for scholars to consider—that of the history of British violence against civilian populations, especially in the context of the British Empire. Common conceptions of the Holocaust in Britain, do not frequently have a role for thinking about the perpetration of violence in the British Empire. Indeed, to return to the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission discussed at the beginning 42 Michael

Marrus, ‘Holocaust Bystanders and Humanitarian Intervention’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 13, no. 1 (2007): 1–18.

43 Samantha

Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York,

2007). 44 Michelle

Tusan, The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide (London: IB Tauris, 2020), p. 215.

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of this introduction that body explicitly rejected our suggestion that we use the opportunity to embrace the multi-directionality of memory and draw links to violence and extermination that the British state has been responsible for. As editors we wish our collection to both shape as well as analyse the memory culture the authors here are writing about. We have included Gordon’s essay on imperial violence and its relationship with Holocaust historiography and memory to do just that. It is deliberately placed chronologically in the volume in the immediate post-war period, during which the sometimes violent retreat from empire took place. Gordon’s analysis shows us that British Imperial violence as well as the Holocaust did not exercise the British imagination in the post-war era. While Britain may have begrudgingly engaged in the processes of decolonisation in the years after 1945, the same was not true of British mindsets and cultural practices—with inevitable consequences for reflexive understandings of state-sponsored atrocity and the oppression of peoples. But as well as having implications for how the Holocaust has been understood, might the British response to Nazi anti-Jewish violence itself be considered in the light of the imperial record of violence? Would considering Britain as a state which commissioned violence alter the way in which we saw British responses to Nazism? After all, most studies of Britain and the Holocaust begin from the idea that British traditions were the very opposite of those that found form in the Final Solution. However, it becomes a rather different question if you take the view that from its inception, the British Empire can be understood as an exporter of racial violence and ultimately genocide. The conquest and subjugation of Ireland, the settlement and plantation of land, involved large-scale killing frequently accompanied by scorched earth policies. Such activities at the very least deserve, and now receive, discussion within the context of genocide.45 Ben Kiernan’s ‘world history of Genocide and Extermination’ devotes an entire chapter to the English in Ireland.46 Neil Murphy has pointed out that the English state’s penchant for racial violence was not confined to Ireland—the Tudor colonial experiment in France can similarly be understood at least using the language of genocide studies.47 Equally the English settlement of the east coast of North America in the Seventeenth century and especially its expansion in-land at the very least had genocidal incidents. Certainly the wars of the Virginia Company in the 1620s were accompanied by an exterminatory rhetoric on the part of settlers towards the Powhatan whom they were dedicated to rendering ‘no longer a

45 See for example Robbie McVeigh, ‘“The Balance of Cruelty”: Ireland, Britain and the Logic of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008): 541–61. 46 Ben 47 Neil

Kiernan, Blood and Soil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 169–212.

Murphy, ‘Violence, Colonization and Henry VIII’s Conquest of France, 1544–46’, Past and Present, Nov. no. 233 (2016): 13–51.

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people’.48 British settler colonialism explicitly involved exterminatory violence throughout its history, not only in North America: for example against the Cape San and the Xhosa in Southern Africa,49 and Indigenous peoples in New South Wales, Tasmania and what became Victoria throughout the first half of the Nineteenth century. In the second half of the century violence in the British world was concentrated in Queensland—where Aboriginal mounted policy fought extermination campaigns against individual Indigenous nations.50 This British association with imperial violence may seem only tangentially related to how Britain responded to the Holocaust. Yet it may at the very least alter the questions that we are asking. Think even of the question when did they know? That questions revolves around the idea that the German destruction of Jews was somehow unthinkable and unknowable, but that contention becomes a little shakier when one considers that the destruction of peoples was not a novel idea in British culture at all, precisely because it was a known, internalised and indeed commemorated feature of British imperial history. There was no shortage of cultural representations of the wild Irish throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and as such narratives of their destruction. Certainly in the 1640s English pamphleteers exchanged images of Irish savagery that then informed the destructive urges of Cromwell’s campaign and the legislation of the 1650s. All of Britain’s destructive wars in the early part of the nineteenth century were reported time and again in a network of regional newspapers. The elimination of ‘savages’ in Australia became part of the imperial propaganda encouraging emigration from the 1820s onwards. Literary culture was suffused with the idea, to quote Anthony Trollope, that in Australia at least ‘the Australian Black man… has to go’.51 The museums of England—from regional cabinets of curiosities (for example the heads of Maori’s displayed in Saffron Walden) to national scientific institutions—commemorated and communicated the violence of the Empire all in ways which suggested British superiority and the extermination of other peoples. In late nineteenth-century debates on human origins, the idea that the British swept other races out of existence was simply accepted—and of course reported in the British press.52 48 Alfred A. Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’, in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 273–95. 49 See essays within Mohammed Adhikari, Genocide on Settler Frontiers (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014). 50 Mark

Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State Vol. II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: IB Tauris, 2005).

51 Quoted

in Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: IB Tauris, 2014), p. 153.

52 Tom Lawson, ‘Memorialising Colonial Genocide in Britain: the Case of Tasmania’, Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 4 (2014): 441–61.

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It continued to be widely assumed that, for example, all Australian Aboriginal populations would ultimately be destroyed well into the twentieth century.53 When the aboriginal leader William Cooper made a direct appeal to King George VI to save his people from extermination in 1937 it was widely reported, a public understanding of racial destruction precisely at the time that Jews were being excluded from German national life. At the same time efforts to provoke Arab resistance in Palestine warned that the consequence of British rule could be racial extermination: the ‘bones of the last Tasmanians [were a] solemn warning to all men of Arab blood’.54 And those bones of the last Tasmanians were displayed in the Natural History Museum in a display which emphasised the hierarchy of the races of man both before and after the Second World War (although they were protected from Nazi bombs during the war itself). The idea that races were exterminated and the British were exterminators abounded. It would be fruitful to explore the British response to the Holocaust in this context. Nazi murders of Jews might be seen as part of a continuum of violence of which the British state was also part and perpetrator of. As Martin Shaw has argued, we might equally place responses to the Holocaust in the context of the British links to demographic re-engineering at the end of the Second World War and the end of Empire.55 Our aim here is simply to suggest future avenues for scholars to explore, to suggest that the history of British responses to the Holocaust stands to be rewritten and could be from a number of different vantage points. However, that is for another book as it were and it is the question of how the Holocaust has been understood, how it has been read, written and constructed in Britain that enlivens most scholarship in this area and is to this that we now turn.

The ‘Holocaust’ in Britain The essays concerned here with British, broadly defined, memories of the Holocaust also build on a rich historiographical heritage of studies that have sought to understand the changing shape, understanding and significance of the Holocaust in the post-war world. In general terms, a standard chronology of the construction of the Holocaust emerged in scholarship (largely concerned with the west, and particularly the USA, rather than Britain per se). This chronology held that in the immediate aftermath of war the genocide of the Jews was the subject of little public conversation in societies much more concerned with their own rebuilding than with a traumatic past. As the

53 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800– 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 54 Lawson, 55 Martin

The Last Man, p. 177.

Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Parameters of National Responsibility’, Review of International Studies 37, no. 5 (2011): 2417–38.

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Cold War descended over Europe there was also little room for the particular crimes against Jews in a narrative that remembered Nazism as a form of totalitarianism directly comparable to Soviet Communism. In addition, it is often suggested that the scale and profundity of the Holocaust, the sheer depth of this rupture in the human condition meant that western societies lacked the means and indeed the vocabulary with which to conceptualise this destruction. According to this narrative it is not until the 1960s, with the Eichmann Trial often heralded as a watershed moment, that what we would call the Holocaust really began to take shape in the post-war west. A variety of watershed moments are then typically highlighted to chart the Holocaust’s journey from ‘silence to salience’—from the growing importance of the Shoah in Israeli memory after the Six Day War; to the broadcast of the popular mini series Holocaust in the late 1970s; to the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the 1990s and the need for a new historical enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Britain, a similar narrative has been proposed and was first fully articulated by Tony Kushner. For Kushner, Britain’s ‘post-war confrontation’56 was one that followed a path from ‘general neglect’57 during the first decade and a half after the war, to a position by the mid-1990s where the Holocaust was ‘more present than ever before in British society and culture’ and ‘a subject of major interest’.58 However, while this development echoed those found elsewhere, Kushner’s pioneering study also demonstrated important differences and particularities in the evolution of what we now call Holocaust memory. Where, for example, there was broad correlation in the condition of Holocaust memory in Britain and America during the late 1940s and 1950s, Kushner showed that divergence became palpable in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to how Americanisation of the Holocaust gathered steam in these decades, Kushner found ‘there was no interest in attempting a similar process’ in Britain—pointing to the comparatively muted impact of the Eichmann Trial as testament to the limited levels of interest in British society at this time.59 Survivors remained marginalised, Anglo-Jewry continued to be somewhat handicapped by an uncertainty as to how to manage their response to the events in relation to their position in Britain, and understanding within non-Jewish society was blighted by a combination of a lack of public knowledge of the Holocaust and a dominance of self-congratulatory Second World War memories. Whereas by the late 1970s ‘the Holocaust had become established as a selfcontained issue in a range of Western societies’, Kushner found that Britain was indeed someway behind the curve.60 This was to significantly change during 56 Kushner, 57 p.

The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 205–69.

245.

58 pp.

245, 255, 277.

59 pp.

247–48.

60 p.

259.

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the 1980s, with a confluence of factors galvanising levels of popular interest in the Holocaust. This included structural shifts, such as generational change, the growth of pluralism, and emergence of anti-racist educational agendas; public controversies such as the war crimes affair and the opportunities created by the establishment of a school National Curriculum; and the sheer determination of individual agents and agencies committed to making the Holocaust a social, cultural and political issue. While these developments did not resolve inherent shortcomings and long-standing problems, Kushner was sufficiently persuaded that although post-war ‘British society was one of the last to accept the importance of the Holocaust’,61 it was by the mid-1990s a subject that was ‘accessible to ordinary people’ and had ‘achieved great relevance’.62 A quarter of a century on from its original publication, Kushner’s social and cultural history of Holocaust memory in post-war Britain remains benchmark and has been further built on by the scholarship that has emerged since. In hindsight, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination marked the beginning of a tangible spike in studies in (and of) Holocaust memory in Britain driven by Kushner himself and his then colleague at the University of Southampton, the late David Cesarani. With Cesarani also serving as then Director at the Wiener Library in London, the pair quickly became leading figureheads who helped to further galvanise the emergence of Holocaust Studies as a field of academic research in Britain. Importantly, the work of Kushner, Cesarani, and others who studied alongside and under them at this time, was not limited to the seminar rooms and workshops of the academy. Rather, through their public activities, the ‘Southampton School’ (as it arguably should be called) made telling interventions which sought to highlight and address issues in popular consciousness of the Holocaust. Illustrative of this was the conference ‘The Liberation of Belsen’, held in April 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, and its follow-up publication Belsen in History and Memory. As the editors of that book wrote in their introductory essay, the ‘popular mythology’ that ‘Britain had actually fought the war to end Nazi atrocities and even to save the Jews’ may have been born in the aftermath of liberation, but it was a narrative still very much in evidence throughout the public commemorations and commentary of April 1995.63 As they explained the Holocaust occupied only a minor place in British war commemorations in 1994 and 1995. But reference to the British army’s liberation of Belsen enabled attention to be drawn to Nazi atrocities without in any way confusing matters by considering Jewish death and suffering during the war. Indeed, as in 1945,

61 p.

278.

62 pp.

261, 269.

63 Tony

Kushner, David Cesarani, Jo Reilly, and Colin Richmond, ‘Approaching Belsen: An Introduction’, in Belsen in History and Memory, eds. Jo Reilly, David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, and Colin Richmond (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 12.

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the liberation of Belsen could be used to concentrate further on the moral righteousness of the British war effort.64

In this way, representations of the Holocaust in Britain during the mid1990s underlined the advances that had been made over preceding decades while exposing the strong threads of continuity which held firmly in place. There were two related dynamics to this: one was the British liberal ‘cognitive framework’ that filtered the Holocaust through a ‘universalistic criteria’ and ‘marginalize[d] the historical experience of the Jews’—a construct which, according to Cesarani, was ‘only modified’ by the surge in Holocaust-related activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s.65 Related to this was the second: that being, the existence of a British Second World War memory so dominant and so infused with moral rectitude, that ‘the memory of the “Final Solution” and Nazi war crimes was deemed apart from and inferior’ to it.66 For Mark Rawlinson, what made the endurance of this ‘popular memory of the war’ all the more noteworthy was that it did not supplant so much as coexist with a greater awareness of the Holocaust.67 As such, it did not necessarily follow that the ‘knowledge of hindsight’ would (or could) redress British understandings of the Holocaust in the 1990s, since—argued Rawlinson—‘certain perspectives embodied in wartime representations of the war in Europe persist in postwar culture and compete with or interfere with our understanding of the “other war” conducted in Central European concentration camps’.68 In this way, what made it possible for late twentieth-century Britain to be both more aware of the Holocaust than ever before and at the same time still blighted by the same blind spots as before, was an ‘unthinking loyalty’ to established conceptual scaffolds69 and a predilection for remembering the Holocaust through narrative frames that generated comforting mythologies instead of confrontational histories. From the perspective of the small, but steadily growing, group of scholars working on Holocaust memory in Britain during the mid-1990s, the changes that had taken place since the 1980s were significant and pronounced enough to suggest a fundamental transformation had occurred. The Holocaust, it appeared, had moved from the margins of British historical culture to become a topic of general interest and intrigue. Major events such as the war crimes 64 Ibid. 65 David

Cesarani, ‘Great Britain’ in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, eds. David S. Wyman and Charles H. Rosenzveig (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 634.

66 David

Cesarani, ‘Lacking in Convictions: British War Crimes Policy and National Memory of the Second World War’, in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, eds. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford: Berg, 1997), p. 35. 67 Mark

Rawlinson, ‘This Other War: British Culture and the Holocaust’, The Cambridge Quarterly XXV, no. 1 (1996): 1–25. 16.

68 p.

2.

69 p.

21.

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affair, the insertion of the Holocaust into the new National Curriculum for schools, and the phenomenal success of Schindler’s List all provided tangible evidence of this development. Equally, it was during the 1990s that these developments came to intersect and entwine themselves with parallel trends on the continent and in North America—further reinforcing the impression that, broadly speaking, Britain was now riding a global wave whereby ‘the Holocaust’ and its memories had moved from relative obscurity to the centre ground of Western cultural politics and social affairs. If, from today’s vantage point, the notion of Britain moving from ‘silence to salience’ appears too neat, too simplistic, or even naïve, this needs to be tapered by a recognition that the study of Holocaust memory—and, indeed, Holocaust studies writ large—was still an emergent field of study in nineties Britain. While a new generation of scholars was coming of age by the turn of the millennium, the body of existing research—notwithstanding the efforts of Kushner, Cesarani and others—remained in a state of relative infancy. With Holocaust memory itself only starting to emerge as an object of societal concern, it is hardly surprising that a body of scholarship on the life-story of that memory was not fully formed or developed. Moreover, with developments themselves quickly assuming a momentum of their own in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was no surprise that academic analysis of how and why Britain had ‘turned’ to the Holocaust was in the process of becoming. This symbiotic evolution was well illustrated during the opening years of the new millennium, when two major milestones in the institutionalisation of Holocaust memory—the creation of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) and the opening of the Imperial War Museum’s permanent Holocaust Exhibition—acted as stimuli to new assessments of the status and position of the Holocaust in contemporary Britain. For the likes of Dan Stone, Tom Lawson, Mark Levene and Donald Bloxham, these events and the wider cultural milieu of a sharp upturn Holocaust-related activity, posed elemental questions. In general, these pivoted on two core considerations. One was that of motive: what purpose, or whose purposes, were ‘being served’70 by the promotion of Holocaust memory? What ‘function’ did it have in official narratives of the past71 —particularly those related to the Second World War? The other, concerned the modes and mediums of this memory-work: in the sense of their suitability or otherwise for recalling the Holocaust,72 the ‘conceptual confusions’ that arose from strategies of framing the Holocaust as at once

70 Dan Stone, ‘Day of Remembrance or Day of Forgetting? Or, Why Britain Does Not Need a Holocaust Memorial Day’, Patterns of Prejudice 34, no. 4 (2000): 53–59. 54. 71 Tom Lawson, ‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory: A Review of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, no. 2 (2003): 173–83. 72 Stone,

‘Day of Remembrance’, p. 56.

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unique and universal,73 and the propensity of these narratives to simplify and reduce the Holocaust to fit culturally-ingrained conceptions of Britain and war memory.74 The scholarship which grew out of these research questions during the first decade of the twenty-first century gave depth and shade to existing knowledge and understanding of Holocaust memory in Britain. In the process, they added new dimensions and lines of enquiry. These included consideration of the ways in which Holocaust memorialisation related to and sat with British memories of colonialism and imperialism75 ; connections and contradictions between Holocaust remembrance and British immigration policy in the early 2000s76 ; and interrogations of how the overt politicisation of Holocaust memory interfaced with, and was to some extent undermined by, domestic and foreign policy agendas.77 Themselves part of a wider expansion in the field of Holocaust studies in the United Kingdom—one which saw a marked increase in the number of university courses and doctoral students—these forays were also accompanied by attempts to re-historicise the evolution of Holocaust memory in Britain. In essence, this took two contrasting but complementary forms. One was something of a micro, or ‘local’ history approach. With roots in the late 1990s, the body of scholarship which took form through these studies shed much needed light on the fate of memory in the first twenty-five years after the war.78 The other was more of a macro, birds-eye perspective—one that tracked trajectories of development in Britain but did so with a concern

73 Donald Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Reshaping the Past in the Service of the Present’, in Representing the Holocaust, ed. Sue Vice (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), pp. 41–62. 41. 74 Lawson,

‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’.

75 Dan

Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory’, in Dan Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), pp. 174–95; Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). 76 Tony Kushner, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 23, no. 1 (2004): 116–29; Aimee Bunting, Britain and the Holocaust: Then and Now (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Southampton). 77 Mark Levene, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: A Case of Post-Cold War Wish Fulfilment, or Brazen Hypocrisy?’, Human Rights Review 7, no. 3 (2006): 26–59. 78 See for example David Cesarani, ‘British War Crimes Policy and National Memory of the Second World War’, in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, eds. Ken Lunn and Martin Evans (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 27–42; Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London: Heinemann, 1996); Tom Lawson, ‘Constructing a Christian History of Nazism, 1945–49: Anglicianism and the Memory of the Holocaust’, History and Memory, 16, no. 1 (2004), 146–76; Dan Stone, ‘The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945–6’, Patterns of Prejudice 33, no. 2 (1999): 13–29. See also the essays by Duncan Little, Caroline Sharples and James Jordan in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, eds., Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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for putting setting these into an international context.79 The cumulative effect of these turns in the historiography of British Holocaust memory was twofold: it expunged the idea that there was such a thing a post-war ‘silence’ or ‘absence’ of the Holocaust in Britain,80 and it underlined how the emergence of what Andy Pearce termed ‘Holocaust consciousness in contemporary Britain’ had duly ‘followed a somewhat incongruous, even “twisted path” of development compared to events elsewhere’.81 Viewed retrospectively, the two decades between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s can be seen as boom years for Holocaust studies generally in Britain, and with regard to reflections on Holocaust memory in Britain. As much as these were organic developments, they also drew sustenance, energy, and—in some cases—their very raison d’etre, from currents and happenstances in broader British culture and society. A major stimuli was the state, with government-sponsored initiatives and mainstream political discourse often catalysing academic activity. Significantly, this work often took issue with the tone and tenor of statist projects—partly because of how it veered towards presentism and the instrumentalisation of Holocaust history, but also because of how Holocaust politics was frequently thrown into relief by contemporary governmental policies. Other sources of impetus have been more cultural and structural—from the continued passage of the survivor generation, to the persistence of Holocaust denial and revisionism, to the reappearance of societal ills like racism, antisemitism and intolerance which it was widely presumed would be invalidated by a mature Holocaust culture. A final spur to scholarly work on the colours and contours of memory of the Holocaust in Britain has been the growing trend in certain political, educational, and cultural circles towards continuing to abstract the Holocaust from its historical contexts, and—indeed—to set memory against history, as if the former is to be seen as being more valuable,

79 Judith

E. Berman, Holocaust Agendas: Conspiracies and Industries –Issues and Debates in Holocaust Memorialization (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); Andy Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979–2001’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 71–94. See also Larissa Allwork, Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational: The Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the International Task Force (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

80 David Cesarani, ‘How Post-War Britain Reflected on the Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder of Europe’s Jews: A Reassessment of Early Responses’, Jewish Culture and History 12, no. 1–2 (2010): 95–130. 81 Andy

Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York & London: Routledge, 2014); Idem, ‘Britain and the Formation of a Contemporary Holocaust Consciousness: A Product of Europeanization, or Exercise in Triangulation?’ in The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, eds. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 119–38. 120.

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more privileged and more morally urgent than the latter.82 Countering such naïve and spurious ideas is but one of the aims of this collection.

Reading This Volume Our reader on Britain and the Holocaust is arranged into sections that are broadly chronological, but also in which particular themes are at issue. The volume progresses from the period before Jews were being murdered by the Nazis, up to the present day. Proceeding from the observation that much of the discourse surrounding Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust unhelpfully adopts what might be called heroic rhetoric, our volume attempts to situate the problematic elements of Britain’s response within British politics and culture. We do not just seek to own only the successes of Britain’s response to the Holocaust as it were, but its evident failures too. If some of the tendency in memorialisation is to proclaim that it (that is fascism and the persecution of Jews) didn’t and indeed couldn’t have happened here, then we seek to challenge that formulation. As such the first section of Britain and the Holocaust presents two articles on the political contexts for Britain’s responses to the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. First, Daniel Tilles outlines the degree to which British Fascism, despite its relative failure at the ballot box was rooted in British political traditions, crucially including the development of an expressly antisemitic politics. Oswald Mosley’s overt adoption of antisemitism was not, as it has sometimes been understood, an adoption of European concerns but a natural development within his and wider British Fascist politics. And of course some aspects of antisemitic politics and imagery have endured in our politics to the present day. After all, the moral panic around antisemitism on the political left in Britain is borne of a concern (amongst other things) around the blurring of anticapitalist and anti-Jewish rhetoric.83 Daniel Tilles shows us that such a blurring would certainly have been familiar in the 1930s. Much of the scholarship reviewed in this introduction has been concerned with British refugee policy in the face of Nazi anti-Jewish persecution and the question (slightly ahistorical as it is) as to its relative generosity. Louise London, whose work has consistently reminded us that we need to consider the aims of that policy as well as its ends, continues that provocation in her essay presented in this collection. And ultimately in her essay in this volume too, London demonstrates that British refugee policy throughout the Nazi era 82 As typified, for instance, by Sir Mick Davis, Chair of the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission’s remark: ‘we were conscious of our responsibility to this and future generations to ensure that the Holocaust does not move from living memory, with the depletion of the survivor generation, into a sterile history’. Sir Mick Davis, ‘Foreword’, in Cabinet Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: HMSO, 2015), p. 5. 83 See

for example David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2018).

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was concerned with its own, effectively racialised vision of the British national community. Essentially the British government sought, including in the aftermath of war and in the context of a greater understanding of the suffering of Jews at Nazi hands, to limit Jewish migration into Britain. The motivation for that default position was complex—ranging from a fear of the antisemitic politics outlined by Tilles, to an overt desire to control the racial diversity of the British community and a suspicion of the national loyalties of the Jewish population; a fear that grew with the development of the state of Israel after the war. The political contexts for Britain’s response to the Holocaust were then, in some senses, defined by Britain’s own racialised political discourse. However, of course Jews did come to Britain in the 1930s and the chapters in Part II of our volume consider the latest research on the experience of refugees from Nazism. Anthony Grenville reminds us of the complex distinction between the reality and the rhetoric of British refugee policy—with the idea that Britain was a place of refuge for the persecuted as much a source of pride in the 1930s as it is now, an idea as much at odds with the legal framework around immigration as it is today. Grenville goes beyond the analysis of policy however, highlighting the difficult experience that refugees faced in coming to a society that was at best ignorant and at worse hostile to them. Grenville highlights the importance of voluntary and self-help organisations to those refugee communities. By concentrating on the refugees themselves, Grenville rightly restores them as active agents in their own history. Meanwhile, Andrea Hammel’s article reminds us of the complexity of navigating history and memory in this subject. The Kindertransport is remembered as a clear bright spot in the British historical record, witness the Holocaust Commission discussed above. But as Hammel demonstrates, the British government was at best a reluctant partner in the endeavour and passed the financial burdens of the scheme onto private individuals and voluntary organisations. Hammel also outlines that not all of those children who came to Britain found refuge from suffering, with some children the victim of abuse in family homes in Britain. Moving on to the period of War and Holocaust, we present three very different essays that consider aspects of Britain’s response during the period of extermination itself. Michael Fleming’s important analysis of ‘Knowledge in Britain of the Holocaust during the Second World War’ returns us to the question of when did they know, and demonstrates that during the war the British government and its officials did not need hindsight to understand Nazi persecution and violence. Fleming demonstrates that the British government had access to and crucially controlled the release of information regarding the murder of Jews from a number of sources, particularly the Polish Underground State. If information did not necessarily always lead to knowledge, Fleming argues, this was not necessarily because of the nature of the information but the assumptions brought to that information by the individuals and agencies receiving it. Fleming details for example the Foreign Office’s ‘policy of strategic scepticism’ as a barrier to knowledge and understanding.

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What Michael Fleming’s essay demonstrates, as does our collection as a whole, is that history, memory and myth are constantly interacting in a complex dynamic in relation to British responses to the Holocaust. Nowhere is this clearer than in Russel Wallis’s chapter on Charles Coward’s wartime memoir, and in particularly his time as a prisoner at Monowitz and his claims to have witnessed Jewish transports arriving at Birkenau and to have played a part in the Sonderkommando uprising there in October 1944. Wallis demonstrates that Coward’s is a tall-tale that has rather more to do with myths of Britain’s wartime experience than the reality of his war. We could of course have included this chapter in later sections of the book which deal more squarely with issues of memory. However, Wallis makes an important point about the future of scholarship in this area when he argues that the reasons that mythical versions of Holocaust heroism like Coward’s can endure is because of a relative dearth of integrated historical narratives. Historian’s attention has very much turned to issues of representation, but this leaves histories of British responses to the Holocaust unwritten. Memory and myth can proliferate, Wallis warns, only because historians have not adequately produced the archivally based histories that could challenge them. It is our contention that such binaries are unhelpful but we agree with Wallis that history and memory are perpetually interacting and that historians have a role to play in both. Dan Stone’s analysis of the liberation of Belsen at the end of the war demonstrates that despite knowledge of Nazi policy, the British were unprepared for the horrors that greeted them. Stone also offers a subtle reorientation of our understanding of Belsen as at the very least functioning as a death camp immediately before its liberation. In doing so Stone again navigates the complex dynamic between history and memory and is commenting on the changing post-war status of Belsen—which had in the first instance been interpreted as the epitome of Nazi barbarity before being replaced by Auschwitz as a more fitting symbol of the genocide of the Jews. Stone also argues that the history of Belsen, its liberation and then its aftermath was an inherently transnational affair, from Belgian medical students to the many international organisations that worked there. Again here Stone points to a tension at the heart of this collection, and in Holocaust studies more generally—the Holocaust was in all its aspects a set of events that challenges national narratives. However, in both its memorialisation and its history it is often fitted back into national histories and memories. The history of Britain and the Holocaust is really a history that crosses borders; a history of refugees, migrants and transmigrants but it is a history that is often domesticated to fit extant national concerns. Judicial accounting in the aftermath of war was both a national and a transnational affair, and the essays presented here that deal with war crimes trials stress the impact those trials had on memory. Caroline Sharples reviews the largest and most famous of the British trials, the so-called Belsen trial, analysing in particular the role it played in shaping the idea of Belsen in the British imagination and the attendant and (un)surprising lack of focus on its

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Jewish victims in the coverage of the trial. Sharples also develops Stone’s analysis of the relationship between Belsen and Auschwitz in British Holocaust memories, demonstrating that Auschwitz took some time to be cemented in British consciousness. But as Paul Jackson and Siobhan Hyland remind us in their essay, the study of remembering is also the study of forgetting. For all that British trial policy did to establish narratives and understanding (and misunderstandings) of the Holocaust, other post-war British policies relied on a lacuna in memories of violence. Jackson and Hyland argue that the British pursued a twin-track policy of remembering and forgetting in the post war period. The British tried Nazi war criminals while at the same time the European Volunteer Worker programme for example brought perpetrators of Nazi criminality into Britain. This was part of a post-war culture that by the end of the trial programme deliberately wished to look to the future and away from the horrors of the past. If this amnesiac tendency promoted forgetting in the immediate post-war era, by the 1980s it had become part of transnational memory politics. The campaign to bring former perpetrators of violence to justice was in an international one, but in Britain was led by the All Parliamentary War Crimes group and Greville Janner, an organisation that would become the Holocaust Educational Trust and of course play an important (and not entirely unproblematic) role in the shaping of ideas of the Holocaust in Britain. History and memory again inexorably intertwined. Michelle Gordon’s essay, which highlights the imperial connections reviewed above, bridges the first four sections of the collection—which focus most squarely on the history of British responses to the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath—and the remainder of the book, where the principal concern is with the means and modes of remembrance. The evolution of the field of memory studies has shown in rich and variegated ways how, at a collective level, memory is formed and practised in ‘socio-cultural contexts’.84 Representational activity exists as the embodiment and expression of these processes, and as ‘vectors of memory’85 that enable memory-work to take place. While it is true that a fundamental shortcoming of the first generation of memory studies was its fixation on ‘cultural representations at the expense of social relations, mediation and reception’86 it also holds that examination of the means of representation ‘provide the best information about the evolution of collective memories’.87 In that spirit, the contributions by James 84 Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p. 5. 85 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). 86 Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ‘Introduction: Noises of the Past’, in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, eds. Alon Confino and Peter Frizsche (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2002), p. 4. 87 Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History & Theory 41 (2002): 190.

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Jordan, Barry Langford and Sue Vice provide valuable insights into how radio, film and literature have both contributed to the development of Holocaust consciousness and can be read as waymarkers to understanding its evolution. In his examination of how the BBC approached and treated the events of the Holocaust, both during the war and in its immediate aftermath, Jordan’s chapter shows how this most ‘British’ of institutions ‘mirrors’ the general trajectories of British Holocaust memory. While coverage of the events as they unfolded was not entirely absent, Jordan observes that generally speaking the BBC ‘failed to report on the murderous nature of the Nazi project’. This was the result of an official policy of only reporting ‘news’, in the belief that anything else could inflame domestic antisemitism. However, through his analysis of two wartime dramas, Jordan illustrates how some programming very much did engage both with the reality that mass murder was occurring and the issues which flowed from it. Evidently this poses questions of reception, but the very existence of these broadcasts complicates blanket assumptions about knowledge and understanding. It also further illuminates arguments forwarded by Jordan elsewhere about the commonly unrecognised ways in which the events of the Holocaust found representation on BBC television in the first two decades after 1945.88 Like Jordan, Barry Langford’s chapter confirms the parallels and correlations between treatments of the Holocaust in British cinema and the wider pathway of Holocaust consciousness in post-war British culture. However, Langford also complicates this relationship by emphasising that ‘British “Holocaust film”’ can only be properly understood within the specific context of ‘British film culture as a whole’. Charting the course of treatments of the Holocaust in British cinema through five phases, Langford demonstrates how simplistic conceptualisation of ‘Holocaust film(s)’ can lead us to overlook ‘traces and fragments’ that speak to wider ‘available frameworks for understanding Nazism and the Holocaust’—just as relative absence of filmic engagement for large parts of the post-war epoch can present the misleading impression this was solely due to lack of interest or concern. By the same token, Langford shows that our reading of the huge upturn in cinematic representation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries also needs to be duly cognisant of the multiple directions Holocaust representation is being put towards. The importance of employing wide lenses and looking beyond the explicit and the obvious to authentically capture the existence and the nature of Holocaust representations in British culture, is a message echoed in Sue Vice’s discussion of literature. As with Langford’s evaluation of cinema, Vice demonstrates that ‘Holocaust literature’ in Britain needs to be understood as being 88 See James Jordan, ‘“And the trouble is where to begin to spring surprises you. Perhaps a place you might least like to remember.” This is Your Life and the BBC’s images of the Holocaust in the Twenty Years before Holocaust ’, in Britain and the Holocaust, eds. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 90–114.

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inherently heterogeneous—remarkably so, she suggests, given the comparative geographical and experiential distance between the country and the spaces of killing. This is showcased in her discussion of the Holocaust’s presence in different literary genres, where she shows that in spite of the diversity of work and approaches it is possible to identify ‘common features’ such as ‘the persistence of national myth-making and its counterpart of national amnesia’. That said, Vice also throws a valuable spotlight on ‘the figure of the anguished bystander’—a trope she suggests has featured with increasing prominence in the field, and arguably represents ‘the most distinctive British contribution to Holocaust literature’. There is no doubting that cultural representations can be seen as both mirror of and motor to the development of British Holocaust memory in the post-war era. But they are, of course, not the sum total of all Holocaustrelated activity in British society. Nor are they the only barometers by which we can get a sense of how the Holocaust as history and as memory has been made present, and how Britons have responded to it. In his chapter, Nigel Copsey reminds us that valuable insights into the Holocaust culture can be gleaned by looking at the far right. Copsey revisits the 1960s to shine much needed light on the development of far right politics during the decade. As he retraces responses to the swastika epidemic and the Eichmann trial, Copsey presents persuasive evidence of how the far right radicalised during these years. Importantly, he shows how this was expressed through Holocaust revisionism and intensified antisemitic action, and served in effect to set the far right’s agenda for the next decade. These tectonic shifts gained no traction with the general public at the time, but Copsey suggests this should not obscure their long-term significance: the far right’s change in fortunes in the 1970s was, he contends, ‘more about presentation than forsaking antisemitic ideology’. Copsey’s conclusions dovetail with Tony Kushner’s critique of the ‘consensus’ or ‘common sense’ view that ‘knowledge and recognition of the Holocaust in the postwar era acted as a barrier to (at least) the public articulation of antisemitism’. While Kushner emphasises the need to properly consider this perspective, it is one which he also seeks to problematise in his chapter. As he asserts, there is an absence of empirical work on the actual, tangible, and often myriad ways in which the presence of the Holocaust in recent history has impacted gentile attitudes and behaviour. Kushner works towards a correction of this lacuna through his microhistory of an infamous murder committed by a Jewish man, named Jacob Harris, in Georgian Britain. Through close analysis of the shifting discourse around and representation of the murder and the murderer—both pre- and post-Holocaust—Kushner shows how the history and memory of the crime has repeatedly been shaped by trajectories of antisemitism in British society. The Holocaust, therefore, has inevitably impacted this particular moment from history as it has Britain more broadly, but not in the all-encompassing way we might presume. Instead, cultural imaginings of ‘the Jew’ and ‘negative semitic discourse’ very much remain and are likely to continue to for the foreseeable future.

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One individual who has experienced first hand the variegated effects that the Holocaust has had on post-war British society is Kitty Hart. As noted already, Kitty encountered indifference and hostility as soon as she arrived in Britain after the war, but her eventual resolve to tell her story saw her become one of the earliest survivors to publicly share her experiences with a mass audience—as seen with various published editions of I Am Alive during the 1960s and early 1970s. Kitty’s emergent role as a public figure is discussed in Isabel Wollaston’s chapter, which focuses in particular on television documentaries made by Kitty. Spanning across nearly four decades, Wollaston’s examination tracks how Kitty’s testimony has itself evolved as a result of retelling, continued research, and the process of recounting her experiences through the documentary medium. In this way, Kitty’s documentaries are vivid expressions of memory-work—both at an individual and collective level. However, Wollaston exposes a bitter and lamentable irony: though made principally for educational purposes, and revealing much about the changing condition of Holocaust consciousness in Britain, these films are, by and large, are ‘unknown and relatively inaccessible’. This reality is all the more peculiar given the prominence of Holocaust survivors in Britain today, and the new opportunities for accessing films and documentaries created by technological developments. A question which inevitably follows is whether or not the relative marginalisation of these films has something to do with the history they confront us with and the type of memory-work they showcase. It seems superfluous to state that the history and memory of the Holocaust is, and should be, challenging, yet Stuart Foster’s overview of Holocaust education in England reveals that a generation of formal teaching and learning about the subject has been accompanied by the emergence of some serious issues. It is undeniable that the introduction of mandatory Holocaust education in England and Wales in the early 1990s was a landmark in Britain’s post-war engagement with this history; even if, at the time, the rationale for doing so was notoriously unclear.89 But, as Foster demonstrates, recent research reveals this brings no guarantees that teaching practices are trouble-free, or that students necessarily have secure levels of knowledge and understanding. The research presented by Foster presents a very different—and difficult—picture, with fundamental problems of pedagogy compounded by knowledge gaps and an aversion to criticality in the majority of students. Crucially, as much as being the product of issues within the educational system, Foster emphasises how the concerning state of Holocaust education in England must also be read as a reflection of the wider social and cultural milieu. Contextualisation is, of course, important—and in the context of the postwar period as a whole, it is true that since the 1990s awareness of the Holocaust has increased to a level hitherto unseen. In part this is testament to 89 Andy

Pearce, ‘The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23, no. 3, pp. 231–33; Lucy Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History (London: Continuum, 2006).

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the effect of teaching and learning about the Holocaust in schools, but it also is the result of the entrance of the Holocaust into sites of cultural pedagogy over the last three decades. This has occurred at local and national levels, and taken form in locations as diverse as art galleries, historical sites, memorials, and museums. Perhaps the most notable example is the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition, which since opening in 2000 has been visited by millions. In their respective chapters, K. Hannah Holtschneider and Chad Macdonald each offer intriguing insights on and readings of the IWM exhibition. Holtschneider provides a birds-eye perspective of how the exhibition came into being, its underlying principles, and its ‘totalising’ approach. As she examines the structure of the exhibition, Holtschneider unpicks an overarching discourse which she suggests storifies the Holocaust in distinct ways. Principally, she argues, it ‘simplifies the complex and expansive history of the Holocaust, and domesticates it’—allowing the genocide to be ‘slotted’ ‘into positive perceptions of British history and thus British national identity’. It is a provocative thesis, but one which is grounded in an awareness of the didactic functions of museums and how a national institution—like the IWM—necessarily frames and leaves an imprint on the exhibitions it showcases. Clearly, for the vast majority of visitors, the mechanics of museology will be of little to no interest, and by the same token, Holtschneider notes how the IWM exhibition has spawned a plethora of interpretative accounts. Yet neither of these truths invalidate consideration of the ways this (or any) exhibition construct frames of reference and structures of meaning—intentionally, or otherwise. Macdonald’s chapter complements Holtschneider’s overview by providing a unique angle on the evolution of the exhibition at the IWM. Macdonald pursues a ‘reagentified’ examination of the involvement of the late scholar, David Cesarani, in the creation of the Holocaust Exhibition. As he does so, Macdonald unearths fascinating instances where Cesarani—sometimes individually, sometimes with others—is able to exert influence over aspects of the exhibit. Perhaps one of the most interesting (and potentially noteworthy) examples is the exhibition’s definition of the Holocaust, which—Macdonald shows—remained significantly different to its final form until a very late stage. Ultimately, the definition’s settled wording was the result of lobbying from Cesarani and other members of the Advisory Group; in this and other ways Macdonald exemplifies the impact that an individual could have on a project which remains of major significance in the history of British Holocaust memory. And yet, as Macdonald also shows, neither Cesarani nor others could exert total influence over the IWM exhibition. Naturally this is to be expected: institutions are inseparable from specific parameters and particular agendas, and it would be foolish to expect them to bend to the wills and whims of everyone. However, by exploring the agency that individuals can and do have, Macdonald illustrates how we can deepen our understanding of change, continuity, and causality.

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The establishment of mandatory Holocaust education and the creation of the Holocaust Exhibition were part of a process of institutionalisation which occurred across the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the new millennium. With this development—which happened at a remarkable pace, given the rate of progress over the previous forty years—the foundations of cultural memories of the Holocaust in Britain were concretised. Significantly, this process had been facilitated by a dramatic change in governmental attitudes towards Holocaust memory, which saw the state provide political will and public funds for this new wave of initiatives. This was clearest to see in the case of the third pillar on which institutionalisation rested: that being, Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). In her chapter, Kara Critchell offers a commentary of HMD’s ‘changing face’ since its inauguration in 2001. Noting the remarkable growth in engagement with this initiative in recent years, Critchell advances that the upsurge in HMD-related activity ‘obscures the complex discourses surrounding the day, and inherent tensions that have existed within it since its inception’. As she reconstructs these, Critchell draws particular attention to the position of other genocides within the mnemonic narrative of HMD, and the ways in which it has constructed a frame of inclusion and exclusion. She also identifies a shift in the agendas HMD has been positioned towards during its lifespan, suggesting a movement towards the Holocaust (and HMD) being used ‘as a tool to sculpt British identity’. In this manner, Critchell speaks of a narrowing of HMD from inclusivity and multiculturality in its early days, to the promotion of ‘British values’ more recently. As such, Critchell paints HMD as something of a political weather vane, but one that has—because of its tensions—also galvanised ‘activists in the promotion of non-Holocaust memory’. With the position of the Holocaust in the National Curriculum, a permanent national Holocaust Exhibition, and an annual day of Holocaust memorialisation, the institutional framework of Holocaust history and memory in Britain was complete. Naturally this did not herald the end of debate or contestation, nor did it provide a cast-iron guarantee that the Holocaust’s new-found pre-eminence in British society would last for time immemorial. But with the core structure of Britain’s Holocaust culture seemingly in place, there seemed little reason to anticipate any dramatic developments or major interventions in the near future. Such assumptions were duly expunged by the creation in 2014 of the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission. David Tollerton, in his summary of the Commission and UKHMF for this volume, argues that cutting across the project are a number of key tensions. According to Tollerton, these crystallise around the international and the national, the unique and the permeable, Jewish and non-Jewish meaning, and the proposed memorial (and learning centre) and its immediate locale. Tollerton’s discussion of these relationships provides a nuanced analysis of some of the key challenges which have emerged out of the project, but he also gestures to how they have also become embedded within it as well. Accordingly, these tensions are not resolvable—in the sense of problems that can be

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neatly ‘solved’, and therefore concluded; instead, they are bound up the whole enterprise, making it—Tollerton suggests—an inherently unstable, ‘conflicted endeavour with an unpredictable future’. Predicting the future is, of course, not the business of historians. And, in the case of contemporary Britain, the future is currently shrouded with considerable ambiguity. Nevertheless, if the work of historians is to have meaning and impact beyond the academy, the future cannot be ignored—even if the inevitable conjecture that comes with discussing it, is anathema to the historical discipline. Contemplating the future of Holocaust memory in Britain has added gravity not only because of the impending appearance of the UKHMF project and the forthcoming opening of a new Holocaust gallery at the IWM; it is also pertinent as we move further into the post-survivor age and as the Holocaust becomes increasingly invoked in discussions of contemporary refugee crises and the resurgence of antisemitism. In his postscript to this volume Andy Pearce ventures cautiously into this territory, with a discussion of Holocaust consciousness in Brexit Britain. Pearce’s broad concern is with how the Holocaust has been used at a state level by successive governments during the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, he historicizes how Holocaust memory has been used in the construction of national identity—first to buttress ideas of Britishness, and subsequently to underpin notions of British values. Pearce subsequently explores how the UKHMF project became unavoidably impacted by the fallout of the 2016 EU Referendum result: both with regard to the heightened identity politics which ensued, and in relation to the decision to frame the proposed memorial in terms of imagined British democracy. His concluding remarks are stark if unavoidably speculative: as well as facing an existential challenge in the coming years, in the shape of a potential break-up of the United Kingdom post-Brexit, the UKHMF enterprise must also duly confront the tides of nationalism that have flowed forth since 2016—a task which will require a reckoning, of sorts, with the skeletons of British history.

Conclusion Writing at the end of his 2005 magnum opus, Postwar, Tony Judt offered the following reflection: Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive – which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins. But history does need to be learned—and periodically re-learned.90

90 Tony

Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 830.

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There is no disputing that the presence of genocides and mass atrocities in the annals of human history breeds disenchantment and disillusion—speaking as they do man’s capacity for violence and innate ability to marshal collective action for the destruction of others rather than their betterment. And, there is no denying that the specific histories of the Holocaust have particular dimensions which disrupt our moral and ethical being. Yet if these truths help—if only in part—to explain our societal penchant for selected histories, they also run into the emotive, impulsive and almost instinctive need to remember such obsidian events in our history. The push and the pull of history and memory, both within and between each other, is a tension we must be appreciative of and alive to. The current position of the Holocaust in British politics, culture and society will not endure; it cannot, even if we wish it were so. But the inevitability of forgetting, even if it is shaded more towards distortion than outright oblivion, makes it all the more critical that what we know now, what we understand about the Holocaust is rooted in historical actuality. This is especially so if we are to respond in meaningful ways to the questions and the challenges that the destruction of European Jewry continues to pose us. For the past generation considerable time, energy and resources have been committed to ‘learning’ the memory of the Holocaust in Britain: a selected, collected memory of the events, and of Britain’s connection to them. Too often, however, the contents of these memories have been detached and abstracted from what actually occurred. As we move further into a new century, approaching—in due course—centenary anniversaries attached to this history, we must re-learn the history of Britain and the Holocaust, if our memories of it are to have purpose.

PART I

Political Contexts

CHAPTER 2

British Interwar Fascism and Anti-fascism Daniel Tilles

In the context of the Holocaust, British fascism can appear rather inconsequential. Among the web of groups that formed Britain’s interwar radical right, only one, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), attracted significant support; most others struggled to reach a membership in the hundreds. Even the BUF failed to win a single seat at local elections, let alone to challenge for national power. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that, in the wealth of work on fascist studies, the British case has received little attention. Stanley Payne, in his History of Fascism, devotes just a page and a half to this ‘political oxymoron’, noting that the relatively large amount of research devoted to native fascism in Britain itself is ‘inversely proportionate’ to the subject’s actual significance.1 One of the leading scholars of British fascism, Richard Thurlow, admits that, even at the brief peak of its popularity, the BUF was ‘of only marginal significance to British politics’, and for the rest of the time was little more than a ‘nuisance’. Other British fascist groups were ‘quixotic and eccentric…minute elements on the political fringe’.2 1 S. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–45 (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 303–5. 2 R. Thurlow, ‘State Management of the British Union of Fascists’, in M. Cronin

(ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 50; R. Thurlow, ‘The Failure of British Fascism’, in A. Thorpe (ed.), The Failure of Political Extremism in Inter-War Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989), p. 67. D. Tilles (B) Pedagogical University of Krakow, Krakow, Poland

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_2

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Yet there are important reasons to take account of British fascism, both in a domestic and international context. To begin with, political success should not be regarded as the sole, or even primary, determinant of a fascist movement’s significance; indeed, in some ways the opposite is true. Although popular and academic attention has been drawn to Italy and Germany, these two cases were, as Roger Griffin points out, actually ‘freak examples’ of fascism, given that they were the only places it managed to form regimes before the war. In every other country, fascism was, to varying degrees, a failure—making British fascism not an anomaly but paradigmatic.3 Moreover, the British case was, as Robert Paxton notes, ‘one of the most interesting failures’. Britain produced a number of noteworthy fascist thinkers, not least Mosley himself, whom Paxton believes ‘probably had the greatest intellectual gifts…of all the fascist chiefs’.4 Thurlow, likewise, sees the BUF’s programme as ‘the most coherent and rational of all the fascist parties in Europe’, and ‘of a far higher quality than the ideas of Mussolini and Hitler’.5 Given the growing emphasis in the scholarship over recent decades on fascist ideology—taking seriously what the fascists said and thought, not just what they did—the sophisticated philosophy and programme of the BUF makes British fascism an interesting, important and instructive case study. Here, again, we see the advantage of focusing on smaller, failed groups: whereas fascist parties that came to power were forced to trade off between ideological purity and the pragmatism required to run a country, movements that remained on the fringes of political life could offer a ‘pure…unmuddied’ version of fascism, argues Zeev Sternhell.6

3 R.

Griffin, ‘British Fascism: The Ugly Duckling’, in Cronin (ed.), Failure of British Fascism (1996), p. 155.

4 R.

Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 75.

5 R.

Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), pp. xi, 62, 114–20; K. Lunn and R. Thurlow, ‘Introduction’, in K. Lunn and R. Thurlow (eds), British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 13. On the BUF’s ideology, see also R. Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 132– 64; N. Nugent, ‘The Ideas of the British Union of Fascists’, in N. Nugent and R. King (eds), The British Right: Conservative and Right Wing Politics in Britain (London: Saxon House, 1977); S. Cullen, ‘The Development of the Ideas and Policy of the British Union of Fascists, 1932–40’, Journal of Contemporary History (1987): 22; D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–81 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 33–60; P. Coupland, ‘The Blackshirted Utopians’, Journal of Contemporary History (1998): 33; P. Coupland, ‘“Left-Wing Fascism” in Theory and Practice: The Case of the British Union of Fascists’, Twentieth Century British History (2002): 13; T. Linehan, British Fascism 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 89–98; G. Love, ‘“What’s the Big Idea?”: Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists and Generic Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History (2007): 42. 6 Z.

Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, in W. Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 329, 332.

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This general pattern of failure is, moreover, significant in its own right, and abortive fascist movements like Britain’s help ascertain what factors might explain it. Much was down to the internal deficiencies of the parties themselves, in terms of leadership, personnel and tactics. Mosley, for all his talents as an ideologue and orator, was aloof, egocentric and a poor organiser. His lieutenants held divergent ideological and strategic visions and were in constant conflict, resulting in the BUF’s tactics and focus regularly shifting depending on which faction was in the Leader’s favour. Beyond the BUF, other fascist groups were generally led by obscure eccentrics, often with little by way of any coherent structure or programme. External factors, however, played an even greater part. Some were circumstantial: for example, the fact that the BUF was not founded until late 1932, meaning that, by the time it had properly established itself, the worst of the Great Depression was over, rendering much of Mosley’s economic programme obsolete and reducing the tensions that he could have exploited. Britain’s only viable fascist party thus missed its narrow window of opportunity. Other impediments were more deeply ingrained. Britain, with an electoral system that inhibits the emergence of new parties, a political culture favouring slow, consensual change, and widespread, deeply ingrained acceptance of liberal democracy, provided barren ground for fascism. Again, in this regard we find Britain prototypical: fascism was hindered by ‘structural feature[s] of all but the most defective liberal democracies anywhere in the world’, notes Griffin, who cautious against the ‘Whiggish belief’ that Britain is uniquely resistant to extremism.7 As well as these in-built defences, a key role was also played by fascism’s opponents. Indeed, while it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to see British fascism as destined for failure, the BUF actually initially gained a relatively large membership in a short space of time and received a sympathetic hearing from some in the political mainstream. It was in large part thanks to the activity of anti-fascists, as well as the BUF’s own response to them, that the Blackshirts’ true nature was exposed and their support rapidly evaporated. Subsequently, a diverse range of anti-fascist forces—from the state itself down to local Communist Party branches—employed a variety of different forms of action to successfully restrict the political space available to the fascists and ensure they remained on the margins. Britain therefore offers an instructive case study in the effectiveness of anti-fascist activity, a fact that is not just of historical interest but has also taken on renewed relevance in recent times. Finally, there is an important but neglected chapter within this broader story of resistance, which is the prominent role played by Jews at all levels of the anti-fascist movement. The aforementioned focus on Italy and, especially, Germany has not only shaped perceptions of fascism, it has also left an image of Jews solely as victims of, refugees from or heroic but ultimately doomed rebels against fascism. In much of the scholarship they have been 7 Griffin,

‘British Fascism’, p. 152.

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presented as facing a stark choice between being ‘sheep to the slaughter’ or undertaking ‘glorious resistance…that never stood a chance of succeeding’, as Robert Rozett puts it. Where other options have been acknowledged, they involved merely mitigating, surviving, escaping or taking a moral stand against their oppression, rather than overcoming it.8 This is of course entirely understandable, given the horrors Jews faced under the rule of the Nazis and their allies, and the overwhelming imbalance of power against them.9 But it obscures the much broader range of interactions Jews had with fascism as an opposition movement rather than a regime. In Britain, the Jewish community, which outnumbered the fascists and held positions of greater influence, was able to play an active and effective role in opposing them. This has contemporary resonance, too. Nowhere does today’s radical right function as a regime; rather it operates as a movement, often with little or no formal political representation, that makes its impact by influencing debate on issues like immigration and the treatment of minorities, and through street activism, the dissemination of propaganda, and verbal and physical violence. This is precisely how Britain’s interwar fascists functioned, again making them an equally or even more relevant historical case study than Italy or Germany. The experience and actions of Britain’s Jews, meanwhile, offers an example of how ethnic, religious or other minority groups can respond to a radical right that is targeting them, by both coordinating action within their communities and collaborating with external allies. Finally, the history of British fascism also helps to reflect on the Holocaust. Just as the complacent view that Britain is inherently immune to political extremism should be dismissed, so too the idea that it has been relatively free of exclusionary prejudice towards Jews is one that must be challenged. Scholars have traced long-standing, widespread and deeply rooted native traditions of antisemitism.10 Likewise, whereas the British fascists’ antisemitism was long regarded as imitative, inspired by its continental counterparts, particularly the Nazis, in fact it drew upon this rich indigenous tradition of anti-Jewish thought. Their programme explicitly envisioned the exclusion and eventual expulsion of Jews from Britain (with one fascist leader, as we shall see, going 8 Robert

Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 341–42, 345.

9 J.

Matthäus and M. Roseman, Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1, 1933–1938 (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2010), pp. xix–xx.

10 On British antisemitism, see D. Cesarani, ‘The Study of Antisemitism in Britain: Trends and Perspectives’, in M. Brown (ed.), Approaches to Antisemitism: Context and Curriculum (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1994); G. Field, ‘Anti-Semitism with the Boots Off’, in Herbert Strauss (ed.), Hostages of Modernization. Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1970–1933/39, Vol. 3/1 Germany–Great Britain–France (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993); C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society 1876–1939 (London: Arnold, 1979); A. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); T. Kushner, ‘The Impact of British Anti-semitism, 1918– 1945’, in D. Cesarani (ed.), The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

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as far as advocating the use of gas chambers, years before the Nazis implemented the idea). This goal was placed at the heart of a typically fascist drive to cleanse the nation of its impure elements and bring about national rebirth. When it comes to remembering the Holocaust, Britain tends to see itself as distanced from its horrors, or even as having played a positive role, with attention focused on the (pre-war) reception of Kindertransport children or (post-war) arrival of Holocaust survivors, as well as on Britain’s part in liberating the German Nazi camps at the end of the war. Meanwhile, as Tony Kushner notes, the uncomfortable realities of Britain’s relationship to the Holocaust are ‘deliberately ignored in order to provide a palatable narrative’.11 There is little reflection on the fact that, despite detailed knowledge of the unfolding Holocaust, Britain remained reluctant, sometimes outright hostile, towards taking action to mitigate it or to help those seeking to flee, despite opportunities to do so. This reticence was often motivated by the prevalent antisemitic attitudes outlined above, both among the public and political establishment.12 As the example of the German-occupied Channel Islands suggests, Britain’s response to Nazi rule may have been little different to other parts of Europe.13 And certainly, in its domestic fascist movement, the country had a ready-made potential puppet government, which would have had little compunction in implementing anti-Jewish edicts.

Proto-fascists and Parafascists The first group in Britain to describe itself as fascist appeared in 1923. But the seeds of fascist thought had been planted earlier, in response to social, political and economic upheaval around the turn of the century, and nourished by the sense of dislocation and disillusionment engendered by the First World War. This early radical right coalesced around ‘Die-hard’ Conservatives, publications like Eye Witness and National Review, and individuals such as Leo Maxse, Hilaire Belloc, Arnold White, the Chesterton brothers, Nesta Webster and Joseph Bannister. Although it did not hold a single, coherent ideology,

11 T. Kushner, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, Journal of Israeli History 23 (2004): 124. 12 See

R. Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); M. Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); T. Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981); L. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

13 See David Fraser, The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law, 1940–45 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000).

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let alone a formal structure, programme or leadership, it did provide a ‘distinct and discernible continuity of ideas’, as well as personnel, that interwar fascists could draw upon.14 In particular, the early radical right fostered a sense that the existing political system was incapable of arresting Britain’s declining global power and prestige, and that more radical solutions were urgently required. The root of these problems was seen to lie in a creeping degeneracy within British society, with early radicals cultivating many of the fears regarding corruption and decadence that inspired fascists of later years. Such concerns were heightened by the disastrous wars in South Africa at the turn of the century, which led many to question the virility, even racial fitness, of the British people; by the emergence of organised labour and feminist movements; and by a wave of, mainly Jewish, immigration. Economically, Edwardian social imperialism, which sought to protect domestic markets from cheap imports, had a strong influence on the later thought of interwar fascists, as did early corporatist ideas. The upheaval of WWI and its aftermath added more socialist concepts, like national planning, to the mix. It also, notes Martin Pugh, ‘severely weaken[ed] liberalism both as an idea and as an organised political force[,]…ma[king] many of the pre-war concerns about race, decadence, anti-Semitism and internal subversion appear more acute’. As this suggests, a constant underlying theme was hostility towards Jews, who were seen to embody many of the ills afflicting British society and the threats it faced from outside, fears that were further stoked by the Bolshevik Revolution.15 In terms of their activism, fascists were also able to draw upon the legacy of the British Brothers League, an anti-alien movement that sprung up in response to the large-scale immigration of poor, east-European Jews in the late nineteenth century. It gained support in particular among the working class of London’s East End, where the majority of Jewish immigrants settled. This would be precisely the same area where the BUF focused its energies in the mid-1930s. The BBL also forged links with Conservative MPs, such as William Evans-Gordon, whose 1903 book The Alien Immigrant provided a 14 Thurlow, 15 M.

Fascism in Britain, p. 6; Lunn and Thurlow, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10, 21.

Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2005), pp. 7–17, 26, 34; Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 1, 3, 5– 6, 10, 12–13; D. Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 10, D. Stone, ‘The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism’, Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 355–8, D. Stone, ‘The Far Right and the Back-to-the-Land Movement’, in J. Gottlieb and T. Linehan (eds), The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 184, 193; Linehan, British Fascism, pp. 17– 18; A. Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 11–33; G. Field, ‘Anti-Semitism with the Boots Off’, in H. Strauss (ed.), Hostages of Modernization. Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1970–1933/39, Vol. 3/1 Germany–Great Britain–France (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 297–8; C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society 1876–1939 (London: Arnold, 1979), pp. 24–30, 75–80; K. Lunn, ‘Political Anti-semitism Before 1914: Fascism’s Heritage?’, in Lunn and Thurlow (eds), British Fascism (1980).

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template for many of the anti-Jewish concerns expressed by later fascist groups. The pressure exerted by the movement, which had thousands of followers and held mass public meetings, played a key role in the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, the first peacetime legislation restricting immigration to Britain.16 As David Feldman notes, the BBL showed how, through an ‘attempt to construct a national community…influenced by the growing threat to Britain’s imperial predominance…[and] inevitably based upon a series of inclusions and exclusions’, it was possible ‘to mobilise a coalition of diverse interests into a significant political movement…[with] values and practices crossing class boundaries’.17 The precedent this set for later fascist movements is clear. The above is important to acknowledge because it emphasises that the fascist movements which did emerge in the 1920s and 1930s were not ‘simply a pale imitation of continent fascist movements’, as they have sometimes been perceived, but instead ‘drew from…both native and continental European sources’. These home-grown influences were long neglected by scholars, with British fascism overshadowed by its more prominent continental counterparts.18 British fascists themselves often faced a difficult balancing act, wanting to draw inspiration from, and bask in the reflected glory of, their counterparts in Italy and Germany, but at the same time asserting—as befitted an ultranationalist movement—that they represented a uniquely British form of this political phenomenon, rooted in native tradition. Britain’s first nominally fascist group (and the largest of the 1920s) epitomised this struggle even in its name, initially calling itself the British Fascisti before settling on the anglicised British Fascists. However, it ‘borrowed the name and very little else from Italy’, argues Thurlow.19 Rather than marking a truly radical break from existing politics, the BF, motivated more by anticommunism than any positive ideological goals, effectively represented an extreme wing of the Tories, with whom it ‘occupied overlapping positions on a broad spectrum rather than two wholly distinct positions’.20 Membership, which came disproportionately from the middle and upper classes, including a number of titled aristocrats and military officers,21 peaked very briefly in the thousands around 1925–6 but was far lower for the rest of the BF’s

16 Holmes,

Anti-Semitism, pp. 89–96; W. Evans-Gordon, The Alien Immigrant (London: Heineman, 1903).

17 D.

Feldman, ‘The Importance of Being English: Immigration and the Decay of Liberal England’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 76–8. 18 Linehan,

British Fascism, p. 13; Stone, ‘The English Mistery’, pp. 336–7, 355–8.

19 Thurlow,

Fascism in Britain, p. 34.

20 Pugh,

Hurrah, p. 57.

21 Linehan,

British Fascism, pp. 154–8; Pugh, Hurrah, p. 52. As the BF went into decline after 1926, the social status of its average member ‘moved down a notch or two’, notes R. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 89–90.

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existence.22 By 1934 it had wound up completely under the weight of mass defections, financial difficulties, and the erratic behaviour and personal troubles of its founder and leader, Rotha Lintorn-Orman.23 It did, though, offer a more active and confrontational form of politics, with blue-shirted uniforms and regular clashes with opponents. The BF was involved in strike-breaking activities during the General Strike of 1926, and its members stewarded Tory meetings.24 Many Conservatives saw the fascists as a potential tool to fight communism, ‘as allies who…might, in some future crisis, fulfil an even more vital function for the state’.25 As the 1920s progressed, the BF also took an increasingly antisemitic stance, with early references to opposing ‘alien immigration’ and the need for ‘purification of the British race’ fleshed out into more explicit accusations against Jews.26 A number of even smaller fascist groups also emerged in the 1920s, many of them growing out of factions that, frustrated by the BF’s conservatism, splintered away from it, fragmenting an already marginal fringe. The only such organisation of any note was the Imperial Fascist league, formed in 1929 by Arnold Leese, who left the BF after deeming it nothing more than ‘conservatism with knobs on’. The IFL was essentially a personal vehicle for the fanatical ‘anti-Jewish camel-doctor’, as Leese described himself in the title of his autobiography.27 Though it remained active until the Second World War, it never accumulated any significant formal following. But Leese’s prolific writings, through The Fascist newspaper and other self-published works, were noteworthy for their obsessive, racial-biological antisemitism, which extended to advocating the use of gas chambers in the 1930s, long before the idea was put in practice by the Nazis.28 Along with the Britons, a publishing house established in 1919 dedicated to producing antisemitic tracts that promoted a ‘crude pseudo-scientific racial ideology’,29 the IFL’s impact was felt chiefly through its propagation of anti-Jewish ideas among others on the radical-right fringe.

22 Records relating to the BF’s internal workings are scant, so estimates of membership are educated guesswork and vary greatly. See Linehan, British Fascism, pp. 152–4. 23 Thurlow,

Fascism in Britain, p. 37.

24 Linehan,

British Fascism, pp. 34–6; Pugh, Hurrah, pp. 61–2.

25 Pugh,

Hurrah, pp. 57–9, 62.

26 S. Garau, Fascism and Ideology: Italy, Britain and Norway (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 155–7; P. Stocker, ‘Importing Fascism: Reappraising the British Fascisti, 1923–1926’, Contemporary British History 30, no. 7 (2016): 14–15. 27 A.S.

Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel-Doctor (Guildford, 1951).

28 Linehan,

British Fascism, pp. 35–7; Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, p. 91; J. Morell, ‘Arnold Leese and the Imperial Fascist League: The Impact of Racial Fascism’, in Lunn and Thurlow (eds), British Fascism (1980), pp. 57–75.

29 G. Lebzelter, ‘Henry Hamilton Beamish and the Britons: Champions of Anti-Semitism’, in Lunn and Thurlow (eds), British Fascism (1980), p. 54.

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Debate continues over whether the BF, let alone even smaller organisations, merit serious attention—and indeed over whether some can even be described as ‘fascist’ at all. Martin Blinkhorn contends that none, with perhaps the exception of the IFL, ‘possessed much more than curiosity value’.30 Thurlow, as we saw at the outset, is similarly dismissive. The BF, in his view, was ‘a cross between a glorified boy scout movement and a paramilitary group’, which had ‘little relevance for the development of native fascist ideological tradition’. He does acknowledge, though, that it left a legacy of political violence which other groups, particularly the BUF, could draw upon.31 Others, however, see the BF as more influential than its low membership figures or visibility would suggest. Pugh points to a clear ‘traffic of ideas’ from the BF into mainstream Conservativism, including many ‘distinctly fascist’ ones.32 Some have also offered the important reminder that, while it is easy with hindsight to argue that the views of these early groups do not fit our current understanding of fascism, this ignores the fact that for much of the 1920s this completely new political phenomenon was in a state of flux. Its Italian archetype contained various factions—radical and conservative, left-wing and right—pulling it in different directions, leaving an ideology and praxis that were variegated and evolving, even once it was in power. As Salvatore Garau notes, ‘instead of looking primarily at the static “finished product”’, one should take account of the ‘remarkably fluid process of fascism’s ideological formation’, especially its ‘capacity to bring together elements from all political traditions, including nationalism, socialism, conservatism and liberalism’.33 With regard to the BF specifically, Paul Stocker stresses that it operated at a time ‘when fascism was new[,]…with little ideological coherence’, and one should therefore avoid viewing it through the lens of a simplistic dichotomy of ‘fascist’ or ‘conservative’. Building on the idea of ‘parafascism’ put forward by Griffin and others, Stocker sees the BF as a ‘middle-road’ formed from a ‘hybrid of continental fascist, British conservative and authoritarian features’.34 Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the BF’s ideological variegation resulted less from design than from confusion and amateurism. As Stocker himself admits, its ideas could be ‘obviously contradictory’, ‘implausible’, sometimes ‘almost unintelligible’. BF propaganda promised to uphold ‘the fundamental principles of free speech’ but also demanded ‘no discussion, 30 M. Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919–1945 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), p. 60. 31 Thurlow,

Fascism in Britain, pp. 31, 33–4, 40.

32 Pugh,

Hurrah, p. 55; K. Lunn, ‘British Fascism Revisited: A Failure of Imagination?’, in Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism (1996), pp. 174–5. 33 Garau,

Fascism and Ideology, p. 4; Payne, History of Fascism, p. 304.

34 Stocker,

‘Importing fascism’, p. 327. See also A, Kallis, ‘“Fascism”, “Para-Fascism” and “Fascistization”: On the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories’, European History Quarterly (2003): 33; Pugh, Hurrah, pp. 55, 73.

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only obedience’; it declared that fascism would ‘respect the sovereignty of the individual’, but at the same time that its creed was ‘Country first; Self second’.35 It is hard to see the BF—let alone smaller 1920s groups—as particularly important in their own right. Their significance lies in the fact that they provided a breeding ground for some of the ideas, activity and personnel that would go on to contribute to the far more significant BUF.

The Emergence of the British Union of Fascists The formation of the BUF represented the culmination of a political journey for its leader, Oswald Mosley. Born into an aristocratic family, he had, following military service in WW1, been a rising star in first the Conservative then Labour Party, serving the latter as a government minister from 1929. However, the impatience that had led him to cross the aisle soon pushed him to seek a new form of politics altogether. Egged on by the press magnate Lord Rothermere,36 Mosley formed the proto-fascist New Party in 1931. Following a failed General Election campaign later that year, and after meeting Mussolini in Roma and Nazi officials in Munich,37 Mosley took the final step in 1932 and founded the British Union of Fascists. The presence of Mosley, one of twentieth-century Britain’s greatest political orators and an accomplished thinker, as well ample financing from his own deep pockets and secret funding from Mussolini,38 guaranteed that the BUF would be a more serious proposition than earlier fascist groups. These advantages were reinforced by a more disciplined approach, professional organisation, and coherent and consistent message than those who came before. Indeed, the BUF was unusual in that, unlike many other fascist organisations at home and abroad, it was founded with a fully formed programme and ideology, one that, although the emphasis shifted over time, remained remarkably consistent. These ideas were embodied in Mosley’s founding treatise, The Greater Britain, which combined technocratic descriptions of the corporate state he wished to create through ‘scientific measures’ with typically fascist rallying calls for an ‘organised revolt of young manhood’ that would ‘invad[e] every phase of national life’ and replace the ‘decadence and disillusion…[of] old values’ with a ‘new flame [that] purifies and inspires to loftier ambitions’.39 Like those that came before it, the BUF had to find a balance between its native roots and foreign influences. Mosley recognised that much of fascism’s

35 Stocker,

‘Importing fascism’, pp. 334–5.

36 R.

Bourne, Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), p. 110.

37 Thurlow, 38 Love, 39 O.

Fascism in Britain, p. 61.

‘“What’s the Big Idea?”’, p. 453.

Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: BUF, 1934), pp. 103, 178, 190.

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allure came from its achievements in Italy and Germany, which BUF publications regularly reported on. But, at the same time, he was at pains to emphasise that his fascism would be ‘very different from Continental forms, with characteristics which are peculiarly British and…avoid the excesses and the horrors of Continental struggle’.40 The BUF was particularly keen, in its early days, to distance itself from the violence and antisemitism that were associated with German and Italian fascism but were regarded, in such extreme and explicit form at least, as alien to British political culture. BUF newspapers, where they did acknowledge such things, attempted to downplay or justify them, or simply reassure that they would not happen in a British fascist state. In 1933, the BUF’s newspaper, Blackshirt, excused Hitler’s ‘relatively mild persecution of a few thousand Jews’ but at the same time promised that this would ‘not be repeated in Fascist Britain’.41 The reason, Mosley explained, was that countries each faced a unique Jewish problem and possessed ‘vast difference[s] in our national character’. Indiscriminate racial or religious persecution, while perhaps appropriate in Germany, was ‘altogether foreign to the English mind’. ‘Our attitude towards [Jews] must be different from the Italian or the German, just as in every part of our policy our attitude is peculiarly British and is not foreign’.42 When it came to violence, Mosley readily admitted that his followers would always be prepared to use it—indeed his uniformed, military-style ‘defence force’ was specifically trained to do so, and the prospect of confrontational activity was a major attraction for many members.43 However, he emphasised that he wanted political change to ‘be achieved by legal and by peaceful means’ (and did indeed set about establishing the electoral machinery to do so). Violence, Mosley claimed, would only be employed defensively, if the BUF was attacked by its opponents or if the British state itself was threatened by a revolutionary left-wing takeover.44 This careful balance—between domestic and international influences, between radicalism and maintaining a respectable façade—was initially successful. The BUF attracted positive interest from significant sections of the public and press; its membership rose to an estimated 50,000 in under two years,45 with a far wider circle of sympathisers. The latter included members of the political, economic and social establishment, many cultivated through the BUF’s January Club, a private dining group designed to woo politicians, 40 Mosley,

Greater Britain, p. 187.

41 Blackshirt,

16 May 1933, p. 4; 5 August 1933, p. 2; see also, 1 March 1933, p. 1.

42 Blackshirt,

2 November 1934, p. 2. See also Sunday Graphic, 2 July 1933.

43 D.

Tilles, ‘Narratives of Violence: Fascists and Jews in 1930s Britain’, in C. Millington and K. Passmore (eds), Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 175. 44 Mosley, 45 The

Greater Britain, p. 182.

most trusted estimates of members remain those of G. Webber, ‘Patterns of Membership and Support for the BUF’, Journal of Contemporary History (1984): 19.

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businessmen and military types.46 In 1934, Rothermere, who had since the start of the decade openly expressed his admiration for fascism in general and the Nazis in particular,47 also began using his newspapers to promote the BUF.48

The BUF and Antisemitism: Challenging a Consensus During their early rise, the Blackshirts had not faced systematic opposition. Heckling took place at meetings, but this was a common feature of British political life. Attempts to physically disrupt events were sporadic and organised spontaneously and locally, rather than as part a more coherent strategy. Given concurrent events in Germany, there was particular concern among Jews about the development of a native fascist movement, one that did not hide its admiration for Hitler. However, while few placed any credence in Mosley’s denials of antisemitism, almost all heeded the calls of the Jewish communal leadership to avoid action that could make Jews appear the aggressors. Indeed, at this stage the most serious violence involving the BUF came in clashes with other fascist groups, particularly the BF and IFL, who resented being eclipsed by a powerful new arrival and regarded Mosley as an opportunist rather than a genuine fascist.49 A turning point came in June 1934, when the BUF arranged its largest meeting to date, at London’s Olympia hall. A lax ticketing policy and a more coordinated anti-fascist effort meant that Mosley’s speech was delayed by mass protests outside, then interrupted every few minutes by choreographed heckling inside the hall. The violent manner in which the BUF’s defence-force stewards removed the protesters from the building, in front of onlooking members of the press and many non-fascists who had attended the meeting out of interest, caused great negative publicity. Further outbreaks of violence at other Blackshirt events that month, as well as the Night of the Long Knives in Germany, further tarnished fascism’s image.50

46 Thurlow,

Fascism in Britain, p. 69.

47 Spectator,

27 September 1930, p. 1; ‘Lord Rothermere Attacking Jews advises Hitler to Eliminate Anti-semitism from Program’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5 October 1930; Daily Mail, 10 July 1933. 48 N.

Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 23; Pugh, Hurrah, p. 150.

49 Copsey,

Anti-Fascism in Britain (2000), pp. 15–24; S. Cullen, ‘Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History (1993): 260; D. Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–40 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 101–105; D. Tilles, ‘Bullies or Victims? A Study of British Union of Fascists Violence’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7 (2006): 331. 50 Tilles,

‘Bullies or Victims’, pp. 331–2.

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There is disagreement about the precise nature of the immediate response to Olympia from the political establishment.51 However, what is clear is that the BUF soon began losing more respectable members at a rapid rate, including Rothermere, who publicly abandoned Mosley the following month.52 In response to this declining popularity, and following further organised opposition at BUF events in the autumn, Mosley announced that antisemitism had been adopted as official party policy. This was presented as a reluctant decision, one forced upon the BUF as a defensive measure in response to Jewish involvement in physical violence against Blackshirts. Jews had ‘mobilised against Fascism’, claimed Mosley, so the BUF had no choice but to ‘take up the challenge thrown down by Jewry’.53 Much of the historiography of British fascism has taken Mosley at his word, portraying him as an unwilling antisemite who was only forced in this direction by external circumstances, especially Jewish aggression. The most prominent exponent of this idea, known as ‘interactionism’, has been Robert Skidelsky, whose early, sympathetic biography of Mosley argued that the BUF was not ‘inherently violent and anti-semitic’ but instead was ‘pushed in these ways by the opposition it aroused’. In particular, the ‘origins of the “quarrel with the Jews” [lay] in a process of interaction…[with] Jewish anti-fascism’, which caused Mosley a ‘genuine’ problem that required a ‘solution’.54 While later research has revised Skidelsky’s account, every major scholar of British fascism continues to cite interaction as a factor in explaining the BUF’s move to antisemitism. It was, says Thurlow, Mosley’s ‘concept of personal honour and his rational analysis of the activities of some Jews against the BUF, and their role in British society, [which] convinced him that assaults by enemies on the movement should be resisted by defensive force’.55 Even when this is supplemented by additional explanations, scholars still tend to point to circumstances beyond Mosley’s control rather than his own volition. Many cite the ‘pressure…at every level in the BUF’ to adopt antisemitism, in the words of Colin Cross, which Mosley ‘found…difficult to resist’. Such demands were bolstered by the growing success of the Nazis and their radical form of antisemitism (in contrast to the previously dominant Italian example, which at this stage had not adopted anti-Jewish laws). Mosley 51 M. Pugh, ‘The British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate’, The Historical Journal (1998): 41; J. Lawrence, ‘Fascist Violence and the Politics of Public Order in Inter-War Britain: The Olympia Debate Revisited’, Historical Research (2003): 76. 52 Blackshirt, 53 Tilles,

20 July 1934, p. 2.

British Fascist Antisemitism, pp. 42, 106–7.

54 R.

Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (London: Papermac, 1980), pp. 16–8, 383, 390–3, and R. Skidelsky, ‘Reflections on Mosley and British Fascism’, in Lunn and Thurlow (eds), British Fascism (1980), p. 87. Other early examples can be found in W.F. Mandle, Anti-Semitism and the British Union of Fascists (London: Longman, 1968), pp. 1–3, 5, 13–19, 25–45, 64, 67–8; Holmes, Anti-Semitism, pp. 186–9, and C. Holmes, ‘Anti-semitism and the BUF’, in Lunn and Thurlow, British Fascism (1980), pp. 118–21. 55 Thurlow,

Fascism, p. 116.

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was ‘buffeted by forces beyond his control’, says Pugh; he was ‘the victim of influential hard-line anti-Semites within the party’, argues D.S. Lewis. Others note Britain’s recovery from the Great Depression, which rendered much of Mosley’s sophisticated economic programme less relevant and appealing. This, along with the fallout from Olympia, left the BUF searching for new impetus, and it settled upon antisemitism.56 The impression left by such accounts is that antisemitism was a belated and artificial, or at least opportunistic, addition to Mosley’s programme. For the BUF, antisemitism ‘never became a total ideological explanation of all the imagined ills of British society’, as it was for the likes of the IFL. It always remained ‘something entirely different’ from ‘the real inner core’, designed to attract certain types of followers, who were then indoctrinated into the true ‘beliefs of inner fascism’. Moreover, while others on the fascist fringe saw Jews as an indistinguishable and undesirable whole, an outlook often rooted in a biological perception of race, Mosleyite antisemitism, which defined Jews in cultural terms, was able to differentiate between the few ‘good’ ones (who were always theoretically welcome in a future fascist state) and the ‘bad’ majority (who had to be removed or otherwise excluded).57 Yet there are important correctives to this general consensus. The first concerns the decision to ‘adopt’ antisemitism as policy, and in particular Mosley’s role in it. Even at first blush, it appears odd that the undisputed leader of a party advocating an authoritarian model of government, who was its main ideologue, orator and funder, exerting supreme control over its programme, could be pressured into suddenly adding a major new component of policy, one that he had previously denounced. In actual fact, as a handful of scholars have noted, one can see that ‘the consistent elements of anti-Semitism were all there’ by the end of 1933, ‘suggest[ing] that an as yet undecided variety of anti-Semitism had become official BUF policy’. Mosley’s announcements the next autumn were therefore ‘not an aberration but rather a further stage in the development of an anti-Semitic process which had begun considerably earlier’.58

56 C.

Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961), p. 123; Pugh, Hurrah, pp. 77, 218–20, 230–4; Lewis, Illusions, pp. 95–101; T. Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South-West Essex (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 24–44, 78–80, 224, 275–6, 302, and Linehan, British Fascism, pp. 176–7, 190; Thurlow, Fascism, pp. xiv, 72–5, 78, 86, 126–8; Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, pp. 79–80. 57 R. Thurlow, ‘The Developing British Fascist Interpretation of Race, Culture and Evolution’, in Gottlieb and Linehan (eds), Culture of Fascism (2004), pp. 66–79, and Thurlow, Fascism, pp. 37, 75, 116–8, 127. See also P. Coupland, review of Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2008) by Stephen Dorril, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9 (2008): 610; Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism, p. 95; Mandle, Anti-Semitism, pp. 1, 64–8, 70. 58 Lewis,

Illusions, pp. 92–110. See also, Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 301–4; Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism, pp. 91–2.

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The present author’s own work takes this even further, arguing that ‘not only was Mosley’s direct influence evident, both publicly and behind the scenes, at every major juncture in the development of the BUF’s anti-Jewish policy, but that antisemitism had been an integral element of his thought from the very start’.59 Immediately upon founding the BUF, Mosley made public statements that not only singled out Jews for criticism, but also associated them with precisely the kinds of ‘subversive’ and ‘anti-British’ activities, such as ‘the direction of the Communist Party’ and ‘international financial transactions’, that would form the basis of his party’s antisemitism.60 By autumn 1933, a year before the official ‘adoption’ of antisemitism, he had published a front-page article in Blackshirt accusing Jews of ‘organis[ing] as a racial minority within the State’, using their ‘great money power’ to exert ‘domination’ over all political parties and establish a ‘corrupt monopoly’ over the media. This was, moreover, linked into a global conspiracy, with Jews ‘all over the world…organis[ing] against the Fascist revolution’. Regarding the BUF’s stance towards Britain’s Jews, Mosley made clear: ‘We oppose them’.61 At this stage these were brief outbursts rather than sustained anti-Jewish rhetoric. But this in itself was part of Mosley’s plan: to make such statements rare enough to maintain plausible deniability, but obvious enough to provoke Jews into a violent response, which would then be used to justify the official adoption of antisemitism. This calculation is confirmed in a handwritten note by Mosley himself, who, after being advised that antisemitism would not be popular among the British public, responded that this was an ‘arg[ume]nt in favour of the strategy of […ing] the onus of aggression onto the Jews’.62 A former BUF propagandist revealed that Mosley’s early denials of antisemitism had always been ‘for political reasons only’.63 That Mosley would go to such elaborate lengths to incorporate and justify an aspect of policy he knew could damage his party’s political prospects points to the fact that antisemitism was not an artificial, opportunistic addition, one that he had been forced into. Rather, it was a fundamental aspect of his fascism. It tied together what was otherwise a disparate set of concerns by identifying a single group allegedly responsible for the various social, culture and economic ills fascism diagnosed in British society. This is, again, something that has begun to be acknowledged in the literature. Whereas the standard view has been that Mosley was ‘not an ideological anti-semite’,64 Thomas Linehan’s more recent work suggests that his antisemitism had a 59 Tilles,

British Fascist Antisemitism, p. 77.

60 Times,

25 October 1932; Jewish Chronicle, 30 September 1932, p. 12; 7 October 1932, p. 8; 28 October 1932, p. 28. 61 Blackshirt,

4 November 1933, p. 1. See also Blackshirt, 18 November 1933, pp. 1, 6; Fascist Week, p. 17 November 1933, p. 4; Jewish Chronicle, 24 November 1933, p. 32.

62 Report 63 C.

on the BUF, University of Birmingham Special Collections OMD/B/7/4.

Dolan, The Blackshirt Racket. Mosley Exposed (unknown publisher, n.d.), p. 11.

64 Thurlow,

Fascism, p. 126.

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‘genuinely held…ideological underpinning’: the ‘mythic palingenetic ultranationalist core at the heart of BUF ideology’ and its ‘gloomy preoccupation with decadence…decay and decline…underlay much of Mosley’s ethnocentric anti-semitism’, with Jews made to represent ‘a welter of apparently “decadent” modern culture forms and developments’ and their removal seen as a prerequisite to ‘bring[ing] about a glorious national rebirth’.65 This was, moreover, not an attempt to emulate the Nazis or import their brand of antisemitism, as it has often been portrayed, but rather drew upon a rich heritage of native anti-Jewish thought that had already associated Britain’s largest ‘alien’ presence with the very forces that fascism had set itself against, such as communism, high finance and middleman professions, migration and ethnic mixing, and modern forms of culture.66 These existing anti-Jewish traditions, which had already been cultivated by the early radical right, were ‘fascistised’ by the BUF, ‘fus[ing] the[m]…into a singular narrative that was more comprehensive and coherent than anything produced’ before and ‘employing them in pursuit of its purgatory and palingenetic goals’.67 While the BUF’s antisemitism was not imitative, and deserves to be understood in its own right, it did also fit a wider a pattern evident across Europe. In the scholarship on fascism as a generic phenomenon, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the place of antisemitism. This perhaps reflects agreement that fascism is inherently predisposed to exclusionary tendencies as part of its aim to purge society of what is perceives as alien or anti-national elements.68 Jews, as the most prominent out-group in most European countries, were the natural target. But this did not have to be the case: fascism’s archetype in Italy was not antisemitic, and indeed had Jewish members, for most of its existence; its exclusionary tendencies were initially directed towards other groups.69 Fascist antisemitism itself took on a different form in each national environment, shaped by indigenous anti-Jewish traditions and the context in which a particular group operated. At the same time, however, there was a conspicuous trend towards more widespread and radical antisemitism among fascist movements as the 1930s progressed, notes Aristotle Kallis. This reflected the growing status of German 65 Linehan,

British Fascism, pp. 176, 186–93, and Linehan, East London, pp. 275–6.

66 Linehan,

British Fascism, pp. 13, 177–86, 190–3.

67 Tilles,

British Fascist Antisemitism, p. 71.

68 R.

Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 7; Payne, History of Fascism, p. 11; Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 32, 76–7, 174, 218–20, 253–4; A. Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 85–8, 102–5; M. Neocleous, Fascism (London: Open University Press, 1997), pp. 29–37. 69 I. Pavan, ‘An Unexpected Betrayal? The Italian Jewish Community Facing Fascist Persecution’, and S. Garau, ‘Between “Spirit” and “Science”: The Emergence of Italian Fascist Antisemitism through the 1920s and 1930s’, both in D. Tilles and S. Garau (eds), Fascism and the Jews: Italy and Britain (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010), pp. 48–9, 51, 55–6, 153–5.

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Nazism as a figurehead in what fascists across the continent saw as a looming final confrontation between themselves and the forces of liberal democracy, communism and capitalism—behind all of which stood the figure of the Jew.70 The BUF was no exception, with antisemitism becoming a more prominent part of the party’s discourse as the 1930s progressed and the party more closely aligning itself with its German counterpart (not least by renaming itself the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’ in 1936).71 This change was also reflected behind the scenes, with Mussolini’s funds drying up but partially replaced by secret subsidies from Berlin.72

The East End Campaign and Anti-fascism The aspect of the BUF’s antisemitism that has attracted the most academic and public attention was the vicious campaign of ‘Jew-baiting’ that it mounted in east London from 1935 to 1937. Following the formal adoption of antisemitism in 1934, Mosley soon discovered that, while his movement was in collapse nationally (losing 90% of its membership within 12 months), it was attracting positive interest in the political sub-culture of the East End, with its history of tension between the large, recently arrived Jewish population and other communities. The area soon became the primary focus of the BUF’s activity, which centred around street-corner meetings, uniformed processions and a crude antisemitism.73 This prompted a much more organised anti-fascist movement to emerge. A coalition of forces developed around Communist and Jewish organisations— although in both cases it was grassroots activists who were responsible for driving activity, with the official Communist and Jewish leaderships wary of becoming embroiled in street violence, both for the damage it could do their reputation and because they recognised it was the fascists’ aim to stir up precisely such conflict. This ‘Communist-Jewish anti-fascist bloc’ pursued a ‘strategy based on the active disruption of fascist meetings and shows of numerical strength’.74

70 A.

Kallis, ‘Fascism and the Jews: From Internationalisation of Fascism to “Fascist Antisemitism”’, in Tilles and Garau (eds), Fascism and the Jews (2010). 71 Tilles,

British Fascist Antisemitism, pp. 33–55.

72 Love,

‘“What’s the Big Idea?”’, pp. 453–6.

73 The best source on the BUF’s activity in the East End and surrounding areas remains Linehan, East London. 74 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, pp. 49–50, 54, and N. Copsey, ‘Communists and the Inter-War Anti-Fascist Struggle in the United States and Britain’, Labour History Review (2011): 76; K. Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 94; T. Linehan, ‘Communist Culture and Anti-Fascism in Inter-War Britain’, in N. Copsey and A. Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the InterWar Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism, pp. 114–45.

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The culmination of these developments came on 4 October 1936, at what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, when a crowd of over 100,000 gathered to block a procession of 3000 Blackshirts through the East End. The protest had been organised locally, after the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Communist Party refused to lend their support (the latter relenting at the last minute). The police sought to clear a path through the crowd for the BUF’s legally organised march, but were prevented from doing so by violent resistance from the protesters, forcing Mosley to abandon his plans. Popular memory of Cable Street as a great victory against fascism is somewhat misleading. While the Blackshirts were stopped on the day, they immediately turned this to their advantage, claiming that British patriots had been violently and illegally prevented from marching through their own streets and using this to substantiate a long-standing narrative of victimhood at Jewish hands. A couple of thousand new members joined the movement and the following months saw an intensification of antisemitic rhetoric and violence. The anti-fascists themselves came to see the effects of their actions and, from 1937, local Communist and Jewish groups began to adopt a more moderate approach, focused on undermining the fascists’ ideological appeal while starving them of the physical conflict they craved to gain publicity and attract sympathy.75 A more significant hindrance for the BUF stemming from Cable Street was that the mass disorder, following months of growing conflict in the East End, prompted the government to hastily push through a new Public Order Act. This banned political uniforms, prohibited political meetings in the East End, and tightened restrictions on provocative, especially antisemitic, language. Historians remain divided, however, as to how much of an impact the POA had on the BUF, which found ways to at least partially circumvent the new measures.76 The passing of legislation designed to restrict fascist activity points to the fact that, while confrontational forms of anti-fascism have drawn much of the attention, there was a far broader range of forces acting against the BUF, encompassing the apparatus of the state,77 all mainstream political parties, local authorities, left-wing activists, religious bodies and an array of other groups and individuals. The Jewish community, which overcame initial internal disputes to form a united front against fascism, was disproportionately involved 75 On Cable Street, as well as its build-up and aftermath, see D. Tilles, ‘Winning the Battle, But What About the War? Cable Street in Context’, in C. Holmes and A. Kershen (eds), An East End Legacy: Essays in Memory of William J Fishman (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 134–51. 76 Mandle, Anti-Semitism, p. 67; Thurlow, ‘State Management’, pp. 46–7; Linehan, British Fascism, p. 109; Copsey, Anti-Fascism, pp. 66–7; Pugh, Hurrah, pp. 173–6; Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism, pp. 153–4. 77 As well as Thurlow, ’State Management’, see also R. Thurlow, ‘Blaming the Blackshirts: The Authorities and the Anti-Jewish Disturbances in the 1930’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), pp. 119–20.

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at every level. Its leadership, though often criticised by contemporaries and historians for passivity and complacency, actually worked energetically behind the scenes, often in tandem with the state, to neutralise the fascist threat.78 In this light, Nigel Copsey emphasises the need to look beyond ‘hostile activism’ and take a more ‘pluralistic’ approach that also incorporates non-confrontational and even non-active forms of opposition.79 These forces worked in tandem with one another to squeeze the political space available to the fascists. Particularly effective was an (uncoordinated) two-pronged attack: while confrontational, street-level anti-fascism tarnished the BUF’s image by associating it with violence and disrupted its means of ideological propagation, at the other end of the scale the state authorities and political establishment acted to restrict the fascists’ scope of activity and publicity.80 Indeed it was the actions of the state that finally brought Britain’s interwar fascist movement to an end, with the government in 1940 ordering the internment of over a thousand British fascists and fellow travellers as potential Fifth Columnists.81 This included Mosley and leading BUF figures, but also a range of other individuals who had become associated in the late 1930s with an underground network of pro-Nazi groups.82

New Directions Despite its limited size and impact, interwar British fascism remains the subject of a lively field of study, constantly refreshed by the emergence of new sources, reinterpretations of existing ones, and novel angles of inquiry. A welcome recent trend has been a move away from exploring fascist organisations— many of which were indeed of limited significance, and all of which have been well covered in the existing scholarship—and instead focusing on fascist individuals, whose ideas, activities and interactions often tell a more interesting

78 D. Tilles, ‘“Some Lesser Known Aspects”: The Anti-Fascist Campaign of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1936–40’, in G. Alderman (ed.), New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010). 79 Copsey, Anti-Fascism, p. 4, and preface to Copsey and Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism, pp. xiv–xxi. 80 N. Copsey and D. Tilles, ‘Uniting a Divided Community? Re-appraising Jewish Responses to British Fascist Antisemitism, 1932–39’, in Tilles and Garau (eds), Fascism and the Jews (2010), p. 201. 81 S. Cullen, ‘Fascists Behind Barbed Wire: Political Internment in Wartime Britain’, in The Historian (2009), p. 100. 82 See series of books by R. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsey, The Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 (London: Constable, 1998), and What Did You Do During the War? The last throes of the British pro-Nazi Right, 1940–45 (London: Routledge, 2017).

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story. Many, as in the case of William Joyce and Ezra Pound, also embody the transnational links between fascism’s various European manifestations.83 Another promising avenue lies in better integration and synthesis. The respective fields of British fascist, anti-fascist and Jewish history have often focused narrowly, making limited reference to one another other. At best, this has inhibited the understanding of their interlinked histories; at worst it has resulted in distortions. For example, the fact that the early scholarship ascribed the BUF’s ‘adoption’ of antisemitism to Jewish aggression resulted from an overreliance on the fascists’ own version of events. Likewise, perceptions of anti-fascism have long been long skewed by giving disproportionate weight to the accounts of those who participated in confrontational forms of activity. By examining a broader range of sources representing a wider range of actors, more nuanced, balanced and representative accounts will emerge. Similarly, work in these fields would benefit from doing more to contextualise itself in the broader study of fascism, something that has begun in recent years to take place.84 Likewise, Britain provides a useful but neglected case study for scholars looking at fascism—as well as its opponents and victims—as a generic or transnational phenomenon, and a useful corrective to the understandable, but not always helpful, focus on Germany and Italy. The British fascists’ marginality, and the success of their opponents, makes them not less relevant but more so. They are highly representative of a political movement that has, barring two prominent exceptions and the tragic consequences they wrought, been an almost universal failure throughout history.

83 C. Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (London: Routledge, 2016); M. Feldman, Ezrad Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); P.M. Coupland, Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A life of Jorian Jenks (London: Routledge, 2017); M. McMurray, ‘Alexander Raven Thomson, Philosopher of the British Union of Fascists’, The European Legacy 17 (2012). 84 For example, the previously cited work by Linehan, Love, Stocker and Garau. See also J. Drabik, ‘Spreading the faith: the propaganda of the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25 (2017); S. Garau, ‘The Internationalisation of Italian Fascism in the face of German National Socialism, and its Impact on the British Union of Fascists’, Politics, Religion & Ideology 15 (2014).

CHAPTER 3

The Agenda of British Refugee Policy, 1933–48 Louise London

What refugees need is refuge.1 The need for refugee policy is felt by governments. It is policy on refugees, not for them. Its primary purpose is selfinterest. It may also accommodate policies and schemes to aid refugees—but only so long as humanitarian considerations do not compromise the government’s higher priorities. Such a balancing of self-interest and humanitarian action constitutes the central thread of the story of British policy on European Jews menaced by Nazism. This essay’s focus is on the agenda of the British government in responding to the Jews’ plight. Over the period in question, the underlying British agenda remained remarkably constant. Of course, as circumstances changed, the limits of what Britain was prepared to do to aid the Jews altered. We will look at the record of refugee policy, and the way in which the government’s agenda shaped its decisions on aid to the Jews. But we begin with the refugee policy agenda itself—and the context and priorities that drove it.

1 This essay draws on the author’s monograph, Louise London, Whitehall and

the Jews, 1933–1948. British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Note the bibliographical essay in ibid., pp. 3–7. L. London (B) Honorary Research Fellow, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_3

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Context and Priorities The context of refugee policy is immigration policy, in particular the exclusion of unwanted immigrants. Like other European states in this period, Britain progressively restricted the primary immigration of aliens. A partial system of controls dating from 1905 was replaced in 1919 by a systematic apparatus of restriction that stayed in force throughout our period.2 Refugees now lacked any legal protection against exclusion. The only rights were those of the state. So refugees were in no better legal position than ordinary immigrants. But ordinary immigration was hardly a good alternative. By the interwar period, British policy no longer permitted aliens to enter for settlement. And, in the depressed conditions of the 1930s, Britain, along with other European countries, severely restricted entry for employment, fearing labour unrest if immigrants appeared to be competing for jobs.3 All aliens were required to show that they would not become a charge on public funds. The quest for a mechanism to exclude destitute East European Jews had provided much of the impetus for the 1905 Aliens Act. Hostility to the entry of Jews continued into the interwar period, and restriction of Jewish immigration remained a key policy objective. The supposition that Jews, merely through their presence, were likely to stir up antisemitism was one of the reasons government ministers gave for excluding refugee Jews—or not admitting ‘too many’ of them. From the moment when Jews seeking refuge from Nazism began arriving in early 1933, the authorities viewed them primarily as unwanted, homeless, and potentially destitute immigrants who might seek to settle in Britain. Extreme caution was needed over admitting them, for, with nowhere to go, they would prove difficult to get rid of.4 The defensive character of refugee policy thus reflected the three key priorities mentioned above: the ban on primary immigration; policies restricting the entry of Jews; and the fear of being saddled with homeless, destitute refugees.

2 For

interwar policy, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 16–24.

3 Herbert

A. Strauss, ‘Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses’ (I) and (II) Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 25 and 26 (1980 and 1981), pp. 313–61, 343–409, surveys the impact of the international pattern of immigration restriction.

4 London,

Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 1–2.

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Unlike Palestine5 and the USA,6 which accepted refugee Jews for settlement, the British government did not want these Jews as permanent residents. For this reason, it consistently regarded any question of their admission to British territory as primarily a problem of disposal. So, the problem of what to do with the Jews always took precedence over the question of what might be undertaken to save them. They were seen as an immigration problem first and only secondarily as refugees. The Home Office was responsible for immigration controls. To prevent refugee Jews from gaining rights to remain permanently, it used strict controls at ports of entry and dealt cautiously with applications from refugees seeking permission to work or to extend their stay. A high level of re-emigration was another key objective, but this was not a matter within Home Office control. The majority of refugee Jews entering Britain were admitted on a temporary basis and were expected to re-emigrate.7 This meant they needed to be deemed ‘suitable’ for emigration, a criterion skewed towards the young. The implementation of this temporary refuge agenda by the risk-averse authorities created a system with its own tortuous logic. The essence of temporary refuge was that it was intended for people with good prospects of re-emigration for settlement overseas. In addition, because of the risk that you might fail to re-emigrate, you also had to be deemed suitable for permanent settlement in the UK, which meant conforming to an ideal of the ‘desirable’ refugee. Such requirements had nothing to do with your need to escape persecution and everything to do with British self-interest. As well as not being humanitarian, this policy was not one with which most would-be entrants could comply. The conduct of refugee policy was marked by secrecy, pragmatism, and lack of initiative. The Home Office preferred not to publicize its policies. It refused to reveal its eligibility criteria, stating it considered each case ‘on its

5 Palestine,

which Britain governed under a League of Nations mandate, was seen as a country of immigration. Britain allowed permanent settlement of Jews there under existing immigration procedures. For details of refugee admissions to Palestine in 1933–7, see post. Later, in response to Arab objections, a policy of restriction developed, culminating in the controversial 1939 White Paper policy that set a ceiling of 75,000 Jewish admissions over the next five years with no further immigration thereafter without Arab consent (see White Paper, Palestine: A Statement of Policy, Cmd 6019, May 1939; London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 9, 42, 95).

6 For US refugee policy, see Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–45 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–41 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968); id., The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–45 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), with further reflections in the paperback edition (New York, 1980). 7 Louise

London, ‘British Immigration Control Procedures and Jewish refugees, 1933– 1939’, in Werner E. Mosse (ed.), Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991), pp. 485–518.

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individual merits’.8 Such secretiveness was calculated to discourage applicants and to maximize the department’s discretion. It was easy to defer longterm policy and planning. Officials improvised new policies as circumstances changed, and the politicians left them to it. All the initiatives to expand admissions came from the voluntary refugee committees, working closely with the Home Office. Politicians defended these ad hoc arrangements and swept aside demands for more formal policy-making machinery. The British authorities acknowledged a degree of moral responsibility for refugees who were in Britain. But they had no corresponding sense of obligation towards would-be refugees abroad. Haunted by the potential demand for admissions, their priority was to contain the scale of the refugee problem. They opposed making policies to provide for refugees, arguing that to do so would stimulate the demand for refuge.

Pre-war Policy The initial influx of Jews from Germany seeking refuge was on a small scale.9 But even so the British authorities tightened up controls on refugees. In April 1933, Anglo-Jewish leaders, who had started a fund and a casework agency, the Jewish Refugees Committee (hereafter collectively, ‘the Jewish organization’), offered the government a guarantee that no refugee admitted would become a charge on public funds. Ministers gladly accepted this arrangement, whereby the Jewish organization took the risks while the government reaped the benefits. From then on, refugee admissions were underpinned by the guarantee and Home Office officials placed huge reliance on it. They were content for refugee committees to manage the main burden of day-to-day casework. Nazi persecution failed to abate and the need for Jews to get out of Germany became increasingly clear. Anglo-Jewish leaders felt a duty to help with emigration, and Zionists and non-Zionists managed to cooperate on this issue. The expectation that the majority of entrants to Britain would reemigrate suited their priorities, which, in the Zionist case, involved expanding settlement in Palestine, while non-Zionists wished to protect Anglo-Jewry against any backlash a large influx might provoke. They agreed to support the resettlement of younger German Jews overseas, giving priority to Palestine.10 In 1933–7 perhaps four times as many went to Palestine for permanent refuge as the 10,000 or so admitted temporarily to the UK. One official

8 Sir

John Gilmour, Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 276, col. 2558, 12 April 1933, cited in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 46.

9 For

policy up to mid-March 1938, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 25–57.

10 For

the policy of Anglo-Jewry, see Louise London, ‘Jewish Refugees, Anglo-Jewry and British Government Policy’, in David Cesarani (ed.), The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 163–90.

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described Palestine as ‘our contribution to the refugee problem’.11 British efforts failed to persuade Dominion governments to contribute generously to refugee resettlement. South Africa took 6000–7000 in the 1930s; over the 1933–45 period, Canada accepted fewer than 5000 Jews, and Australia some 10,000.12 Employment restrictions on refugees in the UK were sometimes relaxed. The UK took a higher proportion of professional refugees than other European countries. The advantages of taking highly qualified refugees from Germany were recognized. But most displaced academics remained officially in transit and eventually re-emigrated, particularly to the USA. And the entry of medical and dental refugees was harshly restricted to pacify professional lobbies. An insatiable demand for resident domestics turned domestic service into the key entry route for women.13 The big unresolved issue was the demand for absorption. A policy agreed in 1935 of letting refugees who had been in the country a year or more take employment created expectations of staying on. Home Office officials privately believed this to be feasible. Content with the numbers and ‘quality’ of the refugees in Britain—and, of course, cushioned by the Jewish guarantee—they were confident of managing the refugee problem. However, in March 1938 the problem was suddenly transformed into a crisis as the ‘Anschluss ’—Hitler’s annexation of Austria—let loose an onslaught of Nazi persecution against Austrian Jewry. Terrified Jews tried to escape, only to find that other countries would not admit them. The Jewish organization instantly withdrew its financial guarantee from future entrants, telling the government that in future it would support only admissions it had approved in advance. The government’s reaction was immediately to re-introduce a mandatory visa requirement for citizens of Germany and the former Austria.14 Otto Schiff, the JRC’s chairman, endorsed this switch to visas, telling the Home Secretary it was especially necessary in the case of Austrian Jews, who were, ‘largely of the shopkeeper and small trader class and would therefore prove much more difficult to emigrate than the average German’.15 New criteria for granting visas effectively disqualified most Jews. This was the turning-point in British policy. To show up at a British port without a visa was now futile. The flow of entrants to Britain was stemmed. Yet the queues outside the Vienna consulate told of a rocketing demand for 11 TNA, FO 371/19676, W1370/358/98, f.113, M. D. Peterson, 18 February 1935, cited in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 42. 12 For

the record of Dominion governments, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 42–5.

13 See

London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 48–50, 75–80; for domestics, see Tony Kushner, ‘An Alien Occupation: Domestic Service and the Jewish Crisis, 1933 to 1939’, in id., The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 90–115. 14 For

British policy from mid-March to October 1938, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 58–96.

15 Cited

in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 61.

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refuge that was overpowering the British authorities’ modest administrative resources. Delays multiplied. The introduction of visas, as the expert Sir John Hope Simpson commented, had, ‘led to much congestion—further restricted the immigration of refugees and has not actually achieved the intended result of greater efficiency in “selective immigration”’.16 In 1933 a High Commissioner for Refugees was set up under—but separate from—the League of Nations. The British agreed this only on terms that effectively confined the High Commissioner to providing legal protection for refugees. Britain nullified the impact of League conventions on its sovereignty over immigration. Its representatives helped to block proposals for international bodies to be able to oblige states to admit refugees.17 British fears that providing openings for refugees would encourage further expulsions by Nazi Germany were overtaken by fears that helping refugees from Nazism would encourage expulsions by Poland and Romania, which had started soliciting the international community’s aid in reducing their ‘surplus’ Jewish populations. As the prospect of war with Nazi Germany approached, the British looked to America for support. The United States had failed to join the League and had kept aloof from European problems. So Foreign Office officials welcomed an invitation from President Roosevelt to an international conference on refugees, if only as an opportunity to nurse Anglo-American relations. The conference itself, which took place in Evian in July 1938, did nothing for refugees. The British had privately come round to the idea of offering finance to aid refugee immigration, but this issue was never raised: the American delegation did not mention it, while the British delegation was under orders to say nothing unless the Americans did. What was agreed was an American proposal to form an intergovernmental committee on refugees, or IGC, with the stated aim of facilitating refugee emigration from Germany. Foreign Office officials saw the new IGC as a hindrance to British policy and undermined its initiatives, even suggesting closing it down. The IGC’s achievements were all negative: it did nothing useful itself, while its existence provided an excuse for governments to sweep aside all proposals not under its auspices.18 So we see British policy-makers manipulating an international body to serve national ends and clinging to sovereignty over immigration controls. The British remained reluctant to work constructively on refugee issues within a multinational framework. Foreign Office officials regarded Evian as a success

16 Sir

John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London, 1939), p. 339.

17 London, 18 See

Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 82–5.

Tommie Sjöberg, The Powers and the Persecuted: The Refugee Problem and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991); A. J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–39 (London: Paul Elek, 1973), charts the development of British policy on international action.

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for British policy: international action to aid refugees had been kept to a minimum—and their networking with the Americans had gone well.19 In November 1938, horrifying reports of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht pogrom led the British public to express an unprecedented level of sympathy for German Jews. A high-ranking Anglo-Jewish deputation called on the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, urging the case for expanding temporary admissions. Chamberlain told his cabinet colleagues that British policy must respond to the pressing need for refuge. Steps were announced to reduce delays and to implement a more positive approach to admissions.20 The result was a huge expansion of admissions in the nine months before the war, when some 40,000 refugees entered the UK. The government simplified the scrutiny of temporary cases and let refugee organizations approve designated categories for entry. But there was no relaxation of the requirement for finance. This was beyond the reach of the majority of would-be entrants. A new guarantee for children offered by the Jewish deputation did not mean exemption from the need for financial sponsorship, backed by cash deposits. For a time the committee handling these cases also demanded cash deposits to cover the children’s eventual re-emigration. The availability of private sponsorship was finite. Failing this, access to refuge depended on fitting the profile of candidates accepted by a specific refugee organization or scheme. The numbers of refugees entering rose, but few were leaving. Worries over the accumulation of refugees in Britain led the immigration authorities to explore ways to tighten up admissions. Increasingly, Jews were fleeing by land or sea without any guarantee of admission anywhere. The Home Office feared the Nazi authorities aimed to dump ‘undesirable’ emigrants on countries such as Britain. It saw pre-selection of refugees as a vital shield against this eventuality. All these issues were dramatically highlighted in the summer of 1939 by the notorious episode of the refugee Jews on the SS St Louis. This was ultimately resolved through the acceptance of a share of the passengers by four Western European countries, Britain being the last to join. It did so only after the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) offered to guarantee passengers’ maintenance in the UK. The process of allocating the refugees to the four receiving countries revealed the British trying to select those with the best prospects of re-emigration to the USA. A further illustration of the government’s preoccupation with reducing numbers was its decision in July 1939—far too late to achieve anything—to make an offer to the IGC to finance re-emigration of refugees from the UK.21

19 For analysis of British pre-war policy on international action on refugees, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 56–7, 82–96. 20 For

this phase, see ibid., pp. 97–141.

21 For

this episode, see ibid., pp. 136–40.

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The British response to refugees from Czechoslovakia is conspicuous for its systematic discrimination against Czech Jews.22 The Czech refugee crisis was sparked by the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten territories by Hitler’s Germany, pursuant to the infamous Munich agreement of September 1938. The British and French governments had forced this sacrifice on the Czechs in a bid to stave off Nazi aggression. Sudeten German social democrats and Jews fled from the newly German areas, seeking refuge in what remained of Czechoslovakia, but the Czech authorities forced many back. In response to this crisis—and to widespread criticism of the betrayal of the Czechs—the British government conceded some refugee admissions. It also loaned funds to help the Czech government cope with refugees. In March 1939, less than six months on from the Munich agreement and in breach of its terms, German forces invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Germans launched a campaign of persecution aimed at eliminating opposition and driving out the Jewish population. Both the new British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) and the British authorities repeatedly listed and categorized groups seeking refuge in an order of priority that was theoretically based on who was most endangered. The top place on these lists was always reserved for ‘political’ refugees—mainly Sudeten German social democrats, the majority of them non-Jews. Many of these ‘politicals’ and their families got refuge in the UK and opportunities to re-emigrate to Canada, where Jews were not wanted. The lowest priority was always reserved for Czech Jews, to whom Britain was even less welcoming than to Jews from Austria. Czech Jews’ prospects in Britain were not helped by the Jewish organization’s dogged refusal to undertake any financial responsibility for them, saying its funds had been raised for German Jews. After the German occupation, the loan to the now defunct Czech government reverted into British control. Entrusted with this fund earmarked for aiding refugees, the British government used it to bankroll refugee admissions and re-emigration. It was also dictating selection policy. It adhered to the BCRC line of giving priority to ‘politicals’ and their families, although, with the Gestapo pursuing them, these politicals could now leave Czechoslovakia only illegally. The British authorities continued to oppose mass Jewish emigration and to discriminate against Czech Jews, claiming that resisting Gestapo pressure to expel the Jewish population was a matter of principle and that cooperation would play into the Gestapo’s hands. British officials categorized non-political Czech Jews as ‘economic’ or ‘racial’ refugees and used these labels to downgrade their need for refuge and to justify denying them visas or funding. The government withheld funds it could have used to help ordinary Jews escape, deliberately understating the sums at its disposal. Refugee advocates protested, but to no avail. War broke out in early September. The refugees then present in the UK numbered about 80,000, of whom some 85 per cent were Jews. 22 For

policy on refugees from Czechoslovakia, see ibid., pp. 142–68.

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Wartime Policy The outbreak of war abruptly halted the refugee inflow. The government banned humanitarian admissions of refugees. A few exceptions were made. A select number of Jews were admitted in connection with the war effort, which had become the standard criterion for allowing admissions. Yet, alongside wartime concerns, immigration considerations still applied. The underlying policy agenda remained to avoid being landed with Jews who might settle in Britain. The Home Office considered it had far too many refugee Jews in the country already. The Jewish organization’s funds ran out, and in December 1939 the government agreed to take over the cost of refugee maintenance and refugee organizations’ administrative expenses. It also paid a secret subsidy for emigration. The United States—now the target for most refugee re-emigration from Britain—had laws prohibiting subsidies for immigrants by outside bodies, but apparently the Americans were choosing not to object. In July 1940, tasked with unravelling the government’s recent panic measure of interning some 27,000 refugees, the Home Office published a list of categories under which internees could apply for release. Persons about to re-emigrate were included. Many of the refugees who opted for this route out of internment made ‘voluntary’ departures in circumstances indistinguishable from expulsion, kept under guard until on board ship. Emigration reduced the burden on the public purse, and refugees able to emigrate but failing to do so faced the withdrawal of financial support. At least 10,000 Jews left for the US in 1940. These numbers were not equalled in the subsequent years of the war, but disposal of refugees remained the key objective. The Response to the Holocaust News of the Nazi conspiracy to murder European Jewry led to political responses such as warning the perpetrators that they would be punished, and the issue, in December 1942, of a formal declaration by the Allies.23 But action to rescue the victims was not on the agenda. The home secretary, Labour politician Herbert Morrison, had agreed a limited offer of British visas to rescue certain Jewish children in occupied France in the autumn of 1942. Morrison’s position that this should be the final concession on admissions was endorsed by the Cabinet. However, both the British and US governments found themselves facing intense and growing public pressure to rescue Jews. Neither government intended to comply. Instead, both started going through the motions of investigating action. Their aim was to outmanoeuvre the rescue campaigners. Part of their strategy to keep activists at bay was to mount a joint conference with

23 See

ibid., pp. 191–251; key studies of the British response are Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Kushner The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, pp. 148–201.

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the Americans on refugees. Campaigners were advised to be patient in the runup to the conference. This took place in April 1943 on the island of Bermuda. The delegates resolved to rule out any possibility of negotiating with Hitler’s Germany to obtain the release of Jews. The fear was that any such negotiations might succeed. The participants’ frank exchanges included warnings by two British ministers that any offer by Hitler to foist millions of ‘useless’ people on the Allies would have to be refused. Both governments were determined to stop such a situation ever arising. Thus, the overriding objective—on this issue as on rescue generally—was to deflect pressure for action and to escape criticism of inaction. The purpose remained not to save Jews, but to save face. Rescue campaigners gradually recognized that nothing substantial was being attempted. Yet, a shake-up within the US policy establishment from late 1943 sparked off changes that led to British involvement in a rescue scheme. US Treasury officials, having wrested control of refugee policy from the discredited State Department, put pressure on the President to adopt a more humanitarian policy. Roosevelt responded by establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB), whose sole purpose was to rescue Jews. US Treasury officials privately deplored what they saw as British policy-makers’ complicity in letting Jews die because of the problem that governments were unwilling to admit them. The WRB preferred to go it alone without British involvement in its operations. Resentment over the WRB’s creation was strongly felt among Foreign Office officials specializing in refugee matters, and when asked to support the WRB’s activities they were ambivalent or downright obstructive. This American shift to a slightly more generous policy signalled the end of the consensus on inaction. Rescue had now acquired a new status within the Anglo-American relationship. A key Treasury official, Edward Playfair, proposed British action to save the lives of Jews. He argued that Britain needed to show the WRB’s top official that it shared his commitment to rescue and he criticized the Foreign Office line on the issue as far too negative. Foreign Office objections needed facing down, but the British then began to support rescue, using moneys voted to the IGC by Parliament. These funds were secretly directed via the IGC to support and expand an existing rescue scheme based on credit. The credit was used to raise local currency inside occupied Europe. This money was used for bribes and other arrangements needed to get people out of camps or enemy territory. The scheme was funded by the JDC, and was operated by a JDC representative in Switzerland. The approach leading to British involvement had come from the JDC’s chairman, who suggested the use of British and American funds. However, the Americans agreed to commit only one-third of the sum the British suggested each of them allocate. Far greater sums raised by the JDC constituted the major source for both the credit scheme and the WRB’s activities. Indeed, the most significant Anglo-American contribution to rescue was in providing exemptions from blockade restrictions to allow this private finance to be used in

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enemy territory, thus helping, as Yehuda Bauer notes, ‘to save Jewish lives with Jewish means’.24 The responses of the British to the developments in American policy show them acquiring political motives for attempting to save Jews. Rescue even became a matter of prestige. British officials started musing on how to stop the Americans reaping all the credit. As for what else might have been done at the margins, it was possible to improve escape opportunities. A particularly worthwhile step would have been for the British and Americans to offer neutral countries, particularly Switzerland, a guarantee to take any unrepatriable refugees they admitted off their hands after the war. Such a promise could have saved lives. It would not have compromised the war effort. The two governments discussed this idea at Bermuda. But they never implemented it. The explanation for this omission is their underlying agenda. Neither government wanted the responsibility to provide permanent settlement for homeless Jews. The degree to which immigration considerations continued to constrain the readiness of British policy-makers to support rescue is underlined by their secret reservations to a new joint guarantee with the Americans to find homes for any Jews who might escape from the Holocaust in Hungary. Herbert Morrison remained intransigent, warning the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in 1944, during evaluation of the problematic Brand proposals to exchange ‘Jews for trucks’, that it was, ‘essential that we should do nothing at all which involves the risk that the further reception of refugees here might be the ultimate outcome.’25

Post-war Policy Post-war planning was underway for several years before the war in Europe ended, but the fate of the refugees in the UK was still unresolved.26 It had been extensively discussed, but officials and ministers found themselves on opposing sides. As early as August 1942, E. N. Cooper, the Home Office official who had been leading on refugee matters, set out the arguments for letting refugees stay, adding that it would not be possible to send back children whose parents were dead or untraceable. This humanitarian approach was followed by a succession of submissions in which Home Office officials repeatedly urged ministers to let refugees remain. They advised it was unlikely that more than 40,000 would wish to stay, that refugees were largely assimilated and had become part of the national life. But Morrison dwelt relentlessly on the danger of explosions of antisemitism and public disorder if all Jews did not go. He rejected advice that it was wrong to force Jews to return to the countries where they had been persecuted. Any who would not emigrate, he said, 24 Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1981), p. 407. 25 TNA 26 For

FO 371/42808, WR170/3/48, Morrison to Eden, 1 July 1944.

post-war policy, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 252–71.

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should be compulsorily repatriated. He relinquished his role as home secretary in May 1945 without having reached a decision. An interim government shelved the issue. The new Labour administration elected that summer adopted a policy of not having a policy. It deferred making decisions over whether to let people work or stay. Not even refugee industrialists could be exempted from the government’s refusal to offer refugees any assurances about their future. Meanwhile, Home Office officials were relying on bluff to conceal the fact that many restrictions imposed on refugees were legally invalid. They started imposing new, valid restrictions on refugees returning from short trips abroad. Refugees’ queries about the meaning of this new practice went unanswered. Some became so nervous that they put all overseas trips on hold. There was a huge backlog of naturalization applications dating from prewar days, half of them from refugees. A government announcement in late 1945 about naturalization prospects for refugees was deliberately couched in vague terms at the direction of the home secretary, saying this would ‘leave us room for subsequent manoeuvre’. Refugees could not work out whether they would benefit. People were further confused over whether immigration status affected eligibility for naturalization. Not knowing whether, or when, their immigration status would be resolved, they could hardly prove the intention to settle required of naturalization applicants. An announcement in early 1946 that certain categories of refugee who were in Britain on a temporary basis would not be required to leave pending naturalization was something, but much less than the certainty that cancellation of immigration conditions could have provided. Ultimately, many refugees were naturalized while still subject to immigration restrictions. Some spent fifteen years or more in Britain before getting their status resolved. Eventually, in late 1946, a government committee decided, in the context of regularizing the position of foreign husbands married to British women, to lift employment restrictions on refugees. Although it claimed this policy was largely designed to save work, the Home Office took nearly a year to implement it, and then chose not to tell refugees of the change. One official considered that it would be to the department’s advantage if this ‘lack of publicity’ meant that some of the refugees affected by the change would, ‘in their ignorance, continue to do useful work instead of branching out into the second-hand jewellery business, and that a few of the undesirable ones will fail to get that feeling of being firmly rooted in this country which the public underlining of such orders as these must engender.’27 Officials still pretended to have the power to restrict the employment of doctors, dentists, and other health professionals. One excuse for this deception was that it facilitated the retention of these refugees’ skills for deployment in the new National Health Service. The authorities continued to assert that

27 TNA

HO 213/962, W. P. Speake, minute, 16 September 1947.

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refugees were temporary residents. It was not until December 1948 that they conceded that most would be treated as returning residents. While the government eventually resigned itself to letting the majority of the refugees stay, it could, and did, prevent any substantial new primary immigration of Jews. Post-war labour shortages were causing Britain to seek many new immigrants. The government launched a large-scale scheme to recruit European Volunteer Workers (EVWs), solving two problems at once by bringing over displaced persons to fill urgent labour needs. But the scheme’s planners did not want and therefore explicitly excluded Jews, whom they considered undesirable immigrants. By now Britain was deep in conflict over the future of Palestine and over Jewish immigration to Palestine, and claims that Jews would wish to go to Palestine rather than to the UK were conveniently invoked to support banning them from EVW recruitment. Jewish men of working age remained unwelcome. But, once the government revived the labour permit scheme for women domestic workers, Jewish women were once again eligible to enter as domestic servants. Another route of entry open to aliens from which Jews could benefit included various categories of family reunification agreed for wives and children of alien servicemen. Two highly selective humanitarian schemes to admit displaced European Jews were agreed. Relatives or voluntary organizations would meet the cost in each case. The first scheme was aimed at orphan children who had been in concentration camps. Other countries’ representatives snapped up most available children before British organizations were ready, but several contingents eventually arrived. The children were admitted on a temporary basis: part of the plan was their re-emigration, perhaps to Australia or Palestine. The second scheme was aimed at camp survivors, designated as ‘distressed persons’, coming to join close relatives in Britain.28 The war’s end was not an easy time for refugees. It brought sad confirmation of Nazi crimes against family and friends. The pressure of continuing insecurity about their future in Britain did not help. It drove some refugees to leave the country, among them several leading exporters. And increasingly refugees were seeking treatment for psychological conditions, as the Home Office knew. Why did the government let the question of the position of refugees in the UK drift for so long? One former Home Office official of the period has plausibly suggested that this problem, unlike foreign labour recruitment, was not an urgent one for the government and so it was easy not to address it.29 Ministers were not blind to the difficulties they would face if they tried to push through a policy of getting rid of the refugees. But, it suited them to 28 James

Chuter Ede, Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 415, cols. 1923–5, 13 November

1945. 29 Beryl

Hughes, interview with the author, 7 November 1988, cited in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 270.

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put off decisions they must have known were inevitable. Some officials, preoccupied with retaining control over refugees, abused their powers by resorting to equivocation and trickery. Deliberately subjecting refugees to such delays and other bureaucratic obstacles caused gratuitous distress to people who had endured enough.

Conclusion British immigration policy in the 1930s and 1940s is still obscured by the myth of the United Kingdom’s generous record of granting refuge, especially to Jews in flight from Nazism. Twenty-first century politicians promote this myth to defend current asylum policies. Well-drilled by their officials, they assert that Britain has always granted refuge to genuine refugees. They are less keen to acknowledge Britain’s equally significant record of denying refuge to equally genuine Jewish refugees. As we know, Britain did not open its arms. Long-term Jewish immigration was unwelcome. The resulting agenda problematized even temporary refuge. Entrants were selected according to various criteria of desirability. And, while refugee advocates sometimes managed to push the government’s policy in a more generous direction, they did not alter its overall agenda. In seeking underlying factors that may have helped to set this agenda, we begin with the role that antisemitism played. There are plentiful examples of policy-makers giving vent to antisemitic prejudice in connection with Jewish refugees. Such comments illustrate the ubiquity of anti-Jewish attitudes within British society, but they do not establish that antisemitism was behind the restrictiveness of British policy. After all, the opponents of Jewish immigration were not necessarily antisemitic. For example, Herbert Morrison, who indefatigably warned that, if refugee Jews were allowed to remain, there would be explosions of antisemitism, is not considered an overt antisemite.30 And we see that individuals who expressed antisemitic views also acted to support humanitarian aid to Jewish refugees: Neville Chamberlain strikingly illustrates this paradox. I would suggest that, while antisemitism was a contributing factor, it is not a sufficient explanation of the conviction that it was necessary to prevent significant Jewish immigration. It appears that the critical factor in British readiness to provide Jews with refuge was the degree to which it was felt possible to adopt a humanitarian stance. What limited such a stance was the assumption that Jews were a problematic element in the population, and that it was therefore necessary to restrict their numbers.31 I suggest that this assumption was not 30 Morrison’s

attitudes are discussed in Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

31 See

London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 275, citing a leading Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, in a 1936 speech given in London to a conference convened by the Council for German Jewry.

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based on attitudes to Jews particularly. Rather, it was a consequence of the prevailing concept of the nation state as being—both in essence and ideally— an ethnically homogeneous entity.32 This, I believe, was the fundamental preoccupation that guided British policy. It was the underlying principle that determined where the line was drawn over aiding the Jews. It was this ideal that was allowed to define what was in Britain’s self-interest. And it was this ideal that underpinned the view that no nation should be required to tolerate more than a certain proportion of Jews. For example, in April 1943, at a meeting of the British government’s Cabinet Committee for the Reception and Accommodation of Refugees, it was suggested that, after the war, not all Jews should return to their countries of origin and that the forthcoming Bermuda conference might investigate allocating some large area for Jewish settlement. The minutes go on to record that, ‘In this connection it was pointed out that the Jewish element in the population of Poland was proportionally higher than was healthy.’33 [Jews had constituted less than 10 per cent of the population of pre-war Poland]. The concept of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state was widely shared in the interwar period. It inspired cross-border exchanges of population, in attempts to solve political strife by making states more homogeneous. A vision that transcended deep ideological differences, it was central to Nazi racial policies and to British conceptions of the nation. Both the Nazis and British policy-makers regarded Jews as unassimilable to their ideal of the nation. And each treated a less intense degree of Jewishness as a possible gateway for the inclusion of individuals within the national community. The Nazis developed ways of measuring degrees of racial mixing that allowed certain Mischlinge, persons who possessed a prescribed low proportion of Jewish blood and familial connections, to remain within German society. The British took a more cultural approach. For example, the British put great emphasis on the potential to anglicize unaccompanied Jewish refugee children—a process calculated to give them the advantage of losing much of what made them stand out as Jewish, thereby hastening their assimilation. This programme of cultural engineering was predicated on separating the children from the Judaizing influence of their loving, sadly missed, but all too irremediably Jewish parents, most of whom were denied admission to the UK. It was the dumping of the children’s Jewish heritage, starting with their parents, which cleared the path to safety in Britain for over 9000 children.34 The case of these children is an extreme example of the de-Judaizing of Jews to suit British agendas. But we see the preference that Jewish refugees 32 This

concept is discussed in Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in Inter-war Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

33 TNA 34 For

CAB 95/15, JR (43) 6th meeting, 1 April 1943.

policy on children, see London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 116–22; for refugee organizations’ policy, see Claudia Curio, ‘“Invisible” Children: The Selection and Integration Strategies of Relief Organizations’, Shofar 23, 1 (2004): 41–56.

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should not stand out as Jewish in other contexts. For example, the policymakers’ consensus that dispersing very large numbers of Jewish women as domestics in households around the country was unproblematic was based on the idea that dispersal would dilute the impact of their Jewishness, perhaps also their Jewishness itself. Both the women’s circumstances and their gender would facilitate this process, and they would start to melt into the population. Of course, refugee Jews were aliens; most became enemy aliens, and in addition they were German-speaking. But for all the undoubted potential for these alien characteristics to trigger xenophobic reactions, they were perhaps seen primarily as aggravations of the refugees’ main disability, which was being Jewish. As well as having problems with the Jewishness of Jews, the British were uncomfortable with the idea of the racial refugee. They sympathized with the plight of political refugees, persecuted for what they did or believed. But the less familiar phenomenon of being persecuted for what you were evoked mixed responses. It seems it was easier to see Jews as unwanted immigrants than as victims of persecution. The stereotype of Jews as perpetually seeking to enter countries where they were not wanted militated against the readiness to accept them as refugees. This stereotype put the emphasis on what Jews were seeking—immigration—rather than on the lethal persecution they were seeking to escape. Similarly, the filters used for admissions focussed self-interestedly on what Jews could bring with them, rather than on what they were fleeing from. We have also seen the stigmatization of Czech Jews as ‘racial’ or ‘economic’ refugees in order to downgrade the dangers of the persecution they faced, with an implication that they had more choice than the ‘politicals’ over whether to seek refuge. All these ways of playing down the humanitarian needs of persecuted Jews diminished the humanitarian response they were able to evoke—and perhaps even diminished the readiness to empathize with them as fellow human beings. The government’s antipathy to long-term refuge meant it would accept only the numbers of persecuted Jews it believed it could dispose of conveniently. This focus on disposal provided its criterion for where to draw the line on admissions before the war. It also determined the excessive zeal policymakers showed in refusing to offer the temporary refuge that could have saved some Jewish lives during the Holocaust. It helps to explain the dread of any negotiations that might allow Hitler to try dump imagined millions of Jews on the Allies. It is manifest in the ungenerous reactions to the Horthy offer in 1944. And, although, in retrospect, it seems hard to believe that either ministers or officials genuinely feared that post-war Britain could not absorb 40,000 harmless refugee Jews—a number equivalent to less than one-thousandth of the population—such a fear should perhaps be added to cowardice, inertia and a fixation on control as explanations for the government’s neglect of refugees’ need to be allowed to try to resume a normal existence once the war was over.

PART II

Refugees in Britain: 1933–39

CHAPTER 4

The Immigration and Reception of Jewish Refugees from the Third Reich Anthony Grenville

The Preconditions for Emigration to Britain In the years between the assumption of power by the Nazis in January 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, before the systematic extermination of the Jews had begun, the principal part that Britain played, as far as the Jews of Europe were concerned, was as a country of refuge. In this immediate pre-Holocaust period, one of the key issues was how many European Jews could be rescued from the Nazi menace. Even though by 1945 the saved, to use Primo Levi’s terms, were far outnumbered by the drowned, a considerable number of Jews did succeed in fleeing Nazi-controlled territory and finding refuge elsewhere. In this respect, Britain played a very significant role in the pre-war period, though it can hardly be said that British immigration policies were unreservedly generous in admitting Jewish refugees or that British society welcomed them with open arms. The Jews of Germany suffered longest from persecution by the Nazis, but they also had the longest time in which to leave the country for a place of safety, before the outbreak of war radically diminished the chances of escape. The Jews of Austria had a shorter window of opportunity, and those of Czechoslovakia an even shorter one, but all three groups were at an advantage compared to the Jews of eastern and south-eastern Europe, who were effectively trapped once war broke out and the German armies began to advance eastwards. By contrast, it was possible for Jews in Nazi-controlled territories to escape to the countries of western Europe until the outbreak A. Grenville (B) University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_4

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of war; a small number of Jews continued to reach Britain until the invasion of Holland, Belgium and France in summer 1940 cut off that route entirely. Almost alone of the countries of western Europe, Britain, which had admitted a large number of refugees from Nazism, some 50,000, in 1938/39, was not occupied by the Germans; consequently, the Jews who had found refuge there survived the Holocaust. In 1933, when Hitler came to power and Jews began to flee from Germany, Britain already had in place a strict system of immigration control. In the nineteenth century, immigration had been free from control, but that came to an end with the Aliens Act of 1905, intended to restrict the entry of Jews fleeing from persecution in Tsarist Russia. After the First World War, the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act of 1919 extended the more drastic measures adopted in wartime and indeed added to them; regulations were set out in the Aliens Order of 1921, which gave the Home Office very wide powers to deal with ‘aliens’, as foreign immigrants were then designated, but also a considerable measure of flexibility in their implementation. By 1933, Britain no longer required that immigrants from Germany or Austria must be in possession of a valid visa. Consequently, during the first five years of Nazi rule, refugees arriving at British ports or airports were subject to scrutiny by immigration officers, who took the decision whether or not to admit them. Britain prided itself on its humanitarian tradition of granting entry to immigrants, especially those suffering under religious or political persecution in their native lands, though by 1933 there was little of that tradition left in the legal framework governing immigration. The Home Office, however, continued to endeavour to act in a humanitarian spirit at least to some extent, as reflected in practice in many of its decisions relating to the refugees from Hitler. In 1933, Britain did not consider itself a country of immigration. It had admitted groups of immigrants down the centuries, Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France after 1685 or French aristocrats fleeing the French Revolution, as well as sizable numbers of mostly economic migrants from countries like Germany or Italy. But these groups had not been large1 ; the waves of Jewish refugees fleeing eastern Europe after 1880 had been large enough to trigger immigration controls—and they also signalled the problems that attached specifically to Jewish immigration. By 1933, the Jews from eastern Europe and their descendants formed the majority of the Jewish community in Britain; it was they who set the tone for the reception extended by Anglo-Jewry to the new immigrants from Central Europe. Britain, then, was still a country of emigration, from which millions of people had left to populate the ‘White Dominions’ of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as the United States of America. In the main, it is fair to say that

1 This

was not true of the Irish community in mainland Britain. But Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom until barely a decade before 1933, and the Irish occupied a position different from other immigrant groups.

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British society was not predisposed to be favourably inclined towards a fresh influx of immigrant Jews from Europe. Another crucial factor affecting British government policy towards the Jewish refugees—and one that does not always receive sufficient attention in historical studies—was the actions, actual and potential, of the German government. For after January 1933 it was the decisions of the Nazi regime that largely determined the dimensions of the Jewish emigration from Germany, and later from Austria and Czechoslovakia. The British government thus found itself in the unenviable position of having to tailor its policies to those of an unpredictable and potentially hostile power that showed scant regard for the customary conventions of diplomacy; the radical shifts in policy that characterised Nazi policy towards the Jews, and the sheer brutality with which those measures were implemented, in turn forced the British government to adopt fresh expedients to meet them. After an initial exodus of Jews from Germany in 1933, following the Nazi assumption of power, the situation appeared to stabilise and Jewish emigration diminished perceptibly over the next four years. That changed in 1938, the key year in which the first marked intensification of Nazi persecution of the Jews occurred, with the annexation of Austria (the ‘Anschluss’) in March 1938 and the anti-Jewish pogroms of November 1938 (the ‘Crystal Night’) across the Third Reich. The pattern of Jewish emigration to Britain from Germany, and later from Austria and Czechoslovakia, reflected what Karl Schleunes described in his pioneering study as ‘the twisted road to Auschwitz’, a road on which forced emigration was one of the first stages.2 The first histories of the Jews who fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution were written in the 1970s. A.J. Sherman’s Island Refuge, as its title suggests, presents a broadly positive view of British policy towards the Jewish refugees, based on thorough research into official government papers then newly released.3 By contrast, Bernard Wasserstein’s Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, published not long after Sherman’s book, is highly critical of the treatment extended by Britain to the Jews of Europe during the Second World War.4 No less critical is Louise London, whose Whitehall and the Jews, published in 2000 and a model of exhaustive research into its sources, is still the authoritative work on its subject.5 These three histories were based very largely on material from government papers and those of non-governmental bodies involved in dealing with the refugee Jews. Tony Kushner’s numerous 2 Karl

A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews 1933–1939 (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990 [1970]).

3 A.J.

Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1994 [1973]).

4 Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1979]). 5 Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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writings on the Jewish refugees from Nazism in Britain set their history in the broader context of British xenophobia and antisemitism.6 Kushner’s most influential study, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, takes the discussion to a new level, by placing it in the wider context of the reaction of the liberal democracies to the Holocaust.7 Anthony Grenville’s more recent study, Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933–1970, seeks to approach the subject from the perspective of the refugees themselves, concentrating on their experience and presenting them as active agents rather than merely as passive objects of government policy.8 Very broadly speaking, these studies set the parameters for current scholarship in this field.

Emigration to Britain from the Third Reich, 1933–38 Initially, the number of Jews from Germany seeking refuge in Britain was relatively small. The assumption of power by the Nazis led a substantial number of Jews, almost 40,000 (of some 570,000) to leave the country in 1933; the boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 and the laws and decrees passed in that month, purging the civil service, the education system and the legal and medical professions of Jews, forced many to consider emigration, by threatening their livelihoods. But for the next four years, as the situation appeared to stabilise and in the absence of further radical measures against the Jews, the annual rate of emigration slowed, not exceeding 25,000 until 1938. Even the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which institutionalised anti-Jewish racial discrimination, had little immediate effect in this respect. Britain was not at this stage a favoured country of refuge. Many Jews preferred to settle in countries closer to Germany, such as France, Holland, Belgium, Austria or Czechoslovakia, in the hope that the Nazi regime might fall and they could return home. Britain was geographically more distant, separated from the continent by the English Channel and also by a yawning gulf in customs and practices, attitudes and outlook, indeed in its entire mentality. The British looked outward across the seas, to the British Empire and the United States, and took little account of ‘foreigners’ from the poorly regarded and poorly understood countries of Europe. Jews considering emigration from Germany were often aware of the somewhat Olympian disdain with which the British treated foreigners and the barriers that this posed to their settlement in that country. They were also aware of the system of immigration control in place in Britain, which acted as a further psychological disincentive to emigration there. 6 See

Especially Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), and Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

7 Kushner,

The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

8 Anthony

Grenville, Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933–1970: Their Image in ‘AJR Information’ (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010).

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The conditions determining the admission of Jewish refugees into Britain from 1933 depended on the government; for governments could refuse them entry on principle, or apply rigid quota limits on the American model. Britain rejected both these options, claiming instead to judge each case on its merits; this had the advantage of presenting a humane face to the world, while at the same time allowing the Home Office to deny entry to those it deemed unsuitable. For the first five years of Nazi rule, British government policy was, broadly, to restrict the admission of refugees to a modest number, while trying to maintain an appearance of humanity in its approach to the refugee problem: a manageable compromise between humanity and expediency. On 5 April 1933, the Cabinet discussed the increasing number of Jewish refugees from Germany seeking entry to Britain and appointed a committee to examine the proposals presented to the Home Office by representatives of Anglo-Jewry, who demanded free entry for the refugees and offered to cover the costs of maintaining them.9 On 7 April, the committee recommended to the Cabinet that the existing arrangements for the admission of German-Jewish refugees be maintained, rejecting both the alternative of tightening the restrictions on entry and that of relaxing them; refugees now also had to register with the police on reaching their destinations in Britain. This compromise line was largely maintained till 1938; it allowed the government to claim that it was safeguarding British interests while also proceeding in accordance with British humanitarian traditions. The government aimed, in practical terms, to ensure that refugees entering Britain should be able to support themselves; refugees were, however, also forbidden to undertake employment, paid or unpaid, unless they could prove that they could fill positions requiring special skills, in which case they were granted a work permit. Though many refugees took employment anyway once they had settled, these conditions would have deterred many from coming to Britain in the first place. The British government was greatly assisted in admitting the—relatively small—number of Jews it allowed into Britain between 1933 and 1938 by the generous offer from Anglo-Jewry to cover the costs of supporting the immigrants. This meant that they would not become a burden on the British state and taxpayer, rendering their entry much more palatable to the British public. However, the representatives of Anglo-Jewry estimated the likely number of Jews from Germany wishing to come to Britain at 3000–4000. This proved to be a serious underestimate; by the time war broke out, when the numbers of refugees arriving in Britain had exceeded the original estimate over 15fold, the burden on the Jewish communal organisations became too great and the government had to step in. Nevertheless, the efforts of Anglo-Jewry on behalf of its co-religionists under Nazi rule were of the greatest importance in facilitating the entry of many thousands of them into Britain. This was

9 See

Sherman, Island Refuge, pp. 29ff.

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especially the case in the areas of financial and administrative support; AngloJewry was also active in lobbying government departments on behalf of the Jews under Nazi control, often enlisting prominent Jewish figures, such as Lord Bearsted, Viscount Samuel and members of the Rothschild family, to form part of delegations to put pressure on ministers. The most important organisation established by the Jewish community to assist the refugees from Nazism was the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC), later German-Jewish Aid Committee, which was founded in March 1933 by Otto Schiff, a banker of Anglo-German background. The JRC undertook the central role of making the organisational arrangements for the entry of Jews from Germany into Britain and for supporting them once there. The JRC received its funding from the Central British Fund for German Jewry, which was established shortly after the JRC to raise money. These bodies and other Jewish voluntary organisations involved in supporting and assisting the refugees worked closely with the Board of Deputies of British Jews; the JRC had offices in Woburn House, the headquarters of the Board of Deputies, until early 1939, when it and other support organisations moved to new premises in Bloomsbury House. Organisations were set up to support specific groups of refugees or to help to resolve specific problems. A network of refugee committees, relying largely on Jewish volunteer workers, covered the country, providing support at local level with the manifold problems besetting everyday life in a strange country. The Jewish organisations assumed that the refugees would, in principle, stay in Britain only temporarily, as did the British government; immigration officers routinely granted refugees arriving at British ports permission to stay for a limited period only, usually one month, three or six months, after which their residence permits had to be renewed, failing which they faced deportation. For their part, the leaders of British Jewry were acutely aware of the possibility that a fresh influx of foreign Jews might fuel the flames of antisemitism, which lay at the very least latent in broad sections of the British population. Studies like Richard Bolchover’s British Jewry and the Holocaust highlight the crucial importance of this fear of antisemitism in shaping the response of Anglo-Jewry to the plight of the Jews from Germany.10 Hence the eagerness with which the leadership of Anglo-Jewry adopted the strategy of assisting the refugees from Nazism as long as they were in Britain, while at the same time seeking to facilitate their rapid onward re-emigration. There was a curious historical irony here. When Jews fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia had begun to arrive in Germany and Austria some decades previously, the established Jewish communities in those countries, afraid of native antisemitism, had assisted their fellow Jews from the East materially, but had done their best to hasten them on their way to the ports of emigration. In Britain in the 1930s, it was the descendants of those Jews from the East who 10 Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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now formed the bulk of the established Jewish community, while the Jews from Germany assumed the supplicant position of outsiders seeking admission and support from co-religionists who themselves did not feel entirely secure. The divide between these two groups of Jews was to influence the relations between them fundamentally. While Anglo-Jewry had been generous in the material support that it extended to the refugees from Nazism, its response in human terms was perceived as being less welcoming, not least because it was conditioned by the underlying fear of antisemitism. The clash of cultures between the Jews from the East, orthodox in their religious practice, traditional in their lifestyle and resistant to integration into German or Austrian society, and the Jews in the German-speaking cities of the West, assimilated, largely secularised and keen to adopt the manners and customs of the societies around them, was now replicated under changed conditions in Britain. The assimilated Jews, who had integrated into German or Austrian society in the cities of the West and had in considerable measure abandoned religion for a veneration of German culture and education, tended to look down on the Jews from the impoverished shtetls of the East, referring to them by the pejorative term Ostjuden. In turn, the latter, who spoke Yiddish, retained their distinctive style of dress and appearance and maintained the identity of observant, traditional Jews, considered the assimilated Jews in the German-speaking cities to have betrayed their Jewish heritage for the meretricious benefits of western European modernity. Prominent among the other religious groups that assisted the refugees were those outside the mainstream Christian denominations, in particular the Quakers, who set up their Germany Emergency Committee, later renamed Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens, in 1933. Quaker centres like Woodbrooke in Birmingham supported Jewish refugees from an early stage, while schools like the Friends’ School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, provided a warm and caring environment for Jewish children who had come to Britain unaccompanied or whose parents were unable to maintain them in their new British homes. The Quakers were also prominent in travelling to the Third Reich, where they helped Jews desperate to emigrate; in particular, they played an important part in aiding those who came on Kindertransports, from the planning stage of the rescue operation to its implementation and to the provision of accommodation, support and care once the children had arrived in Britain. Some of the Quaker helpers are known: for example, Bertha Bracey, who took charge of the Germany Emergency Committee in 1933 and in 1945 arranged for the RAF to fly 300 child survivors from Czechoslovakia to a reception centre at Windermere; or Corder Catchpool, renowned for his fearless behaviour in face of the Nazi regime. But many, like Tessa Rowntree, who helped refugees escape from Czechoslovakia alongside Doreen Warriner (and later Nicholas Winton), have been totally forgotten. The record of the established national church, the Church of England, was more mixed, probably reflecting the varied views of its members. The Church played a role in attempting to mitigate the suffering of the Jews in the Third

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Reich and in charitable endeavours on behalf of those who had reached Britain. Many ordinary British people were inspired by Christian charity and compassion to assist refugees, especially children, in need. Among the clergy there were outspoken and courageous champions of the refugees, notably Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who did not hesitate to raise his voice, for example against internment, when it was less than popular to do so. At the same time, there were clergymen who held antisemitic views and did not hesitate to express them. The Church of England also felt constrained by its status as the established church, which prevented it from taking too robust a stand in opposing the Nazis until the war. The Catholic Church played less of a role; its own members were still a disadvantaged minority in British society—Irish Catholics in particular—and it had little incentive to rush to the aid of another minority. The Catholic Church had a record of antisemitism, accentuated since 1917 by fear of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, a fear that led it to look more kindly on Nazi Germany as the bulwark against ‘godless Marxism’. In Britain, similarly, many British Jews were dismayed to discover that the new arrivals of the 1930s were often closer to German or Austrian than to traditional Jewish lifestyles and culture. A class divide also played an important role here. The Jews who had arrived in Britain from eastern Europe in the decades before the First World War had mostly been poor, had settled in areas like London’s East End and had, broadly speaking, adopted a working-class style of life. The Jewish refugees of the 1930s, however, were predominantly middle-class, having already made their ascent into the middle classes—mainly via the educational system—in Germany or Austria. Their preferred initial areas of settlement in London were solidly middle-class districts like Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage and West Hampstead, in the then Borough of Hampstead, or Golders Green, in the then Borough of Hendon. The distance between the two communities of Jews has never entirely disappeared, and the refugees from Nazism have never been fully absorbed into Anglo-Jewry; for that reason, the organisation that was founded in 1941 to represent the Jews from Central Europe in Britain, the Association of Jewish Refugees, is still vigorous and flourishing in 2017. The Jewish refugees arriving in Britain in the 1930s received a mixed welcome. Historians like Sherman and London have examined the procedures of British immigration control, as set out in government papers, providing a rather cold, inhuman description of a bureaucratic process. It is, however, instructive to observe the same process in operation from the other side, as experienced in reality by refugees arriving at British ports of entry. Here it sometimes shows, by contrast, a more human face. Most refugees approached immigration control with a measure of trepidation; it was known that some were refused entry and sent back, though to France, Belgium or Holland, not to Germany. But relatively few refugees subsequently complained of the behaviour of the officials, more frequently contrasting it favourably with that of their more authoritarian counterparts on the continent. It goes without saying that some refugees suffered officious, high-handed or harsh treatment,

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but most passed through immigration control without major incident. Some refugees recall in diaries and memoirs that they were treated with courtesy, as unexpected as it was gratifying to them; the flexibility with which immigration officers were allowed to perform their duties played a part in this. An example illustrates how, on occasion, the practice of immigration control diverged from the apparently rigid guidelines laid down by the Home Office. Under threat in Berlin both as a Jew and as the daughter of a Communist, Sibylle Ortmann arrived in Dover on 31 October 1933 aged 15, posing as a tourist in the hope of gaining entry into Britain. It was immediately obvious to the immigration officer that the girl was not a tourist: she had no return ticket and very little money. At the height of the Great Depression, with unemployment at record levels, it was plainly the task of the immigration officer to refuse her entry, to avoid burdening the British state with a penniless refugee. The official questioned her for almost an hour, joined by his colleagues; Ortmann sensed that they were favourably inclined towards her and were only waiting for a reason to admit her that was plausible enough to satisfy their superiors. She changed her story, claiming that her mother had been reluctant to entrust her with more money on account of her youth and that, once she was in London, her mother would send her the monthly allowance permitted under German law. This version of events was an obvious invention—otherwise she would hardly have waited for an hour to reveal it—but the official smiled broadly and accepted it. When he signed her entry permit and she could resume her train journey to London, her fellow passengers raised a cheer.11 On arriving in Britain, the refugees from Nazism faced formidable difficulties in their initial efforts to establish themselves. Much of British society was at best ignorant about and indifferent to their plight, at worst unsympathetic and hostile. Jews were the butt of prejudice, viewed with distaste by a population that knew little about them and frequently cared less. Though the level of prejudice did not compare with that from which the refugees had escaped, and was significantly lower than in much of Europe, the reception accorded to the refugees in Britain initially was in general far from welcoming. Public attitudes to the refugees in Britain were divided. The number of extreme rightwingers, ideologically committed antisemites or outright supporters of Nazism was very small. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was vocal, but electorally insignificant; the government remained nervous, however, about the potential of such groups for stirring up trouble over the refugee issue. More widespread was an ugly layer of antisemitism that pervaded right-wing sections of the social and political establishment and the right-wing press. Those sections of the middle classes affected by what is termed ‘golf club anti-Semitism’ disliked and distrusted Jews, indulging in the discourse of casual racism and in acts

11 Sibylle

Ortmann, „Wir leben nun mal auf einem Vulkan“, ed. by Peter Crane (Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 2005), pp. 102f. This is the published version of Ortmann’s diaries, whose daily entries were written immediately after the events described.

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of petty but wounding discrimination. They mostly drew the line at outright violence and the institutionalisation of racial discrimination, however. But there is no doubt that much of the traditional right was opposed to the settlement of ‘alien Jews’ in Britain, and the Chamberlain government paid heed to its views. The government’s policy of seeking to avoid war by appeasing Hitler also militated against the favourable treatment of known enemies of Germany. Hard-line right-wingers critical of government immigration policy declared that Britain could support only very few refugees and argued that large-scale immigration would lead to an increase in antisemitism and even to public disorder. At a time of mass unemployment, the trade unions also opposed immigration that threatened ‘British jobs’, as did professional bodies intent on defending the interests of their members against an influx of well-qualified refugee practitioners; the medical profession, represented by the British Medical Association and the various Royal Colleges, sought especially to exclude refugee doctors. Often, such arguments cloaked a deeper hostility to the integration of foreigners, especially Jews, into British society, whose cohesion was seen to depend on adherence to a core of homogeneously ‘British’ values from which ‘aliens’ were excluded. Ministers were not insensitive to the plight of the refugees, especially when Nazi brutality outraged public opinion and provoked waves of sympathy for the refugees. But ultimately British interests came first: the Cabinet favoured the admission of refugees who could bring some benefit to Britain, for example if they had distinguished themselves in an artistic, scientific or technological field or if they might create new industrial enterprises. Those who had sufficient financial resources to provide for themselves were at an advantage throughout. Consequently, it is not surprising that the refugees who settled in Britain between 1933 and 1938 included a number of persons with capital, industrialists who would set up businesses and provide employment, established figures in the arts like the writer Stefan Zweig, and a significant element of scientific and academic talent brought over under the auspices of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning.12 Less eminent refugees were allowed in as students and domestic servants, or to fill specific job vacancies, or on condition that they did not take employment. The early refugees also included a significant number of political opponents of the regime, often non-Jewish. Accurate figures are not available, but best estimates suggest that by 1938 there were probably not more than about 10,000 refugees from Germany in Britain.13 12 On

the SPSL (originally Academic Assistance Council), see R.M. Cooper, Refugee Scholars: Conversations with Tess Simpson (Leeds: Moorland Publishing, 1992), and Jeremy Seabrook, The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the Flight from Tyranny (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 13 For a thoughtful consideration of the difficulty of arriving at precise numbers and a careful analysis of the available data, see Charmian Brinson, The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm: A Study of Political Exiles in London During the 1930’s (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 20ff.

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Emigration to Britain from the Third Reich, 1938–39 On 12 March 1938, German troops entered Austria, to be greeted enthusiastically by much of the population. The Nazi takeover prompted antisemitic excesses in Vienna, where the great majority of Austria’s Jews lived, on a scale not seen in Germany. The open brutality and viciousness to which Jews were subjected, vividly conveyed to the British public by the reports of G.E.R. Gedye in the Daily Telegraph, prompted a mass flight of Jews; embassies and consulates were, as the British consul reported of his own, besieged by crowds of Jews desperate to emigrate to any country willing to accept them. Jews fleeing Austria soon began to arrive in numbers at British ports, threatening to overload the existing system of immigration control. The British government accordingly decided to institute a visa system, which was introduced in May 1938. This had the effect of burdening Passport Control Officers in consulates in cities like Berlin, Vienna and Frankfurt am Main, instead of the immigration officers in the ports of arrival in Britain, with the work involved in deciding which applicants for immigration should be accepted and which refused, and in issuing visas to the former. Officials struggled to cope with this new workload. The system became seriously overloaded and did not function smoothly, though it was overhauled after November 1938, and later improvements like the introduction of block visas caused it to operate somewhat more speedily. In the period before the outbreak of war, however, it remained inadequate to deal with the numbers of Jews seeking to enter Britain from Germany, Austria and, after autumn 1938, Czechoslovakia. In Germany, the situation of the Jews deteriorated abruptly and brutally with the pogroms of 9/10 November 1938, the so-called ‘Crystal Night’, when Jews across the entire Third Reich became subject to intense persecution; like their co-religionists in Austria, the Jews of Germany were forced to recognise that there was no place for them in Hitler’s Reich and sought desperately to emigrate. These crucial months in the years 1938/39 were the period in which the largest number of Jews from Germany and Austria were under the greatest pressure to emigrate while still having the chance to do so. It is worth noting that whereas the Jews of Austria had some eighteen months to emigrate, between the ‘Anschluss’ and the outbreak of war, the Jews of Germany had only some ten months, between the pogroms of November 1938 and September 1939. That may account for the fact that a relatively high proportion of the Jews of Vienna, some 120,000 of 180,000, succeeded in emigrating. Here Britain played a very important role. Historians have argued that the British government instituted the visa system in May 1938 in order further to restrict the number of Jewish refugees from Nazism entering the country. If so, the measure was a resounding failure. Whereas in the years 1933–38, prior to the introduction of the visa requirement, some 2000–3000 Jews per year were admitted to Britain, in the eighteen months between March 1938 and September 1939 over 50,000 refugees were allowed into the country, at the rate of some 3000 per month. This figure

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represented a very marked increase in Britain’s intake of Jewish refugees, the more so as most other countries of refuge were putting up barriers to Jewish immigration; the countries of Europe, in particular, were becoming reluctant to offend an increasingly powerful Germany by granting refuge to Hitler’s known enemies, and were also becoming increasingly unwilling to shoulder the burden, as they saw it, of admitting destitute Jews. In the period 1938/39, British immigration policy thus appears in a relatively favourable light. It is a regrettably little-known fact that Britain was the first country of refuge for a larger number of Austrian Jews than any other: just over 30,000 came to Britain in 1938/39, as opposed to just under 30,000 to the USA (though subsequent re-emigration was to reverse that order).14 About onesixth of Vienna’s Jewish community survived by emigrating to Britain, or fully one quarter of those who survived the Holocaust. The proof of that was to be seen for many decades after 1945, in the large and vibrant community of former Viennese Jews gathered in north-west London; their impact on the cultural and intellectual life of Britain—in the field of music, for example—was out of all proportion to their numbers. The proportion of Germany’s Jews who found refuge in Britain was smaller, but still large enough to be recognised by the refugees themselves. Werner Rosenstock, long-serving General Secretary of the Association of Jewish Refugees (1941–1982), who had worked in a department of the Jewish communal organisation in Berlin dealing with emigration until he left for Britain in August 1939, addressed this issue in an article written for the twentieth anniversary of the ‘Crystal Night’ pogrom. Rosenstock chose to highlight the greatly increased rate of immigration of Jews from Germany into Britain in the last nine months before the war, implying that many Jews who perished would have been saved if more countries had followed Britain in relaxing their immigration policies: The frontiers of most countries were barred. The United States and Palestine were restricted in their immigration policies by the quota and certificate systems. The only country which really reached [out] a helping hand and which thus lived up to the emergency, was Great Britain. Of the 100,000-150,000 Jews who left Germany between the pogroms and the outbreak of war, about 40,000 found refuge in this island, and in addition a further 40,000 from Austria and Czechoslovakia. One must have experienced what it meant in those days of anxiety if a letter from a guarantor or from a British immigration authority arrived in a Jewish household.15

The Jews who were admitted to Britain during those months fell into several distinct categories. Best known are the nearly 10,000 unaccompanied children 14 These were the figures calculated by the Jewish communal organisation in Vienna, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. 15 W[erner] Rosenstock, ‘Days of Emergency’, Association of Jewish Refugees Information (November 1958), p. 4.

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who came to Britain on Kindertransports. Within days of the ‘Crystal Night’ atrocities, the British government came under pressure to admit more Jewish children from Germany. On 15 November 1938, a delegation of prominent Jewish figures called on the Prime Minister; while Chamberlain responded coolly to their call for children up to the age of 17 to be granted entry, the cabinet, meeting the following day, took a more positive line. As a result, on 21 November Home Secretary Samuel Hoare announced in the House of Commons that unaccompanied children would be admitted to Britain without the need for passports or visas. The Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (later Refugee Children’s Movement) was set up to administer the emigration of the children and to organise their accommodation in hostels or with foster families. This machinery went into motion speedily: the first party of children, from Berlin, arrived at Harwich on 2 December, followed shortly by the first party from Vienna. Children continued to arrive, mostly by train but also in small numbers by sea, from Germany and Austria, as well as from Danzig (then a free city) and from Czechoslovakia,16 until the outbreak of war. The figure of 10,000, which originated in a plan for emigration to Palestine promoted by Jewish organisations, was never intended as a quota; had the war not intervened, there is no reason to suppose that the British government would not have continued to admit children above that number.17 The rescue of defenceless young children was presented to the British public as an act of generous humanity at the time, and it has continued to be the cause for considerable self-congratulation over the decades as Britain has reviewed its response to the Holocaust. Though other countries took in small numbers of unaccompanied Jewish children, the Kindertransports to Britain were unparalleled in their scale and degree of formal organisation. Through their own Kindertransport Association, an affiliated organisation of the Association of Jewish Refugees, the former Kindertransportees have frequently expressed their gratitude to Britain for rescuing them from the Holocaust and for giving them the chance to build their lives anew; it is hard to dispute the merits of saving some 10,000 young lives. Nevertheless, critics of the British government have pointed out that the parents of the rescued children were not allowed to accompany them and were left to their fate; many were not able to emigrate and perished in the Holocaust. Critical historians have also 16 The initiative to rescue children from Czechoslovakia was separate from the Kindertransport from Germany and Austria. It came about thanks to the initiative of Nicholas Winton, who carried out the administration in London, and Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick and other workers for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia in Prague. 17 One trainload of children carrying pupils from the Jawne School in Cologne had come to Britain before the outbreak of war, but when war was declared the train carrying the second half of the school was not permitted to leave by the German authorities. In Prague, similarly, a train carrying some 250 Jewish children was waiting to leave when its departure was prevented by the outbreak of war. Had the trains been permitted to leave Germancontrolled territory, it is hard to imagine that the British authorities would have refused the children entry.

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pointed to the deficiencies in the treatment of the Kindertransportees once in Britain, in particular in the area of emotional and psychological support for children abruptly separated from their parents, in many cases forever.18 A second large group was formed by domestic servants, up to 20,000 of whom came to Britain.19 By the 1930s, a shortage of labour for domestic service had developed in Britain; the government consequently granted work permits to those refugees—mostly but not entirely young women—who were willing to work as domestic servants. A small number of women were also admitted as trainee nurses. This was not a humanitarian measure, though it saved many lives. Most of the refugee domestics, who came largely from middle-class families more accustomed to employing servants than to acting as such, loathed their time in service, seeing it as demeaning and degrading, as well as lonely and penurious. Once female labour was required for the war effort, most of them quit domestic service at the earliest opportunity. In 1939, Britain also admitted as so-called transmigrants some 4000 Jewish men who had been released from concentration camps on the understanding that they must leave Germany within a short time, on pain of re-arrest; the government could claim that these men, who often had some possibility of gaining entry to another country, would re-emigrate from Britain and would not form a permanent presence. They were housed at Kitchener Camp in Richborough, near Sandwich in Kent, a facility created by the Central British Fund for German Jewry.20 The requirement for their re-emigration remained in most cases a polite fiction. On the outbreak of war, a number of the men at Kitchener Camp volunteered to join the Pioneer Corps, the only branch of the British forces then open to ‘enemy aliens’. The largest group of Jewish refugees admitted to Britain in 1938/39 were those who succeeded in obtaining visas. Though many thousands of Jews entered by this means, it was never an easy route and was always fraught with difficulties. In the first place, the Nazi authorities, always keen to harass and torment Jews, subjected the would-be immigrants to a veritable obstacle course of bureaucratic requirements, including a raft of exit documentation, and stripped them of almost all their financial assets. Emigrants then had to secure a British visa. Visas were granted to those who could show that they had offers of employment from a British employer for a position that no British 18 The first comprehensive study of the Kindertransports, Barry Turner, … And the Policeman Smiled: 10,000 Children Escape from Nazi Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), has the inestimable advantage of access to all the files of the Central British Fund for German Jewry, but takes, as its title suggests, a largely uncritical approach to its subject. See for a broader perspective The Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39: New Perspectives, ed. by Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 13 (2012). 19 See

Traude Bollauf, Dienstmädchen-Emigration: Die Flucht jüdischer Frauen aus Österreich und Deutschland nach England 1938/39 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011).

20 See Clare Ungerson, Four Thousand Lives: The Rescue of German Jewish Men to Britain in 1939 (Stroud: History Press, 2014).

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worker could fill; these were relatively few in number. Far more numerous were those who obtained a visa by showing that they would be able to maintain themselves financially in Britain; as by 1938 they were able to take only a small sum of money (usually 10 Marks) with them, this meant for most finding someone in Britain who would sponsor them, by putting up a guarantee of £50, then a considerable sum, against the eventuality that they became a burden on the exchequer. Desperate Jews sought for sponsors by any expedient, calling on distant relatives or contacts from the past, or writing begging letters to people with the same surname whom they had found through British telephone books. For many, the application process proved too lengthy and cumbersome, and they were trapped in the Reich by the outbreak of war. Thousands of Jews came to Britain by this means. It helps to explain the socio-economic profile of the refugee community, which differed markedly from that of the communities from which they came. Whereas the communities in cities like Berlin or Vienna contained substantial numbers of poor Jews, often only recently arrived in the West and unaccustomed to the ways of modern urban civilisation, that proletarian element was comparatively small in the refugee community in Britain; the community was heavily middleclass in its occupational profile and its aspirations, as well as in its chosen areas of settlement, such as the Borough of Hampstead. Middle-class, professional Jews entered Britain in considerable numbers despite the instructions circulated by the Foreign Office’s Passport Control Department to officials responsible for issuing visas. According to these, applicants unsuitable for admission were small shopkeepers, retail traders, artisans and persons likely to seek employment, minor musicians and commercial artists of all kinds, and the rank and file of professional men. Yet one of the features of the refugee community in Britain was precisely the number of small businessmen, traders, entrepreneurs and professional men it contained, while refugee musicians transformed musical life in Britain. The visa system that regulated entry into Britain favoured the middle-class, assimilated sections of German and Austrian Jewry: they were better travelled and more cosmopolitan in outlook, making them more likely to have contacts in Britain who would sponsor them; they were more familiar with the mechanics of foreign travel than the poorer, orthodox Jews from the East, who were less likely to possess a passport, let alone the skills necessary to acquire one quickly from a hostile Nazi bureaucracy; they were more likely to have foreign language skills, or other transferable skills that would assist them in emigration; in general, they had financial and other resources at their disposal not available to the poorer Jews of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel or Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. In the lapidary phrase of Georg Stefan Troller, describing the fate of the orthodox residents of the Leopoldstadt, ‘Waren wir Assimilanten nach Westen emigriert, so die frommen Chassidim geschlossen nach

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Auschwitz’ (‘While we assimilated Jews emigrated to the West, the observant Hassidic Jews went en masse to Auschwitz’).21 In autumn 1938, under the terms of the Munich Agreement, the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland were surrendered to Germany. Thousands of Jews and political opponents of the Nazis, including many refugees from Germany, fled from the occupied areas into unoccupied Czechoslovakia. The British government, conscious of its responsibility for the betrayal of the Czech people at Munich, committed funds to the relief and resettlement of these refugees. In late October 1938, the privately funded British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) was set up; it organised the emigration to Britain of persons perceived as being at particular risk, principally political and trade union activists rather than Jews (though not a few of these activists were Jewish). With the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Germany on 15 March 1939, the far greater number of Jews in the rest of the country came under direct threat. The government committed some £3.25 million to a new body, the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, which took over the work of the BCRC. Numerous Czech Jews also came to Britain as individuals with visas or on Kindertransport trains. The Jews from Czechoslovakia who came to Britain in 1938/39 were considerably fewer in number than those from Germany and Austria, but they formed a significant presence, buttressed by the arrival in Britain in 1940 of the Czech government in exile and Czech military units. The desperate efforts of Jews to leave the Third Reich for Britain were finally and definitively thwarted by the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939. Many were left in the heartrending situation of having their applications for a British visa terminated when they were already being processed and when their hopes for rescue were rising. A case in point is the fate of the parents of Gina Gerson, née Bauer, who had arrived on a Kindertransport from Vienna in January 1939, aged fourteen. The girl’s older half-sister had with the utmost difficulty secured a domestic service permit for the mother in Vienna and a guarantee for the father, enabling them to enter Britain. They could have left Vienna by train in late August 1939, but preferred to delay their departure by a week so that they could travel by air; their flight, due to arrive at Croydon Airport on 6 September, never left and they perished in the Holocaust.22 There is no doubt that many thousands of Jews like Gina Gerson’s parents could have been saved, had Britain been ready to admit them more speedily, or indeed at all. Historians have for that reason been very critical of British policy towards the Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Reich. On the other hand, Britain admitted over 60,000 Jews from the territories under Nazi control 21 Quoted in Georg Stefan Troller, ‘Eine Art Venedig ohne Lagune’, in Ein Niemandsland, aber welch ein Rundblick!: Exilautoren über Nachkriegswien, ed. by Ursula Seeber (Vienna: Picus), pp. 87–90 (p. 87). 22 See

the interview with Gina Gerson, née Bauer, in Refugee Voices: The Association of Jewish Refugees Audio-Visual Testimony Archive.

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before September 1939, a record that compares favourably with that of any other country, bar the special case of Palestine, and, relative to the country’s population and absorptive capacity, even with the United States. There have been few periods in modern history when Britain has been as open to refugee immigrants as it was in 1938/39. The reception extended to the refugees by British society has also been found seriously wanting; there can be no doubt that many refugees were exposed to xenophobia—directed more against them as ‘Germans’ than as Jews—and even to such measures as the mass internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in summer 1940. However, hostility to the refugees was limited both in its extent and in its intensity. Apart from a small minority of convinced, ideologically committed antisemites, the level of antisemitism in Britain was low; the refugees mostly encountered only verbal expressions of anti-Jewish feeling—physical assaults are hardly ever mentioned in diaries, memoirs or interviews—which were distressing but infrequent enough to leave no lasting scars. The great majority of the refugees went on to build settled lives for themselves in Britain, and to develop feelings of genuine affection for their adopted homeland. While the British government may have played host to the refugees from Nazism only reluctantly, its record surely compares favourably with that of its more recent counterparts. The unaccompanied children who came to Britain on Kindertransports, in particular, may have reason to be grateful that their fate was not decided by the governments whose immigration policies left children to languish in the makeshift camps around Calais or which refused to admit more than a tiny number of the children fleeing from the war in Syria.

CHAPTER 5

‘I Remember Their Labels Round Their Necks’ Britain and the Kindertransport Andrea Hammel

There is a public perception that there is something quintessentially British about the story of the Kindertransport. This view has been reinforced by politicians, artists and writers: when the writer Michael Bond was interviewed in 2014 on the occasion of the release of the first cinema film based on his Paddington children’s book series he said that ‘Refugees are the saddest sight’1 and it was stated in a number of newspaper articles that Bond was ‘inspired by memories of Jewish children arriving at Reading station just before the outbreak of the Second World War’,2 clearly referring to the Kindertransport. The Paddington books and films show an ultimately positive picture of British society’s attitude to refugees and migrants. Although initially met with suspicion, the loveable bear Paddington—originally from darkest Peru—overcomes these obstacles and integrates perfectly into British society living with the nice middle-class Brown family. 1 Michael Bond quoted in Julia Llewellyn Smith, ‘Michael Bond: “I Was Worried That I’d Let Paddington Down…”’, The Telegraph, 23 November 2014; http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11247595/Michael-Bond-I-was-worried-that-Idlet-Paddington-down….html (accessed 5 December 2017). 2 Julia Llewellyn Smith, ‘Michael Bond: “I Was Worried That I’d Let Paddington Down…”’, The Telegraph, 23 November 2014; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cul ture/film/11247595/Michael-Bond-I-was-worried-that-Id-let-Paddington-down…. html (accessed 5 December 2017).

A. Hammel (B) Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_5

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As this example illustrates, the Kindertransport is generally seen as a positive chapter in British history. Since summer 2015, when refugees fleeing the war in Syria came to the attention of the British media and thus the wider British public, the Kindertransport has often been invoked as a shining example of Britain’s past humanitarian attitude towards refugees in the context of the present governments reluctance to admit refugees to Britain.3 The involvement of a British politician, Lord Alf Dubs, a Labour peer sitting in the House of Lords, in trying to persuade the British government to accept more refugees fleeing the Syrian war, is another reason for this comparison between the two groups of refugees, despite the fact that nearly 80 years have elapsed since the arrival of the first Kindertransportees in Britain. Alf Dubs tabled an amendment to the 2016 UK Immigration Bill asking for the government to admit more unaccompanied child refugees.4 Dubs fled to the UK aged six on a Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia, a biographical fact that he mentioned in his speech in the House of Lords on 21 March 2016: My Lords, ever since I tabled this amendment, I have been surprised at the level of interest, and above all support, from the wider public over the need to do something for unaccompanied child refugees in Europe. I declare an interest at the outset, as I arrived in this country in the summer of 1939 as an unaccompanied child refugee. This country at the time offered safety to some 10,000 children.5

Consequently, Dubs’ identity as a former child refugee was mentioned in many media reports on the subject of the Bill and the Amendment. On 26 April 2016, The Guardian published an article entitled ‘Fresh proposal to help child refugees stranded in Europe tabled’ which refers to the Kindertransport as a government-backed scheme: A new proposal to help child refugees stranded in Europe has been tabled and is expected to pass in the House of Lords on Tuesday evening, following the government’s vote against accepting 3,000 children into the UK. […] But, Lord

3 See

also Jessica Reinisch, ‘History Matters… But Which One? Every Refugee Crisis Has a Context’, 29 September 2015; http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/his tory-matters-but-which-one-every-refugee-crisis-has-a-context (accessed 1 December 2017) and Jennifer Craig-Norton, ‘Contesting the Kindertransport as a ‘Model’ Refugee Response’ in European Judaism, Vol. 50, Issue 2, September 2017, pp. 24–33.

4 The

text of Amendment 116 A read ‘The Secretary of State must, as soon as possible after the passing of this Act, make arrangements to relocate to the United Kingdom and support a specified number of unaccompanied refugee children from other countries in Europe.’ https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2016-03-21/debates/AAE552DF-70A74220-8B67-D59EAA007FF4/ImmigrationBill (accessed 14 December 2017).

5 See

Hansard Online, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2016-03-21/debates/AAE 552DF-70A7-4220-8B67-D59EAA007FF4/ImmigrationBill (accessed 14 December 2017).

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Alf Dubs, the Labour peer who came to Britain as part of the governmentbacked Kindertransport scheme before the war, vowed to continue the fight and has tabled a proposal.6

Calling the Kindertransport 1938/39 government-backed is only partially true: the British government sought to avoid providing financial and organisational resources for the Kindertransport—at least initially. The Kindertransport was a visa-waiver scheme based on a change in policy in 1938. The objective of this chapter is to outline the situation of the Kindertransportees and their families as well as British immigration policy while discussing the developments in Kindertransport research and its position within Holocaust Studies and Holocaust education and in relation to today’s attitudes towards refugees. From 1933 the National Socialist German government pursued a policy of exclusion for Jewish Germans from public and economic life, which increased in intensity over the years. Many Jewish families started to consider emigration in the first half of the 1930s and searched for countries that would give them refuge while others were still hoping for a change of government in Germany. Most families wanted to emigrate together.7 However, after the November pogrom in 1938, it became clear to the majority of Jews in Germany and in the by then annexed Austria that they had to accept any means of escape from the violence and persecution of the National Socialist government. Jewish men who had been arrested during the November pogrom often only managed to be released if they could provide evidence that they would have the possibility to leave German and Austria immediately. Thus, it had become clear to Jewish families that they had no choice but to flee the country individually rather than as a family unit. The British government’s immigration policy underwent dramatic changes during the first 40 years of the twentieth century: the Aliens Act of 1905 is considered by some the first law on the path to a modern immigration control system and to have been designed ‘to stem the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe’.8 Just before and just after the First World War the Aliens Restriction Acts 1914 and 1919 were passed, further limiting the rights of immigrants to enter the UK and it is argued that ‘no trace of legal protection for refugees remained on the statute book’.9 Immigrants were admitted on a case by case basis, the main consideration being whether the person seeking admittance was considered to be of benefit to the British state. There seems to have been some 6 Karen McVeigh, Heather Stewart, and Rowena Mason, ‘Fresh Proposal to Help Child Refugees Stranded in Europe Tabled’, The Guardian, 26 April 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/26/fresh-proposal-to-help-childrefugees-stranded-in-europe-tabled (accessed 1 December 2017). 7 Claudia Curio, Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung. Die Kindertransporte 1938/39 nach Groβbritannien (Berlin: Metropol, 2006), pp. 39–42. 8 Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948. British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), p. 16. 9 London,

Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948, p. 17.

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possibility of leniency and individual officials made decision on humanitarian grounds after 1919 and even after 1933, After 1933 Jewish organisations of Britain financially underwrote the admittance of Jewish refugees from the German Reich and administered the care and support for such Jewish refugees. Between 1933 and March 1938 the numbers of those seeking refuge were not as large as later, which made this arrangement feasible. This changed after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, when thousands of Austrian Jews sought to escape in a short space of time. Consequently, and with the tacit consent of the Anglo-Jewish community, Britain introduced a visa requirement making seeking refuge in Britain much harder. Fears regarding the state of the labour market and rising antisemitism played a part in this change towards further restrictions and these were fuelled by some xenophobic newspapers, certain sections of the government and far right groups. Others, however, continued to campaign for the rescue of more Jewish refugees. The details and consequences of the November Pogrom of 1938 were widely reported in British newspapers and raised awareness and sympathy with the British public. It was this public pressure in response to the November Pogrom that pushed the British authorities into action. At a Cabinet Committee Meeting discussion on Foreign Policy on 14 November 1938 various possible reactions to the events were discussed, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stated that ‘something effective should be done to alleviate the terrible fate of the Jews in Germany’.10 He alluded to the public mood, and that there was a certain pressure on the government to be seen to be doing something. However, although various suggestions for helping the German Jews leave Germany were discussed, none was decided on during this particular meeting. The next day a group of Anglo-Jewish leaders met with Prime Minister Chamberlain, and at this meeting the idea of temporarily admitting a number of unaccompanied children for the purpose of training and education was discussed. Just a week later, the Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare announced the government’s new refugee policy, which included the directive that all children whose maintenance could be guaranteed by private individuals or charitable organisations were allowed to be admitted to Britain without going through the arduous process of applying for a visa. This was the official go-ahead for the Kindertransport.11 It is clear that public pressure and support was instrumental in pushing a formerly reluctant government to make this decision. It is also clear that the British government was only willing to support a policy change if it did not have to commit financial resources, thus only partially backing the scheme. The decision to admit children without their families was a momentous one, and this has been extensively discussed among 10 Quoted 11 For

in London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948, p. 99.

aspects on the organisation history of the Kindertransport see Curio, Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung; see also Vera K. Fast, Children’s Exodus. A History of the Kindertransport (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); see also Judith Tydor Baum el Schwartz, Never Look Back. The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain, 1938–1945 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2012).

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scholars. Early publications in English such as, for example, Barry Turner’s … And the Policeman smiled 12 had presented a very positive narrative of the Kindertransport experience and thus of the decision to only admit unaccompanied child refugees. Turner was able to use the archives of the World Jewish Relief Fund which contain many case files of Kindertransportees. These files have since been closed to researchers and are only accessible to former Kindertransportees and their descendants. As Turner’s work is not a conventional academic monograph containing no references it is almost impossible to check his sources. After this and other earlier largely celebratory accounts, the historians Tony Kushner and Louise London were at the forefront of the critical turn in research based on a thorough investigation of extensive archival sources. This led to a very critical stance towards the British government at the time, especially by London. In her book Whitehall and the Jews, London writes: Admission saved the children’s lives. Exclusion sealed the fate of many of their parents. Three-quarters of the unaccompanied children in England by July 1939 had parents left behind in Greater Germany, in most cases with no means of support.13

This statement reflects the harsh reality of the situation while also being somewhat teleological. Nobody knew with any certainty in 1938/39 how the situation in Central Europe would develop. What was clear by that year was that children and adults who were defined as Jews by the National Socialist Race Laws had suffered extensive discrimination and violent persecution in Germany from 1933 onwards and in Austria after 1938. Until most recently in the field of Holocaust-related research, children suffering persecution were subsumed in the entirety of the Jewry suffering persecution, but it has been shown to be worthwhile to discuss the specific situation of children. Although it is difficult to analyse conclusively what effect the National Socialist antisemitic policies had on children as compared to adults, Marion Kaplan outlines the growing exclusion of Jewish children from mainstream schools in Germany following the implementation of the law euphemistically called Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung der deutschen Schulen und Hochschulen, a law overtly against the overcrowding of schools and high schools but in reality aimed at excluding Jews, and passed in April 1933.14 A quota for the admission of Jewish children to German schools was set, many Jewish children were explicitly asked to leave their schools, others left after becoming more and more ostracised. Even for those who were still enrolled in mainstream German schools, everyday life 12 Barry

Turner, … And the Policeman Smiled. 10 000 Children Escape from Nazi Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 1990).

13 London, 14 Marion

Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948, p. 118.

Kaplan, Der Mut zum Überleben. Jüdische Frauen und Familien in Nazideutschland (Berlin: Aufbau, 2001), pp. 140–156.

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was affected by exclusion from school trips and other extra-curricular activities. These changes must have been difficult to understand, especially for younger children, and even more so for those who had not been aware of their Jewish background before the National Socialist rise to power. Consequently, more and more children were sent to Jewish schools. This trend only partially cushioned the children from discrimination and persecution, as public life in general, and the public sphere of children in particular—for example on their journeys to and from school—was littered with discriminatory incidents or even violent situations perpetrated by nonJewish adults and children. Many former Kindertransportees have spoken about these or illustrated them in their memoirs. The former Kindertransportee Edith Milton writes about her experience as a Jewish child in public in Germany in her memoir: ‘I shrink against the privet hedge, trying to be invisible, and am preparing myself to run away’.15 Former Kindertransportee Ruth David states that ‘she no longer wanted to be out of doors, life seemed too unsafe’.16 Thus, it could be argued that children were even more prone to experience everyday violence because of their Jewish background than many adults. Because of the threats experienced, most children understood their parents’ efforts to find a way for them to emigrate, even if they were scared to leave their families. Martha Blend, born in 1930 and only nine years old when she came to Britain, remembers both her anxiety and the reasons for leaving her family: When my parents broke this news to me, I was devastated and burst into hysterical sobs at the mere thought. […] I felt as though some force stronger than myself was dragging me into an abyss and I had no power to prevent it. Although I was still very young, I had seen and understood the build-up of terror in the last two years, so I knew very well that my parents were doing this out of sheer necessity.17

Although many Jews in Germany had hesitated initially to prepare for emigration, Jewish organisations had discussed this option soon after the National Socialist rise to power. For example, relatively soon after 1933, the Reich’s Deputation of the German Jews (Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden) decided that leaving Germany was the only way to save the lives and livelihoods of many German Jews, and thus decided to facilitate emigration which became one of the main tasks of the organisation.18 As discussed above, most families tried to stay together when attempting to emigrate, but often this was not 15 Edith

Milton, The Tiger in the Attic. Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 3.

16 Ruth David, Child of Our Time. A Young Girl’s Flight from the Holocaust (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), p. 16. 17 Martha 18 Curio,

Blend, A Child Alone (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995), p. 32. Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung, p. 31.

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possible. Sending children abroad unaccompanied, however, was not a popular option until the November Pogroms in 1938. Discussing the emotions that the parents of the Kindertransportees must have felt when parting from their children is a relatively new topic in Kindertransport research. Although the courage of the parents, who sent their children abroad to save them, is generally acknowledged, post-war researchers have sometimes argued that not enough was known about the effects of parent–child separation,19 which might have made such a course of action easier to follow for the parents at the time. However, publications such as the newsletter of the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) make it clear that as a matter of fact there was a discussion in the public domain about the negative effects of children emigrating on their own in the early 1930s.20 Researching life stories of former Kindertransportees in interview and memoir form show that many were told by their parents that the parents would follow them to Britain or emigrate themselves and send for the children after a period of a few months’ separation. Although it is possible that in some cases this was simply a story told to the children to alleviate their anxiety, letters from the parents show that in many cases they did, in fact, try to organise onward migration to a third country where the whole family would then be reunited. In her memoir Lifesaving Letters Milena Roth includes a letter that her mother had written to her foster carer in English dated 3 June 1939: I feel awfully grateful and excited. […] And please tell your husband, that both my husband and I, thank you for your great kindness. I feel perfectly sure Milena will be safe in your hands and it is really for the moment the best for her. Let us hope that it will not take a too long time and that we all three, Milena, my husband and I can soon live together.21

In other cases, the families tried to put their children on a Kindertransport to keep the family together. One way of gaining a visa and work permit to the UK was to find employment as a domestic servant. The Jewish community in Vienna had pre-printed application forms on which parents could state that they had obtained a domestic permit to enter the UK and thus wished their child to be considered for a Kindertransport.22 Clearly parents wanted 19 See Ute Benz, ‘Traumatisierung durch Trennung. Familien-und Heimatverlust als kindliche Katastrophen’ in Wolfgang Benz, Claudia Curio, and Andrea Hammel (eds.), Die Kindertransporte 1938/39. Rettung und Integration, (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschebuch Verlag, 2003), pp. 136–155. 20 D. Edinger, ‘Ver Sacrum? Fragen einer Mutter’, in Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes (November 1933), pp. 1–2. 21 Milena

Roth, Lifesaving Letters. A Child’s Flight from the Holocaust (London: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 65. 22 Completed form ‘O’, dated 14 June 1939, Collection Israelitische Kutlusgemeinde Wien, XXII. Fuersorge-und Wohlfahrtswesen, F. Jugendfuersorge, 7. Kinderauswanderung, Korrespondenzen ueber bereits abgereiste Kinder, 1938–1939, A/W 1962, Box 560, Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.

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their children to be in the same country as them, possibly hoping for a speedy reunion. This worked out for some families but in the case of those who did work as domestic staff, their employers saw them as employees first and foremost and were not sensitive to their situation. Most were not allowed to have their children live with them. In other cases, the economically difficult circumstances and limited accommodation dictated that child refugees could not live with their parents, even if they had all resettled in Britain.23 As discussed, the eruption of violence towards the Jewish population in Germany during the November Pogroms of 1938 was not only a turning point for German Jewish organisations and individuals. It also showed the international community that the German Jews were in an absolutely desperate situation. The speed of organisation and the magnitude of this immigration movement are two of the reasons why the Kindertransport is often mentioned with admiration. But this admiration needs qualification. Neither swiftly organised emigration of large numbers of people nor child immigration to Britain were without precedent: during the Spanish Civil War, about 4000 unaccompanied Basque children found refuge in the UK and during the First World War a large number of Belgian child refugees were admitted to the UK. It also meant that no vetting or preparation of the children’s placements was possible, which had dire consequences for some Kindertransportees who either had to change placements often, or lived in damaging placements. Nevertheless, the extremely short period of time of two weeks between the decision to admit unaccompanied child refugees in late November 1938 and the arrival of the first ferry on 2 December 1938 at Harwich with around 200 child refugees on board shows the determination and excellent organisational skills of all involved. During the ten months between December 1938 and September 1939 transports arrived from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. On the German side, a Department for Child Emigration (Abteilung Kinderauswanderung der Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden) had already been established by the Reich’s Deputation of the German Jews in 1933. This meant that there were people with experience available, who could deal with the formalities and organisation of a large group of Jewish children to be sent to the UK. In Austria, the situation was different, as there had been no communal initiative to send unaccompanied children abroad before the annexation of Austria in March 1938, which made the helpers less experienced. The fact that the Jewish population in Austria was concentrated mainly in Vienna, made their challenge a little easier. In Germany the Department for Child Emigration which had its offices in Berlin collected all the applications from Berlin itself and from provincial Jewish organisations and community offices located all over Germany. The Department pre-selected the applications and sent them 23 William Dieneman, ‘From Berlin to Aberystwyth: The Life History of a Former Kindertransportee’, 20 March 2012; https://pure.aber.ac.uk/portal/en/activities/from-berlinto-aberystwyth-the-life-history-of-a-former-kindertransportee(4748c198-6360-4eb8-9b4df2888f1d1812).html (accessed 14 February 2019).

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on to London, where they were received by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany which was later renamed Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) in 1939. Its headquarters were located in Bloomsbury House in London. Here the children who were deemed to be suitable for emigration were chosen and this was then communicated back to the Department for Child Emigration. The children and their parents were subsequently informed of the decision and were notified of their likely departure date. They were allowed to take two small pieces of luggage, which had to be labelled and had to be light enough to be able to be carried by the children themselves. No valuables and only a small amount of money was allowed to be taken out of Germany. The age of the children ranged from two to seventeen, though there were some reports of even younger children. Trains left from Berlin or Frankfurt on the Main and the children were either asked to board the trains there or picked up at stations en route. A small number of adults were given the jobs by the Department to accompany the children on the train and supervise them. These adults were required to return to Germany after completing their task and there are no reports that any individual did not do so. The most likely route from Germany to the UK was via Bentheim and the Dutch Hoek of Holland, where the parties boarded the ferry to Harwich. There were also transports that took the train route to Hamburg or Bremen and from there a boat to Southampton. Upon arrival in the UK the children were either put in holding camps—a number of empty holiday camps in East Anglia had been put at the RCM’s disposal, the largest being Dovercourt—or transferred straight onto trains to London, either arriving at London Liverpool Street Station or Victoria Station. Eventually children were either accommodated in hostels or with foster families. The first call for foster parents put out by public appeal in Britain elicited 500 immediate responses from those willing to accommodate children. There is little evidence that the number of Kindertransportees was ever limited during the ten month duration of the scheme by a lack of foster parents which is astonishing. However, as discussed before there was no or little vetting of the placements offered. The decision by the British government to only admit unaccompanied child refugees on the Kindertransport has been scrutinised by many. There was clearly pressure from the public and the media to select refugees that would not immediately seek employment and thus potentially disadvantage unemployed British citizens. This can also be seen as a reason behind the decision to only give work permits to those who were willing to work in jobs that were not attracting British applicants such as domestic work or nursing. Furthermore, it is clear that British society and British politics suffered from its fair share of antisemitism. In her conclusion to Whitehall and the Jews, London quotes politicians, officials and ordinary citizens with antisemitic opinions, stating ‘moderate indulgence in social anti-Jewish prejudice were so widespread as

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to be unremarkable.’24 Adult refugees, especially adult males, were seen as threatening. Child refugees, however, did not have the same negative connotation and also could be imagined as readily assimilating. The pictures of child refugees that were published in newspapers of the time portray an image of the children as sweet and innocent: it can be argued that if child refugees are portrayed as innocent, this makes adult refugees somehow guilty and deserving persecution. Placing the child refugees with foster parents also had the advantage that they were dispersed around the country and not likely to be very visible in large numbers to those who were critical of Jewish refugees coming to the UK. Many more families wished to put their children forward for a Kindertransport to the UK than were able to be put forward for the flight to Britain. Kindertransport researchers have tried to investigate the issue of bias towards certain groups such as middle-class children when it came to being selected for the chance to seek refuge in the UK. Claudio Curio carried out an extensive study of the organisational structure behind the Kindertransport on the continent and in the UK using both German-language and English-language sources. Curio came to the conclusion that there was no overt bias against certain groups of children.25 In the beginning of the Kindertransport movement a sizeable number of children were selected according to the urgency of them having to leave Germany, i.e. boys between fifteen and seventeen years old were seen as particularly urgent cases as they were at danger of arrest. Also, children who were living in children’s homes were perceived to be priority cases as they were easily identifiable by those wishing to carry out violent acts. Other urgent cases were those living without one or both of their parents and those in particularly straightened circumstances. The decision making process was made more difficult by the British foster parents preferring to offer girls between six and ten a home. Not finding evidence of overt bias does not mean that it was not more difficult for children from certain backgrounds to emigrate. Firstly, the parents had to have the initiative to seek a place on a Kindertransport. Secondly, as most British foster families were not Jewish, many of parents were asked to sign a permission form to allow their children to be placed in non-Jewish families. Children from families who were not willing to allow this and did not sign the form had clearly a diminished chance to find a placement. Furthermore, the RCM did try and select children who would make a good impression on their British hosts and would thus convince others in Britain to continue and enlarge the scheme. Thus children who had disabilities or displayed behavioural problems—even very minor ones such as bed-wetting—were far less likely to be picked for a transport to Britain. As mentioned before the British government did not commit to spend public funds on the Kindertransport, on the contrary it pushed the financial burden on private individuals and charities by demanding that every child 24 London, 25 Curio,

Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948, p. 276.

Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung, pp. 58–63.

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refugee to be admitted under this scheme was to be ‘guaranteed’, i.e. the sum of £50 was to be put up to indemnify the British government against any cost arising from admitting the child to the UK. Additionally, funds were needed for the actual journey and the upkeep of the children. Some of their German and Austrian birth parents were in a position to pay for the travel costs, many were not. Eleanor Rathbone, an Independent MP who championed the cause of refugees from the continent, argued in a pamphlet published in 1939, that private charitable appeals would not be sufficient to raise the necessary funds.26 She argued several million pounds were required and should be provided by the government. The government of the time did not agree to this. One major source of funds was the Jewish community’s pre-existing Jewish Refugees Committee. During the 1930s the committee raised over £5 million. Another source of funding was the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees. Philip Voss, a Jewish barrister and Labour Party activist, was a prime mover in the foundation of this charity. He persuaded Lord Baldwin, the former British prime minister, to lend his name to the fund. Although previously a supporter of appeasement, Lord Baldwin had clearly changed his mind and in early December 1938 he gave a BBC radio appeal in aid of this new charity.27 He argued that Jewish children and those of Jewish descent in the Germany and Austria faced an existential threat and proclaimed ‘Shall they Live? Before it is too late get them out!’ a headline that was also used for the newspaper advertising for the Baldwin Fund. Other prominent individuals such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Cosmo Lang, and the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop, Arthur Hinsley, gave their support to the charity. The Post Office Savings Bank issued special savings stamp books in support of the appeal. Many newspapers, even those like the Daily Mail that had a long history of hostility towards refugees, supported the Fund which raised over £500,000.28 Half of this money was used to finance the immigration of Jewish child refugees. Other guarantors were private individuals who were either identical with the child’s prospective foster carers or people who just guaranteed the upkeep of the child refugee while they were placed elsewhere. Until about March 1939, an unspecified number of children who were sent to Britain did not have an individual guarantor, but were supported by a pool of guarantees to be distributed by the RCM as they saw fit. Due to financial constraints by spring 1939 this pool of guarantees from general funds was restricted 26 See Susan Cohen, Rescue the Perishing: Eleanor Rathbone and the Refugees (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010). 27 For an excerpt of ‘Lord Baldwin’s Appeal for Refugees’ BBC radio broadcast aired 8 December 1938, see https://vimeo.com/117834111 (accessed 14 February 2019). 28 Richard Hawkins, ‘The Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees, 1938–39: A Case Study of Third Sector Marketing in Pre-World War II Britain’, in Leighann C. Neilson (ed.), Varieties, Alternatives, and Deviations in Marketing History: Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) (Copenhagen, Denmark: CHARM Association, 2013), pp. 82–105.

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to 200 cases, which meant that only if one of the 200 individuals was no longer in need of a guarantee, could another child refugee come to Britain in his or her stead. From March 1939 onwards, in the majority of cases, only children who had an individual guarantor could enter Britain. This was a significant change in procedure and led to a complicated relationship between the German Department for Child Emigration and the RCM. Potential guarantors and foster parents in the UK were most keen to foster girls between six and ten, which was not the largest group of child refugees waiting to leave Germany. The RCM forcefully rejected the German and Austrian child refugee departments’ attempts to ask for further children without individual guarantees to be allowed entry into the UK: The Movement for the Transport of Children [sic], again, cannot bring over more unguaranteed children, until those already here have been placed. I regret that it is no use to continue to ask for more help than we are giving, because it is not in our power to grant it.29

Not all children who came to Britain on a Kindertransport were Jewish. About 20% of the Kindertransport child refugees were defined as Jewish by the National Socialist regime. According to the National Socialist Race Laws a person was considered Jewish if they had one Jewish grandparent. This did not correspond to the Jewish community’s definition, of course, nor to many individuals’ self-definition. At the time these people were referred to as so-called ‘non-Aryan Christians’ by both British and German organisations, and included children with a combination of Christian and Jewish parents or grandparents who either had no religious affiliation or were in fact Christians. The Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, with offices in Berlin and Vienna and other specific organisations connected to the Protestant and Catholic Church assisted this group of children on the continent.30 The RCM in Britain was an interdenominational organisation and took care of all the different groups of children. Not unsurprisingly, a certain amount of wrangling is reported between the representatives of the different groups about the numbers of places allocated to each group. As mentioned above, the situation in Austria was less organised, but the Department of Child Emigration of the Jewish community in Vienna nevertheless managed to put together their first transport to the UK in December 1938, which included 500 child refugees and remained the largest single transport. Research shows that there were constant debates between the parents of potential child refugees and the RCM in the UK, with the Department for Child Emigration of the Viennese Jewish community positioned in the 29 Quoted

in Rebekka Göpfert, Der jüdische Kindertransport von Deutschland nach England 1938/39 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1999), p. 92.

30 See Curio, Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung and Jana Leichsenring, Die Katholische Kirche und ‘ihre’ Juden (Berlin: Metropol, 2003).

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middle.31 Parents were clearly eager to place their children on a transport and stressed their individual plight. The RCM was eager that only those children who had no special needs and were well-behaved should come to the UK, thus making their placement easier and creating a positive precedent which might encourage more people to come forward in aid of future child refugees. The Viennese department was dependent on the good will of the RCM, but also most immediately aware of the needs of the Austrian children. It seems that in the beginning the social workers in the department gave an honest account of a child’s needs to aid the preparation of a foster placement in the manner of modern social work professionalism. When it became known to the RCM that a child had special needs, it often meant that they excluded the child from the transports. Sometimes even those who had an individual guarantor were excluded. The consequence of this was ‘less thorough’ medical examinations, which in turn made the RCM suspicious and lead to accusations that the Viennese department was not working as well as required. To conclude, one can only emphasise the difficult circumstances all agencies were working under and that tensions were structural rather than based on failures on one side or the other. Behavioural problems were clearly an understandable reaction from the children placed under stress, but they were seen as a problem that might jeopardise the whole operation. For the British public, the media and the government, refugee children had to be portrayed as helpless victims, perfectly placed for integration and grateful to Britain for their rescue. Because of time pressure, very little effort was made to match up the potential foster families with the children. This led to many unsuitable situations which ranged from a mismatch in cultural and religious backgrounds between foster families and children to situations in which the children suffered physical and sexual abuse.32 Also, as nobody could have predicted the events of the Second World War, many foster parents had not realised the length of time they would be required to look after their charges. As the children got older and entered adolescence, their relationship with their foster parents became often more difficult. In many cases, those who arrived as adolescents were accommodated in hostels with other young refugees. Overall, this seems to have been a preferable option for older Kindertransportees as they felt more comfortable in the company of other young people with a similar background. Some of the older Kindertransportees were very disappointed when they were not allowed to follow the educational path they had originally anticipated. They encountered prejudices that a basic education should be ‘good enough’ for a refugee and that they should earn their own money as soon as possible. After the outbreak of war, many older Kindertransportees played their part in the British war effort, either joining the army or working in a variety of jobs that were considered useful. There are as many Kindertransport stories 31 Curio, 32 See

Verfolgung, Flucht, Rettung, pp. 83–92.

Fast, Children’s Exodus, pp. 41–59.

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as there are Kindertransportees and it seems that it depends on a wide variety of factors how individual Kindertransportees remember the war years and use this narrative to construct their identity. Although the British government can only be described as a rather reluctant partner in the Kindertransport rescue effort, after 1945 it decided to offer naturalisation to almost all refugees that had spent the war in the UK and many former Kindertransportees who had reached the age of maturity by then, became naturalised. There has been some debate on how many of the Kindertransportees who came to the UK were reunited with their parents after 1945. As no reliable statistics are available for many years it had been assumed that 90% of children lost both their parents. However, in 2008 the Association of Jewish Refugees in the UK (AJR) sent out questionnaires to over 1500 surviving former Kindertransportees and over 1000 were returned. Although the survey cannot claim to be reliably representative, there are a number of striking overlaps between statistical data known from contemporary sources of the 1930s and 1940s and statistical data of the AJR Kindersurvey. The survey concludes that about 60% of the former Kindertransportees never saw their parents again.33 However, as Jennifer Craig-Morton has pointed out those filling out the questionnaire were those willing to engage with their past as a Kindertransportee. Those with a more traumatic story, i.e. those whose parents were murdered, might be less likely to do so. In sum, we have to admit that we just do not know and that we are unlikely to ever know. This trauma of separation and loss affected the former Kindertransportees for the rest of their lives. But even those who were reunited with one or even both parents had a very difficult time. Ruth Barnett, born January 1935 describes the adjustment difficulties of both herself and her mother who had last seen her as a four-year old and met her again as a teenager after the war.34 By that time and after a number of problematic placements, Barnett had found a foster family that offered her stability and even considered an application to adopt her. Barnett unsuccessfully returned to Germany but did not manage to settle into life with her birth parents, who eventually reluctantly agreed to let her go to university in Britain. The Kindertransport clearly was only made possible due to the will and action of many helpers in the UK and on the continent. Many of the latter perished in the Holocaust. As we have outlined, it is only partially correct to say that the Kindertransport was backed by the British government. It was, however, backed by thousands of British people who worked in local committees, raised funds and offered foster homes. The national Refugee Children’s Movement acknowledged this effort by the British public in its third

33 http://www.ajr.org.uk/kindersurvey 34 See

(accessed 18 february 2017).

Ruth Barnett, Person of No Nationality: A Story of Childhood Separation, Loss and Recovery (London: David Paul Books, 2011).

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report in 1941: ‘The Movement desires to place on record its deep indebtedness to the work of regional and local Guardian Committees and of many other voluntary helpers. Much personal sacrifice of time and energy has been willingly borne’.35 There were twelve regional committees and some of the local committees such as the Cambridge Refugee Committee (CRC) and the Cambridge Refugee Children’s Committee (CRCC), initially a subcommittee of the former, later with independent offices, and the Manchester Refugee Committee have been researched in more detail than other committees.36 What becomes clear from the committee papers surviving in archives is that it was a huge effort by largely private citizens that made the Kindertransport possible. Nicholas Winton is almost the only one of those involved in the rescue operation whose name is still known to the British public today. However, there very many others and especially a large number of women who did the majority of work on the ground as Sybil Oldfield pointed out in her article ‘“It is usually She”: The Role of British Women in the Rescue and Care of the Kindertransport Kinder’.37 The fact that Nicholas Winton was relatively young in 1939 and still alive in the twenty-first century—he died in 2015 aged 106—made him into a figure head for those who organised and aided the Kindertransport in the UK. It is clear, though, that he was one of many dedicated people. Very little records or testimonies from the foster parents survive. There are letters between foster parents and birth parents but these often follow the polite conventions expected of such exchanges, the birth parents expressing gratitude and the foster parents expressing sympathy. It is difficult to discern a comprehensive picture of everyday life in a family where a Kindertransportee found a foster placement. A very small number of memoirs, including those of former foster siblings, outline the challenges of living with a newly arrived child refugee. Ann herself was of the same age at the time. Chadwick draws on some essays her mother wrote for a course training to work with children with behavioural needs. In these texts, Chadwick’s mother points out that it was the birth daughter Ann who started to display challenging behaviour after the arrival of the Kindertransportee Suzie: She highlights it was me rather than Suzie who was traumatized by our coming together and that once I recommenced bed-wetting and exhibited jealous

35 Refugee Children’s Movement, Third Annual Report, 1941, Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, National Archives London, ACC/2793. 36 See Mike Levy, ‘We Must Save the Children’, exhibition and talk, January 2017, Newnham College Cambridge; Gertrude Dubrovsky, Six from Leipzig (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), especially chapters 2, 3 and 4. 37 Sybil Oldfield, ‘“It is usually She”: The Role of British Women in the Rescue and Care of the Kindertransport Kinder’, in Wolfgang Benz, Claudia Curio, and Andrea Hammel (eds.), Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, No. 1, Fall 2004, pp. 57– 70.

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tantrums and withdrawal symptoms, she had to resort to help from the Child Guidance Clinic to help me readjust. It is not surprising. Both of us had been only children, adored and spoilt by our respective parents […]. We did fight too.38

Clearly this particular foster family had the insight and resources to help both children adjust to their new situation. Not all foster parents were able to do this and thus many Kindertransportees had to change placements frequently. Much of what we know today about the Kindertransport has been mediated through memorial efforts by the former Kindertransportees themselves and others who are committed to Holocaust commemoration. The relative obscurity of the Kindertransport as a refugee movement and of the fate of individual Kindertransportees changed dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This was instigated by the former child refugees themselves who from 1989 onwards organised a number of reunion meetings for smaller and larger groups. They were also extremely active in writing memoirs and volunteering to give testimony in different ways. Tony Kushner argues that of all refugee movements in twentieth century Britain […] it is the arrival of what turned out to be close to ten thousand children in the last ten months of peace that has produced the largest number of histories, memoirs, exhibitions, plays, documentaries, films […], and memorials.’39

In Britain today, the former Kindertransportees are a high-profile group who are celebrated and accepted by the British establishment. This manifested itself in a knighthood for the Chair of the Association of Jewish Refugees’ Kindertransport group, now Sir Erich Reich, and a number of receptions for former Kindertransportees hosted by members of the Royal family. Prominent former Kindertransportees include the politician Lord Alf Dubs, the artist Frank Auerbach and the Nobel laureate Walter Kohn. It is clear that the Kindertransport does play a special role when considering the Holocaust in Britain today. In 2011 The English German Girl, a novel by the British author Jake Wallis Simons was published.40 It focuses on the Kindertransportee Rosa who flees to Britain from Berlin aged 15. In correspondence the author, born into an Anglo-Jewish family in 1978 in the UK, reveals that he chose the Kindertransport as the subject for a novel because he felt that it was an accessible British topic: The Holocaust is a difficult and dangerous subject for a novelist […] Recently, I think, we have entered a phase in which fiction is necessary if the memory of 38 Ann Chadwick, Suzie. The Little Girl Who Changed Our Lives (Cambridge: Keystage Arts and Heritage Company, 2012). 39 Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 141. 40 Jake

Wallis Simons, The English German Girl (London: Polygon, 2011).

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the Holocaust is to be kept alive for future generations. However, as someone who did not live through the period, the risk of being transgressive with other people’s memories, or of trivialising the extent of the horror, was great. Therefore, I chose the Kindertransport, as it seemed more accessible than the ‘core’ of the mass slaughter. It contained both despair and hope; it had a profound link to the UK; and it gestured towards this ‘core’ without articulating it explicitly.41

For Britain the Kindertransport is an area that gives a unique angle into the subject of the Holocaust. The twenty-first century throws up a number of questions: clearly, we are at a time that Holocaust and Kindertransport memory can rarely be passed on first hand from eye witnesses any more. Therefore, we will need to rely more on memorialisation attempts through various forms of literature and art. While the feeling of immediacy might be lost in this process, it opens up space for reflecting creatively on the subject of the Kindertransport and thus opening up the complexity of the subject. Eyewitnesses allow themselves to be more critical of the events of their past. The 80th commemoration of the Kindertransport has further increased public interest and has also brought a much more nuanced picture of the Kindertransport to the attention of the British public.42 In 2018/19 the only eyewitnesses likely to be able to bear witness in person are child survivors and child refugees. This takes the former Kindertransportees more into the centre of Holocaust commemoration and education than ever before. As a consequence former Kindertransportees do not focus only on the rescue aspect of their experience but also on the trauma of their separation and the trauma of the Holocaust in general. Like many subjects, Kindertransport research has developed in a specific historical context moving from testimonies and collections of autobiographical writing to critical studies involving extensive archival research in the UK and abroad. There is clearly no unified narrative to this research, nor is there such a narrative to the Kindertransport experience itself, however, some of the more naively celebratory narratives have given way to more complex and comprehensive analyses. The Kindertransport 1938/39 was enabled by a policy change introduced by the British government of 1938 and the operation of the process was aided by a large number of British citizens. Most former Kindertransportees would argue that the outcome would have been more positive if they had been able to seek refuge in the UK together with their families. The scheme was underfunded and had many flaws such as a lack of suitable placements for the children and lack of training and supervision of those involved. These needs to be recognised when celebrating the 41 Jake 42 For

Wallis Simons in an email to Andrea Hammel, 14 May 2011.

example, the Guardian newspaper ran a series of articles between 6 and 10 November 2018, covering many different aspects of individual Kindertransportees’ stories, see for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/the-kindertransp ort-children-80-years-on-when-i-was-14-my-mother-appeared-out-of-nowhere (accessed 13 February 2019).

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Kindertransport as a humanitarian success in Britain. Another area that has received far too little attention are those Kindertransportees that migrated to other countries after having initially arrived in Britain. We might yet have to revise our idea of the Kindertransport as mainly a British phenomenon. Kindertransport research has shown that there are many variants in narrative and outcome: age, gender, religious traditions and individual personality shaped every single Kindertransport story. The fact that nearly 10,000 child refugees fled to the UK in such a short space of the time, the fact that a number of them rose to prominence in British public life and the fact that an active reunion movement facilitated the exploration of the common context, are all contributing factors to the endurance and resurgence of the Kindertransport history and memory. Tony Kushner argued in 2006 that ‘The Kinder, by the start of the twenty-first century, had become a safe story, put together neatly and with a redemptive ending’.43 Recent scholarship has shown this to be false. To be meaningful at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century we have to make connections between Kindertransport research and education and other Holocaust research and education in the context of contemporary persecution, exclusions and refugee issues in Britain today. When it came to the attention of the British public that thousands of refugees were fleeing from the war in Syria and were trying to find refuge in Europe, the response of the British government was less generous than the governments of some other larger European countries such as Germany and Sweden. The British government is committed to admitting up to 20,000 refugees within 5 years. It is not surprising that the Kindertransport 1938/39 is sometimes hailed as a shining example in comparison with today. However, as this chapter has shown, no easy comparisons can be made. But there are some similarities regarding grass-roots support: in 2016 the British government launched the Community Sponsorship Scheme to aid refugees affected by the war in Syria.44 Community groups made up of British residents can apply to the Home Office to sponsor a refugee family and facilitate the family finding refuge in their community. The Community group has to find accommodation for the family, prove to the Home Office that facilities such as educational opportunities and capacity in the health service is available in the area and they have to fundraise a guarantee of £4500 per adult to be sponsored. The difference between the Community Sponsorship Scheme and the Kindertransport is clear: in twentyfirst-century refugee families are to be supported to come to Britain. However, the similarities are also striking: it suggests that once again there is a dichotomy between the public and the governmental response to a humanitarian crisis. It 43 Kushner, 44 See

Remembering Refugees, p. 165.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/community-sponsorship-scheme-launchedfor-refugees-in-the-uk (accessed 12 December 2017) for details of the Community Sponsorship Scheme. The scheme was launched on 19 July 2016 by the Home Secretary Amber Rudd and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

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has been suggested that in a climate of austerity in Britain and especially after the Brexit referendum in 2016, the British people do not wish to accommodate more refugees and migrants in their country similar to the British people in 1938/39 who were said to be weary of Jewish refugees. However, a sizable section of the British population was and is willing to go to great lengths to assist and resettle refugees. The British political establishment should not be able to celebrate the rescue of the Kindertransportees while refusing to assist present-day refugees.

PART III

War and Holocaust

CHAPTER 6

Knowledge in Britain of the Holocaust During the Second World War Michael Fleming

Information about German atrocities against Jews during the Second World War reached Britain throughout the conflict. The arrival of information, however, did not mean that it was equally accessible to all sections of the population. Like all information entering Britain during the war, it was subjected to various control processes—including different forms of censorship and journalistic and editorial decisions (newspapers, the BBC). The manner in which recipients comprehended the information was also coloured by their pre-occupations (social, political), prejudices (including antisemitism), their understanding of atrocity news in a context in which the reporting of atrocities during the Great War had been criticised and, at the level of senior government officials and senior politicians, geo-political concerns and a determination not to undermine domestic morale in the context of war. It is therefore important to recognise that different groups had different access to information about atrocities against Jews, and that key gatekeepers exercised influence on how the information that reached wider publics was actually understood. Much scholarship on the knowledge in Britain, and in the West more generally, of the Holocaust often gives the impression that information about the atrocities appeared as random and unclear flashes of data which did not give a clear view of what was happening in occupied Europe. The best example of this is Martin Gilbert’s 1981 book Auschwitz and the Allies, which presents a random and very limited selection of distributed and source data, some of which is misrepresented, to argue that news of the mass-murder of Jews at M. Fleming (B) Polish University Abroad, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_6

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Auschwitz was not known until the distribution of the Vrba-Wetzler report which reached Britain in mid-June 1944.1 In actuality, the true function of Auschwitz had been known to various government officials and politicians for over a year and on 2 June 1944 the Polish Government in Exile filed a charge sheet with the United Nations War Crimes Commission that referred to the crimes of Commandant Hoess and others, and noted that more than half a million Jews had been killed at that camp before the end of 1942.2 News of the evolving German policy against Jews, including identification, isolation, property confiscation, deportation, slave labour, ghettoization (policy-created overcrowding, disease and starvation), shooting, and massmurder in death camps, arrived in Britain in a variety of ways. Journalists in Germany reported on German policy for the British press prior to the war. Knowledge of the anti-Jewish actions of the German state encouraged stockbroker Nicholas Winton to act—he helped Jewish children find refuge in Britain (Kindertransport), and, in Berlin, British passport officer (and intelligence officer) Frank Foley provided papers to Jews seeking to escape Germany. With the advent of war, information about German atrocities arrived in Britain from a range of sources. On the one hand, there were pieces of information that did (seem to) appear fairly randomly. This included data derived from refugees reaching Switzerland and Portugal, and information sent from Jewish representatives in Switzerland, for example. On the other hand, there was information that was sent regularly and in a coherent format by the Polish Underground State via courier and via radio message. This information, collated in Warsaw by the Polish Underground, and sent in structured reports to the Polish Government in Exile (in London from the summer of 1940) provided details of the evolvement of German policy towards Jews, including accounts of systematic murder, and from mid-1942, death camps and gas chambers. The regular information, passed on to British officials via a trusted ally (news of military and industrial development sent by the Polish Underground was highly valued), provided various British officials and politicians with a good and often timely picture of German policy. In addition, information about atrocities was also intercepted by intelligence officers at Bletchley Park. This included news of the systematic mass killing of Jews as 1 For

instance, an 18 April 1943 report about Auschwitz is described as having been written by a member of the Polish Underground who had reached Britain and having never been made public. Gilbert, however, failed to inform readers that the report was written specifically for Ignacy Schwarzbart, a moderate Zionist on the Polish National Council, and that Schwarzbart in turn distributed the report to a range of Jewish colleagues in Britain, the United States and Palestine. See Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Pimlico, 1981/2001), p. 130; Yad Vashem Archive M2/261. The report was intercepted by British censorship and reached the Foreign Office on 4 May 1943. See NA.FO 371/34552.

2 Wiener

Library, UNWWC Archive, Correspondence with National Offices, Reel 41, p. 14. The charge file was logged in by the UNWCC Secretariat on 3 June 1944. See Charge File 20, Reel 14, p. 171.

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the German Army drove into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 (this information was passed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill), statistics of the number of arrivals at various camps (denoted by an initial) sent by Herman Höfle to Adolf Eichmann in January 1943, and news of the escape of Jewish prisoners from the Sobibór death camp in October 1943.3 Through an assessment of the mass of information that arrived in Britain, the source of the information and the important role played by various information gatekeepers, it is possible to answer the question as to who knew what, when and how? It is also possible to explain, in part, the origins of the influential narrative that important aspects of the Holocaust (e.g. the killing at Auschwitz) were not known or confused to key groups (e.g. relevant Foreign Office officials, various politicians and journalists) and to show that this narrative is best understood not as a historical discourse grounded in empirical evidence but as a myth which is likely only to be tempered, not overcome, by evidence and cogent reasoning. In this chapter, I make four interrelated arguments. First, the chronology of knowledge in Britain of the Germans’ determination to kill all Jews should be revised and privilege the summer of 1942 rather than December 1942 (the UN Declaration of 17 December 1942). Second, the arrival of information in Britain was generally not random, voluntaristic or rare, but systematic, structured and regular. Third, key information gatekeepers shaped how and if the information was presented to wider publics. Fourth, the way news of atrocities was handled and responded to by different groups and individuals is best understood in relation to those groups’ and individuals’ ongoing political and social commitments, prejudices or place on the information distribution chain rather than in relation to the substance of the information itself.

Chronology of Knowledge On 17 December 1942, the United Nations Declaration (on German atrocities) was released. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden rose in the chamber of the House of Commons to deliver a speech that specifically condemned the Germans’ ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’.4 This intervention publicly and officially acknowledged that Germany was systematically killing Jews under German control, and promised punishment for the perpetrators. This speech, co-ordinated with allies, succinctly outlined German policy towards Jews, but it should not be understood as indicating when that policy became clear to British officials, politicians and others. Rather, it marks the point at which the authoritative body on foreign matters in Britain (the 3 See

Michael Smith, ‘Bletchley Park and the Holocaust’, in Understanding Intelligence in the Twentieth Century: Journeys in Shadows, eds. Len Scott and Peter Jackson (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 111–121. Also see National Archives (NA) (Kew), HW16/23 (Höfle telegram); HW16/38 German Police Decodes, no. 1. Traffic 15 October 1943 (Sobibór).

4 Hansard,

House of Commons Debates, 17 December 1942, vol. 385 cc2082-7.

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Foreign Office) was persuaded/induced to publicly confirm what had long been known. The decision to make such a statement was the result of several factors, not least that of increased lobbying by both the Polish Government in Exile (including through the Polish Government’s 10 December 1942 Note to Allied Governments) and by Jewish representatives.5 The arrival of a new batch of reports from the Polish Underground State delivered to the Polish Government in Exile in November 1942 prompted this renewed lobbying. The German decision to increase the rate of Jewish deaths through executions rather than relying on disease and starvation to reduce the Jewish population in occupied Europe was taken between September and December 1941 (though there are indications of movement towards such a decision earlier, in the summer).6 The radicalisation of German policy followed on from the advance of German forces into the Soviet Union and the massacres of Jews committed by those forces. News of these killings reached the highest level of the British government in the first instance, through intercepts of German radio traffic, but over the autumn of 1941 a range of British officials understood that German policy had moved from generalised ‘passive’ social murder to ‘active’ killings. On 22 January 1942, British Postal and Telegraph Censorship in its third report in the confidential ‘Reports on Jewry’ series noted that the ‘Germans clearly pursue a policy of extermination against the Jews’.7 Two months later, in March 1942, Wilfrid Israel of the Foreign Research and Press Service, based at Balliol College, which provided reports to the Foreign Office, maintained that ‘Nazi rule is aiming at the extermination of the Jews’.8 Although the murderous policy of Germany towards Jews was becoming clear to some British officials, this was not reflected in official statements or in the national press. However, this was to change, at least temporarily, in late June and early July 1942. In late May 1942, the Polish Government in Exile received a report sent via Polish intelligence channels from representatives of the General Jewish Workers Union—the Bund—in Warsaw. This report, distributed in June 1942, highlighted German atrocities, described the gassing of Jews at Chełmno and stated that 700,000 Polish Jews had been murdered.9 This information was confirmed in a subsequent report (sent via the same channel from the Polish Underground State) that arrived on 23 June 1942. Polish Prime Minister, 5 See

Republic of Poland Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland (London: Hutchinson, 1942).

6 Christopher

Browning, Initiating the Final Solution: The Fateful Months of September– October 1941 (Washington, DC: USHMM, 2003).

7 NA.HO

213/953, 3, “Report on Jewry, No. 3, Part I.”

8 Naomi

Shepherd, Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 216.

9 The

Bund Report of May 1942 can be found at the Polish Underground (1939–1945) Study Trust (PUMST) MSW 16/26.

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Władysław Sikorski, noted on the BBC, on 9 June 1942, that the Germans intended to kill all Jews.10 Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative in London and a member of the Polish National Council, worked to place the news in a British newspaper. On 25 June 1942, The Daily Telegraph reported the news. The BBC followed up with a broadcast by Zygielbojm to Poland and, on 29 June 1942, the British Section of the World Jewish Congress hosted a conference that highlighted the latest information. Local newspapers across Britain printed the news and the official English language press organ of the Polish Government in Exile, The Polish Fortnightly Review, published information about the death camps of Bełzec, ˙ Sobibór and Chełmno. On 9 July 1942, Winston Churchill’s good friend, Brendan Bracken, who held the post of Minister of Information, hosted a conference at which he stated that ‘700,000 Jews alone have been murdered in Poland’ and promised that those responsible ‘will be treated as common murderers…and those gangsters will be punished with the utmost rigidity of the law’.11 That same evening the BBC Home Service’s 9 p.m. news bulletin reported on gas chambers for the first time, stating that ‘the Gestapo regularly kill masses of their victims by machine gun fire and hand grenades – even poisons them in mobile gas chambers’.12 At the same, the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council, the moderate Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart and Bundist Szmul Zygielbojm, circulated summaries of the news from Poland to British politicians, journalists and others, and spoke at various venues. Zygielbojm liaised closely with the Labour Party, which in turn published news of German atrocities against Jews in Poland, including the mass killing at Chełmno, in its International Supplement in July and in August. The Labour Party also convened a conference on 2 September 1942 in London, which condemned German atrocities and supported, alongside the Polish Social Information Bureau, the publication of a booklet entitled Stop Them Now: German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland, edited by Zygielbojm and with an introduction by Josiah Wedgwood.13 The booklet was released on 2 September and it included the recent news about the deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, which commenced on 22 July 1942. However, over the course of the late summer and early autumn of 1942 there were very few BBC Home Service broadcasts which referred to German actions against Jews. The primary exception was a 1 September broadcast by

10 National 11 Brendan

Archives—NA 371/31097 (66).

Bracken, Bestiality…Unknown in any Previous (London:Polish Ministry of Information, 1942), p. 38.

Record

of

History…

12 Jeremy Harris, ‘Broadcasting the Massacres: An Analysis of the BBC’s Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust’, in Critical Concepts in Holocaust Historical Studies,eds. David Cesarani, Volume 5 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 298–323. 13 Szmul

Zygielbojm, Stop Them Now: German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland, Foreword by Josiah Wedgwood (London: Liberty Press, 1942).

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Robert Vansittart. The text of this broadcast was published in the BBC’s magazine ‘The Listener’ on 10 September 1942. Vansittart advised readers/listeners that: The fate of Polish Jews is unspeakably tragic. They are murdered by thousands daily, even children – and poison gas is used to do the dreadful work. Hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews have already perished. Hitler has no use for the Jews: he does not consider them as potential slaves like the Poles. Never in history were terror and oppression so well organised or on such a scale of cruelty.14

The documentary record referred to above indicates that certain individuals and groups had a good comprehension of Germany’s murderous policy towards Jews by the summer of 1942. However, despite the upsurge in attention given to German atrocities as a result of information arriving in London in May and June 1942, the placing of the news in the inside pages of newspapers, the limited follow-through of reporting on the massacres in the national press, and the gloss given to the news by the Foreign Office (more on this below), limited the impact of the news. Information that was received by the Foreign Office in August 1942 was controlled. The Foreign Office, for instance, did not pass on Gerhart Riegner’s important telegram to its intended recipient, Sydney Silverman, for seven days as officials ‘feared that [the report] could have embarrassing consequences’.15 Riegner had indicated the German intent to exterminate ‘at one blow’ Jews under German control. Similarly, news that 100,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had been murdered received by the Foreign Office on 10 September 1942 was not shared with a wider audience’.16 Despite this, information from the Riegner report circulated in diplomatic London, and information about deportations from the Warsaw ghetto reached various journalists and publics in Britain. Prime Minister Churchill also made reference to German policy towards Jews (and to the punishment that awaited perpetrators) in a long speech in the House of Commons on 8 September 1942. He described the 14 Robert Vansittart, ‘Never in History…’, The Listener Vol. XXVIII, No. 713 (10 September 1942), pp. 325–326. 15 Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: The Suppression of the Final Truth About Hitler’s Final Solution (New York: Henry Holt, 1980/1998), p. 79. 16 See NA.FO 371/31097 (178). This data arrived in Bern from the Polish Underground in August 1942 and was received by the Polish representative Dr. Julius Kuhl (an Agudist). It was sent via Polish diplomatic cable to the US and reached Jacob Rosenheim and Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz. Rabbi Stephen Wise was informed on 3 September. On 4 September the Polish Ambassador to the US passed the information to the British Ambassador who, in turn, forwarded it to the Foreign Office. However, it was not made clear to the Foreign Office that the original source of the data was the Polish Underground. The courier who delivered the information to Switzerland was Napoleon Segieda, also known as Jerzy Salski—the man who informed Schwarzbart about Auschwitz on 18 April 1943. See Adam Puławski, Wobec “niespotykanego w dziejach mordu”: Rzad ˛ RP na uchod´zstwie, Delegatura Rzadu ˛ RP na Kraj, AK a eksterminacja ludno´sci z˙ ydowskiej od “wielkiej akcji” do powstania w getcie warszawskim (Chełm: Biblioteka Rocznika Chełmskeigo,2018), p. 140.

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deportation of Jews from France, but chose not to draw attention to the mass-murder underway in occupied Poland.17 On 29 October 1942 a fourth conference that considered German atrocities against Jews was held in London. Organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews at the Albert Hall, the conference brought together Jewish representatives, British officials and politicians and leading figures from exiled governments in London. Perhaps the most significant intervention was made by the Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, who highlighted that the ‘plain man rarely saw down in black and white any attention-compelling information of these massacres’. Pointedly, he argued that ‘such indifference encouraged the gorillas of Berlin to go on perfecting their technique of extermination’.18 At the end of November 1942, following the arrival of reports from Warsaw, news of German actions against Jews returned to the inside pages of newspapers. By the end of 1942 the German policy of extermination had been officially acknowledged by the British Government (which is distinct from when key politicians and officials were aware of the policy) and the incremental steps towards mass extermination had been summarised in an aide memoire produced by the Political Warfare Executive (responsible for propaganda to occupied Europe) entitled ‘Special annexe on the extermination of the Jews’.19 The names of Chełmno, Sobibór, Bełzec, ˙ Sobibór, Treblinka and Majdanek had been circulated and news of the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto distributed. At the beginning of January 1943, the Foreign Office received news about the slaughter of Jews taking place at Auschwitz.20 Further news about the camp that later became a symbol of the Holocaust arrived throughout 1943 and 1944. On 11 April 1943 a broadcast on the BBC’s Polish Service referred to ‘the concentration camp of O´swi˛ecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz], which as it is known, has special installations for mass murder…’.21 The Jewish Chronicle, on 16 April 1943, drawing on information sent by the Polish Underground State, reported that Jews from Kraków were ‘transferred to the notorious camp of Oswiecim, which was recently converted into a death camp for Jews…’. By April 1943 at the latest key Foreign Office officials, journalists, and Jewish representatives had been provided with clear and coherent information about the mass extermination taking place at Auschwitz, mainly, but not exclusively, from the Polish Underground State, via the Polish Government in Exile. This information was not published in the national press, but some of the information 17 Winston Churchill, ‘War Situation’, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 8 September 1942, vol 383 cc82-110. 18 Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 98. 19 BBC Written Archives Centre, C165. PWE Central Directive: ‘Special annex on the extermination of the Jews’. 20 NA. 21 BBC

FO 371/34361 (CM255). WAC European News Bulletins—Polish 1943.

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did appear in the Jewish Chronicle and more regularly in The Polish Jewish Observer edited by the Manchester Guardian’s former Warsaw correspondent Joel Cang. The Polish Jewish Observer was read by some Foreign Office officials, including Frank Savery of the British Embassy to Poland, British intelligence officers monitoring leading Polish politicians, and various Jewish representatives including Adolf Brotman, secretary to the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It provided a steady stream of news of German atrocities against Jews. Many of the published reports were translations of information despatched from Warsaw by the Polish Underground State.

The Structured and Regular Arrival of Information Information about German actions against Jews in occupied Poland was included in the regular reports sent from Warsaw by the Polish Underground to the Polish Government in Exile in London. Couriers traversed from Warsaw to Polish intelligence centres in Budapest, Bern, Paris. From those centres, couriers continued to Lisbon or Gibraltar and then on to Britain. During the first half of 1942 Swedish business people played an important role in carrying reports from Warsaw to Stockholm. The time it took couriered reports to reach London varied from a few days, to weeks or months. On occasion, reports sent later arrived in London before some of those sent earlier. In addition, some reports were not delivered, but this problem was partially overcome by the same information being sent multiple times. Most of this information was passed on to British officials and reached journalists. An important issue exercising researchers today is the timeliness of information transfer and the form that it took, rather than whether information about German actions against Jews was actually sent by the Polish Underground State or passed on by the Polish Government in Exile. Scholars have been able to track numerous reports of German actions against Jews in Poland from their source to the distribution of the news in the British and American press. For instance, the flow of information about the gassing of Jews at Chełmno has been determined. In January 1942, a month after the camp had been established, some Jewish prisoners employed as gravediggers escaped. Escapee Szłojme Fajner’s (Szlamek) eyewitness testimony informed the May 1942 Bund Report.22 This Report was included with materials from the Polish Underground and taken by the Swede Sven Norrman to Polish intelligence in Stockholm. A regular RAF plane delivered 22 Fajner’s testimony also informed a report prepared by Hersz Wasser (secretary of Oneg Shabbat) which was passed on to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw on 23 March 1942. The Information and Propaganda Office (BIP) of the Polish Underground State drew ˙ on this data in a 25 March 1942 report entitled Masowe egzekucje Zydów w pow. kolskim [Mass execution of Jews in the Kolski district]. This report, in turn, was included with the material carried by Norrman to Stockholm, but did not reach London until 23 June as it followed a different transit protocol. See Adam Puławski, W Obliczu Zagłady: Rzad ˛ ˙ RP na Uchod´zstwie, Delegatura RP na Kraj, ZWZ-AK wobec deportacji Zydów do obozów zagłady (1941–1942) (Lublin: IPN,2009).

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the material to Britain. The report arrived in London in late May and, as noted, news about Chełmno was reported in the British press from 25 June 1942. The Polish Underground in Warsaw also sent information by radio to Polish intelligence in London. In 1942, this included reports on the deportations from Warsaw and, in 1943, information on the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the killings and experiments taking place at Auschwitz. One report on Auschwitz recorded that over half a million Jews had been killed at the camp. This information was radioed to London on 4 March 1943 and reached the United States’ Office of Strategic Services in May.23 Earlier, news of the Warsaw ghetto deportations had been radioed to London by the head of the Polish Underground State’s Directorate of Civilian Struggle, Stefan Korbonski, ´ on 26 July 1942. This information appeared in various newspapers shortly afterwards. Polish intelligence centres in Bern, Stockholm and Istanbul also sent radio messages that reported on German actions against Jews to the Polish Government in Exile. This data was mainly derived from couriers from Warsaw, but also included information available from other sources. In addition to information derived from a trusted ally, British officials in the Foreign Office and elsewhere drew on reports compiled by bodies specifically charged with producing intelligence on occupied Europe, including the Foreign Research and Press Service at Oxford and the Political Intelligence Department (later the Foreign Office Research Department). Monitoring of German press and radio took place throughout the war, and legal ordinances issued by the German state were collected and analysed, allowing a picture of conditions in Europe to be established.24 Less well circulated through the British state apparatus was intelligence derived from the interception of German radio traffic and allied states’ secret diplomatic correspondence. Information from specifically Jewish sources also reached Britain. The World Jewish Congress’s office in Geneva forwarded information—most notably from Gerhart Riegner, and refugees arriving in Palestine and Portugal provided eyewitness testimony which also found its way to Britain. This includes the testimony of a lady from Sosnowiec who told Jewish Agency officials in Palestine about the slaughter of trainloads of Jews at O´swi˛ecim (Auschwitz) in November 1942. This information was reported in the New York Times on 25 November 1942, passed to President Roosevelt on 8 December, handed to an official (possibly the First Secretary—Isaiah Berlin) at the British Embassy on 30 December 1942, and reached the Foreign Office on 7 January 1943.25

23 United States National Archives, RG 218 Joint Chief of Staff CCS 334, Polish Liaison, Washington, Folder 3.0. 18 May 1943. 24 BBC Monitoring at Caversham monitored broadcasts in Europe, and the Press Reading Bureau in Stockholm provided a Daily Digest to British officials. 25 NA.

FO 371/34361 (CM255).

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The Role of Information Gatekeepers News that arrived in Britain did not circulate freely. The Ministry of Information vetted information coming into and leaving Britain via news wires. This was possible because all commercial cables were channelled to a single point—the Press Association headquarters in London. Less direct methods of information control were also employed by the British state. Minister of Information Brendan Bracken exercised a ‘voluntary’ censorship regime. Bracken liaised with newspaper owners and editors, who well understood that access to war information that was controlled by the government went hand in hand with judicious, responsible use of information. Bracken’s position was strengthened by the government’s control of the paper supply and ability to offer or withhold government advertisements—an important stream of revenue during the war. A memorandum agreed by Bracken, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison on 12 November 1941 noted that the ‘news department of the Foreign Office [which had an office in the Ministry of Information] advises the press on the accuracy of its material and on the advisability of publishing it’.26 And as Jock Brebner, director of the News Division of the Ministry of Information, opined in March 1941, ‘in war time more news becomes public through the medium of public announcements that in peacetime’.27 Given the way in which the British state could influence what news was circulated by the press, the question of how the state (including the Home Office, Ministry of Information and most importantly, the Foreign Office) approached news of atrocities and Jews is particularly relevant. For the British state, news of atrocities was problematic, especially if the victims were Jews. Even before the war started, the Ministry of Information officials determined that ‘no special propaganda to Jews is necessary outside Palestine’.28 The view that Jews should only be addressed as nationals of the state in which they resided was shared by senior officials in the Foreign Office who were concerned about Zionist ambitions for Palestine and potential complications for Britain’s Middle East policy and the war effort. This reluctance to specifically address Jews made it more difficult for a range of actors (including journalists) to narrate the specificity of German antiJewish policy to the British public. This was compounded by a widespread tendency to view antisemitism as being the result of the activities of Jews themselves. Antisemitism in Britain was recorded in the Home Intelligence reports

26 NA.

CAB 65/18/41 (WP (41 269), 12 November 1941, p. 2.

27 NA.

INF 1/64, 7 March 1941.

28 NA.

INF 1/770, Memo 314, Document 20 (p. 7), Publicity Division, Planning Section meeting, 10 July 1939.

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which monitored the sentiments of the British public, and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison expressed concern about antisemitism undermining national morale.29 Reference to Jews in wartime reporting was discouraged. A 25 July 1941 Ministry of Information planning document entitled ‘What have I got to lose even in Germany wins’ advised that in reporting the war ‘a certain amount of horrors is needed but it must be used very sparingly and must deal with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent opponents. And not with Jews’.30 This view was put into practice across the media landscape— news about Jews remained marginal throughout the war. The records of the BBC (one media organisation whose records are available and accessible) indicate how news about Jews was side-lined. A memo of 26 September 1942 on Home Service broadcasts referring to the atrocities taking place in occupied Europe, including those against children, suggested that ‘in the case of Jewish children it would be better not to refer to their race’.31 Later, on 18 November 1943, Director-General Robert Foot outlined BBC policy in relation to Jews. There would be no attempt to correct the antisemitic feeling in Britain, and the facts of the persecution of Jews [in occupied Europe] could be reported ‘from time to time…as well as any notable achievement of Jews’. He argued that ‘any other policy would tend to increase rather than decrease the anti-Jewish feeling in this country’.32 Even when journalists and editors had access to the information that arrived in Britain, including data passed on by the Polish Government in Exile, it was not necessarily published. A good example of how news of German massmurder of Jews was simply not reported is illustrated by a 10 January 1944 letter from Zygmunt Zaremba of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in Warsaw, received by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party. It was passed to Attlee by Adam Ciołkosz and Jan Kwapinski, ´ both of the PPS, in late March 1944. The letter focused on the issues raised by the advance of the Soviet Army into Polish territory, but it also included reference to O´swi˛ecim (Auschwitz), gas chambers and 2.5 million Polish citizens of Jewish faith ‘who were murdered ´ also last year for the simple reason that they were born Jews’.33 Kwapinski passed the letter to the Polish Telegraphic Agency, and it reached a number of journalists. Various newspapers critically reported on the PPS’s view of Polish– Soviet relations at the end of March and the beginning of April, including The Sunday Times and The Observer—and ignored the reference to the murder 29 Indicatively, 30 NA.

see NA INF 292 Home Intelligence report 115.

INF 1/251, 25 July 1941, p. 2.

31 BBC Archive, ‘Memo on Reporting Atrocities in Occupied Europe’. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20190509064600/; http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holoca ust/5138.shtml?page=txt. 32 Harris, 33 Polish

“Broadcasting”, p. 300.

Underground Movement (1939–1945) Study Trust AALC, Kol 133/296. Also see Attlee’s letter to Ciołkosz, AALC, Kol 133/297 (5 April 1944).

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of Jews. On this occasion, like on many others, news of wartime developments of political and military import trumped news of the ongoing slaughter of Europe’s Jews. The general framework of wartime reporting in Britain accentuated this tendency. The practice of ignoring information available is dramatically illustrated by the response to a 21 March 1944 press release by the Polish Ministry of Information. The press release described O´swi˛ecim (Auschwitz) as the ‘largest death factory’, and advised that it was not ‘possible to estimate the exact figure of people put to death in gas chambers attached to crematoria but it certainly exceeds half a million, mostly Jews both Polish and from other countries’.34 This information was transmitted from London to the United States and Australia, and the main facts appeared in a range of newspapers in those countries. In Britain, virtually all the national media ignored the press release. On 22 March 1944 The Daily Mirror only reported on the experiments conducted on Jewish women at the camp, which had also been referred to in the press release. On 24 March 1944 The Jewish Chronicle published some of the information available but did not outline the full extent of the slaughter taking place. The Polish Jewish Observer, on 7 April 1944, provided a faithful account of the information in a front-page article entitled ‘In the Charnel House of Oswiecim’, but, given that this was a small, subscription-based newspaper, it had a limited readership—but this readership did include British officials and representatives of British Jewry. The Polish Government in Exile released information about German actions against Jews and on a few (though significant) occasions worked hard to ensure that the information had an impact. In July 1942, news of the camps at Bełzec, ˙ Sobibór and Chełmno was published in The Polish Fortnightly Review. The cleavage between the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office provided an opportunity for the public distribution of information. However, the tightening of Foreign Office control over the war narrative during the summer of 1942—already in evidence in Minister of the Interior Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s speech at the 9 July 1942 Ministry of Information press conference—together with the strength of the Polish Right in the Polish National Council and government, resulted in news of the Holocaust received from Poland not being highlighted by the Polish Government in Exile as much as it could have been or should have been. The negative synergy between Foreign Office policy and the views of the Polish (nationalist and not infrequently antisemitic) Right made it more difficult for those who, like Zygielbojm, Schwarzbart and Adam Ciołkosz, sought to widely disseminate the news and to encourage a robust response. The Polish Fortnightly Review of 1 December 1942 focused on the extermination of Polish Jewry, and on 10 December the Polish Government sent

34 Hoover Institute Archives, Polish Information Center Papers, Box 3.9, cable from London, 21 March 1944.

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a note to allied governments detailing German crimes. The Polish Government played an instrumental role in ensuring that the 17 December 1942 UN Declaration was issued. However, The Polish Fortnightly Review did not publish news of the mass killing of Jews at Auschwitz during 1943 or the first half of 1944. This can be explained by the power of the British information regime, the strength of the Polish Right, a desire by some influential Poles to narrate O´swi˛ecim as exemplifying ‘Polish’ suffering and the unwillingness of various senior Polish politicians, including Mikołajczyk, to challenge this situation. The 21 March 1944 press release about Auschwitz, issued in the context of growing fears for Hungarian Jewry, was not published in The Polish Fortnightly Review. The press release is perhaps best understood as a Polish attempt to retain relevance and utility to allies while adhering to Foreign Office information policy. The press release provided context for President Roosevelt’s 24 March speech condemning ‘the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe’.35 In spring 1944 Roosevelt was more willing to speak frankly about German actions against Jews than was the Foreign Office. Through the interventions and guidance provided by the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office, the British media, including the BBC, restricted the flow of information about German actions against Jews to the British general public. The flurry of Holocaust reporting in late June and July 1942 was approved by the Minister of Information (he hosted the important 9 July 1942 conference). The Foreign Office was far more circumspect about the news that Bracken helped to promulgate. Clearly, there were different views within the British state apparatus at this point. But over the summer of 1942 the Foreign Office’s influence increased, and news of the Holocaust was effectively marginalised until late November and December 1942. Bracken and the Ministry of Information never again publicly deviated from the Foreign Office view of how atrocities, and atrocities against Jews, should be narrated. With the British media broadly controlled by a voluntary censorship regime, and a broader discursive environment which encouraged the marginalisation of news about Jews, the Foreign Office was faced with the task of guiding how the information that reached Britain and was actually publicly distributed would be understood. This was achieved, in part, through advice provided to those who made representations. A good example of how the Foreign Office managed those who raised questions about German atrocities is the response provided to the Liberal Member of Parliament Geoffrey Mander when he submitted a parliamentary question about the gassing of Jews at Chełmno in August 1942.36 As Walter Laqueur has noted, ‘some of the [FO’s] arguments were so illogical that it must be asked whether they were not misquoted in transmission’.37 The internal Foreign Office discussion frames the release of the original news as being the result of Polish Jewish pressure—which 35 http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/resource/march-1944-2/. 36 NA.FO

371/31097.

37 Laqueur

“The Terrible Secret”, p. 221.

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makes little sense, as Polish Jews could not demand the release of information of which they were not aware. It also misrepresents how the information reached Britain and was circulated—with the predictable and arguably desired consequence that the credibility of the information was questioned. Mander was persuaded to withdraw his question on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, and the opportunity for Chełmno to be raised in parliament in September 1942 was lost. In addition to the Foreign Office providing ad hoc advice to individuals when necessary, it also guided in a more structured and regular way how news about events abroad was to be understood. The Weekly Political Intelligence Summary (WPIS) was distributed to around 500 members of the British governing class—politicians, leading civil servants, the King and so on.38 It was prepared by officials of the Political Intelligence Department (many of whom also helped with the Political Warfare Executive’s overseas propaganda) and was vetted by senior Foreign Office officials (including Frank Roberts of the Central Department). It constituted the authoritative account of the war for Britain’s authoritative citizens and, from its first issue in October 1939, it played a disciplining function within the British state apparatus. The rationale of the WPIS was ‘inter alia to prevent the issue by other departments, as happened in 1914–1918, of various summaries with the resultant discrepancies in interpretation’.39 Information that circulated in Britain only became ‘true’ when it had been authenticated by the Foreign Office. The problem was that the Foreign Office was not a disinterested actor, but sought to promote a particular wartime narrative, which was aligned with what it viewed as Britain’s strategic and geopolitical interests. The writers of the WPIS had access to BBC radio monitoring reports, data from the Press Reading Bureau in Stockholm, material from governments exiled in Britain, business people, material from Alfred Wiener and to the most secret sources, including decrypts of other countries’ diplomatic correspondence. There was no lack of information about the Holocaust, it was simply omitted or marginalised within the WPIS. In July 1942, the WPIS adopted a sceptical tone to the news circulating in the press about atrocities against Jews in Poland. WPIS 145 of 15 July 1942 described Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Polish Minister of the Interior’s claim that 200,000 Jews had been killed in occupied Poland as ‘authoritative’. In fact, Polish Minister of the Interior Stanisław Mikołajczyk had stated that in excess of 200,000 had been killed, and his reference to Bełzec ˙ was omitted.40 The failure of WPIS to mention Chełmno when news of this camp circulated in the British press 38 The WPISs have been published. See Clifton Child (ed.), Great Britain. Foreign Office. Weekly Political Intelligence Summaries (London: Kraus International Publications, 1983). 39 NA

FO 366/1276 (14 October 1941) ‘PID: The Functions of the PID are: … ’.

40 Mikołajczyk

had, on 29 June, passed documents to Frank Savery (perhaps the writer of the Polish section of the WPIS in 1942), and it is possible that an agreement was made to lower the numbers reported in the Bund Report.

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and had been reported on the BBC’s Home Service worked to encourage scepticism towards that news among various recipients of the WPIS. Information not confirmed in the WPIS could easily be comprehended as ‘rumour’ or ‘propaganda’. Given that recipients of the WPIS occupied influential positions throughout the British state apparatus, their views had an impact on others. In October news of the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto was recorded, over two months after the news first circulated in London. WPIS 158 of 14 October 1942 reported that ‘Jews are being steadily deported from Warsaw – sometimes as many as 6000 in a day – to unknown destinations. Although there is no certain information as to what happens to these unfortunates, the Polish Government fear that very many are put to death’. On 2 December 1942, WPIS 165 reported on the information that had been published in a range of newspapers in late November, but offered an idiosyncratic perspective. Sobibór, Bełzec ˙ and Treblinka were described as camps which ‘are believed in Poland to be in nearly all cases only places of execution for those Jews who have survived the terrible and protracted journey’. The reference to the journey distracted from the well-understood fact that those camps’ main purpose was to murder Jews. The text also failed to unambiguously imprint the Foreign Office’s authority onto the news. It was only on 26 May 1943 that WPIS provided clarity on how Jews were being killed—and it is possible that this was an editorial oversight. WPIS 190 reported that Jewish ‘men, women and children have there [Treblinka] been deliberately slaughtered en masse in lethal chambers’. This summary was a response to a detailed report on Treblinka (which also mentioned other camps, including Auschwitz) circulated to British members of parliament prior to the 19 May 1943 parliamentary debate on refugees. The summary was put together soon after the responsibility for writing it was transferred from the Political Intelligence Department to the Foreign Office Research Department—a new body created from the merger of the Political Intelligence Department and the Foreign Research and Press Service. FORD was headed by the historian Arnold Toynbee. Francis Bernard Bourdillon, a diplomat, drafted the Polish section of the summary. The frankness of WPIS 190 was not repeated, despite a great deal of new and detailed information arriving about the Holocaust, until 5 July 1944 when gas chambers at Auschwitz were finally reported. This was over a year after this information had reached the Foreign Office.

Explaining Response Explanations of responses to news of the Holocaust have followed two main paths. First, contentions have been advanced that there was insufficient information, that this information was confused or unclear, and that certain facts, such as the gassing of Jews at an industrial scale at Auschwitz, were simply unknown until fairly late in the war. Second, it has been suggested that the information that was available was simply so incredible it was not

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believed. Yehuda Bauer offered the clearest articulation of this argument, noting that information has to be internalised before it can acquire the status of knowledge, which in turn can motivate action.41 These arguments, if deployed with care and precision, have merit in relation to particular individuals and groups, but fail as generalised, overarching explanations of response. It is entirely possible that a munitions worker in Scotland might have been ignorant of the German policy against Jews. The news was buried in the inside pages of newspapers and rarely featured on the BBC Home Service. As Rabbi Joseph Hertz noted in October 1942, the British information regime shielded the common person from much. The same cannot be said for Foreign Office officials, leading British politicians and journalists or leading Jewish representatives. All these groups had good and often timely access to information, including material received by the Polish Government in Exile from the Polish Underground State. Ignacy Schwarzbart worked very hard to keep various constituencies informed through his regular newsletter/bulletin. Schwarzbart’s office was funded by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Board of Deputies received his regular bulletin and other material.42 The data Schwarzbart provided was derived from reports distributed to the Polish National Council and the messages addressed to him from colleagues in Warsaw. The argument about knowledge developed by Bauer is predicated on the belief that news of systematic mass killing was difficult to process. Often cited is United States Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter’s response to Polish emissary Jan Karski in July 1943 when Karski told him of the situation of Jews in Poland—information which had been widely published prior to the UN Declaration of 17 December 1942. Frankfurter stated that he was ‘unable to believe’ what he had been told. This should be understood not as Frankfurter doubting the veracity of Karski’s testimony but as an expression of shock in response to Karski’s testimony or, as Leff suggests, as ‘a refusal to accept that reality’.43 It is important to specify who, exactly, is being referred to in the discussion of information/knowledge. Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart were not alone in being able to proactively respond and to engage with others to disseminate the news. The four conferences that took place in 1942 (on 29 June, 9 July, 2 September, 29 October) that considered German atrocities against Jews— all suggest that many people associated with those events had processed the

41 Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), p. 18. 42 Some

of Schwarzbart’s bulletins can be found in the Board of Deputies of British Jews archive at the London Metropolitan Archive—ACC 3121 C11 012 087. 43 Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 54. Educators well understand the power of eyewitness testimony. This is one of the reasons why students are invited to listen to survivors rather than simply being instructed to read their accounts.

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terrible news prior to it becoming ‘official’ through the UN Declaration of 17 December 1942. It is true that the responses to the news that arrived in May and June 1942 were not uniform, but this is best explained not by the character of the news itself, but by the commitments and concerns of the institutions, groups and individuals who received it. The Foreign Office’s strategic scepticism outlined above, promulgated through advice given to individuals and through the Weekly Political Intelligence Summary, helped insulate the Foreign Office from demands to change policy to provide refuge and save the perishing. It also helped to ensure the war continued to be narrated, in the main, in national terms. This marginalised what was happening to Jews specifically. The authoritative British office on foreign affairs (Foreign Office) played an important role in fostering doubt about the information that arrived in Britain during 1942—and continued to downplay news of the Holocaust in 1943 and 1944. Elsewhere other socio-political considerations were important. This is clearly seen in how the broad international Left in Britain, including the Labour Party, responded to the May/June 1942 news from Poland. During the war, the Left debated the nature of Nazism. On one side were those who viewed Nazism as the result of class contradictions, and Leftist refugees from Austria and Germany could see themselves as Hitler’s first victims. Responsibility for Nazism rested with the Nazi leadership. On the other side of the debate were those who saw the rise of Nazism as a result of the particularity of German history, culture and tradition, and consequently ordinary Germans were seen as co-responsible for Nazism. This second view was advanced by the Huysman Committee, set up within the Labour Party in the autumn of 1941 as an advisory body. Chaired by the Belgian socialist Camille Huysman, with the Labour Party’s international secretary, William Gillies, as secretary, the committee defended a socialist ‘Vansittartist’ position. The information that arrived in May and June 1942 was readily accepted, in part, because recipients had a view on the nature of Germans that could accommodate such information and, importantly, the information itself could be mobilised in the debate about the nature of Nazism. It is no accident that many of those on the Left who responded to the news of the Holocaust during the summer of 1942 were those associated with the Huysman Committee and/or the Fight for Freedom Editorial and Publishing group which was set up at the end of 1941 by British and exiled socialists and headed by the German-Jewish socialist Walter Loeb. These people provided support to Zygielbojm, and helped to galvanise the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress to issue public statements condemning ‘the bestial atrocities’ in Poland and Czechoslovakia (Lidice) in July 1942. The 2 September 1942 Labour protest meeting against German atrocities brought together many of those associated with the Huysman Committee. This meeting was roundly criticised by a number of German and Austrian socialists. Austrian socialist Oscar Pollak argued that excluding socialists from ‘a Fascist country is a narrowly nationalist attitude’ and that ‘the ‘Vansittartist

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obsession to punish all Germans…prevents Labour from fully realising the vast international implications of this war…’.44 In actuality Pollak was not excluded—he did not attend the 17 July meeting at which plans for the protest event were mooted. However, Pollak’s intervention influenced how Labour and the broader (non-communist) European Left responded to news of the Holocaust. Given the Left’s value placed on unity and the potential for the issue of atrocities to reignite the debate about Nazism and the nature of Germans (and thereby sow division), the Labour party did not again organise a protest meeting and generally adhered to the broader British information policy. Tellingly, it was the Fight for Freedom Editorial and Publishing group which organised a conference, entitled ‘Germany’s Thirty Years War’, on 18 December 1942 at the Savoy hotel in London (i.e. after the UN Declaration) rather than the Labour Party. At this event Zygielbojm declared that ‘whatever we do or say about retribution or punishment after the war cannot stop this mass slaughter which is going on, nor rescue a single soul of those millions who are sentenced to death today in Poland and all over Europe’.45 It is through reference to the intra-Left debate about the nature of Nazism that it becomes possible to explain the delayed response to news of German atrocities against Jews of people like Victor Gollancz. Gollancz had criticised Robert Vansittart’s views in an early 1942 publication entitled Our Children Live or Die? A Reply to Lord Vansittart on the German Problem—a publication that signalled Gollancz’s distance from an often reductive and generalising view of Germans.46 It seems that Gollancz and others of a more liberal sociopolitical outlook failed to adequately respond to some of the information that arrived in the summer of 1942 from Poland, in part, because of their ongoing disagreements with those who were most active in promulgating it. In short, the news itself was confused with how it related to political debates in Britain. Soon after the British state officially verified the German policy of extermination in the 17 December 1942 UN Declaration, Gollancz, and no doubt others, recognised that even if news of atrocities was being instrumentalised by some, this was an insufficient reason not to respond energetically. Gollancz wrote the important pamphlet Let My People Go on 25 December 1942,47 worked tirelessly through the first half of 1943 to disseminate the news of the atrocities, and demanded ways be found to save the perishing. However, the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, founded in 44 People’s History Museum, Manchester, LP/ID/21. ‘London Information of the Austrian Socialists in Great Britain’, 15 September 1942, p. 4. 45 Szmu

Zygielbojm,. ‘Untitled Speech’ in Fight for Freedom Round Table Conference ‘Germany’s Thirty Years’ War’ 18th December, 1942 in London (London: Fight for Freedom Editorial and Publishing Services, 1943),p. 48.

46 Victor Gollancz, Shall Our Children Live or Die? A Reply to Lord Vansittart on the German Problem (London: Gollancz, 1942). 47 Victor Gollancz, Let My People Go: Some Practical Proposals for Dealing with Hitler’s Massacre of the Jews and an Appeal to the British Public (London: Gollancz, 1943).

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March 1943, of which Gollancz was a vice-president, never developed formal relations with those who had been most active in promulgating the news of Holocaust during 1942. Information about German atrocities against Jews was not completely buried or ignored. Throughout the summer of 1942, thinking about war crimes advanced, and in October 1943 the United Nations War Crimes Commission was established. The doctrine, promoted by leading British politicians and officials, that winning the war and then punishing criminals (rather than attempting to save potential victims like, for example, Hungarian Jewry) was of paramount importance, was put into practice. Information that arrived in Britain throughout the war was collected, including by Governments in Exile, and provided evidence, submitted to the UNWCC, to bring perpetrators to justice.

Conclusion Information about the evolving German policy against Jews continuously arrived in Britain throughout the war from various sources, including in a structured, regular way from the Polish Underground State. The distribution of this material was subjected to the decisions of various information gatekeepers and different groups had different access to information. Understanding of the distributed information was undermined by the Foreign Office’s policy of strategic scepticism, especially in the summer and autumn of 1942. But those with good access to information, especially from the reports sent by the Polish Underground State, could develop an understanding of the German programme of annihilation of Jews in occupied Europe by July 1942, and many did. In the most part, it was not the character of the news itself that constituted a barrier to comprehension/knowledge, but the way in which the information related to individuals’ and groups’ ongoing political and social projects, prejudices and position on the information distribution chain. For the Foreign Office, the news always constituted a problem—it raised serious questions about Britain’s strategic interests in the Middle East, the war effort, domestic antisemitism, national morale, and ability to determine policy and so on. For those on the Left, the debate on the nature of Nazism delayed many from processing the information until after the British state imprinted its authority on the news on 17 December 1942. Frank, authoritative official statements had the capacity to apprise the public of the German atrocities against Jews and to guide responses, as did obfuscation and omission. It was the latter that formed the basis of the British practice regarding news of the Holocaust.

CHAPTER 7

The Unlikely Tale of a Hero Named Coward: Uncomfortable Truths and the Necessary War Russell Wallis

Premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in mid-summer 1963, The Great Escape was among the highest grossing films of the year. Director John Sturges must have felt vindicated given the obstacles that cumbered his quest for studio backing. Nothing however, could have prepared him for the film’s uncommon afterlife. He could not have foreseen how it would become so profoundly woven into Britain’s cultural tapestry.1 Broadcast on television with seeming interminability, especially at Yuletide, it became required comfort viewing for the engorged masses following the festive meal. It was an incongruous destiny for a movie that culminates with a scene that depicts the massacre of escapees. But, that is to miss what The Great Escape has come to symbolise in the British psyche. It was based on Paul Brickhill’s first-hand account of the ill-omened but genuinely daring escape attempt carried out by Allied prisoners of war incarcerated at Stalag Luft III.2 Like most war films The Great Escape contained more than an element of truth. Hundreds were involved in the plot and there really were three tunnels named Tom, Dick and Harry (the lesser-known George came later), supported with timber bed boards and excavated using little more than cutlery. The stoic heroism of the characters, however, encapsulates much 1 Sinclair Mckay, Daily Telegraph, 24 December 2014, London. 2 In what is now Zagan, Poland. Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape (London: Faber

and Faber, 1951). R. Wallis (B) Independent Scholar, Hertfordshire, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_7

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of the film’s appeal. It is imagined that these quintessentially British traits are emblematic of how the war was fought and indeed at the heart of what the country was fighting for. The film’s enduring popularity is evident in the seeming ubiquity of Elmer Bernstein’s spritely movie score, which has become something of a synonym for convivial masculinity. Featured in beer commercials, it has also been adopted by the brass band that has taken upon itself the unenviable task of playing at England football matches.3 It can normally be heard when England are losing and the fans are yearning for victory against the odds. The discrepancy between the endless renditions and English footballing miracles should act as a salutary reminder that such rituals are based firmly in the realm of myth and ideology. Underneath the bonhomie lurks a deep attachment to notions of national identity, and in particular how the Second World War acts as an archetype for the national character. The Second World War is an obvious candidate for helping to build an acceptable picture of the nation that can be understood by all. After all Nazism was by common consent bad and Britain was influential in its defeat. The creation of superficial narratives reinforcing this rather obvious fact is an unremarkable consequence. This chapter unpicks one such fabricated tale, demonstrating how it came into being on the back of overly simplistic patriotism and a 1950s desire to believe the sacrifices of war had been worthwhile. Its durability highlights the gap between popular conceptions of the war and a historiography largely critical of Britain, especially with regard to the Holocaust. Is this the fault of the popular imagination? Or does academia have a role to play in bridging the gap? One of the reasons for the enduring success of The Great Escape is that its core message was built on deep foundations. As early as 1939, Alexander Korda, the Hungarian Jewish film director, overcame a dearth of government funding by cashing in his own life insurance. The result was The Lion Has Wings. Although panned by critics it was a hit with the public, who were heartened by the RAF’s blend of aerial prowess and cutting-edge technology. The film set the tone for other heroic retellings of the war.4 This tradition, entrenched by 1945, was given a boost by the onset of post-war drudgery. Austerity gave birth to a popular hankering. The British wanted to look back to the recent conflict and believe the sacrifice had been worthwhile. The Great Escape dealt with one particular facet of Britain’s war with Germany, namely, prisoners of war and their struggle behind the wire. It is viewed as the consummate escape movie, but it was not the first to portray a breakout from Stalag Luft III. This honour belongs to The Wooden Horse, an account of a three-man tunnel dug from under a vaulting horse. The book, published in 1949, sold in millions and virtually guaranteed the success of the

3 Telegraph, 4 For

24 December 2014.

instance, Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942).

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film, released the following year.5 Movies such as these have reinforced the view that British captives carried the weight of bondage with a light heart and a ready wit. Doubtless, this has some basis on a solid core of historical fact. However, as the military historian S. P. Mackenzie points out: it is a core around which audience, and those who have successfully catered for them, have unconsciously woven layers of generalized meaning based on selective evidence that serve their own needs rather better than the cause of a full and balanced understanding of the past.6

Thus, the grim reality of life as a prisoner of war, that of disenfranchisement, debilitation and misery was eclipsed by a popular image of courage, audacity and forbearance against overwhelming odds. Most books and films portrayed the officer class, which was seen as more representative of those values. This left a gap in the market for a hero with whom millions of ex-squaddies might identify. It was also perhaps inevitable that the plethora of valiant yarns would somehow find a place for the Holocaust. Charles Coward, a lowly non-commissioned officer from Edmonton in North London cornered the market. His tale of derring-do, The Password Is Courage, penned by two journalists and published in 1954, caught the public imagination and clings on to this day.7

Coward the Hero Coward claimed to have embarked on a litany of deeds, from escapes to intrepid feats of sabotage. He was taken prisoner in France after the ‘glorious defeat’ at Dunkirk and spent the war in a series of camps in Germany and occupied Poland. According to The Password Is Courage, Coward’s war did not end with captivity. He was portrayed as a loose cannon, a mischiefmaker, a singular agitator bent on becoming a spanner in the works of the Nazi machine, the self-deprecatory hero unequivocally on the side of the Jews. The most striking claims relate to his time with E715, a work detachment not dissimilar to six hundred or so others in Upper Silesia. This particular group was placed just outside the colossal IG Farben plant, within sight of Monowitz, the barrack-built slow-death camp for slave workers, mostly Jews. On arrival in Auschwitz, where he staggeringly claimed to have disembarked 5 It

was a box office success and helped launch the acting career of Leo Genn, who, by way of an interesting aside, was one of the British prosecutors at the Belsen Trial.

6 S.

P. Mackenzie, The Colditz Myth: British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 2.

7 John

Castle, The Password Is Courage (London: Souvenir Press, 1954). John Castle is the pen name for Ronald Payne and John Garrod. For its continuing hold see, for example, a blog by Shahan Russell ‘The Heroic World War Two Volunteer—Charles Joseph Coward’ https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/the-her oic-world-war-two-volunteer-charles-joseph-coward.html (accessed 16.41, 29 November 2017).

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inside Birkenau itself, Coward professed he instantaneously won the respect of his men and was installed as the Man of Confidence, senior man if you will, for E715. Portrayed as a selfless man of action, Coward professed to have faced down his German oppressors while simultaneously winning them over with his decency and bearing. Moreover, Coward maintained he was an eyewitness to the arrival of a Jewish transport, saw for himself the notorious selection process and was present when Jews entered the gas chambers. Such sights, it was affirmed, prompted Coward to make contact with the Polish underground, who used him to smuggle weapons and ammunition to the Sonderkommando, the ‘special commando’ responsible for the day-to-day running of the gassing procedure at Auschwitz. These arms and explosives were allegedly used in the 1944 uprising that took out crematorium No. 4 in Birkenau. Effectively acting as the British government’s man in Auschwitz, Coward contended that he secretly provided them with details of the mass killing operation. Furthermore, Coward, in what was portrayed as an act of compassionate bravado, attempted to make contact with a British doctor incarcerated in Monowitz by swapping places with a Jewish inmate for the night. Sergeant Coward further asserted that he hatched and realised a scheme in which dead bodies were swapped for live inmates, thus expediting the escape of nearly 400 Jews. Following the publication of The Password Is Courage, Coward’s star steadily rose. In 1960, he was the subject for This Is Your Life, the spritely biographical television show. His acceptance into British popular culture was secured when, in 1962, a film was made of the bestselling book. The star was Dirk Bogarde, a bankable actor at the top of his trade, who was himself no stranger to the horrors of the Holocaust. In a 1986 interview with Russell Harty for Yorkshire Television, Bogarde emotionally told of his experience at the liberated Belsen camp and an encounter with a young woman near death. The Password Is Courage, however, was more of a light-hearted romp, which one critic bemoaned as a missed opportunity to provide ‘a telling tribute to a character of guts and initiative’.8 Underlying this criticism was a firm belief that Charles Coward was a genuine hero. Heroic status was assured when, on 16 February 1965, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, education and research centre in Jerusalem, recognised Coward as Righteous Among the Nations, the award given to gentiles for acting bravely on behalf of wartime Jews. Coward is one of very few Britons to have received the honour. Lauded too as a local hero, an English Heritage blue plaque was placed on the North London house where he lived and a ward named after him at the North Middlesex University Hospital. An explosion of interest in the Holocaust from the 1980s onwards saw no diminution in Coward’s gallant status. His story remained unquestioned. In 2000, Holocaust scholar Joseph White, bestowed more credibility and reinforced his image as a man of singular courage. White focused on Coward’s sojourn with E715, substantially scaling down his claims, but still holding 8 Variety

Staff, Variety, 31 December 1961, Los Angeles.

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that ‘sufficient evidence has emerged to demonstrate that [Coward] waged a personal campaign against the mass murder of Jews while at E715’. White concluded that ‘in extremis, Coward exemplified the British challenge to the Nazi racial hierarchy’.9 Shortly afterwards, respected historian Martin Gilbert included Coward in his book The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust.10 A decade later he was one of Lyn Smith’s Heroes of the Holocaust.11 Finally, Coward, who died in 1976, was posthumously recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said of this select group that they were ‘true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us’. The solid silver medallion bears the inscription ‘in the service of humanity’ and on the reverse, ‘in recognition of Charles Coward whose selfless actions preserved life in the face of persecution’.12 Coward’s deeds have thus been underwritten in a variety of ways for over half a century. His story has straddled cultural trends with ease, arguably gaining greater endorsement with temporal flow. A tale built to assuage a post-war appetite for wartime valour seems impervious to criticism in a cynical postmodern world. Indeed, broad approval reveals Coward as something of a metonym for how Britons still wish to interpret their country’s engagement with the Second World War, and more specifically its interaction with the mass murder of Jews under German rule. Attempts to raise Holocaust awareness consistently run against the buffers of what might be called the ‘Good War’ as it exists in the collective imagination. After all, there is little doubt that the war against Nazi Germany was, perhaps unlike any other in history, terrible but necessary. Yet, as Britain was fighting the necessary fight, the murder of European Jews was widely known, evoking a range of responses, even though the nature of those reactions remains a point of historical controversy.13 It is worth speculating that the inability of historians to successfully explain British reactions to the Holocaust contributes to modern day difficulties over how to properly remember the ultimate bad news story in the context of what is popularly remembered 9 Joseph

Robert White, ‘Even in Auschwitz … Humanity Could Prevail’: British POWs and Jewish Concentration-Camp Inmates at IG Auschwitz, 1943–1945’, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15(2) (2001), p. 278.

10 Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2002). 11 Lyn

Smith, Heroes of the Holocaust (London: Ebury, 2012).

12 Robyn 13 A

Rosen, Jewish Chronicle, 11 March 2010, London.

few books have sought to explain the complex British reactions. Taken together, they have so far failed to provide a comprehensive account. It is an area of Holocaust historiography badly in need of more research. Perhaps the most influential include Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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as a good war. The search for heroes of the Holocaust makes more sense if seen in this light. Agencies responsible for Holocaust commemoration have to bridge what seems like an ever-widening gap between a historiography that in broad terms takes a critical position of Britain’s wartime engagement with the Holocaust and a public that are as unlikely as ever to be convinced that Britain was a pernicious factor in a vital war. Those heady but terrifying days of 1940 when Britain ‘stood alone’ against an all-conquering Nazi menace are at the heart of how the war is still remembered. The British public are, even now, bolstered by a vision of parochial pluck, a small island of shopkeepers rallying bravely against the odds. It is a powerful image and acts as a foundation for the acceptance of Coward’s incredible tale of an ordinary Briton performing extraordinary feats. So, Coward himself in some ways represents the conundrum faced by the agencies and individuals that together constitute the guardians of Holocaust consciousness in Britain. If Coward acts as an exemplar of British involvement or even as a example of the best of British behaviour under duress, then what will be the effect if it were proved that the story he told about himself was false? At the very least, it should serve to complicate what seem like comforting stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, in the face of the most ill-famed of crimes. In a wider sense, perhaps it will go some small way towards bridging the gap between, on the one hand, various forms of socially constructed communal memories that are normally selective in their use of evidence and on the other, primary source driven history, which, if done well, seeks to establish an informed version of what actually happened.14

The Evolution of Coward’s Story Coward’s own story did not appear in 1954, fully formed and simply told. It transubstantiated over time, from something undistinguished to a tale of self-sacrificial salvation. Initially, Coward was not dissimilar to the majority of recently liberated POWs. Like all others, he was given a chance to provide an account of his captivity in a repatriation questionnaire.15 He was asked to provide details: dates, camps, escapes and war crimes. Coward completed his on 14 April 1945, recounting three escape attempts and some minor sabotage. No war crimes were mentioned. Unlike other ex-prisoners though, Coward’s repatriation form has a letter attached, submitted sometime in September of that year. Apparently, he wanted to put some meat on the bones of his story. He recounted a daring escape attempt from a work camp in Tost and how he had personally sabotaged 14 For an insightful breakdown of memory theory see ‘British Holocaust Consciousness— From Past into Present’, Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014). 15 Approximately

140,000 of these are held in the National Archive at Kew.

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a train near Crailsheim, in southern Germany, carrying what he claimed were V1 flying bombs. Coward could not have know that in August 1942, the time of this alleged act of bravery, the V1 developers were still experimenting with concrete dummies hundreds of miles away on the Baltic coast.16 At this early stage in the evolution of Coward’s narrative, the evidence does not support his assertions. Coward then wrote of his time with E715, saying that he escaped ‘with two Jews from the concentration Lager’, meaning Monowitz. Against all odds, he conspired to smuggle them aboard a Vienna-bound train. He told how he selflessly gave himself up, distracting two Gestapo officials ‘whilst the two Jews could jump the train’.17 Certainly, this would have been a remarkable feat, given what is known about the condition of inmates at Monowitz, who were invariably starved, severely dilapidated, poorly and distinctly dressed with conspicuously shaven heads and often covered in sores.18 Given the average state of Jewish slave labourers, it seems unlikely that Coward’s two comrades could ‘jump the train’ let alone escape a camp regime characterised by hairsplitting sadism. It is notable that few of the deeds laid out in this missive survived to appear in The Password Is Courage. Indeed, they are contradicted by the later account. In contrast to the earlier version, the book ‘reveals’ Coward’s rumination as he first set eyes on the men of E715: He knew his urge to escape would have to be crushed at Auschwitz. These men needed someone to look after their interests; to do that he would have to remain with them, helping others to get away if possible, but never going himself.

His ‘escape’ from E715 had, by 1954 been dropped from the narrative and replaced by a story of stoic resolve to stay put and look after his men. Such inconsistencies cannot be easily brushed aside. Perhaps the unanswered question here is, why Coward submitted this extra report at that particular moment. September 1945 was a key month for Britain’s confrontation with the Holocaust. The Belsen Trial commenced mid way through the month, looming large in the British newsprint media. Most daily nationals were only allowed four pages because of shortages, thus magnifying headline coverage even further. The most newsworthy aspects of the trial were the crimes that had taken place at Auschwitz. When Dr. Ada Bimko, who had testified to the court on 21 September that ‘her father, mother, brother, husband and six-year-old son had all perished in Auschwitz’, left her seat in the witness-box and walked forward into the body of the court to identify the 16 National Archive, WO 344/75/1. For the development of the V1 see Steven J. Zalogo, V —1 Flying Bomb 1942–52: Hitler’s Infamous ‘Doodlebug’ (Oxford: Osprey, 2005). 17 National 18 Primo

Archive, WO 344/75/1.

Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce (London: Abacus, 2005), p. 148.

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perpetrators, The Times, reported this as ‘the biggest moment of the trial’.19 Reporting on the first day of the trial, the Daily Mail chose to print in bold, distinct from the rest of a long article, that Irma Grese ‘took part in the selection of cases for gas chambers at Auschwitz’.20 Auschwitz was in the news writ large and it is worth speculating that Coward would have felt a distinct connection to the notorious camp in the headlines. This might help clarify why he penned the letter, but does not explain his struggle with the truth. Coward’s letter was passed to MI9, the Department of Military Intelligence, which was uninterested in this inventory of intrepid deeds. Nonetheless, the patent inaccuracies contained within seem to show that this erstwhile noncommissioned officer was intent on formulating a valorous tale about himself as early as September 1945.

Coward at the I.G. Farben Trial It was not long before Coward was presented with another opportunity to develop his story, this time at the IG Farben Trial held at Nuremberg in 19478. A number of British ex-POWs were called to testify for the prosecution. All wrote an affidavit setting out their evidence. Coward was no exception. It contained fresh claims about his exploits that had, thus far, not seen the light of day. In order to make contact with an interned British doctor, Coward said that he swapped places with an inmate of Monowitz and spent one hideous night inside the concentration camp. The details of his visit, however, do not correlate with what is now known of life inside Auschwitz III. To give just one example, Coward asserted that during roll call, he saw shattered Jews hold up dead comrades in order to draw on the rations of the deceased. Survivor testimony reveals that food rations were allocated in a typically brutal fashion. On pain of a beating, each inmate was compelled to reveal the tattooed number they had received during the grim initiation on arrival at the camp.21 Notwithstanding Coward’s complete ignorance of the system, his description of roll calls in Monowitz also did not acknowledge the infirmity of the slave workers or the vicious and fastidious nature of the camp regime. There are also problems with Coward’s rendition of the swap itself. A ruse in which he bribed a guard, switched clothes with an inmate, ‘dirtied’ himself, hid among the slave workers and ‘marched into the concentration camp’.22 For anyone unfamiliar with the hierarchy at the core of the German slave labour system, such an account might appear plausible. After all, once the working day was complete, it seems logical that workers of all kinds might 19 Special

Correspondent, The Times, 22 September 1945, London.

20 Edwin

Tetlow, Daily Mail, 18 September 1945, London.

21 Primo

Levi, If This Is A Man (London: Abacus, 2005), pp. 33–34.

22 Imperial

War Museum (IWM), Document No. NI-11696 Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes.

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wend their way back to their respective camps. However, the system governing work at Farben had, at its heart, strict racial criteria consistent with Nazi ideology. For slave labourers, one way this manifested itself was in the number of hours worked. British POWs toiled the least number of hours, followed by foreign slave workers and, finally, Jews were required to work the longest day. This meant that British POWs, contrary to Coward’s assertion, were marched away from the Farben site before Jews, or indeed any of the other groups had finished work.23 So, the ‘swap’ could not have taken place as Coward described. Coward also portrayed himself as a conduit for crucial information about the Holocaust. He professed to have sent coded messages to the War Office, telling of the appalling conditions for inmates and even providing numbers and the origin of transports arriving at Birkenau. This was an extraordinary claim, which if true, should indeed mark Coward out as deserving of praise. These are his words on the affidavit: I wrote giving particular dates on which I had witnessed thousands arriving and marched into the concentration camp, I used to inquire of the people in Auschwitz where the next batch was coming from. In my letters I would say that 600 arrived from Czechoslovakia, so many from Poland, etc. The turnover was in the hundreds of thousands. You could not count them. The majority of them went into the camp next to us.24

The majority, of course, were gassed on arrival and Coward could not have seen them. His evidence suggests a degree of conflation between Monowitz and Birkenau, which were approximately 3 miles apart. This sense of confusion was even more apparent in The Password Is Courage and in particular a ‘body swap’ scheme that ‘saved’ hundreds of Jews, more of which below. Coward’s apparent proximity to key events was made possible because of subtle discrepancies in the construction of his narrative. For example, the distance between the British POW camp containing E715 and Monowitz was downplayed. In his affidavit, the distance between the two camps was ‘not 320 yards’, while under cross-examination this shrunk to ‘200’ yards.25 Coward conveyed the idea that British POWs could look through the barbed wire of their own camp and see directly into Monowitz.26 In reality, they were, at least half a kilometre apart and besides, SS and administration blocks obstructed the

23 Russell

Wallis, British POWs and the Holocaust: Witnessing the Nazi Atrocities (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), p. 200.

24 Imperial War Museum (IWM), Document No. NI-11696 Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes. 25 Imperial 26 Despite

War Museum, NI-11696.

clear contrary evidence of plans and aerial photographs, Joseph White believed Coward, stating that ‘a prisoner could look beyond his own fence and glimpse activity inside [Monowitz] unobstructed.’ White, “Even in Auschwitz…” p. 272.

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view.27 Such ostensibly trifling incongruities are key to placing Coward at the centre of events.28 Coward’s attempt to cast himself as a leading actor in the Holocaust drama caught the attention of the defence lawyers. They were particularly intrigued by his claim to have seen the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. In contrast to the other POW witnesses, Coward wore a dapper bow tie for the occasion but it did not help. He was discredited as a witness. When asked to state the location of the gas chambers, Coward informed the Court that they were not in Birkenau but in Auschwitz town, yards from the railway station.29 Reading the exchange in the trial transcript today, one is left with a sense of unease and embarrassment at Coward’s attempt to be taken seriously in court.30 The most generous conclusion is that Coward was genuinely confused about the facts. Yet, the same claim appears once again in The Password Is Courage albeit in an embellished form. Here, Coward provides an entirely false view of the selection procedure, then claimed he saw a Jewish transport enter the gas chambers singing together as they went to their deaths.31 The unspeakable reality was, of course, altogether different. So why was Coward not unmasked as a fraud after his courtroom testimony? Once again, the context is key. The accused were in the dock for preparing and waging aggressive war, crimes against humanity, looting the occupied territories and enslaving and murdering civilian populations. Onlookers were in little doubt as to the magnitude of the charges. The odd behaviour of a minor witness against the backdrop of enormous injustice was a drop in the ocean. In any case the trial was not widely covered by the British press. Therefore, in public memory, the humiliation he endured at the hands of defence lawyers was trumped by the mere fact that he had been a witness. Coward was thus able to advance his story, as it were, under the radar. There is also an additional question. Why, when so much of the Holocaust has been poured over by numerous historians, has Coward’s courtroom debacle not been exposed? Part of the answer lies in the overarching narrative concerning so-called minor Holocaust trials. As Lorie Charlesworth has pointed out, albeit to little avail, ‘it is striking that in most histories and associated texts concerning German/Nazi war crimes trials, discussion of the

27 National

Archives, AIR 29/332.

28 Another

example of this was the murder of Corporal Leslie Reynolds by a guard at IG Farben. The murder was real, but Coward’s stated involvement simply cannot be verified by the sources. 29 Trials of War Criminals Before the Neurenberg Military Tribunals Under control Council Law No. 10, Volume VIII , ‘The I. G. Farben Case’ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 610. 30 Trials

of War Criminals, pp. 603–616.

31 Castle,

The Password Is Courage, p. 142.

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“minor” trials is for the most part reduced to a brief discussion’.32 Once again, the shortcomings of Coward’s story escaped scrutiny, this time because the legal efforts of post-war prosecutors were deemed insufficiently important for detailed study.33

The Password Is Courage After the trial, Coward’s tale continued to grow. The Password Is Courage rode the wave of popular demand for a heroic retelling of the war in 1950s and 1960s Britain. Building on established foundations, it contained new and sensational details of the ex-POW’s heroics. Again, central to these claims was a smaller one that helped Coward establish his modus operandi. This relates to his position in the camp hierarchy. The Password Is Courage depicts Coward’s astute reading of the situation on arrival at E715. He saw it in their eyes, the witnessing of untold horrors and the ‘hopelessness’. Thus, he claimed, they welcomed him ‘with open arms’, for Coward’s ‘name and reputation were not unknown to them…’34 According to the book this was the beginning of a relationship built on Coward’s straight-talking, but inspirational leadership. However, his claim to have been camp leader, or Man of Confidence, is open to question. Contemporary evidence suggests that he was Red Cross Liaison for E715 at some point, but probably never was senior man. Firstly, clear proof exists that Sergeant Major Horace Charters was leader of the E715 work detachment.35 Secondly, Coward’s own affidavit gave him away. He called himself ‘liaison man and [Red Cross] trustee’ but also wrote of having to explain himself ‘to my chief’.36 The Password Is Courage took Coward’s false claim of leadership and built a legend around it, that he was instantly recognisable and carried himself with such dignity and bearing that he was bestowed with the moniker ‘Count of Auschwitz’. Not by his men but by his captors. Such an avowal invites speculation about how the most well-known Briton in the camp carried out clandestine operations, such as swapping places with an inmate of Monowitz. In the world created for Coward by his ghost-writing biographers, the principal protagonist was able to both shame his captors through his shining example of adherence to British values, and at the same time undermine them by shrouding himself in the cloak of anonymity. It is a 32 Lorie

Charlesworth, ‘Forgotten Justice: Forgetting Law’s History and Victims’ Justice in British “Minor” War Crime Trials in Germany 1945–1948’, Amicus Curiae, 74 (Summer 2008), p. 2. 33 See,

for example, Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 95–101. 34 Castle,

The Password is Courage, p. 128.

35 Russell

Wallis, British POWs and the Holocaust: Witnessing the Nazi Atrocities (London: I.B Tauris, 2017), pp. 145–146.

36 Imperial

War Museum, NI-11696.

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literary and filmic trope that was around in Coward’s day and still survives in the shape of James Bond: at once a ‘secret agent’ in Her Majesty’s service and a spy instantly recognisable by his arch enemies. Public acceptance of Coward’s claims reveals that the post-war hunger for heroic stories contributed to an increased propensity to suspend disbelief, a tendency that has hardly disappeared from popular tastes. Once Coward (latterly) interpolated himself into the position of camp leader, he established the idea that he could rove round the environs of Auschwitz with alacrity. He merely requested a guard, who for the purposes of the story was invariably and conveniently dull-witted, and could thenceforth wander at will. Thus, the stage was set for two more feats of bravura. Absent from earlier accounts, but occupying a prominent place in The Password Is Courage, was Coward’s avowed role in the Sonderkommando uprising of October 1944. The ‘Polish underground’ is said to have recruited Coward and used him to smuggle weapons and explosives into cellars at the Farben site where the Sonderkommando collected the dead. This was an imaginative fabrication. The Sonderkommando worked at the gas chambers and crematoria three miles away in Birkenau, in virtual isolation from all other inmates. In addition, it is now known that the uprising was made possible by cooperation between the ‘Auschwitz Struggle Group’ and a group of Jewish resisters. Members of the latter, who included Roza Robota a young Jew from Ciechanów, a small town north of Warsaw, worked at local explosive manufacturing plants. They smuggled gunpowder into Birkenau in tiny quantities over time.37 Coward’s claims in this regard are not only inaccurate in significant details, but also rather obscene considering the sacrifices made by those who really carried out this incredible feat, a factor that might explain the silence of Coward’s latter-day supporters on this issue. The Password Is Courage makes the further weighty claim that Coward personally saved four hundred Jews from extermination in the gas chambers. This story appears on the Yad Vashem website as verification of heroic status.38 The scheme was allegedly facilitated by the exchange of dead bodies for Red Cross supplies. Hiding in ditches alongside the road to Birkenau with these cadavers, Coward threw them behind columns of marching inmates. This apparently confused the guards, (again portrayed as buffoons instead of draconian, obsessive and sadistic), and allowed live prisoners to escape while maintaining the head count. Just to be clear, this was not a one-off operation. Nearly four hundred Jewish inmates are said to have escaped in this way, three at a time. This 37 Gideon Grief, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 40–43; Herman Langein, ‘The Auschwitz Underground’; Yisrael Gutman, ‘Auschwitz—An Overview’ in Yisreal Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 500. 38 http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4014395,

(accessed 17.09, 27 September 2017).

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means the scheme would have been carried out approximately 130 times. If true, then Coward undoubtedly deserved all the post-war plaudits he received. However, there are some further major factual discrepancies in the narrative. For example, selections for the gas chamber although frequent, did not occur every night as suggested. Furthermore, those selected for the gas chambers did not walk from Monowitz to Birkenau but were transported by lorry following selections. Thought should also be given to the language barriers. Monowitz held prisoners from all over Europe, creating a tumult of divergent tongues. The difficulties of executing a complex plan like the one described, would have been virtually insurmountable. Nor does Coward’s story take into account the desperation of inmates. Life in the concentration camp was a continuous struggle for survival of all against all and information was power. Those wishing to curry favour with the authorities could not have been counted on to keep silent. Additionally, inmates were often near death and their weakness and lethargy would probably have precluded the major exertions required to make a successful escape. Context here, once again, is vital for understanding why Coward’s story escaped scrutiny. British knowledge about the mass murder of Jews under Nazi rule was widespread in post-war Britain, but details were missing. The Password Is Courage traded on both. The cover of the first few editions portrayed an iconic view of Birkenau, with smoke billowing from chimneys. Presumably, this was an image that the publishers thought would be recognisable to what, after all, turned out to be a sizeable mid-1950s readership. Yet, at the same time, intricate details about gassing procedures and slave labour programmes had not fully penetrated into the public sphere.39 When Holocaust scholar, Joseph White, revisited Coward’s story at the start of the twenty-first century, he sought to present a more balanced version of the story. Unconvinced as to the veracity of Coward’s ‘body swap’ claim, he scaled down the numbers rescued to ‘two or three’.40 This certainly made it more acceptable to a modern audience, one that is schooled in the Nazi genocide. However, the question needs to be asked whether such an approach brings us closer to the truth. If Coward sought to inflate the number of Jews saved from two or three to nearly four hundred, then that raises a more fundamental question: that of Coward’s fidelity to the truth.

39 1954

saw the publication of Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes (London: Cassell, 1954). It was on its fifth edition after a mere three months, garnering praise for its restrained retelling of the Holocaust.

40 White,

‘Even in Auschwitz…’, p. 282.

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Coward in Context Yet, Coward’s reputation endures. In order to make sense of this when so much evidence points towards systematic fabrication, it is necessary to examine something of the complex dynamic that exists between Holocaust remembrance and the search for historical accuracy. Key to Coward’s success is his inclusion in the esteemed and select group that constitutes the Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem was established in 1953 and a decade later embarked on a global mission to identify and honour the few bold enough to have given aid to European Jews at their time of greatest need. A public Commission was appointed, headed by a Supreme Court Justice, to examine each case and bestow the honour. The award scheme is unique and unprecedented, resulting in right and proper recognition being afforded to individuals who undertook to help stricken Jews, often at considerable personal risk. What then are we to make of the case of Charles Coward? After all, his award has the full weight of Israeli officialdom behind it. It is worth examining the circumstances surrounding Coward’s acceptance into this venerated institution. He was invited to Israel sometime after the publication of The Password Is Courage by the British Immigrants Association (BIA) to receive an award for helping Jews.41 While there it became apparent that Coward had known a fellow POW by the name of Yitzchak Persky, who was the father of none other than Shimon Peres, who was then Director General of the Ministry of Defence. The BIA contacted Peres’s office and arranged for Coward to visit the family home for dinner. Here perhaps it is possible to glimpse how Coward himself, perhaps in contradistinction to his image as a reluctant public figure, pro-actively promoted his own story and was adept at gilding the lily. This adornment proceeded as follows. During the war Persky, taken prisoner in Greece, managed to escape Nazi clutches, spending ‘a year hidden alone in a succession of secluded monasteries’. The Greek underground eventually ‘brought him to a small village near Mount Olympus’ where a number of British POWs were hiding out. The alleged leader of this band of renegades was, according to Peres, none other than Charlie Coward. Led by the intrepid sergeant, the men commandeered a boat and set out for Turkey. The death of one of their number, according to Peres, prompted Coward to decide that ‘my father must adopt the dead man’s identity instead of his own Jewish one, in case they were caught again’. They were indeed caught, but this was not the end of their war, as Coward and Persky professedly embarked on a series of adventures together. On their final escape, according to this rendition, ‘they grabbed a horse and cart and galloped towards General Patton’s lines bellowing ‘We’re British’.

41 The British Immigrants Association was set up in the early 1950s to help British immigrants integrate into Israeli society.

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Once again, the story is full of holes. Not least of which was that Coward was never in Greece, as verified by his own repatriation form. More importantly why did Shimon’s father, later known as Gershon Peres, endorse what was patently a false story. It seems that one of three things happened: Persky deliberately invented important elements of his own wartime account in collusion with Coward, or; he was confused about the identity of the person who ‘saved his life’ and with whom he seems to have spent time in captivity or; he was rather bewildered about his wartime experiences and further befuddled by Coward’s expansive new claims. The final option is perhaps the most likely. After all, Persky did not instigate the post-war meeting, so it certainly seems he did not set out to deceive anyone. Moreover, in his autobiography, Peres states that his family ‘all fell under the spell of this extraordinary man’.42 A man who had also managed to convince the Peres family that he was the recipient of the Victoria Cross. He was not. However, Coward’s persuasive skills are not enough to explain that level of credulity. Shimon Peres was undoubtedly proud of his father and of the role he played during the Second World War. Being presented with what appeared to be evidence of his father’s heroism would probably have increased his propensity to believe the stories. But again, this does not fully resolve the issue. We have to look further at the interaction between national memory and identity, those ‘intangible and imagined notions, created and shared by some larger group of population’, and state politics, something altogether more palpable.43 Shimon Peres was, in many ways, a crucible for all those elements. He considered his life as one ‘entwined with the birth and construction of Israel’.44 Clearly, the Holocaust is an important aspect of Israel’s founding principles. However, Peres’ principal connection with the Holocaust was through his father, a former prisoner of the Nazis. During the 1950s and 60s, as Israel fought for its very existence, Peres was a pivotal figure in procuring aircraft and nuclear capability for his country’s defence. During a period when the overriding image of European Jews under Nazi rule was passive, the appeal of a father who was pro-active and heroic, values more in tune with Israeli nation building, must have been close to overwhelming. Thus, we are left with a connection between Israeli and British identities, one that lasts to this day and rests on a longing for a predominantly heroic conception of engagement with war and Holocaust. In 2012, British MPs called for the release of Yitzhak Perksy’s service record and archive files about his time as a POW. Defence Secretary at the time, Phillip Hammond, 42 Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace: Memoirs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), p. 52. 43 Tomasz

Cebulski, ‘Memory of the Holocaust and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in Israel’, Paper Presented by Tomasz Cebulski on the “Legacy of the Holocaust” Conference, Organised by the University of Northern Iowa and the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, May 2007. 44 ‘Shimon

Peres, In Memoir, ‘Takes on Israel Past and Future’, New York Times, 7 September 2017.

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announced that ‘The Ministry of Defence and the National Archives need to release all the information it holds about Yitzhak Persky and other British POWs at Auschwitz. These men served their country and we should pay full tribute to their courage’. His comments were echoed by John Woodcock, chair of Labour Friends of Israel, who added that ‘We should also be proud of the ties that we have long enjoyed with the people of Israel—ties based on shared sacrifice and values’. This campaign was championed by the Jewish Chronicle, which reported, unquestioningly, the heroic deeds claimed by Coward and Persky.45 The same year, Coward posthumously received the British Hero of the Holocaust medal. Suffice to say, his reputation remains in tact. The enduring acceptance of Coward’s story has had ramifications elsewhere. A 2011 book about Denis Avey entitled The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz enjoyed international success. Avey, an anonymous ex-member of the E715 work detachment until the turn of the century, was revealed as a man very much in Coward’s image: a firebrand, provocateur and rabble-rouser bent on waging a personal war against his captors, shrewdly aware of the injustices being played out before his enlightened gaze. Other elements that echo Coward’s story include interrogations at the hands of sadistic Germans, instigating sabotage and a propensity to be at the heart of the action. The claims that Avey communicated with his family in England using an amateur code, that he put himself at risk for the sake of Jewish inmates, that he saw a transport of Jews being marched to Birkenau (although this was left out of his book) and, most importantly, that he spent time in Monowitz (this was changed from an earlier claim to have been inside Birkenau), are all present in Coward’s account. This last attestation, that he ‘broke into Auschwitz’, involved a ruse that more or less exactly mirrors that of Coward: swapping clothes with an inmate at the end of the working day, bribing a guard or kapo with cigarettes, having help from the ‘inside’ and spending the night in Monowitz. And yet, for Avey, Coward was a ‘conman’ as he told his Imperial War Museum interviewer in 2001 and he is completely ignored in The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz.46 Coward was undoubtedly the inspiration for Avey’s fantasies. The success of Coward’s story, that it has remained largely unchallenged, somehow generated a common and long-standing belief that a resourceful individual and a degree of British guile was all that was needed to puncture the epicentre of the Final Solution. Avey’s success, whether acknowledged by him or not, was built on this distorted foundation. Yet, these stories struck and continue to strike a chord in Britain. They resonate because they present tales that people in Britain generally want to believe.

45 The

Jewish Chronicle, 26 January 2012.

46 Denis

Avey with Rob Broomby, The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz (London: Hodder and Staughton, 2011).

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Conclusion The very complexity of modern living perhaps contributes to a widespread desire for more simplistic readings of the past and this has aided Coward’s (and Avey’s) continued acceptance. Scholars are right to point out the fallacy of this tendency. However, the case of Charles Coward reveals that academia might share some responsibility for the current state of affairs. That Coward’s story gained traction in a post-war context hungry for heroes should come as no surprise. That it has remained virtually unscathed in the context of an everexpanding Holocaust historiography poses a problem for modern scholarship. It is a body of work that vigorously takes issue with ‘Britain’s conventional, celebratory narrative of the war’.47 Driven by an understandable desire to counteract overweening nationalistic posturing, scholarship concerning Britain and its relationship to the Holocaust has arguably developed its own internal imbalance. The principle historiographical arguments have barely altered since the 1990s, a decade that, like any other, possessed its own motivations for re-writing history. Perhaps this contributes to the widening gap between popular understandings of the war on the one hand, and on the other, scholarly interpretations of British reactions to the Holocaust.48 This is not to say that academia should be anything less than rigorous in uncovering the past. However, it is almost as if there is an underlying belief within the academic community that the story of Britain and the Holocaust has already been told. It has not. Increasing emphasis on memory, remembrance, memorialisation and education is in many ways a welcome shift and certainly opens up rich seams of study for a new generation of scholars.49 However, this change of emphasis towards commemoration, which by definition pertains to the post-war period, has arguably averted attention from thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of untapped primary source documents from the Holocaust era itself, sources that could shed further light on the way Britain understood and dealt with the mass murder of European Jews.50 Given the vast historiography of the Holocaust, serious monographs about Britain’s contemporary interaction with it have been relatively few and far between.51 In recent years published output 47 Caroline

Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds.), British and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 3.

48 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (London: MacMillan, 2016), p. xxv. 49 For example, Sharples and Jensen (eds.), British and the Holocaust; Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness. 50 The National Archive at Kew for example, has been extensively raided for Foreign Office records however it contains a trove of other material that requires mining. 51 In

terms of major contributions, by my reckoning there was one in the 1950s, one in the 1960s, three in the 1970s, one in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, and three in the 2000s. More recently there has been a perceptible shift towards memory and representation in this

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has slowed to a trickle. To an extent, it seems to have become unfashionable to write Holocaust history books that are grounded in uncovering primary sources and building a picture from that evidence. Scholars of Holocaust memorialisation and education in Britain will perhaps be placed at a disadvantage unless their work is underpinned by a lively on-going investigation into the events being represented. Squaring that particular circle has the potential to open up new ways of bridging the gap between scholarship and popular understandings of the Second World War. It would certainly help to undermine some of the spurious claims that seem, too easily, to gain public traction. False claims of heroism, in the end, do little more than undermine those who really suffered and those who made genuine sacrifices to help stricken Jews. As the late lamented David Cesarani wrote, ‘we need to know more Holocaust history, not less’.52

subject, for example Sharples and Jensen, Britain and the Holocaust and Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness. 52 The

Observer, 25 July 1999.

CHAPTER 8

Belsen and the British Dan Stone

We feel that some of you who were not here at BELSEN from the beginning might like to see these notes. They give the most accurate facts available. We would like to have produced them before, but we were one and all rather busy on the first main job of clearing the Concentration Camp. That job is now finished.1

In 1946, Dutch Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg published a small collection of essays about Bergen-Belsen, where he and his wife were incarcerated from January 1944 until the liberation of the camp in April 1945. In the book, he describes at one point how one of the female guards beat a fifteen-yearold boy whose father was already dead, whose mother was at death’s door, one of whose sisters was in hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis and whose other sister was ‘wandering about somewhere or playing in the mud, unsupervised, unkempt, with a snotty nose, ragged, an open and oversized shoe on one foot, and a shredded slipper on the other’. He commented on this image: ‘That, historian of the future, was how it was every day in the heart 1 Col. H.L.W. Bird, ‘Notes on Belsen Camp’ (18 May 1945), C.C. Warmer Papers,

Wiener Library, London, 1936/1/3, 1. Also in Imperial War Museum, London, docs. 9230. D. Stone (B) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_8

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of Europe, around the middle of the twentieth century. In the background of such a tableau, paint in only a garbage truck full of naked, emaciated corpses’.2 Decades after Herzberg wrote these words, we still reel at the images captured by the military photographers and film-makers at Bergen-Belsen. The ‘historians of the future’ have described the history and changing nature of the camp in great detail, and have written a huge amount about its liberation by British and Canadian (and some American) forces, and the assistance rendered them by doctors, nurses, and charitable organisations. Yet they, like everyone else, remain shocked by what the Nazis did at Belsen. Although it was not established as a death camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the end of the war Belsen was functioning like a death camp, and the photographs and film footage of the mountains of corpses—about 10,000 of them—around which some 50,000 inmates were desperately clinging to life, have lost none of their power as evidence of the Third Reich’s brutal abandonment of the basics of human decency. The job of clearing the camp, as Colonel Bird noted, took weeks, but explaining it remains a challenge. This chapter focuses on the immediate post-liberation period in order to analyse what the British found at Belsen in April 1945 and how the camp was understood by those who saw it in those first days and weeks after ‘liberation’.3 I examine the British approach to dealing with the survivors, noting that criticism of the feeding regime and medical care needs to be contextualised so that the enormity of the task is better appreciated. I note that it did not take long for ‘Belsen’ to enter into British consciousness as a byword for evil. But I also show that among the confusion of the end of the war, which led to the fact that Belsen’s place in the Nazi camp system remained poorly understood for decades, there were commentators who saw clearly what Belsen was and why, even if it was not a death camp, it could act as an appropriate symbol of Nazi atrocity. Most important, in a chapter on ‘Belsen and the British’, I show that dealing with the aftermath of the liberation was never just a British affair; rather, from medical care to identifying the dead to tracing survivors (a topic which is rarely mentioned in the British-focused literature), everything associated with the administration of Belsen, though it was headed by the British occupation forces and civilian authorities, required international assistance. Here I draw on the holdings of the International Tracing Service to illustrate the international dimension of the relief process, understood in 2 Abel

Herzberg, Amor Fati: Seven Essays on Bergen-Belsen, trans. Jack Santcross (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016 [1946]), p. 36.

3I

use the term in inverted commas to indicate that the demise of the camp did not mean the end of survivors’ troubles. Indeed, many died after ‘liberation’ because they were too weak to survive and the rest struggled, often for the rest of their lives, to regain some sense of physical and psychic normality. For further detail, see Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

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the widest terms. Part of the confusion that arose in the British ‘memory’ of Belsen was a result of the fact that national pride obscured the complex, international nature of the military takeover of the camp and everything that flowed from it, leaving in its place a simplified narrative in which ‘the British’ alone were responsible for what happened next. This simplification meant that ‘Belsen’ was identified in British popular understandings with ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘Treblinka’ as a major killing site, when it only became one in the first months of 1945. Nevertheless, as I show in the final section, the misidentification of Belsen as a death camp was not wholly inappropriate given the huge numbers of inmates who died there in the last months of the war, especially when the camp is understood from the victims’ rather than the perpetrators’ perspective.

The Military at Belsen A purely military analysis of the liberation of Belsen might begin with the ceasefire agreement between the British army and the Wehrmacht, who surrendered the camp according to the somewhat vague terms of the agreement of 13 April 1945. Agreeing that ‘[b]oth British and German tps [i.e. troops] will make every effort to avoid a battle in this area’, the camp—the true state of which had not been revealed by commandant Josef Kramer to the British— was handed over.4 The report might then continue in dispassionate terms with reference to the disarming of the Hungarian troops who had been left behind, the reconnecting of the water supply and the start of the process of clearing the camp and caring for the inmates. However, the human element soon bursts through in all such accounts, and no matter how often one reads the soldiers’ reports one cannot but be struck by their shock and their sense that words were inadequate. For example, Lt.Col. R.I.G. Taylor, commander of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, who took over as commandant of the camp, starts his report in typical, clipped style by noting the sequence of events running up to the entry into the camp. A few paragraphs later, Taylor struggles to remain restrained: As we walked down the main roadway of the camp we were cheered by the internees, and for the first time we saw their condition. A great number of them were little more than living skeletons, with haggard yellowish faces. Most of the men wore a striped pyjama type of clothing – others wore rags, while the women wore striped flannel gowns, or any other garment

4 See

‘AGREEMENT with regard to BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP made by Chief of Staff, 1 Para Army, Military Commandant BERGEN, and BGS 8 Corps’, The National Archives, Kew (henceforth TNA), WO171/4773. Also reproduced in Raymond Phillips (ed.), Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-four Others (The Belsen Trial) (London: William Hodge & Company, 1949), p. 396.

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that they had managed to acquire. Many of them were without shoes and wore only socks and stockings. There were men and women lying in heaps on both sides of the track. Others were walking slowly and aimlessly about – a vacant expression on their starved faces. There was a concrete pit near the first cookhouse we visited, with a few inches of dirty water in the bottom – this was the only water supply that was seen, and crowds were round it trying to fill tins and jars tied to the end of long sticks.5

Many such reports were even more graphic, not flinching from recounting the filth, the heaps of corpses lying around, and evidence of cannibalism. Brigadier Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes’ statement to the court at the Belsen Trial on 18 September 1945, that ‘[t]he compounds were absolutely one mass of human excreta’ serves as a metaphor for the Nazi camps in general.6 What Taylor and other British officers could not know was that in those final days before they entered the camp, the madness of Belsen reached its apogee as the SS forced the dying inmates to carry corpses to mass graves. ‘And so we saw and enacted the last of those memorable tableaux which will stay in our minds forever’, as German inmate Rudolf Küstermeier put it. ‘Two bands played music all day long while two thousand men were dragging corpses to the burial pits. … the corpses jolted over the stones and the SS men and Capos clubbed and lashed the stumbling prisoners, to the melodies of Léhar and Johann Strauss’.7 The soldiers’ reports are closely echoed by the survivors’ diaries and testimonies. What follows is a typical description of liberation from the point of view of one of Belsen’s inmates: Finally, one morning, I think it was 15 April 1945 (at that time I could no longer perceive my environment and I lay almost the whole time in agony), a high-pitched cry rang out: ‘They’re here, they’re here!’ ‘Who?’ ‘The English of course.’ ‘Ah’, sounded the answer, almost without interest. It is peculiar and paradoxical, that the moment we had been yearning for throughout the whole period of the war, about which we spoke ceaselessly, which we painted for each other in the most varied fantasies, that shone in the distance for us like a lighthouse showing us the way, the moment that not only we but the whole world had waited for,

5 Lt.-Col. 6 Phillips 7 Rudolf

R.I.G. Taylor, ‘Report on Belsen Camp’, p. 3. TNA WO171/4773. (ed.), Belsen Trial, p. 31.

Küstermeier, ‘How We Lived in Belsen’ (August 1945), in Derrick Sington, Belsen Uncovered (London: Duckworth, 1946), pp. 138–139. Küstermeier, a Social Democrat, was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in 1934, at the end of which he was sent to Sachsenhausen and then to Belsen. In March 1946 he became editor of Die Welt.

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left us cold. If you ask what feelings I had at the liberation, I reply: ‘absolutely none.’ A person whose sister died in her arms a few hours before, who was herself standing with one foot in the grave, was naturally as little interested in the fact that the English had come to liberate her, as in the fact that it was raining at the equator. But here hats off to the English! They immediately set to work and threw themselves fearlessly and without protective masks into the contaminated blocks. They carried the corpses out with their bare hands and dug an enormous mass grave so that the bodies would not roll on the ground like carrion. They started the water immediately, supplied us with food and freed us from lice. They accomplished a huge achievement in the shortest possible time, for they gradually brought all those still living to a new, clean camp. And when the camp was closed behind the last prisoner, they set this most horrible place in the world alight, and it disappeared from the surface of the earth forever. However, it remained in the memories of all those who had lost their dearest relatives and friends there. We, the survivors of Belsen, spontaneously pay our respects to our heroes and dedicate a reverent and silent thought to them.8

Like many others in the camp, Zdenka Fantlova was dying and was in no shape to appreciate what was happening. Moving scenes of survivors kissing the hands of their liberators—as in the famous footage of the camp in the American documentary film Nazi Concentration Camps —are exceptions, not the norm. More common was the scene of utter degradation and the inability of the inmates to react to events unfolding around them, for they were too ill. In his report of 18 May 1945, ‘The Story of Belsen’, Captain Andrew Pares provided an exemplary description of what the British forces found at Belsen after the ceasefire had taken effect: About 50% of the inmates were in need of immediate hospital treatment. All of them had been without any food for seven days, and prior to that living on the normal concentration camp semi-starvation scale of diet. There were about 10,000 typhus-infected bodies, mostly naked and many in an advanced stage of decomposition, lying around the camp, both inside and

8 Zdenka

Fantlova, ‘Modernes Mittelalter’ [‘The Modern Middle Ages’] (1945). 1.1.3.0/82351126_1, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Wiener Library, London (henceforth ITS DAWL). Fantlova has subsequently become well known as the author of The Tin Ring, trans. Deryck Viney (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Northumbria Press, 2010). The start of chapter 49 of that book (p. 214) is based on this postwar statement and I have borrowed some of the translation. It is worth noting that whilst immediately after the war, Fantlova referred to the ‘English’, in The Tin Ring she corrects it to the ‘British’.

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outside the huts, which required immediate burial; and the daily death rate was 4/500. The living conditions were appalling – people were sleeping 3 in a bed, mainly treble-bunk beds, and huts which would normally accommodate 60 were housing 600. There were no sanitary arrangements, and both inside and outside the huts was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags, and filth. There were some 50,000 persons to supply and feed, but the cooking facilities were totally inadequate. There were 5 cookhouses of varying size equipped with a number of large boilers, and the only containers available to distribute the food were a few 100 and 50 litre tubs. A large proportion of the occupants were bed-ridden, and many were incapable even of feeding themselves. The internees had lost all self-respect and been degraded morally to the level of beasts. The clothes were in rags and teeming with lice; they had no eating utensils or plates, and at the time of the food distribution they behaved more like ravenous wolves than human beings.9

Such reports, and especially that published in the supplement to the British Zone Review on 13 October 1945, provided the first detailed accounts of the liberation and established many of the tropes that identified Belsen with ‘the British’ for decades thereafter (Fig. 8.1).

Medical Care After Liberation Planning for relief began several years before the end of the war. Apart from the military services, in 1942, COBSRA, the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad, was established with the aim of pooling expertise and resources. Of the forty teams that joined, eleven sent members to continental Europe at the end of the war.10 Yet preparation was wholly inadequate for what the military and the charities were to find at Belsen. Many historians have criticised the British army for not being better prepared, and it does indeed seem strange that with all the knowledge of Nazi camps that had proliferated from 1933 onwards, including considerable intelligence towards the end of the war about

9 Captain

Andrew Pares, ‘The Story of Belsen’ (18 May 1945), p. 1. Charles Phillip Sharp Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 2004.664.3. This text was published in 113 L.A.A. Regiment, The Story of Belsen (1945), p. 4, a copy of which is in C.C. Warmer Papers, Wiener Library, 1936/1/2.

10 Johannes-Dieter Steinert, ‘British Relief Teams in Belsen Concentration Camp: Emergency Relief Teams and the Perception of Survivors’, Holocaust Studies, 12, 1–2 (2006), 63.

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Fig. 8.1 Supplement to British Zone Review, 13 October 1945

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slave labour and the sub-camp system, more was not done.11 Yet apart from the fact that Belsen was the only camp to be surrendered by the SS and that it was in the middle of an ongoing war zone, the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of inmates from camps further east meant that one can understand why what the Allies found there was some way from what they had been led to expect. As Brigadier Glyn Hughes, who headed the medical relief work, noted, based on their knowledge of numbers in the camp, presumably from Kramer’s report when negotiating the ceasefire, HQ 8 Corps had estimated initial requirements; ‘ignorant however of the indescribable conditions that existed’, Glyn Hughes went on, ‘these could not possibly be adequate’.12 As a result of Belsen’s change in status shortly before the end of the war, becoming a dumping ground for evacuees from concentration camps further east, the medical challenge was immense. It is easy to forget that the number of inmates in the camp meant that it was the size of a small town and that it soon became the largest hospital in Europe. Glyn Hughes noted that of 28,185 in the women’s compound in Camp 1, 21,000 required hospitalisation, with the comparable figure for the men being over 9000 of 12,000.13 Given that fact, the medical care that did take place should be recognised as a tremendous effort on the part of the liberators. Certainly, mistakes were made and initially supplies and resources were woefully inadequate, but it is too easy to lay the blame for this at the door of the British. Even if, as Ben Shephard rightly says, the planning literature had little to say about Jews or concentration camps specifically, so that ‘[t]he genocide of the Jews was contained within a larger cataclysm’, the scale of Belsen would still have challenged the best-prepared relief effort.14 As Major Charles Phillip Sharp of the 113th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment noted in his diary: ‘The RAMC are beginning work at BELSON 11 See, for example, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, Evaluation and Dissemination Section, G-2 (Counter-Intelligence Sub-Division), Basic Handbook KLs (Konzentrationslager): Axis Concentration Camps and Detention Centres Reported as Such in Europe (n.d., c. early 1945), 6.1.1/82328575#1ff, ITS DAWL. This remarkable document shows that the Allies were very well-informed about the nature of the camp system in the last months of the war, although it was of course a rapidly-changing scene, given the evacuations and the shunting of inmates around on ‘death marches’. On pre-war understandings of Nazism, see Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 12 H.L. Glyn Hughes, ‘Belsen Concentration Camp’, in Brig. H.L. Glyn Hughes and Lt.Col. Gwyn Evans, Belsen Concentration Camp: Medical and General Reports Submitted by HQ Second Army (1945), Wiener Library, OSP 332, Appendix B, p. 5. 13 Glyn 14 Ben

Hughes, ‘Belsen Concentration Camp’, p. 2.

Shephard, ‘The Medical Relief Effort at Belsen’, Holocaust Studies, 12, 1–2 (2006), 33. See also Shephard, ‘“Becoming Planning Minded”: The Theory and Practice of Relief 1940–1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 3 (2008), 405–419, and Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London: Vintage, 2011), esp. ch6.

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[sic] and their first forecast is that 15000 (minimum) of the living will not last 10 days. … We start to feed the poor wretches but many of them are too far gone to eat’.15 Too many of the inmates were simply too close to death to be helped. This was the fault of the SS’ Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), which controlled the administration of concentration camps, and not the British Army. The international nature of the post-liberation scene is evident not just in the number of testimonies given by survivors in almost every language of Europe but in the memoirs of those involved in caring for them. As with the military occupation of the camp, British doctors, nurses and charities predominated. But, just as Canadian forces were alongside the British,16 so the medical operation would have been severely hindered without the help of an international cast of supporters, including among others: Belgian medical students, international agents of the ICRC and other humanitarian organisations, those survivors of Belsen from across Europe now well enough to assist and, much to the chagrin of the survivors and many of the British, German nurses. The existence of testimonies such as that by Swiss Red Cross worker, Anny Pfirter, in languages other than English, reminds us that what has come to be known as ‘the relief of Belsen’ was not solely a British affair. Were that the case, communication between the liberators and the surviving inmates and the former guards, to name only the most obvious matter, would have been considerably harder in this ‘babylonische Sprachengewiss’.17 As Pfirter added: ‘In addition to numerous dialects, 22 official languages were spoken in the camp. I can hardly believe now that we managed to understand the stories told by our patients in a foreign language. When they spoke in their mother tongue, and in their dialect in particular, their speech was more spontaneous and we understood them better than if it were partially interpreted’.18 Most important, one should not forget that the running of the Hohne DP camp, though it was in the British Zone of Occupation, fell officially under the remit of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

15 Major Charles Phillip Sharp, Notes. From 1 Jan 45 (unpublished manuscript), p. 57. Charles Phillip Sharp Collection, USHMM, Washington, DC, 2004.664.3. I am indebted to Tim Cole for alerting me to Major Sharp’s diary; see Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 201–202. 16 Mark

Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 17 Or ‘Babel of languages.’ Anny Pfirter, ‘Erinnerungen an einer Mission des I.K.R.K.: Hommage a Mademoiselle Odier’ (3 October 1955), 1.1.3.0/82351152_1, 4, ITS DAWL. 18 Pfirter, ‘Erinnerungen’, p. 4. This rough translation of the original is from Ben Flanagan and Donald Bloxham (eds.), Remembering Belsen: Eyewitnesses Record the Liberation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), p. 54.

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(UNRRA). UNRRA and its successor agency, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) with their remits to repatriate DPs and later to resettle them in third countries, were the lead organisations; the roles played by British and international charities, however invaluable their contribution, took place in this wider international context.19 Some of the most important relief organisations, such as the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), left the COBSRA umbrella organisation and made direct agreements with UNRRA. For the JCRA, this decision, which took it out of the British Red Cross Society’s embrace, allowed it to focus more on its own priorities, that is Jewish survivors and keeping up pressure with respect to the British government’s position on Palestine.20 Nevertheless, as Dieter Steinert reminds us, the COBSRA teams’ work remained indispensable throughout the whole UNRRA period. In fact, when the IRO took over from UNRRA in the summer of 1947, the importance of the COBSRA contribution rose again. And besides the British Red Cross Commission, five Jewish charities were especially important: the American Joint Distribution Committee (‘the Joint’), the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the JCRA. There were relief contributions made by the Italian, Dutch, Polish and American Red Cross, the YMCA and YWCA, the Papal Relief Commission, CARE, CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany) and the Quakers.21 That said, in the early post-liberation days before civilian workers were allowed in, the relief effort was primarily a British affair, with assistance from the Canadian military. Fantlova’s praise for the British in those first days, despite the high post-liberation death rate, is well-deserved, for, as Anita Lasker-Wallfisch observed, ‘[w]hat the British Army had to cope with was simply mind-boggling’.22 Glyn Hughes reminds us that the organisation of essentials in the immediate post-liberation period, their transport into place and the equipping of a hospital which grew to 14,000 beds, ‘was carried out solely by RAMC units and medical personnel’.23 Medical officer Robert Collis said of the medical students sent to Belsen that they ‘have done and are doing a work of epic gallantry and are worthy of all honour’; Lt.-Col. J.T. Lewis, the 19 It is worth bearing in mind that the UK made the second-largest contribution to the costs of UNRRA and IRO, after the US. 20 Johannes-Dieter

Steinert, Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit: Britische humanitäre Hilfer in Deutschland. Die Helfer, die Befreiten und die Deutschen (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag, 2007), pp. 81–82.

21 Steinert,

Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit, p. 83.

22 Anita

Lasker-Wallfisch, ‘A Survivor’s Memories of Liberation’, in Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani (eds.), Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), p. 25. 23 Glyn

Hughes, ‘Belsen Concentration Camp’, p. 9.

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man in charge of the Glyn Hughes Hospital at Belsen, praised the nurses there for having ‘shed a light on British nursing which will never be forgotten’; and Josef Rosensaft, head of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews and by no means afraid of criticising the British over their policies towards the survivors, was full of admiration for Glyn Hughes and Col. Johnston, who ‘conducted the desperate drive to save the liberated inmates of Belsen, and many were saved because of their efforts’.24

‘the Search in Belsen’ Among the activities conducted at Belsen, the work of tracing individuals has been long neglected by historians, who have focused more on the medical care of survivors and the creation of the DP camps.25 Yet the work of tracing and identifying people was a crucial aspect of the post-liberation tasks facing the occupiers, and is something we can now appreciate thanks to the opening of the International Tracing Service (ITS) collections. Among them, the socalled ‘factual documents’ (Sachdokumente) on Belsen are not extensive—as opposed to records of individuals who were at some point in Belsen, which are numerous—but they contain some revealing material. In particular, a report by Lt. H. François-Poncet, the French Search Officer at Belsen, is especially interesting for the light it sheds on postwar activities at the former concentration camp. The report began with an account of the liberation of the camp and the problems facing the British once they discovered the true scale of the task, as in this page26 :

24 W.R.F.

Collis, ‘Belsen Camp: A Preliminary Report’, British Medical Journal (9 June 1945), 814; J.T. Lewis, ‘Medical Problems at Belsen Concentration Camp (1945)’, Ulster Medical Journal, 54, 2 (1985), 123; Josef Rosensaft, ‘Our Belsen’, in Irgun Sheerit Hapleita Me’Haezor Habriti (ed.), Belsen (Tel Aviv: Irgun Sheerit Hapleita Me’Haezor Habriti, 1957), p. 29. For further discussion, see Stone, The Liberation of the Camps, ch3. 25 On

the Hohne (Belsen) DP Camp, see Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany, trans. John A. Broadwin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 167–210; Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002); Erik Somers and René Kok (eds.), Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945–1950: The Unique Photo Album of Zippy Orlin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Nicola Schlichting, ‘Öffnet die Tore von Erez Israel’: Das jüdische DP-Camp Belsen 1945–1948 (Nuremberg: Antogo Verlag, 2005); Habbo Knoch and Thomas Rahe (eds.), Bergen-Belsen: Neue Forschungen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014).

26 Lt. H. François-Poncet, ‘Report on The Search in Belsen’, 10 June 1946. 1.1.3.0/82350819_1, ITS DAWL.

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By the time this report was written, the Belsen DP camp was under the control of UNRRA, which received assistance from a British Red Cross team, the Jewish Relief Unit and the Joint in education, welfare and emigration matters. The Tracing Unit that was established at the Belsen DP Camp ran on a tight budget but recruited staff from local Germans as well, primarily from among the DPs, because of their language skills and knowledge of what had transpired. Perhaps one of the reasons why historians have not devoted much attention to tracing at Belsen is because it does not fall into the ‘Belsen and the British’ narrative. Rather, from its inception, tracing was a transnational affair, involving staff from many countries and the sharing of information across national lines.27 A map produced by the French Mission in Belsen, accompanying lists of French deportees, provides a helpful illustration of the camp itself and its surroundings and of this international dimension28 : François-Poncet noted the general problems with identifying people, such as the many possible spellings of frequently occurring names, the presence of many survivors with the same name, and how people often gave false names either to the Germans when they entered the camp—for fear that their families would be subjected to reprisals—or to the liberating authorities, if they were trying to avoid returning to Eastern European countries. He then alluded to the specific problems affecting Belsen, in particular that the Germans had destroyed the camp records and that it had been impossible to identify the dead who were buried in huge numbers in communal graves in the days and weeks following the liberation. ‘As most of the survivors could not even give their own names’, he drily observed, ‘it was useless trying to obtain information as to the identity of the dead’. The result was that out of some 28,000 people buried after the liberation, only about 3500 could be identified.29

27 See

Dan Stone. ‘The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing Service and the Construction of the Past as History’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 31, 2 (2017), 69– 88; and ‘“The Greatest Detective Story in History”: The BBC, the International Tracing Service, and the Memory of Nazi Crimes in Early Postwar Britain’, History & Memory, 29, 2 (2017), 63–89. 28 Henri François-Poncet, Mission Française de Raptriement et Recherche B.A.O.R. (Mission de Belsen), Listes ayant trait aux déportés français du camp de Belsen (1 October 1946), 1.1.3.0/82350880_1, ITS DAWL. 29 François-Poncet, ‘Report on The Search in Belsen’. 1.1.3.0/82350826_1, ITS DAWL. See also the discussion of this document in Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), pp. 170–171.

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Still, the committees formed by the inmates even before the Germans surrendered the camp had compiled some lists and these, together with lists created by national liaison officials sent to the camp after the liberation to obtain information on and aid nationals of their countries with repatriation, formed the basis of tracing work in the DP camp, at least until such officials left, taking their lists with them, as François-Poncet complained. Tracing work in the camp was, by mid-1946, thus reliant on records kept by the Central Registration Office in the camp, the Central Jewish Committee, the Polish Committee, the Glyn Hughes Hospital and the AJDC. Another report gives a good indication of the organisation of the searching process at Belsen and stresses the different tracing organisations involved. It was unavoidably a work of international cooperation30 : As the report notes, cooperation between the different agencies was not always as generous as it could have been, meaning that there was considerable duplication of efforts. Even so, it is clear that this aspect of the camp’s afterlife brought the British into close relationships with survivors’ committees and national organisations from other countries.

30 ‘Report on the Visit to BELSEN Camp by Capt I. D. Kadomtzeff and Lt M. L. Graham (17 Aug 45 to 25 Aug 45)’ (n.d., early September 1945). 1.1.3.0/82350945_1 and 82350946_1, ITS DAWL. The report was sent by Lt Col C.C. Allan of the Search Bureau at Bunde (the British National Tracing Bureau) to SSO 30 Corps on 14 September 1945.

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Belsen as a Death Camp Included in the ITS collections on Belsen is a report by a former inmate on ‘this extermination camp’.31 The report itself is fascinating—its author states that before they arrived there just a few weeks before the liberation, no one among his comrades had heard of Belsen—but the mere fact that he designates the camp an ‘extermination camp’ (Vernichtungslager) is noteworthy. In similar vein, Ada Bimko (Rosensaft), a famed inmate doctor and later key player in the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone, testified at the Belsen Trial that in its final months Belsen was worse than Auschwitz in terms of food and sanitation, a statement which gives some indication of how the camp was perceived by its inmates.32 That Belsen became central to British culture, including being shorthand for anyone thin or for atrocity in general, is beyond doubt. We have become used to the claim that the British misunderstanding of the Holocaust—i.e. its association with concentration camps in Germany itself—was based on the mistaken assumption that Belsen was a death camp, and that the focus on Belsen was a direct consequence of its being liberated by British forces. Images of the liberation of Belsen became touchstones in the British collective memory of World War II and the genocide of the Jews, and only decades later—from the 1990s onwards—did scholars and public consciousness really grasp the fact that Belsen was not really a ‘Holocaust camp’. Although it was always involved in the unfolding of the Holocaust, Belsen was originally a ‘detention camp’ (‘Aufenthaltslager’) for ‘privileged prisoners’. These were Jews with passports of neutral or Allied states, or ‘prominent’ Jews who the Nazis believed could be used as bargaining chips; in other words, Jews who were exceptions in that they were not to be immediately killed or worked to death. Thus, although the camp’s main historian, Eberhard Kolb, is right to say that the development of Belsen into the ‘horror camp’ of early 1945 ‘was anything but “accidental”’ since what happened there was ‘in keeping with the internal logic of the concentration camp system’,33 it only turned into the site of mass death found by the British army in April 1945 at the start of that year. In the 1990s, the death camps further east, i.e. the Operation Reinhard camps, Chełmno, Majdanek, even smaller camps such as Mały Trostinec and Vaivara 31 Arnošt

Basch, ‘Bericht über die letzte Zeit im Konzentrationslager BERGEN-BELSEN vor, während und nach der Befreiung, zusammengestellt von einem ehemaligen Häftling dieses Vernichtungslager’ (n.d., c1945), 1.1.3.0/82351018_1-82351029_1, ITS DAWL. The document came to ITS from the Yad Vashem archives. Basch had survived a death march from Hannover-Linden, a sub-camp of Neuengamme, to Belsen at the end of March 1945, following the Allied bombing of the factory in which he was set to work. 32 Bimko

in Phillips (ed.), Belsen Trial, p. 71.

33 Eberhard

Kolb, Bergen-Belsen: From ‘Detention Camp’ to Concentration Camp, 1943– 1945, trans. Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), p. 50. See also Thomas Rahe, ‘Das Evakuierungslager Bergen-Belsen’, Dachauer Hefte, 20 (2004), 47–57, esp. 48 where he indicates that the later development of the camp was connected to its incorporation into the WVHA.

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came to people’s attention, as did, most obviously, Auschwitz, the main killing centre of the Holocaust. Given that new understanding, the notion that Belsen had been a death camp gradually fell from British ‘Holocaust consciousness’ to be replaced by Auschwitz. In both cases, a simplification—one camp standing in for a continent-wide genocide—lay at the heart of British understandings. From the point of view of institutional history, this revision of ‘collective memory’ of Belsen is correct. The history of the Nazi camps was one of permanent change, and the murder of the Jews was not part of the history of the camp system until 1942—Jews had been incarcerated in camps before then but once the Holocaust began the majority of Jews were killed by face to shooting in the occupied east or by being starved to death in ghettos in Poland, with death camps which were separate from the SS’s ‘regular’ camp system taking over in 1942.34 Belsen itself had several uses from 1940 onwards, as a POW camp and, from 1943 when it became part of the WVHA’s camp system, a detention camp and then, in the SS euphemism, a ‘recuperation camp’ (Erholungslager).35 Thus although it was part of the camp system, Belsen, like Dachau and Buchenwald, ‘became truly embroiled in the killing process only in the last chaotic weeks of the war as the Third Reich was collapsing and camp inmates—by no means only Jews—were forcibly evacuated from camps that were being approached by the Red Army and made to walk westwards or, in the case of Mittelbau-Dora, in the face of the American approach. These so-called ‘death marches’, as the camps’ inmates called them, witnessed massive loss of life and ended in the camps inside the Third Reich that, unlike the Reinhard Camps, for example were part of the SS’s concentration camp system (i.e. administered by the WVHA). Where previously Belsen and the other camps inside Germany had been connected to the Holocaust through the structures which administered slave labour (such as the Schmelt and Todt organisations) and resources, such as the distribution of stolen goods, at this point they became directly involved. This is also something that UNRRA’s Central Tracing Bureau (the forerunner of the ITS) knew, thanks to its remarkable ‘graves recheck’ programme which sought to retrace the death marches. As well as mapping the routes themselves, the fieldworkers also drew plans of the cemeteries in which camp inmates who had died or been murdered on route were buried in every locality through which they had passed.36 For example, the map of the ‘convoy of 34 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015). 35 To appreciate how outrageous a term ‘Erholungslager’ really was, see Dr. Fritz Leo, ‘The Concentration Camp for Sick, Bergen-Belsen’, Wiener Library, London, Warmer Papers, 1936/1/4, e.g. 5: ‘50,000 people perished from disease and hunger! People mainly between 20 and 40 years, formerly well and healthy, of all nations. This is how they fell victims to this inferno called “Sick Camp.”’ 36 Sebastian

Schönemann, ‘“Accounting for the Dead”: Humanitäre und rechtliche Motive der alliierten Ermittlungsarbeit zu den Todesmärschen’, Freilegungen: Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, 1 (2012), 122–135.

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political prisoners’ from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen on 4 April 1945 gives a clear indication of the route taken on the evacuation. Further documents detail names—where known—of inmates who died or were killed on the way and show their burial locations in local cemeteries.37 Huge amounts of information about the death marches were acquired in this way, which gave rise to a clear understanding of why so many Jewish concentration camp inmates ended up at Belsen and other camps inside Germany at the end of the war (Fig. 8.2). What I want to consider here is not how the change in understanding came about so that we now grasp Belsen ‘correctly’, as it were, in its institutional history as part of the camp system and as part of the Holocaust. Rather, the assumption that a British misunderstanding of Belsen derives from the British liberation of the camp when the liberators assumed they had stumbled across an extermination camp is only partly correct. In fact, some early commentators and survivors understood well that Belsen was not a death camp in the sense that Treblinka or Sobibor had been. Derrick Sington, for example, one of the first British soldiers to enter Belsen on 15 April 1945, wrote a fine little book about the camp, published in 1946. In it he describes a group of Jewish women who had arrived at Belsen only a few days earlier and who were thus not yet as dehumanised as camp inmates of longer standing. He writes of them knowledgeably: ‘Some had come direct from factory camps where conditions, though hard, were not always sub-human. Other young Jewesses, hardy, strong-willed and perhaps a little lucky, had retained their self-respect in the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau from whose gas-chambers they had been saved by the Russian advance’.38 A little further on, Sington refers to the c.18,000 Jewish women in the camp as follows: ‘They were a large part of the survivors of European Jewry, hastily piled into Belsen as the advance of the Allied armies from East and West forced the Germans to evacuate the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and the scores of slave-labour camps in Silesia and North-East Germany. The greater part of these Jewish women were sole survivors of families who had perished in the gas-chambers of Birkenau and Treblinka’.39 Similarly, Captain Pares wrote in his report on Belsen that ‘There was no gas chamber as at the even more infamous camp at Auschwitz, where according to numerous testimonies hundreds of thousands were done to death by this means. Starvation, disease, and physical degradation were the lethal weapons employed at Belsen’.40 There is no misunderstanding about Belsen or the death camps here.

37 See

documents in 5.3.2 and 5.3.5, ITS DAWL.

38 Sington,

Belsen Uncovered, p. 26.

39 Sington,

Belsen Uncovered, p. 47.

40 Pares,

‘The Story of Belsen’, p. 3.

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Fig. 8.2 ‘Convoy of political prisoners 4.4.45’, from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen (5.3.3/84619448_1, ITS DAWL)

Indeed, many of the women described by Sington were former slave labourers who had been extracted from Auschwitz, the Lodz Ghetto or Nazioccupied Hungary as the Third Reich desperately tried to sustain its war effort in autumn 1944, even breaking with its own racial beliefs in the process— here pragmatism trumped ideology, although only partly: the way the slave

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labourers were treated suggested not only that the Nazis had no regard for their well-being or productivity but that they imagined there was an inexhaustible supply of camp labour. Sington’s recognition of the fact that many of these women were sole survivors of their families helps to explain the alacrity with which they, like survivors across Europe, immediately tried to set out— whether they were well enough yet or not—at the first whiff of rumour to try and locate relatives who might be alive (see François-Poncet’s comments above). This criss-crossing of Europe, often ‘illegally’, was one of the reasons the Allies sought to take control of the tracing process: having huge numbers of refugees on the roads was perceived as a hazard by the military and as a form of anarchy by civil authorities.41 Sington’s ability to perceive nuance is echoed in some of the first scholarly inquiries. In the chapter of her Origins of Totalitarianism devoted to concentration camps as the ‘central institution of totalitarian organisational power’, Hannah Arendt included the following footnote: It is of some importance to realise that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. On the other hand, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what and what gives the films their special horror – namely, the sight of the human skeletons – was not at all typical for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany.42

The ‘misunderstanding’ about Belsen thus set in only later, in the universalising of the victims in the postwar newsreels so that their Jewishness was not mentioned, and in the 1950s with the popularisation of Anne Frank’s Diary, the success of bestsellers such as Lord Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika, and the continued assertion of a British nationalist war narrative, from Dunkirk and ‘standing alone’ in 1940, through to D-Day and postwar films of bravery and derring-do, all of which contributed to turning the Holocaust into an abstract evil, the actual facts and figures of which hardly mattered.43 Nevertheless, 41 Jenny

Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), ch3.

42 Hannah

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. edn (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), p. 446, n138. Her comments are right insofar as they pertain to the genocide of the Jews. In fact, millions of Soviet POWs were left to die by starvation in forgotten corners of concentration camps, a gruesome mass murder that has still not properly been researched by historians. 43 See,

for example, Tony Kushner, ‘“I Want to go on Living after My Death”: The Memory of Anne Frank’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 3–25; Kushner, ‘“Wrong War Mate”:

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although from the institutional standpoint of the perpetrators, Belsen was of little importance to the ‘Final Solution’ until early 1945, from a different point of view it was crucial. This is the difference between writing the history of the Holocaust from the perpetrators’ perspective, by which I mean on the basis of perpetrator documents and understanding how the perpetrators ran the whole process, and the victims’ perspective, that is to say, the Holocaust as it was experienced and felt by its victims. This shift represents a recent change in Holocaust historiography, which has tended to be dominated by top-down history, and in which the victims’ agency has been largely absent or side-lined. Saul Friedländer’s recent work, along with that of Christopher Browning, Nikolaus Wachsmann, Laura Jockusch and others, has changed things, so that history written on the basis either of victim documents from the Holocaust period itself (diaries, letters, photographs, official and forged documents) or of postwar testimonies, or indeed a combination of both, is becoming more familiar. Friedländer’s notion of an ‘integrated history’ in which the perpetrators, victims and wider society are brought together in an over-arching narrative is considered by many historians now to be the most desirable approach. In such an integrated history of Belsen, we would find that from the perpetrators’ point of view, the camp could be used to house (in the loosest sense—there should be no connotations of homeliness here) ‘evacuees’ from camps further east in the hope of preventing camp inmates from falling into enemy hands. The fact that Belsen had not previously been significant for the killing of the Jews was irrelevant at this stage, when the Third Reich was collapsing. From the victims’ perspective, by contrast—and here it is important to remember that as the Holocaust was ongoing the victims did not have a notion of ‘the Holocaust’ or, for the most part, an understanding of how the Nazi camp system was administered—Belsen was just another camp in their long journey through the universe of Nazi camps. Indeed, and this is the key point, for many of the victims who arrived there in 1945, Belsen was actually the worst camp they had been to, for reasons that are familiar: the massive overcrowding, the lack of food, the absence of hygiene, the huge number of dead and dying in the camps, in other words, their total abandonment by the guards and, therefore, by the Nazi camp system as a whole. For the camp inmates who survived death marches and arrived at Belsen in the early months of 1945, the distinction between a ‘concentration camp’— i.e. a place where inmates were treated brutally and many died but which were not designed solely to kill—and a ‘death camp’—i.e. a facility to which people were sent to be murdered on arrival—was impossible to discern. Hanna LevyHass, for example, a Jewish Yugoslav communist and a long-term inmate of Fifty Years after the Holocaust and the Second World War’, Patterns of Prejudice, 29, 2–3 (1995), 3–13; and most importantly, Tony Kushner, ‘From “This Belsen Business” to “Shoah Business”: History, Memory and Heritage, 1945–2005’, Holocaust Studies, 12, 1–2 (2006), 189–216.

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Belsen (she had been there since summer 1944), concluded after describing the deaths of the inmates ‘like animals’, that ‘the vilest, most savage humiliation imaginable has turned life here into something that no longer bears any relationship to life as we understand it. In reality we are dealing with the barbaric annihilation of thousands of human beings – of this there can be no doubt, not the slightest doubt ’.44 Given that about 35,000 people died in Belsen between January and 15 April 1945, over 18,000 of them in March alone, could we possibly say that she was wrong? It is quite correct to say that Belsen was not a death camp and that British collective memory was mistaken to regard Belsen as a Holocaust camp, just as British culture misused Belsen as a symbol of Nazi ‘atrocity’ without considering the humanity or specificity of the victims. But that scholarly precision about the functioning of the camp system masks the lived experience of the Holocaust. Many people who had survived Belsen and liberated it knew full well that Belsen had not been a camp established solely to kill Jews. But they also knew that in its final incarnation as a holding pen for survivors of death marches, Belsen was functioning like a death camp, for both Jewish and non-Jewish inmates. In other words, in its last days, and whatever the Nazis intended it to be for, Belsen was in fact a death camp.45 In fact, it was ‘an extermination camp in the truest sense of the word’, as one former inmate put it.46 There has always been a temptation among British—and not only British— commentators to universalise the Holocaust, meaning well in seeking to warn humanity of the dangers of genocide but thereby overlooking the specific experiences of the Jews. Sometimes, however, such universal lessons seem warranted. In a BBC radio programme from 1946 marking the first anniversary of the liberation of the camp, Harold Le Druillenec, the only known British survivor of Belsen, said the following: Though the Germans perfected the Concentration Camp, it was not a German invention, and I saw men of other nationalities employed in the camps, behave as brutally as the Germans. No, the Concentration Camp is a new weapon, as new as gunpowder was in the fifteenth century. It is a scientific instrument of domination by which a Totalitarian state can control millions through fear: not fear of death, but of a living death. I believe that wherever a State achieves total power, wherever free speech and criticism are denied, and power is not subject to democratic 44 Hanna

Levy-Hass, Inside Belsen (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 68–69.

45 See

also Hagit Lavsky, ‘The Day After: Bergen-Belsen from Concentration Camp to the Centre of the Jewish Survivors in Germany’, German History, 11, 1 (1993), 36–59, esp. Part I: ‘The Bergen-Belsen Death Camp’. 46 Arnost

Basch, “Bericht über die letzte Zeit im Konzentrationslager BERGEN-BELSEN vor, während und nach der Befreiung, zusammengestellt von einem ehemaligen Häftling dieses Vernichtungslager” (n.d.). 1.1.3.0/82351020, ITS DAWL.

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control, unscrupulous men will be tempted to use this weapon again. Surely, if civilisation is to survive, we must preserve at all costs a humane and liberal way of life.47

The last seventy years of British attempts to understand Belsen have achieved much; they have, however, neither prevented the appearance of concentration camps in other parts of the world—including in Britain’s colonial empire— nor done away with the widespread sense in Britain that such horrors are alien to British culture.48 As Tony Kushner notes, the meanings that ‘Belsen’ has acquired in British culture ‘have been far from static and have been constantly contested’.49 There is still much to learn from Belsen.

47 The

Man from Belsen (broadcast 15 April 1946), in ‘Lesser-Known BBC Broadcasts: The Scripts’, Holocaust Studies, 12, 1–2 (2006), 151.

48 Dan

Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2014); Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). See also, for specific discussion of Belsen, Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. ch4 on the Sex Pistols.

49 Tony Kushner, ‘The Holocaust in the British Imagination: The Official Mind and Beyond, 1945 to the Present’, Holocaust Studies, 23, 3 (2017), 366.

PART IV

Punishment and Memory

CHAPTER 9

‘Where, Exactly, Is Auschwitz?’ British Confrontation with the Holocaust Through the Medium of the 1945 ‘Belsen’ Trial Caroline Sharples

The name ‘Auschwitz’ is intrinsic to knowledge and representations of the Holocaust in twenty-first century Britain. It occupies a prominent position within UK commemorative culture with former prime ministers David Cameron and Gordon Brown, plus members of the England football team, all making high-profile visits to the site.1 The annual Holocaust Memorial Day, observed by the UK since 2001, takes its date from the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, and a scale model of the camp complex sits at the heart of the Imperial War Museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition in London. Within Holocaust education too, Auschwitz now holds more currency for UK

1 See, for example, Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum: Prime Minister’s Statement’ (10 December 2014) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ auschwitz-birkenau-museum-prime-ministers-statement; Daily Telegraph, ‘Gordon Brown Pledges Funds for Holocaust Memorial During Tour of Auschwitz’ (28 April 2009); Guardian, ‘Euro 2012: England Players Visit Auschwitz with Avram Grant’ (8 June 2012).

C. Sharples (B) University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_9

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school pupils than any other person, event or site associated with the Nazi genocide apart from Adolf Hitler.2 Yet, as other essays in this volume illustrate, the path towards a ‘Holocaust consciousness’ in Britain has been protracted, hindered by an initial post-war preference to speak in universalist terms about the victims of Nazi persecution, and a struggle to comprehend the complexity of the concentration camp system. In 1945, Auschwitz was an unfamiliar name, having received scant media attention until survivors of other camps began referring to it in testimonies recorded that summer by British and American investigators.3 Even the moment of Auschwitz’s liberation by the Red Army went unnoticed by both The Times and the Manchester Guardian. The metaphorical ‘Iron Curtain’ that descended across Eastern Europe during the subsequent Cold War further ensured that Auschwitz remained geographically and psychologically remote to western audiences. Instead, for many years, British understanding of the Nazi genocide was framed by another camp entirely: Bergen-Belsen. Situated in Lower Saxony, Belsen was not a purpose built extermination centre, nor did it contain gas chambers. Instead, the site passed through various phases, from a military training centre during the 1930s, to POW detainment centre following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and so-called ‘residence’ camp for ‘exchange’ Jews from spring 1943. It was not until December 1944, with the appointment of Josef Kramer as commandant, that Belsen received the official designation of ‘concentration camp’.4 Belsen’s infamy was secured, however, through the shocking scenes captured by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit in the days after liberation. Haunting images of emaciated survivors and piles of corpses, disseminated in newspapers, special publications, public exhibitions and newsreel footage—and 2A

2014 of nearly 8000 secondary school students in England questioned participants’ recognition of various people, events and sites associated with the Holocaust. Auschwitz was the second most commonly identified term in the survey, receiving 71 per cent recognition. By comparison, Hitler received 91.4 per cent and ‘SS’ came third in the survey with 44.4 per cent recognition. See Stuart Foster, Alice Pettigrew, Andy Pearce, Rebecca Hale, Adrian Burgess, Paul Salmons & Ruth-Anne Lenga (eds), What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, 2014) pp. 50–51.

3 The first, fleeting reference to Auschwitz by the Manchester Guardian came with news of ‘unspeakable conditions’ in ‘the camp Auschwitz in Upper Silesia’ in ‘Harvest of Hate’ (31 August 1943) p. 4. The term ‘Auschwitz’ did not appear again, however, until spring 1945 when newly-liberated Buchenwald prisoners informed American investigators that ‘the outstanding place of extermination in the world was Auschwitz near Cracow’—see ‘Notorious Concentration Camp Records Discovered: What Americans found at Buchenwald’ (16 April 1945) p. 6. The Times followed a similar pattern of reporting, making no detailed reference to Auschwitz before the publication of ‘Nazi Camp Guard’s Confession’ (18 July 1945) p. 3. 4 Christine

Lattek, ‘Bergen-Belsen: From “Privileged” Camp to Death Camp’, J. Reilly, D. Cesarani, T. Kushner & C. Richmond (eds), Belsen in History and Memory (London & Portland, Orgeon: Frank Cass, 1997) pp. 37–71. ‘Exchange Jews’ were prisoners held on the pretext that they would be exchanged for German nationals held by the Allies.

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screened as evidence for the prosecution during subsequent war crimes trials— ensured that this camp quickly became symbolic shorthand for Nazi evil, and a retroactive justification for the British war effort.5 Fundamentally, though, Belsen held an important place within the nation’s historical consciousness because it was the only concentration camp liberated by British forces; it was ‘our camp’. This relationship further cemented through the prosecution of Kramer and forty-four others between September and November 1945. Although the victims of Belsen originated from at least ten different European nations, a multi-power tribunal was considered unwieldy. As British forces were already on the scene and held concentration camp staff in custody, Britain assumed full responsibility for the resultant ‘Belsen’ proceedings; ‘our camp’ was dealt with through ‘our trial’. This was the first war crimes proceeding to take place before British Military Tribunal in occupied Germany, and the first to focus on a Nazi concentration camp.6 It set an important precedent, demonstrating that the Allies were serious about upholding international law, and offering one of the earliest insights into conditions within the camps. As such, it commanded considerable public attention. Moreover, as Kramer and twelve co-defendants had previously held posts at Auschwitz, survivors testifying before the tribunal inevitably described their experiences of both camps, including testimony on the selection processes, human experiments, gas chambers and crematoria within Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was thus through press reporting of the ‘Belsen’ trial, that British audiences received the earliest documentation of the Holocaust and the term ‘Auschwitz’ began to be heard. Yet, to date, the prosecution of Kramer et al. has been overshadowed by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, and undervalued by historians. The IMT, which opened just as the Belsen trial was concluding in November 1945, dealt with the most high-profile set of defendants, established the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ within international law, and ultimately provided the only example of a four-power tribunal to take place in the aftermath of the Second World War. Consequently, the Nuremberg legacy has garnered the greatest scholarly interest.7 By contrast, for many years, the 5 On

the persistence of the Belsen images, see: Tony Kushner, ‘The Memory of Belsen’, Reilly et al. (eds), Belsen in History and Memory, pp. 181–205; Mark Donnelly, ‘“We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth”: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, C. Sharples & O. Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) pp. 171–189; Judith Petersen, ‘How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory in 1995’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2002) pp. 255–272.

6A

Lublin-based Soviet-Polish tribunal prosecuted personnel from Majdanek extermination camp between November and December 1944. Western war crimes proceedings, however, were not initiated until the second half of 1945. The American-led Dachau trials opened in November 1945, as did the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The Belsen trial preceded both cases by two months.

7 See,

for example; Michael Biddis, ‘The Nuremberg Trial: Two Exercises in Judgment’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1981) pp. 597–615; Christian

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only significant work dealing with the Belsen trial was Raymond Philips’s 1949 summary of the case.8 This collection was well-received, but attracted greatest interest among legal scholars concerned with the jurisdiction of Allied military tribunals in occupied Germany, and the key features of the defence arguments.9 Subsequently, the Belsen trial has received fleeting mention within war crimes historiography, but generally criticised for its failure to address the particular suffering endured by European Jewry under National Socialism. David Cesarani, for example, suggests that the trial had a negative legacy in this regard, establishing an unfortunate model for later trials—including Nuremberg. ‘The charges ranged widely and certainly did not focus on the persecution and mass murder of Jews’, he notes.10 Instead, prosecutors were primarily interested in crimes perpetrated against Allied military personnel and civilian citizens of Allied nations. While Cesarani accepts that Jewish survivors provided evidence to the tribunal, he insists ‘they were only a fraction of those who testified’ and this meant that the detail of the Holocaust was lost.11 Donald Bloxham shares these misgivings, adding that even though the case against Kramer included crimes committed in Auschwitz, the distinctions between the camps became blurred. The media, for example, quickly latched onto a (misconstrued) comment within the prosecution’s opening statement that described Auschwitz as a camp with ‘very much the same routine… as Belsen’.12 Similarly, Bloxham argues that the very structure of trial proceedings reduced the impact of Jewish witness testimony. The first testimonies heard came entirely from British sources: soldiers involved in the liberation or collection of evidence, and then former prisoner Harold Le Druillenec, a Channel Islander who had been held in several concentration camps since 1944, and arrived in Belsen at the start of April 1945, a few days before liberation. With media attention at its highest level at the start of the case, these non-Jewish, British voices received greater coverage than former Auschwitz prisoners who testified later in the proceedings.13 This obscured the racial dimension of Nazi crimes. Nevertheless, the history of the Belsen trial merits further consideration. First, as this chapter will demonstrate, the trial provided a cathartic moment for Britons who welcomed the end of the war and seized the opportunity to Tomuschat, ‘The Legacy of Nuremberg’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Vol. 4 (2006) pp. 830–844; Michael R. Marrus, ‘The Nuremberg Trial—Fifty Years After’, The American Scholar, Vol. 66, No. 4 (1997) pp. 563–570. 8 Raymond Philips, Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others: (The Belsen Trial) (London: William Hodge, 1949). 9 See,

for example, F. Honig, ‘Review: Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial) by Raymond Philips’, International Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1949) p. 351.

10 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933–49 (London: Macmillan, 2016) p. 783. 11 Ibid. 12 Donald

Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 98.

13 Ibid.,

p. 99.

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vent their disgust at the defeated Nazi regime. Closer analysis of newspaper reports, readers’ letters and petitions to the UK government reveals a considerable public interest in Nazi crimes and sheds important light on Holocaust awareness in Britain. Second, while the trial certainly failed to get to grips with the particular persecution of the Jews and muddled the distinction between Belsen and Auschwitz, it did offer one of the first public documentations of the machinery of mass murder. It also prompted a related, legal discussion about perpetrator intent. War crimes investigators operating in Belsen in the summer of 1945 urged the tribunal to consider a wider definition of ‘murder’, emphasising the need to indict Kramer and other senior SS officials for the general climate of neglect and abuse rather than looking solely for specific, individual acts of violence. John Cramer similarly attributes the trial’s significance to this conceptual shift, formulating charges on the basis of ‘concerted action’ and widening the circle of responsibility.14 Third, while the testimony of former prisoners was occasionally subsumed within the more tedious submission of documents and quibbles over the accuracy of translations, prosecutors in the Kramer case were far more willing to incorporate survivor statements into proceedings than their colleagues operating at the IMT in Nuremberg. Indeed, the Belsen trial actually contained more Jewish voices than critics such as Cesarani credit. Sixty-seven per cent of the prosecution witnesses who appeared in court during the first 18 days of proceedings identified themselves as Jewish former prisoners. Likewise, sixtytwo per cent of the depositions submitted in evidence by prosecutors emanated from Jews.15 Kim Priebel offers a rare, positive assessment of the Belsen trial on this very issue, insisting that survivors did, in fact, have important ‘voice and agency’ within the trial process, providing statements, giving testimony, identifying perpetrators and assisting with the pre-trial research which compensated for deficiencies within British investigations.16 Finally, the process of mounting the trial in the first place underscores both the challenges of liberation and occupation in post-war Germany and the Allies’ unpreparedness for confronting Nazi crimes. Drawing upon British media reports and the extensive War Office and Foreign Office holdings of the UK National Archives, this chapter reassesses the origins and impact of the 1945 Belsen trial.

Initial Encounters with Belsen The name Bergen-Belsen held little meaning for the UK until news emerged on 14 April 1945 of a ‘plague camp’ that lay in the path of advancing British forces. The war correspondent Leonard Mosely noted, ‘we are approaching a 14 John

Cramer, Belsen Trial 1945: der Lüneburger Prozess gegen Wachpersonal der Konzentrationslager Auschwitz und Bergen-Belsen (Göttingen, 2011) pp. 117–118.

15 Author’s analysis compiled from the Transcript of the Official Shorthand Notes of ‘The Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty Four Others’, http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/Tri alTranscript/Trial_Contents.html. 16 Kim Priemel’s ‘Consigning Justice to History: Transitional Trials after the Second World War’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2013) p. 573.

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grisly Nazi pest camp’ and described Belsen as ‘one of the worst concentration camps in Germany’.17 His report, circulated in the Daily Record, Daily Herald and Aberdeen Press and Journal recorded the army’s concern that typhus could infect British troops and the wider countryside, but there was no discussion of how the disease had been able to develop, the identity of the camp prisoners, or the reasons for their detention. Published estimates of 11,000 sickness cases did little to prepare troops for the appalling scenes they would uncover upon entering the camp the next day. An army representative later commented, ‘the existence of such a place could not have been imagined’.18 Initial observations from soldiers, journalists and relief workers on the spot were emotive. ‘Belsen was “Horror Camp”’, proclaimed the Gloucester Citizen on 21 April 1945 before reprinting a report by Reuters special correspondent, Doon Campbell which noted, ‘war seems nearly wholesome compared with the black spot that lies beyond the big red and white “danger typhus” notices strung along the road more than three miles from the main entrance to the Belsen compound’.19 As details and photographs of Belsen emerged throughout April and early May 1945, the UK press published demands for swift retribution against concentration camp staff. The Northern Irish publication, Northern Whig was typical, proclaiming, ‘such deeds cry to high heaven for justice’.20 Immediately, attention centred on former camp commandant Josef Kramer, ensuring that, just one week after liberation, he had received the moniker, ‘the Beast of Belsen’. This nickname endured throughout the subsequent investigative and trial process, and established the media trope of demonising Nazi perpetrators as ‘devils’ and ‘monsters’ who had to be destroyed. However, while officials offered assurances that every Nazi would be captured, newspaper readers questioned the need for formal proceedings. A letter published in the Lancashire Evening Post, for example, insisted ‘brute force is what the Hun understands. Bring all such Huns to trial quickly and make the punishment equal to Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen’.21 The correspondent signed himself simply as a ‘pilot’s father’, implying that the fate of Allied POWs had a particular resonance for him. Elsewhere, two readers of the Daily Record pushed for summary execution of the Nazi perpetrators. One of these letters, signed simply ‘Tired of Words’, questioned why there was so much prevailing debate about the legality of Allied plans to prosecute 17 Daily

Record, ‘Nearing Grisly Death Camp’; Daily Herald, ‘Plague Camp Lies in British Path’ and Aberdeen Press and Journal, ‘Plague Camp Danger’ (14 April 1945).

18 TNA

WO309/424: Legal Staff, 21st Army Corp to Judge Advocate General’s Office, London (2 June 1945). 19 Gloucester

Citizen, ‘Belsen was “Horror Camp”’ (21 April 1945).

20 Northern

Whig, ‘German Horror Camps’ (19 April 1945) p. 2. Hopes for an immediate trial were also expressed by the Derby Daily Telegraph, Trial of Belsen ‘Killer’; Birmingham Mail, ‘Solemn Warning’; Dundee Courier, ‘Germans and Their Crimes’ (24 April 1945). 21 Lancashire

Evening Post, ‘Treatment of Huns’ (18 May 1945) p. 3.

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the ‘camp killers’. Insisting that ‘enough evidence has accumulated during the advance into Germany to condemn the whole German nation’, the author demanded that the ‘German fiends’ be made to ‘die lingeringly, in anguish’.22 Other correspondents agreed that mere hanging or shooting was ‘too good’ for these war criminals and advanced various suggestions for making them suffer. In the days after the official German surrender, for example, a correspondent to the Devon-based Western Morning News, asked why Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his ‘entourage’ were not being made to clean up Belsen, Buchenwald or Dachau.23 The sense of a state-wide responsibility for the atrocities was made manifest in this statement.

Justice Delayed So eager were the British population to see Nazi perpetrators brought to account that the slightest delay generated impatience. Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, the UK press reported faithfully each new step on the road to establishing the Belsen trial. There was widespread optimism that proceedings were imminent, and that they would be a relatively short-lived affair; a likely duration of two weeks was commonly anticipated within these reports. By June 1945, though, the Dundee Courier was expressing bewilderment at the fact that no trial had yet taken place: ‘The delay is amazing. The atrocities of Belsen and Buchenwald ring through the world, vast dossiers of crimes are compiled, yet week after week the perpetrators continue to live’.24 The following month, the newspaper vented further frustration, asking ‘would not justice have been better done and better seen to have been done by a drumhead trial on the spot?’25 Recognising this popular demand for blood, and anxious to deflect criticism about the protracted nature of the war crimes investigation, army personnel recommended publicising the fact that a number of SS personnel had recently died of typhus. This ‘might provide a useful morsel for the public hunger, if tactfully dressed up’, observed Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn, head of No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team (WCIT).26 The news appeared to have the desired, albeit temporary, effect with several press reports heralding the deaths as ‘poetic justice’.27

22 Daily

Record, ‘Letters: “Proof Enough” and “Camp Killers”’ (30 April 1945) p. 5.

23 Western

Morning News, ‘Letters: Nazi Leaders’ (17 May 1945) p. 2.

24 Dundee

Courier, ‘German Occupation Problems’ (23 June 1945) p. 2.

25 Dundee

Courier, ‘Goering Gets a Fright’ (31 July 1945) p. 7.

26 TNA

WO309/424: Lt. Col L.J. Genn, No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team, Belsen Camp to Col. T.M. Backhouse, Rear HQ, 21 Army Group (1 June 1945). 27 See,

for example: Daily Mirror, ‘20 Belsen Thugs Die of Typhus Believed Given Them by Victims’ (28 June 1945) p. 4; Liverpool Daily Post, ‘Belsen Camp Guards’ (28 June 1945) p. 4; Aberdeen Press and Journal, ‘The Beast of Belsen is High on the List’ (6 August 1945) p. 2.

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There were several practical reasons behind the delay in bringing the Belsen case to court. First, the actual shape of the trial needed to be determined. It was only on 14 June 1945, with the signing of the Royal Warrant, that British Military Courts attained jurisdiction.28 Second, a suitable trial venue had to be found. Locations mooted during the summer of 1945 included the Lüneburg Chamber of Commerce, Celle Castle and even Belsen itself. The latter was eventually rejected due to its isolated location and the continuing presence of the Displaced Persons; the castle was dismissed due to a lack of space and the fact that its ‘theatrical atmosphere [was] felt to be undesirable’.29 By July, it was agreed to hold the trial within the town gymnasium, but even then, a long list of improvement works was required to transform the hall into a working courtroom. Over the remainder of the summer, benches were installed for the presiding judges, legal counsel, press and viewing public, together with a witness stand and a dock for the defendants. An amplification system and improved lighting also needed to be rigged up.30 The British were working from scratch with the Belsen trial. There was no existing model or useful experience to draw upon, and a lack of facilities further hampered proceedings. Inevitably, practices implemented during this period were imperfect. The most significant challenge facing investigators, though, concerned the physical act of gathering trial evidence. As a closer analysis of the pre-trial investigations reveals, the British simply did not expect to find themselves sifting through crimes of such magnitude or dealing with so many defendants with different, complex roles within the concentration camp hierarchy.

Investigating Belsen The official enquiry into what had happened in Belsen concentration camp moved slowly. No investigative teams had been formed prior to liberation and in June 1945, as legal staff stationed in Germany attempted to defend their record to the Judge Advocate General’s [JAG] office in London, they stressed how Belsen had been ‘overrun by British troops entirely unexpected’ [sic]. Furthermore, they added, the priority on arrival was, necessarily, with saving lives and providing relief to survivors, rather than setting down to take extensive witness statements.31

28 War Office, Royal Warrant —Regulations for the Trial of War Criminals (18 June 1945). Reproduced at The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http:// avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtroyal.asp. 29 TNA

WO309/480: Telegram from Exfor to 30 Corps (undated).

30 TNA

WO309/480: Memo from 21 Army Group, ‘Trial of War Criminals’ (22 July

1945). 31 TNA WO309/424: Legal Staff, 21st Army Corp to Judge Advocate General’s Office, London (2 June 1945).

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Consequently, it was not until 27 April that a ‘scratch team’ of six researchers, led by Major Geoffrey Smallwood, was dispatched to the scene. An additional three NCOs and four interpreters joined them, just over a fortnight later but it was only with the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Genn’s WCIT on 20 May that efforts became more organised. By 22 June, Genn’s team was in a position to publish their Interim Report on Bergen-Belsen. This fourteen-page document summarised investigators’ key findings and made recommendations for the cases against the principal concentration camp personnel. At the same time, the report seized the opportunity to reiterate the various challenges that had hampered the investigative effort. First, investigators stressed, British forces had been completely unprepared for the ‘herculean’ task that lay before them upon entering Belsen. The sheer size of the camp was stressed in both the Interim Report, and other internal Foreign and War Office memoranda, with repeated explanations that the German camp was far beyond the 2400-acre Catterick army camp in North Yorkshire.32 Investigators also calculated there were 55,000 potential witnesses to interview, a total that would take immense time and labour to process. A ‘desperate lack of personnel’, however, meant the unit could barely scratch the surface. Indeed, the authors of the Interim Report declared that twenty investigation teams could be deployed and they would still prove inadequate to the task.33 Particularly problematic was a lack of translators. The first interpreters dispatched to Belsen only arrived in mid May, and tended to know only German. With a ‘considerable number’ of witnesses speaking other European languages, including Czech, Russian and Polish, investigators had to rely on former prisoners to help translate.34 The existing poor health of survivors already made this an unsatisfactory arrangement, and it soon became apparent that some were unable to cope with either the pressure posed by the number of witnesses to interview, or the horrific evidence coming before them. On 12 May, Smallwood petitioned JAG for additional support, arguing, ‘it is really impracticable to do the work here in a satisfactory manner unless each officer has a car and interpreter to himself. We have two good interpreters at present, but they are both girls, ex-prisoners, and get tired easily. The other two we started with have each cracked up and gone sick’.35 Logistical challenges were compounded by uncertainty regarding the precise legal framework in which staff were operating, and the sort of evidence that needed to be collected. Genn noted that his unit had ‘envisaged the ordinary investigation of a particular war crime’; they were not prepared to come 32 TNA WO309/424: Interim Report of No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team regarding War Crimes and Atrocities by the Germans at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp (22 June 1945). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 TNA

WO309/424: Major G. Smallwood to JAG Branch (12 May 1945).

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face to face with human suffering on such a vast scale.36 Furthermore, an initial sweep of information gathering in the first days after liberation had produced a mass of witness statements but the content of those statements had only been ‘cursorily considered’; investigators simply did not know what they had. Nor did they necessarily remember how they had obtained such information; many sources were unaccredited.37 These administrative gaps extended to the retention of the witnesses themselves. By June 1945, just ten per cent of those who had made a deposition remained in Belsen. Investigators had no power to hold non-German nationals; indeed, as the Interim Report noted, it was policy that no displaced person should be detained against his or her will any longer ‘than immediate necessities dictate’.38 In any case, investigators were very aware that, should witnesses who were otherwise healthy enough to leave Belsen be detained, it would deter others from coming forward, ‘virtually stopp[ing] the flow of willing testimony’.39 The problem of ‘vanishing’ witnesses was exacerbated by the fact that British staff did not always record the immediate destination of survivors after leaving Belsen. This meant that statements could not be followed up, nor witnesses invited to give verbal testimony during the eventual trial. Some witnesses even managed to ‘disappear’ within the camp complex itself, moving into a different section of the camp, or changing their preferred name before the investigative process had been completed. In short, post-war chaos, staffing shortages and the unprecedented nature of the war crimes investigative process meant that British forces were struggling to piece together a coherent sense of what had happened in Belsen. Nonetheless, it was Belsen that remained the focal point of the investigation. Genn’s priority was to assemble evidence against Kramer, plus other senior SS officers such as Concentration Camp Inspector Richard Glücks and Head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, Oswald Pohl— men detached from the everyday operation of the camp itself. Perpetrators of specific crimes against British victims within Bergen-Belsen, and evidence of other crimes committed by Belsen personnel were next on the investigative agenda. The Interim Report acknowledged that crimes committed in other camps were of ‘secondary’ importance, as was ‘the compiling of evidence in relation to mass extermination in gas chambers at Auschwitz’.40 References to Auschwitz within the resulting paperwork were almost accidental, a quirk based on the fact that many Belsen survivors, and thirteen of the camp personnel, had formerly been in Auschwitz, rather than British investigators deliberately trying to learn more about the wider concentration camp universe. 36 TNA 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.

WO309/424: Interim Report.

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Nonetheless, further examination of the June 1945 Interim Report illustrates a fledgling conception of the Nazi genocide. Investigators recognised that numerous, specific instances of killing and brutality had taken place in Belsen, and conditions within the camp had deteriorated sharply after Kramer assumed control in December 1944. It was at this point, they noted, that Belsen was re-designated as a Krankenlager (sick camp), receiving prisoners deemed incapable of work from other concentration camps. Most significantly, the report concluded that Kramer and his colleagues had deliberately created a set of conditions within Belsen that would ‘offend gravely against the lowest possible code of ordinary humanity and civilised decency’.41 For the WCIT, this systematic policy of barbarism and neglect amounted to mass murder and they recommended strongly that Kramer face charges on these grounds.

The Trial Five months after liberation, trial proceedings finally opened against Kramer and his SS colleagues on 17 September 1945 in the Lüneburg gymnasium. Hearings took the form of a military court, with procedure effectively based on that for a Field General Court Martial. Five British officers, headed by Major General Horatio Berney-Ficklin, presided over the affair while four officers of the Legal Staff of the British Army on the Rhine, led by Colonel T.M. Backhouse, conducted the prosecution. Eleven British officers and one Polish officer who held law qualifications provided defence counsel; the defendants had rejected the opportunity to use German attorneys. The accused included sixteen women and twelve former kapos (prisoners assigned to overseer roles within the camp by the SS). Alongside Kramer, other especially high-profile defendants included deputy commandant Franz Hössler, camp doctor Dr. Fritz Klein and Irma Grese, the highest-ranking female SS guard on trial. Charges against the accused were grouped into two categories: crimes committed in Belsen, and crimes committed in Auschwitz. Twelve of the defendants faced both charges. The tribunal ran for 54 days, and heard oral and written evidence from hundreds of former prisoners of varying nationalities. Additionally, the prosecution screened footage of the liberation and members of the court visited the Belsen site in person. The Belsen trial differed sharply from the IMT at Nuremberg and the Dachau hearings that would open before US Military Tribunal two months later. Operating under the remit of the Royal Warrant confined proceedings to handling acts recognised as war crimes under existing international law. Thus, prosecutors at Belsen would speak to how Nazi perpetrators had defied the Hague Convention and the Manual of Military Law, mistreated prisoners of war and committed atrocities against Allied civilians. There was no scope for contemplating crimes against German nationals (that would become the preserve of the revived German court system after December 1945), nor was 41 Ibid.

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there a suitable charge to specifically take into account the systematic persecution of Jews and other minorities. The conceptual and legal framework for documenting the Holocaust—‘crimes against humanity’ and the definition of genocide—had yet to be established. Accordingly, the opening prosecution statement made no explicit mention of racial persecution, noting only that prisoners of Belsen were ‘all persons who had been placed there without a trial, either because of their religion, because of their nationality, because of their refusal to work for the enemy or merely because they were prisoners of war’.42 The Belsen trial was further unique in that the charges included counts of ill-treatment against specific individuals. Eighteen different victims of eight different nationalities were named in the Belsen charge. British soldier Keith Meyer headed this list, immediately imbuing proceedings with greater relevancy for audiences back home. Certainly, Meyer’s inclusion generated a lot of press excitement; the dramatic Daily Mirror headline ‘Death Accuses Beast of Belsen’ eagerly anticipated Meyer’s last known words being submitted in evidence against Kramer.43 His compatriots Harold Osmund Le Druillenec and Therese Klee, ‘a British national of Honduras descent’, also appeared in the Belsen charge and while Backhouse’s opening statement admitted that ‘there were not many British persons in that camp’, British voices nonetheless remained a strong feature of the trial proceedings.44 The sole surviving Briton, Le Druillenec, was privileged over other potential witnesses when he became the first prisoner to testify against his former tormentors. His appearance, on day four of the proceedings, occurred while media interest was still riding high. Consequently, his story received significant dissemination especially as his testimony came directly after the screening of liberation footage. The correspondent for the Manchester Guardian was moved to observe, ‘this has been a terrible day at the Belsen trial’ before summarising the various ordeals that Le Druillenec had been forced to endure during his internment.45 Le Druillenec was also referenced on three separate occasions during Backhouse’s opening statement, a factor that enabled him to be perceived as a ‘typical’ victim of Nazi persecution. The repeated promise of hearing from ‘the only Englishman’ seemed to lend additional weight to the evidence assembled by the prosecution.46 Twelve other prosecution witnesses were British army personnel, called upon to testify about the conditions within Belsen at liberation, and the process of collating trial evidence.

42 Opening

Address by the Prosecution (17 September 1945), http://www.bergenbelsen. co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_001.html#Day001_OpenProsecution.

43 Daily

Mirror, ‘Death Accuses Beast of Belsen’ (22 August 1945) p. 8.

44 Opening

Address by the Prosecution.

45 Manchester

Guardian, ‘British Survivor’s Account of Life in Belsen’ (21 September

1945) p. 5. 46 Opening

Address by the Prosecution.

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By contrast, the tribunal did not set out to emphasise Jewish suffering under Nazism. Witnesses were described in terms of their nationality, and the accompanying media coverage followed this pattern. Out of the forty-four articles published by The Times between 17 September and 19 November 1945, for example, the word ‘Jew’ was used just twice and even then, only in passing. The witness Roman Sompolinski, for instance, happened to be described as a ‘Polish Jew’.47 Yet the clues about Nazi racial policy were there for anyone following the case closely. All twenty-three of the former prisoners who appeared as prosecution witnesses identified themselves as Jewish, while written depositions gave a voice to Russian prisoners of war, Czech and Polish forced labourers and another sixty-one Jews. Furthermore, the witnesses themselves were very clear in explaining the reasoning behind their internment, with the line ‘my only crime was being a Jew’ becoming a popular refrain within their statements. Collectively, witnesses in the ‘Belsen’ trial detailed the layout of Belsen and Auschwitz, the routine beatings administered by camp staff and other acts of brutality such as the setting of dogs onto prisoners. Witnesses also listed other concentration camps that they had passed through before coming to Belsen, including Buchenwald, Dora, Drancy and Majdanek. Theoretically, this enabled the British to build up a picture of the geography of the Holocaust, although none of these other camps was discussed in depth during the trial. Events in Auschwitz, however, were relayed vividly, particularly through the testimonies of Ada Bimko and Sofia Litwinska, two Polish Jews. Bimko, having been forced to work in the camp hospital, detailed the medical experiments perpetrated by Fritz Klein, and the selection of prisoners for the gas chambers: All the sick Jews were ordered to parade quite naked in front of the doctor…. They [the SS] pointed with a finger to one or the other, pointing out that those may join those people who were condemned to death.48

Bimko generated what the Manchester Guardian termed ‘the biggest moment of the trials’ when she recounted how her whole family had been murdered in Auschwitz.49 Litwinska, meanwhile, testified how she herself had been sent to the gas chamber, only to receive a last minute reprieve:

47 The Times, ‘Belsen Trial: Attempt to Escape Gas Chamber’ (27 September 1945) p. 3; ‘Burning Pits of Auschwitz’ (2 October 1945) p. 4. 48 Testimony

of Ada Bimko, Fifth Day of Proceedings (21 September 1945), http://www. bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_005.html.

49 Manchester Guardian, ‘Belsen Guards Identified by Polish Woman Doctor’ (22 September 1945) p. 6.

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I saw fumes coming in from a window… I had to cough very violently. Tears were streaming out from my eyes and I had a sort of feeling in my throat as if it would be asphyxiated.50

The Nazi policy of extermination was being documented but two factors limited the impact of this testimony. First, the tribunal devoted significant time to uncovering how this evidence had been compiled. War crimes investigators were questioned about their methodology, and witnesses were cross-examined over the veracity of their statements. Misremembering dates, instances of hearsay and possible confusion over perpetrators’ identities saw some testimonies disputed by defence consul. Second, prosecutors showed greater interest in Belsen than in Auschwitz. Prisoners who had been held at both sites were routinely invited to draw comparisons between the two, a line of questioning that encouraged witnesses, the tribunal and the watching press to see Belsen as constituting the very depths of Nazism. Thus the court heard Anni Jonas concede that the food was worse at Belsen, and Fritz Leo, who had been interned in a series of different camps, conclude that ‘Belsen was by far the worst of all’.51 An exception to this trend occurred when Paula Synger described her arrival at Belsen: ‘I could breathe with relief because I had not seen the chimneys any more’.52 Coming on the twelfth day of the trial, this statement was not picked up by the press. A key challenge facing both prosecutors and reporters was how to make sense of the concentration camp system. Backhouse took pains to note the differences between Belsen and Auschwitz in his opening statement. In Auschwitz, he declared, ‘there was deliberate killing of thousands of people and probably millions of people, quite deliberate cold-blooded extermination of millions of people in that camp’.53 He summarised the ‘deliberate extermination’ process, noting the presence of gas chambers in the camp, and the façade that camp staff had constructed around taking prisoners to the ‘showers’. Backhouse also sought to convey some sense of the scale of the Auschwitz operations, informing the tribunal, ‘you will hear that 45,000 Greek Jews were taken to that camp and when they were evacuating the prison, only 60 were left out of 45,000’. In summarising Belsen, Backhouse stated clearly: There will not be an allegation [here] that there was a gas chamber or that persons were herded by their thousands to their death, but there will be an 50 Testimony of Sofia Litwinska, Seventh Day of Proceedings (24 September 1945), http:// www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_007.html. 51 Testimony of Anni Jonas, Seventh Day of Proceedings (24 September 1945), http:// www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_007.html; Testimony of Fritz Leo, Eleventh Day of Proceedings (28 September 1945), http://www.bergenbelsen.co. uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_011.html. 52 Testimony of Paula Synger, Twelfth Day of Proceedings (29 September 1945), http:// www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_012.html. 53 Opening

Address by the Prosecution.

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allegation that, by the treatment that was given to the men at Belsen, every member of the staff at Belsen who stands before you bore their share in that treatment which they knew was causing and would continue to cause death and injury.54

However, with the trial aiming to document crimes perpetrated by fortyfive individuals across two sites, confusion was, perhaps, inevitable. This was evidenced on Day 14 of the trial when the Judge Advocate paused to ask, ‘where exactly is Auschwitz? Is it in Poland?’55 The numbering of the charges, and the structure of Backhouse’s opening statement, had already relegated Auschwitz to second place. Media reporting reflected this pattern. Analysis of the Manchester Guardian, for example, reveals 46 articles were published on the trial between the start of proceedings on 17 September 1945, and final sentencing on 18 November 1945. 23 of these pieces referenced Auschwitz although coverage of the camp frequently failed to extend beyond the headline or a few brief words of description. Thus, having summarised the charges pertaining to Belsen on the opening day of the trial, the newspaper stated simply, ‘in addition, charges relating to the concentration camp at Auschwitz will be heard’.56 A similar pattern is observed within The Times: 27 out of 44 articles on the Belsen trial mentioned Auschwitz, but the majority of these failed to go beyond merely naming the camp. The term ‘Auschwitz’ appeared in just four headlines.57 Reportage at the start of the trial saw greatest attention to detail, with witness testimony regarding the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz relayed in emotive detail. Later articles, however, often failed to make it immediately apparent which camp was under discussion. On 28 September, for example, a Manchester Guardian article entitled ‘International Law Authority to Aid Belsen Accused’ clearly placed the western camp at the centre of attention. Yet subsequent paragraphs, discussing the testimony of Abraham Glinowiecki, failed to explain that the witness was actually talking about Auschwitz when he described beatings and gas chambers. While a regular follower of the trial may have been able to separate the two camps in their mind, the casual reader would no doubt have been left with the impression

54 Ibid. 55 Fourteenth Day of Proceedings (2 October 1945), http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/ pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Day_014.html. 56 Manchester Guardian, ‘Trial of Kramer and 47 of His Subordinates’ (17 September 1945) p. 5. In a similar vein, the article ‘Kramer Denies Auschwitz Gas Chamber Executions’, published on 3 October 1945 (p. 8), made no further mention of the camp itself in the remainder of the report. 57 The

Times, ‘Gas Chambers at Auschwitz’ (22 September 1945) p. 3; ‘Victims Gassed at Auschwitz’ (22 September 1945) p. 4; ‘Burning Pits of Auschwitz’ (2 October 1945) p. 4; ‘Russian Film of Auschwitz’ (15 October 1945) p. 3.

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there were gas chambers at Belsen.58 A similar situation was created with a later headline, ‘“I Chose victims for Gas Chamber”: Belsen camp doctor’s admission’.59 While press coverage obscured the locations and victims of the crimes, the Nazi perpetrators generated much interest, crystallising around two central characters: Kramer and Grese. The latter stole the media spotlight due to her youth, gender and ‘filmstar’ looks that seemed incongruous with the brutal acts of violence attributed to her. Several newspapers published frontpage photographs of these defendants, pictured either individually or side by side. The dehumanisation of defendants persisted, imposing a comfortable sense of distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Attention was directed to the accused’s physical appearance, as if reporters hoped to discern some tangible sign of their depravity. The fact that Kramer was chained to a guard during his first court appearance was seized upon by several reporters, implying that he was a wild animal that needed to be restrained.60 Regional newspapers, meanwhile, highlighted local connections to the accused. The Northampton Mercury interviewed Private A.W. Hickman of the Wiltshire Regiment who had just returned home after a month’s service in Celle prison, guarding Kramer in the run-up to his trial. Hickman duly reported that the unrepentant Kramer was confident he would be acquitted and that the female defendants ‘still retain their arrogant attitude’.61 In a similar vein, the Middlesex Chronicle relayed the story of Lieutenant Corporal E.A. Holloway from Hounslow, a young portrait artist who had enjoyed some critical success before the war. He too had been involved in guarding the Belsen defendants, and took the opportunity to sketch the infamous Kramer, describing him as a ‘willing subject’ with ‘the largest eyes of any person I’ve ever seen’.62 Yet despite the tabloid sensationalism surrounding Kramer and Grese, trial fatigue soon set in. While the first two weeks of the trial were characterised by a succession of oral witness testimonies that imbued the proceedings with drama, the latter part of the prosecution’s case dealt with the submission of depositions that were read into the trial record. This document-driven approach failed to sustain public interest and, as the trial stretched beyond its anticipated two-week duration, UK audiences grew weary. By October, The Times was decrying how ‘the wheels of the law are grinding exceedingly small in the Belsen trial’ and stressing the need for ‘reducing procedure to a 58 Manchester

Guardian, ‘International Law Authority to Aid Belsen Accused’ (28 September 1945) p. 8. See also Manchester Guardian, ‘Petrol and Lysol Used for “Glucose” Injections’ (26 September 1945), p. 8. 59 Manchester

Guardian, ‘“I Chose Victims for Gas Chamber”: Belsen Camp Doctor’s Admission’ (6 October 1945) p. 7. 60 Shields

Daily News, ‘Kramer of Belsen Chained at War Crimes Trial’ (17 September 1945) p. 1; Dundee Evening Telegraph, ‘“Belsen Beast” Chained as Trial Opens’ (17 September 1945) p. 1.

61 Northampton 62 Middlesex

Mercury, ‘Guarded “Beast of Belsen”’ (14 September 1945) p. 6.

Chronicle, ‘Sketched “Beast of Belsen” in His Cell’ (15 September 1945) p. 5.

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less redundant form’ in future war crimes hearings.63 Nor was this frustration confined to the press. Speaking in the House of Lords on 23 October, former diplomat and renowned Germanophobe Lord Robert Vansittart also criticised the ‘painfully slow’ progress that had been made on the war crimes issue. ‘So far’, he noted, ‘nobody was been executed although we are now six months from VE Day’.64 Vanisttart was especially anxious as he wished to see the perpetrators of the Stalag Luft III murders brought to account as soon as possible. The notion that this case—the ‘massacre’ of ‘a great number of our most gallant airmen’— should be deemed more urgent than the Belsen one betrays the extent to which the UK’s primary interest rested with the fate of its own nationals. Ironically, Vanisttart disclosed his ‘fear that the rate at which this problem is being tackled shows some incomprehension of its magnitude’.65 In the House of Commons, disillusionment with events in Lüneburg likewise prompted Stanley Prescott, MP for Darwen, to seek assurances that hearings for the Stalag Luft III murders would ‘not develop into another Belsen trial’.66 Other observers, though, urged patience. In Preston, a reader of the Lancashire Evening Post insisted that it was crucial to uphold scrupulous methods and demonstrate the fairness of the British justice system: When one reads of the terrible evidence of cruelty revealed in these trials, one can understand the feelings of impatience by our people, but we must not allow our distressed feelings to make the Court a slaughterhouse. Having regard to the number of prosecution witnesses, the difference in language, where every statement has to be interpreted into two or more languages, I do not see how, if we want justice to be done, the trial could have taken any other course.67

The Belsen Verdicts The two-month Belsen trial eventually concluded on 17 November 1945. Eleven of the accused, including Kramer and Grese, were condemned to death and hanged at Hameln Prison on 13 December. Eighteen defendants received prison sentences ranging from one to fifteen years; one perpetrator, Erich Zoddel, was sentenced to life imprisonment but executed due to his conviction in another war crimes trial. Fourteen were acquitted. The ‘leniency’ of these verdicts met with public outcry. A correspondent to the Scotsman denounced the verdicts as ‘disturbing’, and suggested it would have been ‘more just’ to have simply shot Kramer et al. on the very first day of the occupation: ‘this… 63 The

Times, ‘Belsen Trial Delays’ (1 October 1945) p. 3.

64 Hansard,

HL Deb 23 October 1945, vol. 137, cc412-40.

65 Ibid. 66 Hansard,

HC Deb 5 November 1945, vol. 415, c894.

67 Lancashire

1945) p. 3.

Evening Post, ‘Letters: Trial of War Crimes—Call for Patience’ (12 October

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will appear distasteful to a legal mind, but the point is that the ordinary legal system has been devised to deal with ordinary situations. There has never been a Belsen or an Auschwitz on the British legal practice’.68 Others wrote directly to the government to express their ‘amazement and disgust’ at the ‘absurd sentences’.69 One petitioner from Somerset asked: Is this justice? And to whom? Surely not to the tortured prisoners, nor to their friends and relatives, and certainly not to all those who fought and died for freedom and decency.70

The author of this particular letter rued the fact that the trial had not been conducted by a United Nations or—‘better still’—a Russian tribunal, believing that any other body ‘would have been realistic enough to have given short shrift to these “Supermen” and would already have rid the world of their vile presence’.71 In the midst of the public condemnation of the acquittals, one newspaper reader writing under the pseudonym ‘Justice’, took issue with a different sentence: the fact that Grese had received the death penalty. Pointing to her youth, the author insisted Grese was not a ‘natural’ Nazi like Kramer or Klein, but a simple ‘country girl’, ‘conscripted’ and brainwashed since the age of seventeen. The letter concluded, ‘I am sorry for all who suffered in Belsen but I am also sorry for Irma Grese’.72 It was something of a lone protest, though, and two days later, the Daily Record published an angry retort from another reader: ‘it is futile to be sorry for so depraved a creature as Irma Grese’.73 In Parliament, Bridgwater MP Vernon Bartlett denounced the Belsen trial as a ‘farce’ when it became apparent that none of the defendants had been specifically charged with murder.74 Further afield, protest meetings were held outside the British Embassy in Paris at the verdicts while the Soviet press bemoaned the fact that the Belsen trial had ‘said nothing at all about fascism’ or the long-term roots of the Belsen atrocities.75 In the face of such criticisms, the Army Council retorted it was ‘satisfied that the trials at Lüneburg were carried out in conformity with the best tradition of British justice and that the sentences awarded by the court were proper in view of the evidence 68 Scotsman,

‘Points of View: The Belsen Trial’ (21 November 1945) p. 4.

69 TNA

FO371/50997: Letters from A.D.W. Duxbury, Devon and E.M.K Green, Devon to the Home Office (19 November 1945). 70 TNA

FO371/50997: Letter from M. Barker, Somerset to the Foreign Secretary (undated). 71 Ibid. 72 Daily

Record, ‘Sorry for Irma’ (22 November 1945) p. 3.

73 Daily

Record, ‘Needed at Home’ (24 November 1945) p. 3.

74 Hansard, 75 Red

HC Deb 03 December 1945 vol 416 cc1909-10.

Star, ‘Lessons of the Lüneburg Trial’ (23 November 1945)—translated and preserved in TNA FO371/51001.

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before it’.76 Privately, British Foreign Office staff admitted that, ‘the degree of publicity which the proceedings received has had an effect which is exactly the reverse of that which it was… intended to produce’.77

Conclusion There were a number of significant flaws in the British prosecution of Josef Kramer and forty-four others during the autumn of 1945. The sheer number of defendants and their different, changing roles within the concentration camp system, made it difficult for tribunal staff and lay observers to keep track of what had happened in Belsen, and what had occurred in Auschwitz. British ‘ownership’ of the former Belsen camp, and the helpful alliteration of Kramer’s ‘Beast of Belsen’ nickname, ensured that it was the western camp, located within Germany itself, that dominated proceedings and overshadowed all contemporary references to Auschwitz. The tribunal’s limited jurisdiction, confined to the prosecution of ‘conventional’ war crimes, also prevented any particular study of the Nazis’ deliberate programme of persecution and physical extermination against European Jewry. Yet Jewish witnesses were heard, the machinery of mass murder that existed at Auschwitz was documented, and Nazi crimes did enter public discussion. In hindsight, we know that the tribunal was barely scratching the surface, and that so much more evidence of Nazi criminality would be exposed during later Holocaust trials such as the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the 1963–5 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and the long-running Majdanek case conducted in Düsseldorf between 1975 and 1981—each of which built upon the lessons of the Allied trials of the immediate post-war era, placed the extermination of European Jews at the heart of their enquiry and made extensive use of Jewish survivor testimony. The Belsen trial, though, had no such precedent to draw upon. Investigators were overwhelmed by what they were discovering and hampered by significant logistical challenges in the chaotic environment of the immediate post-war period. Bearing this in mind, it might therefore be concluded that Britain did as best a job as it could at the time. Ultimately, the Belsen trial constitutes an important reminder that, for all of the twenty-first exhibitions, educational initiatives and planned national memorials that we have today, Britain was not always so attune to the concept of Auschwitz, or fully cognisant of the extent of Jewish suffering under Nazism. Rather than taking contemporary expressions of Holocaust remembrance for granted, we need to explore the process by which the genocide gradually entered the nation’s historical consciousness, paying attention to the various political, generational and cultural factors that have influenced these 76 TNA FO371/57560: Army Council Dispatch to Foreign Office, London (8 January 1946). 77 TNA FO371/57560: British Embassy, Paris to War Crimes Section, Foreign Office, London (29 December 1945).

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developments along the way. The prosecution of Kramer et al. constitutes an important starting point for such discussions, enabling us to reflect on how the UK has progressed from a position of uncertainty about Auschwitz’s whereabouts back in autumn 1945, to placing it front and centre of the nation’s contemporary commemorative activities.

CHAPTER 10

Campaigning for Justice: Anti-Fascist Campaigners, Nazi-Era Collaborator War Criminals and Britain’s Failure to Prosecute, 1945–1999 Siobhán Hyland and Paul Jackson In the years immediately following the Second World War, Britain took on a high-profile role in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Britain became central to the development of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg of 1945–1946, and also prosecuted others within its own areas of occupation. While such trials themselves are now often seen by historians as problematic, both legally and in terms of their ability to capture an accurate picture of the anti-Jewish nature of the genocide led by the Nazi regime,1 it is also important to highlight a wider history of ‘forgetting’ wartime actions emerged at this time, one that the British state has engaged with since 1945 as well. One important problem with the trials at Nuremberg was that investigations were focussed on the evidence gathered related to the perpetrator’s activities, often in the form of documentary evidence. This helped to remove the experiences of victims from the process, and alienated the Jewish victims 1 Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of

Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (New York NY, Skyhorse Publishing, 2010). S. Hyland (B) · P. Jackson University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. Jackson e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_10

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from crimes committed.2 This is an important point, which will be addressed in several ways throughout this chapter, and it perhaps goes some way to explaining a lack of interest in developing war crimes trials in more recent times. This is despite the fact that, especially since the 2000s, there has been a notable growth in the ways that the British state, both formally and culturally, promotes a powerful memory of the Holocaust, such as through its support for Holocaust Memorial Day. Nevertheless, while many elements of the Holocaust have been ‘remembered’ in Britain, most notably the British involvement in defeating Nazism, this is a past that has nonetheless been ‘remembered’ in certain ways. To explore this selective memory of Britain and the Holocaust, this chapter focuses on how, at the same time as Britain was involved in prosecuting leading Germans at Nuremberg and thereby establishing a powerful image of Nazi perpetrators in the minds of the world, a number of Nazi-era collaborators from central and eastern Europe were able to come to Britain after 1945 without investigations into their prior activities. Often, this was the result of a largely uncritical system designed to recruit much-needed labour from among Europe’s many refugees.3 Once in the UK, many were able to create new lives for themselves. British politicians, and the wider public, appeared to be unconcerned with the murky details of such post-war immigrants in the later 1940s, and this history of forgetting then lingered into the longer post-war period.4 Even when the questionable backgrounds of some of those involved in wartime crimes became more apparent, through the vocal actions of antifascist campaigners in the later 1980s and into the 1990s, the British state remained unwilling to fully grapple with the issue. As with the later 1940s, by the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s Europe was at a watershed moment. Dan Stone, for example, identifies the end of the Cold War as a period that saw the weakening of an anti-fascist post-war consensus that developed after 1945 with revelations of the Nazi war crimes.5 As such, as with the 1940s, the end of the Cold War period became a time when many politicians felt the need to look to a new future, which helped to shape attitudes, sometimes in ways that sought to wilfully overlook uncomfortable elements of the past. Meanwhile, a much more critically aware memory of the Holocaust had also emerged by this time,6 especially as Europe saw the collapse of Communism, and so British politicians also came under renewed pressure to change the law in ways to enable prosecutions of alleged war criminals who had come to the 2 Tom

Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010),

p. 27. 3 David

Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London: Heinemann, 1992), p. 5. 4 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 92.

5 Dan

Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 10.

6 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), pp. 803– 834.

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country after 1945. Yet they often wondered: why worry about the actions of old men in a distant war? Following the passing of the controversial War Crimes Act in 1991, there were fresh efforts to investigate cases.7 However, despite investigations costing around £11 million, there were only two efforts at prosecution, and only one of these actually led to a conviction. This chapter will explore this history of forgetting, a story that reveals an unwillingness by the British state to clearly recognise Britain’s role in providing the opportunity for a new life for some of those who were perpetrators of the Holocaust. It will highlight the ways in which Britain, despite taking a central role prosecuting Germans for war crimes at Nuremberg, failed to sufficiently check potential Nazi-collaborators coming to Britain in the years after 1945, as labour requirements were placed above detailed checks of wartime records of individuals to create opportunities for war criminals to evade detection and begin their lives anew. It will also look, briefly, at the case of Dr. Wladislaw Dering whose libel action in the 1960s helped highlight this issue in Britain. Notably, this episode did not result in more sustained action against others.8 It will then explore the more effective war crimes campaign of anti-fascists, Jewish pressure groups, prominent academics and others of the late 1980s, which was able to help bring about a change in the law, leading to new investigations. Finally, it will conclude with a brief examination of the relative failure of this phase of these enquiries. By the time a legal framework and investigatory unit had been developed in Britain, prosecutions had become expensive and difficult. It was increasingly challenging, if not impossible, to get successful convictions as many suspects had by this time either died or were in failing health. Moreover, the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) demanded a high bar to proceed with any legal action.

Nuremberg Trials and European Volunteer Workers As the Second World War progressed towards an Allied victory, high-level debates began on what to do with those Germans who engaged in war crimes inevitably developed. Initially, there was no clear idea on what to do with such leading Germans. Some central figures, including rather notoriously Winston Churchill, thought they should simply be viewed as outlaws, and so should be shot once captured.9 However, both the Soviet Union and America favoured some form of legal procedure, deemed necessary to explain to the wider world the nature of those who they deemed guilty of wartime criminality. In November 1943, Britain, along with the Soviet Union and America, 7 A.T Richardson, ‘Legislation: War Crimes Act 1991’, The Modern Law Review, 55:1 (1992), pp. 73–87 (p. 73). 8 Brian

Flemming, ‘Be Careful What You Sue For’, The Globe and Mail, 19 March 2008,

p. 21. 9 Richard

Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p. 28.

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published the Moscow Declaration, a document setting out the need to prosecute war crimes, an unprecedented development in international law.10 Britain also became central to developing a new era of putting war criminals on trial through the formation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and its contributions on the issue of prosecutions at major conferences, such as Yalta. Britain was also the location for the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, a development that was central to establishing the legal framework for the International Military Tribunal of 1945–1946, and subsequent trials in Germany that lasted until 1949. Britain, therefore, played a crucial, formative role in creating a new international legal framework for identifying and prosecuting war criminals, which meant that leading Germans were put on trial. British legal voices, such as Hartley William Shawcross, later Sir Hartley Shawcross, became central to these legal proceedings. Yet for critics at the time and afterwards, a sense of selectivity was obvious: Italian Fascists were not prosecuted; Soviet war crimes would not be acknowledged; and Allied bombing of German cities was also not up for discussion. Leading Germans were seen as complicit in war crimes, and so they were located and prosecuted for their actions in carrying out genocide. Yet many others were not identified. Initially twenty-two Germans were put on trial. In the British zone of occupied Germany there were another 1085 people who were prosecuted for their roles in the Nazi regime. Dirk Moses puts forward the point that the prosecution played down the racial specifics of who had been targeted by Nazi genocide, namely the Jews, which again separated perpetrator and victim.11 Donald Bloxham has argued that, at this time, British justice was not prepared for the genocide of Jews to be given its own unique recognition, therefore concentrating on killing centres, not specific victims.12 Moreover, by the end of the decade, the ‘promise of Nuremberg’, and a mood of determination around putting on trial those who engaged in criminal acts during the Second World War, had certainly weakened. Typifying the turn away from finding new people to prosecute, in 1948, the British Government sent a communiqué to its commonwealth countries to stop investigating anyone that may be linked to atrocities during the Second World War. As Donald Bloxham has highlighted, these trials also played a much wider political role in the edgy politics of Europe immediately after the war. By the end of the decade, the will to continue finding those responsible for genocide was waning due to the pressure of establishing new allegiances, and a viable West German state, in the emerging Cold War landscape.13 In this

10 Tara Helfman, ‘Francis Biddle and the Nuremberg Legacy: Waking the human conscience’, The Journal Jurisprudence, 15 (2012), pp. 353–373 (p. 356). 11 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The Holocaust and Genocide’, in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. by Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 533. 12 Bloxham, 13 Ibid.,

Genocide on Trial, pp. 188, 225.

p. 127.

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process, the issue of collaboration was another that had been often neglected, as the new realities of the Cold War era developed. So, despite being a pioneer nation in 1945, leading a new era of persecution of war criminals, by the end of the 1940s, attitudes in Britain were typified by a wish to draw a line under the recent past, and look to a new era for Britain and Europe. The need to forge a new political landscape overtook the will to critically assess the destruction of an old Europe through genocide. Moreover, the rather mixed approach of the British state in its attitudes to identifying and prosecuting those who committed war crimes can be seen developing elsewhere at this time. In particular, after 1945, Britain faced major labour shortages, and so several dedicated programmes were developed to recruit European Volunteer Workers (EVW). These included Balt Cygnet and later Westward Ho!, which from 1947 to 1948 alone allowed a total of 57,089 men and 12,422 women to come to Britain from countries including Yugoslavia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Other migrations from Central and Eastern Europe included 8397 prisoners of war from Ukraine, who were considered EVWs.14 Colin Holmes estimated that in total over 80,000 people came to Britain as EVWs.15 John Solomos meanwhile notes that there was a strong contrast between the ways these white European migrant populations were encouraged to settle and integrate, and the much more negative treatment of black migrants also coming to the UK to meet labour needs of this period.16 David Cesarani added that there was an antiJewish racial bias here too, as Jewish Displaced Persons were often explicitly excluded from becoming EVWs. He pointed out that barriers to doing more to help Jewish communities included anti-Jewish prejudice in Britain, as well as growing tensions in Palestine, both of which meant many British officials became concerned that Jewish people would not be welcome in late 1940s Britain.17 Cesarani was also clear that, while some refugee groups, including Jewish people, were seen as far less desirable entrants to Britain, there was often only a minimal level of screening of the categories of EVWs who were seen as desirable by the British state. Although the vast majority of EVWs were unlikely to have been involved in any form of active collaboration, some of these people, a few years prior, had certainly been working alongside the Nazis, including as SS collaborators engaged in genocide. For example, Cesarani quoted Baroness Ryder, who worked in the selection of EVWs at this time. Ryder claimed that she was aware of several cases of tattoo marks linking people to membership of the Waffen-SS. These indicators of collaboration were simply ignored, she 14 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, pp. 73–74.

15 Colin

Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 213.

16 John

Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),

p. 51. 17 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 79.

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explained, demonstrating how processes of vetting EVW migrants for their possible engagement in wartime atrocities were minimal. Cesarani’s pioneering study of this episode in British migration history cited a range of similar evidence, repeatedly pointing to a systematic failure to screen potentially questionable EVW candidates. This was not due to British sympathy for wartime criminal activity, he concluded, but rather due to the pressures generated by Britain wanting to recruit as many people to the EVW schemes as quickly as possible. Other evidence of wartime activities was also ignored at this time. For example, on occasion the Soviet Union would also provide details of EVWs who they considered war criminals, but this was also not given due attention. Questions were raised at this time about some of the figures that later became central to the British investigations of the 1990s, such as Szymon Serafinowicz. Regarding this case, Jon Silverman has found archival evidence that, in February 1947, J. I. Irvine, an MI5 officer, wrote to S. H. E. Burley in the Home Office Aliens Department highlighting that Serafinowicz ‘is said to have taken part in arrests, executions and burning of villages and to be guilty of the deaths of numerous persons’, so should be considered ‘a war criminal’. Despite this, a cursory investigation saw Serafinowicz exonerated, even though evidence drawn on in the 1990s to develop a prosecution case against him suggested that he had serious questions to answer. His trial collapsed in 1997 due to ill health.18 While there may have been good reason in many cases to be dismissive of evidence from the Soviet Union—such as the Soviets wanting people extradited for political reasons not because of their genuine guilt— a picture that emerges of Britain’s desire to recruit a high number of EVWs taking priority over checking potential problems with the types of people being selected. The issue of British authorities wilfully ignoring evidence of wartime culpability supplied by the Soviet Union is a recurrent one throughout the period under discussion in this chapter. In sum, exploring the twin issues of developing a new era of international justice by putting Nazi war criminals on trial on the one hand, and the need to rebuild Britain after 1945 through the labour available via the EVW scheme on the other, reveals some curious paradoxes. While high-profile Germans were clearly recognised as war criminals, and prosecuted as such in a very public way, albeit by largely removing the Jewish voice from the process, some of their collaborators could find ways through such new efforts to prosecute war criminals and reach British shores. A spotlight was shone on some who committed war crimes during the Second World War, while others were able to evade detection. As a result, during the later 1940s there were clear opportunities for people who worked alongside the Germans as collaborators to enter Britain, and make new lives for themselves. Such developments suggest an inability to take war crimes committed against Jewish people seriously, and prosecutions were often about dealing with wider concerns. How would Britain respond 18 Jon

Silverman, ‘War Crimes Inquiries’, History Today, 50:11 (2000), pp. 26–28 (p. 27).

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in subsequent generations to its role of offering safety to some war criminals from the Second World War?

The Holocaust and Shifting Public Consciousness While the prosecutions of the later 1940s were foundational to the development of a collective memory of the Holocaust, this memory was far from static in the subsequent decades. As Paul Ricour highlights in his important meditation on the nature of collective memory, Memory, History, Forgetting, collective memories of events are fostered through on-going shared communications about the past.19 Such memories are not fixed physiological entities, but rather are cultural constructions that develop and change over time. In the minds of the wider public in Britain, it has taken many decades to foster a rich and detailed understanding of the Holocaust, and to overcome some of the simplifications of Nuremberg, or the impact of powerful reports such as Richard Dimbleby’s account of entering Bergen-Belsen broadcasted in April 1945. In post-war memory, events such as Nuremberg meant that Germans were quickly recognised as responsible for unprecedented atrocities against civilians, though the exact nature of how others collaborated, or the extent to which Jewish people in particular were systematically targeted and killed, took time to develop. Camps liberated by the British tended to be concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen, where by the war’s end, many people had died, though often they were not Jewish. The death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, as well as Auschwitz, Chelmo and Majdanek, that more clearly typified the focused destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities, meanwhile, were less well known. At Nuremberg too, Jewish voices were often excluded from debates about Nazi atrocities.20 With the emergence of the Iron Curtain, these locations also became remote places, helping to obscure crucial elements of the development of the Holocaust. Collaboration was also less well discussed and understood, especially in central and eastern Europe, where again the Cold War situation restricted the west in obtaining a detailed appreciation of the recent past. By the 1960s, a growing awareness of the Holocaust was nevertheless emerging, provoked in part by events such as the capture, and televised trial, of Adolf Eichmann. The public nature of this trial meant it reached a wide audience, and here victim testimony was heard.21 West Germany also began a new wave of trials from 1958, though as Caroline Sharples notes, while supportive of new trials elsewhere, the British government were not keen to

19 Paul

Ricoeur, Memory, History Forgetting (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004).

20 Bloxham, 21 Eli

Genocide on Trial, p. 202.

Kavon, ‘Eichmann: The Man, His Crimes, and His Trial’, Midstream, 53:2 (2007), pp. 21–23 (p. 21).

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allow this development to reignite the issue at home.22 Nevertheless, even in Britain, there was a high-profile court case that started to draw out the issue of Nazi collaborators and their ability to set up new lives in Britain after 1945. In 1959, Leon Uris published the novel Exodus, a fictionalised account of Dr. Wladislaw Dering, explored through a character called ‘Dr Dehring’.23 The real life Dering was a Polish doctor who had been sent to Auschwitz in August 1940. As he had expert medical knowledge, Dering became a nurse at Auschwitz, and by 1943 rose to the position of a trusted prison doctor. His surgical skills meant that he could perform operations linked to the medical experiments into sterilisation that were carried out at Auschwitz. He operated on probably around 200 people, removing testicles and ovaries. He also developed responsibilities to send people to gas chambers, and eventually became considered a Volksdeutche and left Auschwitz to work for a related clinic in Germany, under Dr. Carl Clauberg. After the war, Dering then moved to Britain, and was put in prison for a short period. Polish authorities attempted to have him extradited, but failed. After his release, Dering was then able to start a new life, and he went on to work for the British Colonial Medical Service in the 1950s.24 He was even awarded an OBE. In Exodus, Uris explored this narrative, though the book’s account contained many exaggerations and so should not be seen as accurate. Incensed by the book’s publication, Dering sued for libel. In 1964, he won his case against Uris, and was able to successfully prove the account in Exodus was flawed. For example, Uris suggested Dering carried out 17,000 operations, when the figure was much lower. Yet Dering’s court victory was Pyrrhic: he won only one half penny, while the media coverage had highlighted his prior life, and so destroyed his reputation. It also helped reveal to the wider British public the issue that the later anti-fascist War Crimes Campaign of the 1980s would also focus on: Nazi collaborators who had evaded justice after 1945. Britain’s memory of the Holocaust was certainly changing twenty years after the end of the Second World War, and trials such as Dering’s in the UK, alongside more impactful events such as Eichmann’s trial, were becoming more frequent occurrences in other countries by this time. Such developments were certainly helping to promote a more complex collective memory of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, questions remained regarding whether Britain would assess its role in offering war criminals haven after 1945. Would the British

22 Caroline Sharples, ‘In Pursuit of Justice: Discussing the Statute of Limitations for Nazi War Crimes in Britain and West Germany During the 1960s’, Holocaust Studies, 20:3 (2014), pp. 81–108. 23 For

more on Uris, see Ira B. Nadal, Leon Uris: Life of a Bestseller (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010). 24 For

more on Dering, see: Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 246–249; Paul Weindling, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 143–145.

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state ask itself some difficult questions? Would it try to prosecute war criminals living on its soil? While the Dering case of the 1960s pointed to some of the complexities that had developed in the years immediately after 1945, it would take another two decades before a more sustained effort developed to reveal such Nazi collaborators in Britain.

Anti-Fascism and the War Crimes Campaign of the 1980s In Britain at least, it was not until the mid to late 1980s that a new wave of interest in this issue came to a head. This saw a new campaign for justice spearheaded by a combination of British anti-fascist campaigners, Jewish interest groups and public academics such as David Cesarani. Such campaigning helped inspire parliamentarians to develop new legislation, although here too politicians met with fierce resistance.25 In other countries as well, new efforts were by this time being made to find and prosecute war criminals. While West Germany was clearly a special case and had established a specialist unit to deal with these issues in 1958, America had introduced its own measures in 1979, and Australia did likewise in 1987, both before Britain did so in 1991.26 In the UK at least, the new wave of energy to seek out and prosecute alleged war criminals was inspired by fresh evidence of specific cases of collaboration offered by Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Weisenthal Center. Zuroff passed a list of seventeen suspected war criminals to the British authorities in 1986, and also provided this data to those likely to campaign in Britain for new prosecutions. The Simon Wiesenthal Center had been established in 1977 by Simon Wiesenthal, himself a survivor of the Nazi death camps, with the aim of exposing Nazi-era war criminals.27 Wiesenthal said of his work tracking and exposing Nazis: ‘I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it’.28 In part inspired by this quest for justice, campaigners in Britain felt likewise. The approach taken by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to promote new investigations around the globe was to offer campaigning groups in each country new information, thereby allowing these groups to develop for themselves the political will to prosecute alleged war criminals that had managed to forge a life for themselves after 1945. As well as Britain, the Simon Wiesenthal Center helped to provoke

25 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 201.

26 Jürgan

Schurr, Strategies for the Effective Investigation and Prosecution of Serious International Crimes: The Practice of War Crimes Units (2010), p. 7. Available at: https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/The_Practice_of_Specialised_War_Crimes_ Units_Dec_2010.pdf [accessed 08/03/2018].

27 For more on Wiesenthal, see Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010). 28 Shayndi

Raice, ‘Wiesenthal Dies at 96’, Jewish Advocate, 23 September 2005, pp. 1–3.

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new efforts to investigate cases in Canada, Australia and the USA.29 Armed with new evidence, at this time a range of anti-fascist campaigners in Britain became central to the development of a new pressure group effort to find and prosecute individuals, including those specific cases identified by Zuroff. Before exploring this campaign, it is worth briefly reflecting on the term anti-fascism, and how it is being used in this discussion. Campaigners who fed into the war crimes campaign included a wide range of figures, and this case certainly demonstrates that the term ‘anti-fascist’ should not be seen simply as a synonym for radical far left street protestors who aggressively oppose fascist groups.30 Indeed, leading historian of anti-fascism, Nigel Copsey, describes anti-fascism as an identity that can be shared across those with left wing, liberal and conservative views and values.31 Rather than defining the term through specific types of activity, Copsey presents anti-fascism as any endeavour that styles itself as engaged in the act of opposing fascism and defending Enlightenment principles of freedom and democracy, and so certainly pressure groups that sought to expose war criminals from the Second World War, and seek justice for their victims—from the Simon Wiesenthal Center itself, to British publications such as Searchlight, to academics such as Cesarani—can be seen as anti-fascists through Copsey’s approach. As an example of British anti-fascist culture, Searchlight magazine in particular is worthy of special mention here. It dedicated a great deal of attention to the issue in the later 1980s, helping to inform others who put pressure on the British Government. Searchlight became a monthly anti-fascist publication in 1975, although it originally established itself as an anti-fascist group in 1965. Lifelong anti-fascist Gerry Gable, among others who identified as antifascist in 1960s Britain, have led the organisation.32 Since the mid 1970s, Searchlight has engaged in a wide range of campaigns against British and international extreme right groups, from the National Front, to the British National Party, to the Blood & Honour music network. It also took a keen interest in the issue of Second World War era criminals. For example, the May 1985 edition of Searchlight, shortly before it launched its own War Crimes Campaign, featured an article about Klaus Barbie, the ex-Gestapo officer who tortured French Resistance members while in France during the Second World

29 Efraim Zuroff, Occupation: Nazi-Hunter: The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust (New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House, 1994), p. ix. 30 For a historical account that employs such a narrow perspective on anti-fascism, see: David Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 1–10. 31 Nigel Copsey, ‘Towards a New Anti-Fascist “Minimum”’, in Varieties of Anti-Fascism, ed. by N. Copsey and A. Olechnowicz (Germany: Palgrave, 2010), pp. xiv–xxi (p. xv). 32 Nigel

Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), esp. pp. 134–135.

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War.33 As with the subsequent disclosures published in Searchlight, this information had been gathered from sources at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as well as Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Nazi hunters who investigated Barbie’s crimes in France. As Searchlight explained to its readers, Barbie arrested Jean Moulin, a high-ranking member of the French Resistance, and was implicated in the death of forty-four Jewish children from Izieu. Moreover, a feature on Barbie appeared in Searchlight magazine as it claimed files pertaining to him were prohibited for release in Britain; Searchlight argued that they might have contained information on the British government attempting to recruit him after the war.34 In such ways, albeit to a rather specialist, activist audience, by the mid 1980s Searchlight was clearly working to expose forgotten episodes in the history of the Holocaust, with the aim of establishing a more complex collective memory of the Nazi past as part of its wider anti-fascist activities. In December 1986, Searchlight published its first piece on Anantas Gecevicius, or Anton Gecas, a junior lieutenant in the Lithuanian Police. Gecas became a figure many talked about during the war crimes campaign.35 Searchlight explained to its readers how the SS would often use collaborator units from the local police force to support their efforts in developing operations in occupied territories. The aim of this strategy was to draw on the knowledge of local police or militia, who would know the landscape, the people, especially those who were Jewish. Collaborators would also be able to find places where victims could be buried, or where they would most likely hide.36 Orders from the 6 October 1941, reprinted in Searchlight, highlight that Gecas was a member of staff on an operation in Borisov, Minsk and Slutsk, to support German battalions.37 Gecas strenuously denied being involved, but again another duty roster confirmed his attendance, and given his rank, it was certainly plausible to suggest his potential involvement. Indeed, six members of his battalion and one eyewitness also all corroborated his participation. New information found its way into the public domain occurred in other ways as well. In March 1987, Searchlight published another article, which commented on a television programme broadcast by Channel 4 called Britain: The Nazi Safe House.38 This documentary was another important step in putting pressure on the government for a wider investigation into wartime collaborators who came to Britain after 1945. In a recent oral history interview, Gable stated that this television programme supported Searchlight ’s 33 As the magazine explained on its front cover, ‘The Government Have Considered the Release of Any Papers Relating to Klaus Barbie … and Have Concluded That Because of the Sensitive Nature … They Cannot Be Released’, Searchlight, May 1985, p. 1. 34 ‘The

“Butcher of Lyons” Is There a British Cover Up’, Searchlight, May 1985, p. 3.

35 ‘Ratline

to Britain’, Searchlight, December 1986, pp. 11–14 (p. 11).

36 Martin

Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 70. 37 ‘Rat

Line to Britain’, Searchlight, December 1986, pp. 11–14 (p. 13).

38 ‘Butchers

on Our Doorstep’, Searchlight, March 1987, pp. 6–7.

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campaigning on the issue, as it was an important source exposing to a wider audience those complicit with the Nazis who came to Britain. Mainstream media outlets were now delivering to a larger audience the same messages as Searchlight was doing for a more specialist, anti-fascist audience.39 For the growing number of campaigners alert to the issue, such high-profile exposure of Nazi collaborators was seen as positive, as it helped to put more pressure on the state to reconsider its position of largely ignoring a difficult past. David Cesarani, who was also involved in pursuing the issue, stated that growing pressure from groups including Searchlight, as well as such documentaries, meant the issue of war criminals living in Britain could no longer be ignored.40 It was around this time that some Members of Parliament also started to take a significant interest in the issue. Greville Janner, an MP of Jewish heritage, found other members of parliament who would join with him to create the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Crimes, formed in November 1986.41 The chairman was Merlyn Rees, a former Home Secretary. Other members included Liberal Democrat MP Alex Carlile, who as a QC could bring great expertise regarding the legal aspects of any potential future prosecutions. As parliamentary interest grew, Searchlight and others campaigned for a change in the Criminal Justice Bill, and later supported efforts to pass the War Crimes Bill, so that prosecutions could be brought in Britain for those who had committed atrocities outside the UK. Their motivation was linked to wanting formal recognition of wartime atrocities, and was driven by an urge among many of those engaged in campaigning to remember the past. For example, in a recent oral history interview, Gerry Gable discusses how his colleague at Searchlight, Maurice Ludmer, had been motivated to expose fascists in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to his experiences at Bergen Belsen. It was this formative experience that inspired him to campaign against antisemitism and Nazi war crimes. Though Ludmer died in 1981, before Searchlight ’s own War Crimes Campaign started, Gable went on to explain he too had been motivated to develop his anti-fascist campaigning for similar reasons.42 This type of motivation of not wanting to forget the Nazi past, and a personal connection with the Holocaust, was found among other prominent figures in the campaign, including parliamentarians. For example, Alex Carlile was descended from Jews who lived in Poland who were all killed in the Holocaust. As such, Carlile found it particularly difficult to hear other speakers, including the Conservative MP Ivor Stanbrook, dismiss the growing war crimes campaign as a revenge attack on old men.43 Indeed, Stanbrook typified opposition to those seeking justice as people driven by selfish and base 39 Interview

with Siobhan Hyland.

40 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 199.

41 Ibid.,

p. 198.

42 Interview

with Siobhan Hyland.

43 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 214.

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motives. In another recent oral history interview, Baroness Golding explained that, although not directly affected by the Holocaust herself, she was moved enough by her understanding of a difficult past to join the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Crimes, and has even kept her own private archive of material from this campaign.44 In March 1987, delegates from the Simon Wiesenthal Center came to Britain, armed with further documentation containing names of people they suspected were living in the UK that had committed war crimes. The AllParty Parliamentary Group on War Crimes also pressed the government on what action would be taken in the light of this list of suspects. However, the Home Secretary was initially reluctant to respond to the issue. In February 1987, Douglas Hurd stated that crimes committed abroad could not be prosecuted in Britain, posing a significant barrier to campaigners.45 While Searchlight published further material, Hurd went on to suggest that there was the potential to strip anyone believed to have committed war crimes of their citizenship, so they could be sent for trial either in West Germany or Israel, although he categorically ruled out extradition to the Soviet Union.46 However, by August of the same year, there was no movement on this proposition, and Hurd explained he could not act on the basis of one list of suspects alone. Nevertheless, further revelations demonstrating that it was very likely Nazi-collaborator war criminals were living in the country, alongside formal government acknowledgement of the issue, helped generate additional media exposure, galvanising sections of the public behind the war crimes campaign. In July 1987, Gable and others from Searchlight, including his wife Sonia, responded to criticisms of a lack of detailed evidence by spending ten days in the Soviet Union, which they detailed in the magazine in the form of a diary.47 Novosti, the Soviet Press Agency, arranged this tour. They met with a senior prosecutor in the Department of Justice, who said much evidence had already been sent to the British government about alleged war criminals living in the country. The Soviet authorities also explained that, if the British government would not extradite these figures to the Soviet Union, then they would support their prosecution in Britain as a compromise.48 At this time, Kyril Shein was identified as one of the partisans that were hanged by Anton Gecas. As part of their visit, Shein’s daughter spoke with the Gables about her life, and she described how she had managed to escape deportation by living in hiding helped by local gentiles.49 Gerry and Sonia Gable also visited Vilnius, where the state prosecutor handed over documents pertaining 44 Interview

with Siobhan Hyland.

45 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 200.

46 ‘Editorial’, 47 ‘On

Searchlight, April 1987, p. 2.

the War Crimes Trail’, Searchlight, August 1987, pp. 10–11.

48 Ibid.,

p. 11.

49 Ibid.,

p. 11.

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to Antas Derzinskas. Derzinskas was accused of shooting 70 women and children during the Second World War. His last known address in the UK was in Oldham, and later Searchlight tracked him down to living in Nottingham. They subsequently handed a file detailing these new findings to the Home Secretary.50 Armed with new data, Searchlight also officially launched their own War Crimes Campaign on 12 October 1987 with a press conference.51 This was done with the support of the Union of Jewish Students, who praised Searchlight for their understanding of the need to expose the extremes of the past, and challenge lingering antisemitic attitudes that seemed to minimise Jewish suffering and the desire for justice. The campaign, now more formalised, organised and sustained, was followed by a public meeting, held on 25 November 1987, to lobby to Parliament on the issue. In the months that followed, Searchlight continued to publish evidence on suspected war criminals, and also generated petition sheets, so readers could register their opinion with the Home Secretary. Hurd continued the position of not wanting to introduce new legislation, stating there would be no change to the Criminal Justice Bill to incorporate the prosecution of war criminals. However, he indicated that he was once again considering alternatives.52 Meanwhile, Searchlight, the Union of Jewish Students and other anti-fascists continued their campaign, in particular by petitioning the Government to co-operate with other countries to get the evidence needed to prosecute. Searchlight even noted that other countries, such as Australia, seemed more alert to the issue than Britain. Eventually, the sustained political pressure and potential for embarrassment met with a new attitude from the Government. Hurd announced an official War Crimes Inquiry on 8 February 1988.53 He appointed Sir Thomas Hetherington to lead it, along with William Chalmers. They had to consider four points: whether any retroactive legislation would be legal; what the rules on evidence should be; what jurisdiction Britain had with offences committed abroad; and the reliability of evidence from the Soviet Union. The report generated from this inquiry, The Hetherington–Chalmers Inquiry Report, gave much more substantial evidence that the claims made by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Crimes, alongside anti-fascist campaigners such as Searchlight, were indeed correct. It concluded: The crimes committed are so monstrous that they cannot be condoned: their prosecution could act as a deterrent to others in future wars. To take no action would taint the UK with the slur of being a haven for war criminals. … War criminals were not given the assurance that they would not be prosecuted here, 50 ‘Killer 51 ‘War

Loose in UK?’, Searchlight, September 1987, pp. 10–11 (p. 10).

Crimes Supplement’, Searchlight, October 1987, pp. 9–11 (p. 10).

52 ‘Editorial’, 53 Cesarani,

Searchlight, December 1987, p. 2.

Justice Delayed, p. 211.

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as we see nothing in the policy or practice of successive British Governments that would prevent the present Government taking whatever action it considers suitable.54

While the report urged action, new legislation would also be required. Such legislation was proposed in the wake of the inquiry, and was now supported by Hurd, although it met with a range of criticism and took several years to become law. Cesarani’s account of this episode explored in detail how the House of Lords twice rejected the proposed War Crimes Bill. As well as criticism from figures such as Lord Hailsham and Lord Houghton, who argued that Jewish people unreasonably sought vengeance, it saw fierce opposition from others too. Criticism even came from perhaps surprising voices, such as Lord Shawcross, who has been the chief prosecutor for Britain at the original Nuremberg Trials. Shawcross now argued the time for legal action had passed.55 Meanwhile, leading figures including Lord Pym and Edward Heath argued that digging up old episodes of European history was at odds with the emergence of a new Europe and the end of the Cold War. Eventually, the Parliament Act was used to approve the new War Crimes Act, which became law on 10 May 1991.56 Finally, anti-fascist campaigners believed, entrenched attitudes had been overcome and the necessary legislation had been enacted that would allow the state to prosecute alleged Nazi-collaborator war criminals.

Prosecuting the Accused While the passing of the War Crimes Act of 1991 was a clear victory for the AllParty Group on War Crimes, Searchlight, the Union of Jewish Students, and many others who campaigned for justice for the victims of Nazi-collaborator war criminals, the next nine years showed that using the Act to actually convict anyone of war crimes was very problematic. Over £11 million pounds was spent in the 1990s, and the Metropolitan Police developed a special War Crimes Unit consisting at its height of eleven police officers and two historians, as well as further support staff. It travelled in central and eastern Europe, Israel and elsewhere, investigating around 400 cases of suspected activity. However, while the Act itself was passed in 1991, it was only in 1995 that the first person was actually charged. This was the case of Szymon Serafinowicz, an alleged war criminal of Belarusian origin.57 The British Crown Prosecution Service was certainly one barrier to speedier action, as they were 54 Michael J. Bazyler and Frank M. Tuerkheimer, Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014), p. 279. 55 Cesarani,

Justice Delayed, p. 241.

56 Gabriele

Ganz, ‘The War Crimes Act 1991—Why No Constitutional Crisis?’, The Modern Law Review, 55 (1992), pp. 87–95 (p. 87). 57 Silverman,

‘War Crimes Inquiries’, p. 26.

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wary about bringing prosecutions using the new legislation. Notably, by 1999 it was revealed that they wanted to ensure that those prosecuted were of a very high level, and specifically that there was proof that a defendant was in a position of command. This meant that several cases were not brought to trial despite strong evidence. Examples here included Nikola Popkho and Andre Bakunowicz, who both allegedly engaged in atrocities with Serafinowicz but were not deemed responsible for directing others, therefore not worthy of prosecution. Other barriers to speedy action were far more mundane, such as police muddling up the spellings of the surnames of the accused. This was the case with Serafinowicz, and, incredibly, police were slowed down in locating him as they were searching for several months for a ‘Szymon Serafimowicz’.58 Eventually, after many delays, the case against Serafinowicz collapsed in 1997, as a medical team judged him to be unfit to stand trial.59 The case against him had cost an estimated £2 million to develop, and required a number of witnesses to travel to Britain. Such conclusions demonstrated the problems with mounting a successful prosecution five decades after alleged crimes had occurred. A surprising outcome in this era of prosecutions was the case of Anton Gecas, a figure much discussed by the anti-fascist War Crimes Campaign, yet who was not prosecuted.60 The new Lithuanian government had sought his extradition for a trial in Vilnius but before this could be concluded he died in Britain, and so Gecas was not prosecuted anywhere. Indeed, the only successful prosecution was that of Anthony Sawoniuk, a retired railway ticket collector who lived in London, who eventually faced a trial for his crimes in 1999. Again, his case showed the slow pace of the prosecution process. British authorities were alerted to him as early as 1988, via information passed to the Government by the Soviet Union. A police investigation began in 1994, he was then interviewed in 1996 and finally charged in 1997. He was found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences in prison. He later died in Norwich Prison, having served 6 years of his sentence. David Hirsh has discussed the difficulties with the historical testimony used for legal process in his assessment of this ground breaking trial, drawing out the difficulty of prosecuting people successfully for crimes that occurred many decades beforehand.61 This is, to date, the only time the War Crimes Act has been successfully used in a prosecution. In the wake of the Sawoniuk trial, the War Crimes Unit of Scotland Yard was scaled back dramatically. Police announced its work had been largely 58 Silverman,

‘War Crimes Inquiries’, p. 26.

59 Alan

Robinson, ‘War Crimes, Old Soldiers and Fading Memories: The Serafinowicz Case’, The Journal of Holocaust Education, 8:1 (1999), pp. 42–57 (p. 51). 60 David Cesarani, ‘Scottish Nazi May Have Lost More Than a Libel Suit’, The Jerusalem Report, 13 August 1992, p. 12. 61 David Hirsh, ‘The Trial of Andrei Sawoniuk: Holocaust Testimony Under CrossExamination’, Social and Legal Studies, 10:4 (2001), pp. 529–545 (p. 535).

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completed, and explained that new cases would be referred to the Organised Crime Group at Scotland Yard. A few months later, in October 1999, the police announced the closure of the War Crimes Unit, as the CPS had deemed the last remaining case lacked sufficient evidence to achieve a successful prosecution. The War Crimes Unit ceased activity by the end of the year, marking an end to the rather stalled and limited efforts to put Nazi collaborators on trial in Britain.62

Conclusions: A Failure of Memory The collective memory surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust in Britain is powerful, but as this chapter has shown it can also be selective. While crimes and atrocities committed by Germans are often easily remembered in Britain, the ways the British themselves played ambiguous roles can often be forgotten. The memory surrounding the history of British attitudes towards Jewish migration before 1939 is another example: while the Kindertransport programme can be pointed to in order to highlight how Britain helped Jewish children in times of extreme need, such as in 2016 during the migration crisis, it is all too easy for recollections of the programme to neglect the fact that the British state did little to support this initiative, or highlight that the parents of saved children were often killed at places such as Auschwitz.63 Regarding the issue examined by this chapter, putting Nazicollaborator war criminals on trial, it is clear there were discrepancies between the past and the ways the British state wanted to acknowledge the Holocaust. Certainly, developing prosecution cases against leading Germans in the wake of the Second World War was seen as important by the British state, yet prosecuting those who killed Jews but evaded initial detection because they were not German was not so easy. The attitudes to the EVW scheme suggest that crimes against Jewish civilians were not regarded as particularly important in the later 1940s. This also seems to be the case from looking at the prosecutions of the IMT and other British trials. The efforts among anti-fascists, Jewish interest groups, leading academics and concerned MPs to ensure that people who seemed very likely to have committed war crimes would face justice was also, largely, a failure and led to only one successful prosecution. This was certainly not a result of antifascists and others trying to raise the prominence of the issue. The barriers that led to failure here help reveal a wider range of institutional and cultural impediments to remembering the more ambiguous, darker elements of British 62 Harry

Reicher, ‘War Crimes Trials: Crystallization of the Principles of International Criminal Law’, in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, vol. 20, 2nd ed. (Detroit: MacMillan Reference USA, 2007), pp. 634–649 (p. 646). 63 Caroline

Sharples, ‘The Kindertransport in British Historical Memory’, in Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39: New Perspectives, ed. by A. Hammel and B. Lekowicz (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2012), pp. 15–27 (p. 15).

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history. In the later 1940s, there was a clear prioritisation of Britain’s immediate labour needs over the idea of carefully screening those who came to the country. Often hysterical concerns at this time over immigrants who were not white, or who were Jewish, were far stronger than worries over admitting entry to those who may have collaborated with the Germans in mass killings during the Second World War. Then, as the post-war period developed, a more entrenched period of forgetting these complex details set in, despite occasionally being highlighted—as in the example of Dering’s libel case or Anton Gecas featuring in a mainstream TV programme. It was not until the 1980s that a range of international factors meant new evidence emerged leading, eventually, to a more complete acknowledgement by the British state of its need to investigate alleged war criminals. Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Soviet Union provided anti-fascists and other campaigners with fresh data to allow them to create a sustained campaign, and put pressure on the Government to remember this past.64 This campaigning helped a largely forgotten issue to gain more exposure in the media, while Parliament was also forced, increasingly, to take the issue seriously. Nevertheless, Hurd remained resistant to introducing new legislation for a number of years, preferring initially the idea of extradition. The eventual passing of the War Crimes Act in 1991 also came very late in the day, in part as it met with much political resistance from figures such as Edward Heath and Lord Hailsham, though there was still time to mount prosecutions. However, the political climate that now surrounded the issue in the 1990s meant these prosecutions had to be of high-profile figures, and needed to be deemed highly likely to succeed. This proved especially difficult, which helps explain why, of the approximately 400 people investigated, there was only one successful conviction. By the end of the 1990s, despite millions of pounds having been spent on investigations, the work of the police and the CPS came to an end. While this episode came to a close by 1999, it is curious to note this coincided with the rise of a new wave of collective memorialisation of the Holocaust in Britain. In 1999, Tony Blair explained that Britain would support a new Holocaust Memorial Day, conceived as an initiative to help cultivate a powerful collective understanding of Nazi-era crimes, in schools and more widely too.65 While Britain has often wanted to remember the Holocaust, the war crimes campaign of anti-fascists and others helps reveal how the British have also wanted to evoke such a collective memory in certain, more convenient, ways.

64 Zuroff, 65 Tony

Occupation: Nazi Hunter, p. 265.

Kushner, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, Journal of Israeli History, 23:1, (2004), pp. 116–129 (p. 120).

CHAPTER 11

Selective Histories: Britain, the Empire and the Holocaust Michelle Gordon

The purpose of the present work is to address the significance of scholarly work on the Holocaust for a reassessment of the perpetration of extreme violence across the British Empire. Popular representations of the Holocaust are often highly selective and tend to emphasise the perpetration of violence by others while occluding Britain’s historical role in extreme violence, not least in reference to commemorative acts.1 Britain has undertaken little in the way of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung ’ in relation to its relationship with the Holocaust2 ; indeed, the country has yet to ‘bewältigen’ (deal with) its violent imperial history. There has been a resurgence in popular and academic interest in the British Empire over the last few years and the former tends to adhere to the longstanding view that the empire was fundamentally benevolent and was 1 On ‘screen memory’ see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remem-

bering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 12–16 and Dan Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory’, in Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), p. 190. 2 Dan Stone, ‘From Stockholm to Stockton: The Holocaust and/as Heritage in Britain’, in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 212–29. M. Gordon (B) The Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_11

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beneficial to both the ‘colonisers’ and the ‘colonised’.3 Misconceptions related to the Holocaust have contributed to these distortions. Holocaust ‘consciousness’ underplays genocide’s relevance to British history and impacts the ways that violence in the British Empire is studied and represented; there is a neglect of studying the British Empire within a wider framework of mass violence and genocide. An approach in which we try to ‘fit’ British colonial violence into a Holocaust paradigm is not desired, but rather we should first explore episodes of extreme violence within their specific historical contexts and secondly, we should view such brutalities within a longer European continuum of violence. To this end, there needs to be greater dialogue between scholars of empire and mass violence.

Selective History in British Memory As historian David Cesarani stated in his final work, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949, ‘The Holocaust has never been so ubiquitous’.4 This is certainly true in lots of ways, however, as Cesarani then states, ‘there is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship’.5 That this is the case in Britain has been confirmed by University College London’s recent study on secondary school teaching of the Holocaust.6 The key developments within Britain related to public ‘Holocaust consciousness’, particularly since the 1980s, have been well documented.7 The Holocaust has a presence in British contemporary consciousness—as well as across Europe, as scholars such as Andy Pearce have highlighted, it is learnt, read, seen and remembered in a variety of ways.8 However, in many ways we ‘continue to ignore the Holocaust’.9 As Paul Salmons has suggested, Britain has failed to really discuss the Holocaust in a meaningful way in order to avoid asking difficult questions raised by considerations related to British history and 3 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 1990 [1965]). An advocate of empire is Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2002). 4 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (Pan Books, 2016), Kindle edition. 5 Cesarani,

Final Solution.

6 Tom

Lawson, ‘Britain’s Promise to Forget: Some Historiographical Reflections on What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 23:3 (2017), 345–63 and Stuart Foster et al., What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Institute for Education, 2016).

7 Notably,

Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).

8 See

Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness.

9 Paul

Salmons, ‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’ Paper presented at the David Cesarani Holocaust Memorial Lecture at Royal Holloway University, Egham, 26 January 2016.

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identity.10 Misperceptions that have long reigned in British history include representing the country as an unequivocally ‘good’ actor in World War II, not least fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to ‘save’ European Jewry. Debates have been illuminating in relation to Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), which takes place annually on 27 January, as of 2001.11 Although the Holocaust is relevant to British society and history in a variety of ways, the reasons for this have been unclear to many. Cesarani set out the many ways in which the Holocaust is relevant to Britain in the theme paper for HMD 2002, ‘Britain, the Holocaust and its Legacy’.12 Issues that Cesarani argued had been ‘swept under the carpet’ include: the failure of the British government to take in greater numbers of Jewish refugees or allow them access to Palestine13 ; the extent of British knowledge regarding the Holocaust as it unfolded; whether the Allies should or could have bombed Auschwitz in order to bring an end to the killing process14 ; allowing former Nazi war criminals into the UK shortly after World War II; the question of Allied war crimes in relation to the totalised bombing of German cities.15 Of course, Britain’s role in Palestine was also more direct with regard to the British Empire and hence, intertwined with the aftermaths of the Holocaust16 ; an issue that I will discuss below. The introduction of HMD was viewed critically by many British scholars of the Holocaust for a variety of reasons including the ‘lesson-centric’ approach taken, which purports that if we ‘never forget’17 we may ensure ‘never again!’18 Historian Donald Bloxham has questioned this approach, which includes calls for the lighting of a virtual candle and more recently, the creation of Jewish recipe cards.19 Such initiatives are undoubtedly 10 Salmons, 11 See

‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’

Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness, Chapter 6.

12 David

Cesarani, Britain, the Holocaust and Its Legacy: The Theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (2002), http://www.ofmdfmni.gov.uk/2002_theme_paper.pdf: accessed 21 November 2011, p. 2; see also: Tony Kushner, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, The Journal of Israeli History, 23:1 (2004), 116–29.

13 See Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14 Caroline

Sharples and Olaf Jensen, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, p. 3.

15 Eric

Markusen and David Kopf (eds), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press, 1995).

16 We need to move beyond demarcating ‘the Holocaust’ as ending in 1945: Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015). 17 Sharples

and Jensen, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

18 See

Donald Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Using the Past in the Service of the Present’, Immigrants and Minorities, 21:1 (2003), 47. 19 Stone, ‘Stockholm to Stockton’, p. 222. See, Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, ‘Recipe from the Jewish Community’, https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/ 08/jewish_community_recipe_card_hmd_2017_final.pdf: accessed 1 September 2018. Although, on local HMD commemorative efforts and their deviation from the centralised

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made in good faith, as pointed out by Cesarani, and yet they are evidently not having the intended impact. While Dan Stone has highlighted that, in reality, HMD has become ‘Genocide Memorial Day’, it certainly has not become ‘Britain’s Self-Reflection Day’20 and there has been a failure to address direct links between genocide and Britain; although as Stone points out, the day was not intended as an avenue for Britain to deal with its genocidal past.21 The approach taken by London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) is also indicative of wider issues to underplay Britain’s relationship with violence22 ; in particular the Holocaust exhibition and the now defunct Crimes against Humanity exhibition have been critically assessed. Genocide scholars note a failure of self—i.e. British-reflection in particular, not least the avoidance of discussing issues related to Britain as a ‘site of genocide’.23 The approach of the IWM speaks to popular representations of British ‘peaceableness’, in which Britain goes to war to ‘do good’.24 As discussed by Elizabeth Edwards and Matt Mead, while sensitive issues such as the Holocaust have been dealt with ‘more confidently and discretely… in public culture’—at least when focusing on ‘the perpetrators’, the ‘bewältigen’ of violent colonial pasts speaks to wider issues of ‘negative heritage’ and the challenges of ‘colonial remembering’ and ‘collective amnesia’, representing an ongoing challenge for Britain’s museums.25 In the case of the museum sectors’ representations of British colonial violence, the dynamic is very much one of ‘forgetting’; while there is to be two spaces dedicated to informing the British public about the Holocaust within walking distance of one another in London (the IWM and the new Holocaust Memorial and accompanying learning centre), there is currently no museum to victims of the British Empire, nor any genuine engagement with narrative of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust see, John E. Richardson, ‘“If Not Me, Then Who?” Examining Engagement with Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration in Britain’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 32:1 (2018), 22–37. 20 Stone,

‘Stockholm to Stockton’, p. 213.

21 Stone,

‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, 188; Martin Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Parameters of National Responsibility’, Review of International Studies, 37:5 (2011), 2417–38. 22 See,

Tom Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, pp. 160–68. 23 Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide’, p. 160; Rebecca Jinks, ‘Holocaust Memory and Contemporary Atrocities: The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition and Crimes Against Humanity Exhibition’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, pp. 142–59. 24 On the ‘“good war” paradigm’ see Mark Donnelly, ‘“We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth”: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, p. 173 and Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 557–89. 25 Elizabeth Edwards and Matt Mead, ‘Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past’, Museum & Society, 11:1 (2013), 32, in reference to: Lynn Meskell, ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’, Anthropological Quarterly, 75:3 (2002), 557–74.

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Britain’s violent past within existing museum settings.26 Justifications for a second Holocaust memorial and information centre include a lesson-centric, ahistorical approach: the memorial and centre ‘will tell visitors the story of the times we as a country stood up to intolerance and hatred. It is crucial, if this is to be a memorial for the twenty-first century, that future generations continue to be exposed to the lessons of the Holocaust’.27 Unlike Australia’s ‘history wars’, no such debate has occurred in Britain and genocidal episodes against the Aborigines are not traditionally considered as being part of ‘British History’.28 Hence, the destruction of the Aborigines in Australia is a key area of research, not least in relation to a consideration of both Australia and Britain as ‘post-genocidal’ societies29 and the fact, as Martin Shaw has highlighted ‘that genocide was a repeated problem of British … imperial and colonial expansions, in which the imperial centre was often, if usually indirectly, implicated’.30 A lack of understanding related to the processes of the Holocaust enables a (at times wilful) misinterpretation of British imperial history.31 Sentiments of Eurocentrism are in evidence related to representations of ‘industrial killing’ in the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust certainly did not unfold ‘in the clockwork fashion entertained in popular consciousness’, as Dirk Moses points out.32 In many ways, misunderstandings of the Holocaust have (mis)informed knowledge of other instances of mass violence, and I argue that such misunderstandings reinforce a distancing between mass violence and British history, forming a barrier to comparative approaches. In Britain, Holocaust memory

26 The

British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol was closed completely in 2009. The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool marks something of an exception. Harriet Sherwood, ‘Imperial War Museum in Clash over Planned Holocaust Memorial’, The Guardian, 7 October 2017 and Afua Hirsch, ‘Britain’s Colonial Crimes Deserve a Lasting Memorial: Here’s Why’, The Guardian, 22 November 2017. 27 Ed Balls and Lord Pickles, ‘Why a New Memorial to the Holocaust Is Essential’, UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, originally published in the London Evening Standard on 3 September 2018. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/why-anew-memorial-to-the-holocaust-is-essential: accessed 21 October 2018. See also, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: Cabinet Office, 2005). 28 See Richard Gott, ‘Shoot Them to Be Sure’, in Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 108. 29 Tom

Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 23.

30 Shaw,

‘Britain and Genocide’, p. 2428.

31 Salmons, 32 A.

‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’

Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2010 [2008]), p. 26. On the misperceptions of the ‘mechanical’ nature of the Holocaust see also, Cesarani, Final Solution; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 153.

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has bizarrely become one that is ‘[comfortably] horrible’.33 If we look beyond the emphasis on the gas chambers, then there are clear similarities between Nazi violence and European colonial violence. As scholars have highlighted, within Nazi Germany’s initial anti-Jewish policies one may recognise continuities with the treatment of colonial subjects in European empires, not least related to forced removals, ‘concentration’ tactics,34 appropriation, slave/indentured labour and food insecurities.35 Studies that place the Holocaust within a wider framework of European violence are not undertaken to be ‘fashionable’.36 Nor is this approach an attempt to ‘universalise’ the Holocaust and remove its specificities—notably the key role of antisemitism: ‘The idea that anti-Semitism was the essence of the Holocaust is perfectly compatible with the idea that such anti-Semitism can also be understood as related to colonial ideologies’.37 Discussions of the ‘singularity’ and ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust make scholarly undertakings, as well as public understandings regarding other instances of genocide and mass killing, all the more difficult.38 However, a competition of suffering is clearly not desirable and I do not want to go into these debates other than to state that while the ‘uniqueness’ position may have run out of steam in most quarters, the logic of this position is still very much apparent in some criticisms of considerations which explore the Holocaust and colonialism within a wider framework of mass killing.39 Our attention to these issues should be ‘multidirectional’ rather than competitive.40 We are not partaking in a zero-sum game and I am not arguing that we should discuss the Holocaust less; indeed, there are valid concerns that the current approach in the UK is clearly not doing

33 Edward

T. Linenthal cited in Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 9.

34 See

Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (CA: University of California Press, 2017). 35 Stone,

‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, 174. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001). In relation to the Holocaust see for example: Shelley Baranowski, “Nazi Colonialism and the Holocaust: Inseparable Connections.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 27:1 (2013), 60.

36 Dan

Michman, ‘The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope’, in Norman J. W. Goda (ed.), Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transitional Approaches (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 17. 37 Tom Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past: Reading and Writing Colonial Genocide in the Shadow of the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 20:1–2 (2014), 135, 147. 38 See Dan Stone, ‘Genocide as Transgression’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7:1 (2004), 45–65 and Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). In response, advocates for other genocide victims have made their own uniqueness claims: Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). 39 On

the problems of ‘uniqueness’ see Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’.

40 Rothberg,

Multidirectional Memory.

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enough to enable a genuine understanding of genocide, never mind encouraging greater tolerance.41 By advocating the Holocaust as an ‘unprecedented’ crime, British imperial history can be and has been played down: the argument goes that the empire’s misdeeds could not possibly have been ‘as bad’ as the Holocaust, as if this somehow vindicates the crimes committed.

European Continuities of Violence Both British and German colonial violence have been regarded as ‘exceptional’—Britain based on its moderation and Germany based on its brutality. Holocaust Studies has had a direct impact on the study of empire. While there has been a recent focus on German colonial history within the context of ‘Hitler’s Empire’,42 for contemporary post-war commentators the links between colonialism and fascism were self-evident, however, it has taken decades for their ideas to be fully explored.43 Within the context of the burgeoning field of Holocaust Studies—and as an extension of this field, comparative genocide studies—scholars of violence have been extending their focus to include European empires within a wider framework and history of violence. Indeed, it was within this historical context, that Raphael Lemkin developed the term and definitions of ‘genocide’ in 1944.44 A rediscovery of Lemkin’s work in recent years has contributed to new enquiries related to the relationship between colonialism and genocide. The subject of ‘colonial genocide’ was initially disregarded on account of, in part, the overemphasis of political scientists in the 1980s on the role of the state in genocide.45 Colonial genocide challenges the perception of genocide as state-led as often in a colonial context it is the colonial settlers rather than the state that are leading the violence.46 However, the Holocaust also did not result from a seamless process directed from the centre; the Holocaust has many ‘histories’ and was

41 Bloxham,

‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days’, p. 57.

42 Mark

Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Penguin, 2009 [2008]) and David Furber and Wendy Lower, ‘Colonialism and Genocide in NaziOccupied Poland and Ukraine’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, pp. 372–402.

43 See, Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2008). 44 Raphael

Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).

45 Dan

Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies’, New Formations, 71 (2011), 52; idem, Histories of the Holocaust, pp. 214–16.

46 A case in point is the destruction of the Aborigines in Australia; for further discussion see: A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 24–25, pp. 28–35; Alison Palmer differentiates between ‘state-led’ and ‘society led’ genocide: Palmer, ‘Colonial and Modern Genocide: Explanations and Categories’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21:1 (1998), 89–115.

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often driven by local initiatives.47 For Lemkin, genocide was ‘intrinsically colonial’.48 Indeed, if one considers Lemkin’s oft-quoted definition, concepts of genocide and mass violence can make an essential contribution to our understanding of the broader nature of colonialism, and by extension, the British Empire. To this end, Lemkin’s approach emphasises ways in which genocide is not limited to mass murder: Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.49

Historians of genocide have highlighted Lemkin’s focus on aspects of ‘cultural genocide’ in particular, which were left out of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC).50 In contrast with more limited contemporary popular understandings of the Holocaust as ‘industrial’ killing, post-war understandings of genocide and explorations of the Holocaust were placed within wider contexts of mass violence, including notions of Nazi genocides.51 We do not need to prescriptively follow ‘genocide’ as a legal definition. We can take a more ‘flexible’ approach and adopt Lemkin’s definition, and view extreme violence within a wider-historical framework.52 Hannah Arendt discussed ‘boomerang effects’ in relation to colonialism ‘come home’53 and anti-colonial critics such as Aimé Cesairé, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre made it clear that for them the connections between the violence of colonialism

47 Stone, 48 Moses,

Histories of the Holocaust and Cesarani, Final Solution. ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 9.

49 Lemkin, 50 See

Axis Rule, p. 79.

Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, pp. 12–13. See Lemkin, Axis Rule, Chapter 9.

51 Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’, p. 147; Dan Stone, ‘Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, 7:4 (2005), 539. As Hannah Arendt acknowledged, Nazi genocide would not have been limited to European Jewry, in the event of Nazi victory: ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’ (1964), in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 43 and Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide’, in Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 241–64. 52 See,

Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, pp. 215–17.

53 Hannah

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976 [1951]), p. 223. For further discussion see: Stone, ‘Defending the Plural’, pp. 46– 57. On ‘the moment of the boomerang’ in reference to decolonisation: Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001 [1965]), p. 7.

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and Nazi policies were more than obvious.54 If we accept the relevance of nineteenth-century European imperialism then, given its depth and breadth, we must also assess the role of the British Empire as an inspiration and important antecedent for Nazi colonial/genocidal practices.55 However, a more typical approach has focused on the ‘benefits’ of being ‘colonised’ within the British Empire; the argument goes that the ‘colonised’ should perceive themselves as ‘lucky’ to have been colonised by the British rather than another European power in a line of argument that accepts British ‘exceptionalism’.56 In contrast, German colonial violence has been viewed within a continuum of genocidal violence. The ‘continuity thesis’ explores the connections between German colonial violence and the Holocaust; such studies have been particularly instructive in highlighting connections between German colonial policies in Africa—particularly those targeting the Herero and Nama—with Nazi policies in ‘the East’.57 This approach has been led predominantly by the work of Jürgen Zimmerer for whom the relevance of colonialism for genocide (including the Holocaust) is clear; as he states, ‘genocide is colonial’, though it does not necessarily follow that the reverse is true.58 In contrast, many scholars have been critical of what they see as a new colonial Sonderweg, which links ‘Windhoek to Auschwitz’.59 There is a growing body of work that highlights the fact that there was no ‘special path’ for Germany, not least in its empire; this approach is contrary to Isabel Hull’s contention that a distinct German ‘military culture’ ultimately led to genocide, in reference to an alleged propensity for ‘final solutions’.60 In contrast, Susanne Kuss addresses continuities insofar as she highlights that comparison of colonial massacres in different contexts ‘soon dashed all claims of [Germany’s] uniqueness’. Kuss argues that it was the ‘unique’ conditions on the ground that dictated the escalation of violence and methods to be used in colonial ‘Kriegschauplätze’ (theatres of 54 For example Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]); W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto’, Jewish Life (1952), 14–15. 55 On

these connections, Michelle Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 21:4 (2015), 272–91. 56 As

discussed by Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society’, p. 4.

57 Jürgen

Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39:2 (2005), 197–219. 58 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Nationalsozialismus postkolonial: Plädoyer zur Globalisierung der deutschen Gewaltgeschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 57:6 (2009), 534. 59 Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), 279–300; Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, p. 237; and Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, trans. Andrew Smith (London: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 3. Including Isabel V. Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 60 Hull,

Absolute Destruction.

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war), rather than a particular ‘intent’ to exterminate.61 Genocide could and did become an option in European colonies in certain conditions; the ‘potential’ for genocide was ever-present in the colonies.62 Thus the purpose of the present work is not to argue that the British Empire was fundamentally genocidal, but to explore the utilisation of extreme violence not least resulting from the often one-sided nature of colonial warfare.63 Just as there has been resistance among individual scholars in relation to attempts to place the Holocaust within a wider framework of extreme violence and genocide, the same may also be said regarding genocidal violence and the British Empire. However, the sophisticated literature of Holocaust scholarship provides us with an extremely useful body of work and methodology, which may be applied in relation to the practices of extreme violence that were perpetrated across the British Empire.64 In seeking continuities, historians, notably Moses, have illuminated key areas in which the logic of violence in European empires was similar to violence perpetrated by the Nazis.65 Moses has argued strong links between genocidal violence and national security; indeed he has stated: ‘Genocide is as much an act of security as it is racial hatred’.66 This line of argument leads Moses to emphasise key connections between Nazi violence and counterinsurgency, as he explains: ‘The German state regarded the resistance of illegitimate and targeted civilians preemptively and often collectively to forestall future resistance, just as in colonial wars of “pacification” against unruly tribes’.67 While these developments may be contentious for some scholars, historians such as Moses have convincingly argued that the colonial paradigm has something to tell us about Nazi genocidal violence, just as genocide studies has much to tell us about the nature of European colonialism. Colonial wars of ‘pacification’ then represent antecedents to extreme violence in the world wars, as well as the wars of decolonisation, which were consistent with the violence wrought across the British Empire hitherto. ‘Small wars’ throughout the empire were significant in this evolution 61 Kuss,

German Colonial Wars.

62 Mark

Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Volume II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 52. On genocidal ‘moments’: A. Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2:1 (2000), 89–106. 63 A key text on colonial warfare remains J. A. de Moor and H. L. Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War: Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1989). 64 A

point also made by Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 175.

65 On

the Holocaust as ‘subaltern genocide’ see Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 38.

66 A.

Dirk Moses, ‘Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 54:2 (2008), 264. Of course much depends on how one defines ‘The Holocaust’: for contrasting definitions see: Michman, ‘The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust’, pp. 17–38 and Carroll P. Kakel, III, The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. vii. 67 A.

Dirk Moses, ‘Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust’, in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), emphasis in the original.

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of practices, which developed to deal with ‘natives’ who opposed colonial rule and the creation of a catalogue of violence; not least ‘taking no quarter’ and massacring the enemy wounded.68 Imperial knowledge was transferred between the metropole and the colony, as well as across empires, and we may recognise a system in which ‘mentalities of violence’ and practices of violence were held/remembered within a ‘colonial archive’ of transnational learning.69 It is also clear that the British Empire was a model for many other powers to emulate, not least Hitler.70

Extreme Violence in the British Empire It is a natural progression that the British imperial project also be examined within the context of colonial atrocities and genocidal violence considering the fact that the British Empire was underpinned by methods of extreme violence and in light of its scale and significance. Focusing on the more ‘positive’ aspects of empire means that, until recently, there has been a marked reluctance among imperial historians to engage in discussion of the more negative aspects of empire and in particular, the genocidal policies implemented within it.71 There remains a commonly held view of British ‘exceptionalism’ and standard studies of empire tend to underplay the extent of the violence that was inherent across the British Empire, presenting a sanitised history.72 While there are clear links between the practices of violence carried out across the British Empire and twentieth-century genocidal violence, it is also evident that European colonial violence needs to be examined in its own right.73 The increased willingness of historians of empire to discuss colonial violence in a British context marked the beginning of a much welcome shift in the historiography, but it remains the case that studies based on archival research are 68 Gordon,

‘Colonial Violence’, p. 6.

69 As

highlighted in Donald Bloxham et al., ‘Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence’, in Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 40. 70 Birthe

Kundrus, ‘Forum: The German Colonial Imagination’, German History, 26:2 (2008), 259. See Ulrike Lindner, ‘German Colonialism and the British Neighbour in Africa before 1914: Self-Determination, Lines of Demarcation, and Cooperation’, in Langbehn and Salama (eds), German Colonialism, p. 266. 71 An illuminating discussion is the exchange between Duncan Bell and John Darwin, ‘Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin’s The Empire Project ’, Journal of British Studies, 54:4 (2015), 987–97. However, there are exceptions, notably, V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (London: The Cresset Library, 1988 [1969]). 72 A

case in point: Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Also noted by Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 182.

73 Not

least, in order to incorporate the experiences of indigenous troops wherever possible. One attempt is Ronald M. Lamothe, Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War 1896–1898 (Oxford: James Currey, 2011).

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lacking.74 The attention that has been paid to British colonial campaigns is generally limited to traditional and, at times, ‘parochial’ military history.75 However, scholars are increasingly considering the integral role of violence in the colonisation process and are providing studies which counter ‘British exceptionalism’ in relation to settler and administrative colonialism, colonial warfare, counterinsurgency, decolonisation as well as the inherent everyday violence across the empire. It is without dispute that atrocities were carried out in the name of the British Empire, and new studies in this area are now spanning decades, if not centuries, of British colonial rule.76 Areas of interest include British actions in Australia, Ireland, Rhodesia and Zululand, India, with focus specifically on the 1857 Indian Uprising and violence on the Northwest Frontier, the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, the Reconquest of Sudan 1896–9, the Boer War 1899–1902, the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and colonial famines, to name a few.77 Methods of violence that were routinely used to achieve the expansion and maintenance of the empire include: looting; hostage taking; a disregard for international standards of warfare; martial law and indemnity acts; the use of collective reprisals on civilians—including indentured labour—and scorched earth policies; summary executions; starvation tactics on the enemy as well as the wider population.78 These tactics of collective punishment belie Britain’s reputation as ‘moderate’. The perpetrators of this violence justified their participation by denying the applicability of European standards of war to the colonies; in this way the latter were viewed as ‘states of exception’.79 74 Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011). 75 See, Kim A. Wagner, ‘Seeing Like a Soldier: The Amritsar Massacre and the Politics of Military History’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 23–37. For a traditional approach see, Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars 1837 –1901 (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1973). 76 Ben

Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Robbie McVeigh, ‘“The Balance of Cruelty”: Ireland, Britain and the Logic of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 10:4 (2008), 541–61.

77 These

include: Levene, The Rise of the West; Michael Lieven, ‘“Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place”: Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879’, History, 18 (1999), 614–32; Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120:4 (2015), 1218–46. Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

78 On the contradictory approach of the British to issues of slavery and exploitation see for example, Esme Cleall, ‘“In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice, Principles of Righteousness”: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40:4 (2012), 601–18. 79 Tom

Lloyd, ‘States of Exception? Sovereignty and Counter-Insurgency in British India, Ireland and Kenya circa 1810–1960’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009).

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We can identify connections between the British imperial project and the ensuing genocidal violence on European soil in the twentieth century. These include the ways in which British colonial violence was predicated on notions of a racial hierarchy in which the colonists were inherently ‘superior’ and the ‘natives’ confirmed as ‘inferior’ and ‘illegitimate’. For example in Sudan, the Mahdia were deemed Dervish ‘fanatics’ or ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’, the Malays ‘ran amok’, making them ‘irrational’ and ‘unpredictable’80 and Jews in Palestine were of a ‘fanatical and cunning nature’.81 Racist assumptions were key to the British Empire and helped to justify extreme methods of violence and resulted in the dehumanisation of the enemy. This racial hierarchy was based on the dichotomisation of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbaric’: indigenes were deemed ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilised’. ‘Scientific’ racism was central to the colonial project and was used to legitimise its inherent racism, extreme violence, the ‘language of progress’ as well as fin de siècle fears of racial ‘degeneration’.82 Extreme violence was buttressed by the ‘extinction discourse’, which exploited racial stereotypes and assumed the ‘inevitable’ demise of indigenous communities.83 Racial prejudice and assumptions of British ‘superiority’ informed the processes of colonisation at all levels: in settler colonialism, quotidian violence, colonial warfare and the processes of decolonisation, as I will explore below. Genocide scholars have explored settler colonialism as inherently genocidal; Patrick Wolfe has pointed to the critical issue of whether the colonists needed land, but not necessarily the labour of the indigenous people.84 In any case, we can point to the significance of structural violence in colonialism, as scholars of empire address everyday, non-military violence.85 While it has been typical to argue that the destruction of indigenous communities resulted in spite of the ‘good intentions’ of the British government and colonial administrators, notably in colonial Australia, genocide scholars have demonstrated the complexities related to communication and policies between the periphery and the metropole.86 Debates include ‘the vexed question of intention’ and

80 See

Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1236.

81 David

Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945–1948 (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 39; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’. 82 See

Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 83 Patrick

Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

84 Patrick

Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, American Historical Review, (2001), 867. Cf. Palmer, ‘Colonial and Modern Genocide’, p. 103.

85 Elizabeth

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

86 Regarding southern Africa: Nigel Penn, ‘The British and the “Bushmen”: The Massacre of the Cape San, 1795 to 1828’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:2 (2013), 188–89.

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the ‘unintended’ consequences of colonial policy.87 These debates are integral to an understanding of the colonial relationship; however, there has been hitherto a lack of engagement between imperial and genocide scholars. For some imperial historians, discussions of colonial genocide are addressing an ‘anachronistic question’.88 However, the aim of such discussions is not to ‘fit’ colonial violence into contemporary definitions of the Holocaust and genocide, as Jordanna Bailkin claims.89 Rather, historians are viewing genocidal violence as part as a wider-historical process.90 The role of law and order in the British Empire is significant and has implications for our understanding of both everyday violence—including discrimination as a form of structural violence— and the processes of extreme violence.91 Taylor Sherman’s work regarding state violence and punishment in India has shown that once colonial rule was established, quotidian violence remained in a variety of forms: ‘from firing on crowds and bombing from the air, to dismissal from one’s place of work or study, to collective fines, imprisonment and corporal punishment’.92 Such actions flew in the face of claims regarding the British ‘civilising mission’. Elizabeth Kolsky’s exploration of white violence in India shows how violence was endemic, not ephemeral in the colonial relationship.93 Colonial administrators were integral to this violence. The everyday discrimination, subjugation, exploitation and violence that was enacted upon the ‘colonised’ clearly speaks to Lemkin’s analysis of genocide, who by no means solely focused on mass killing.94 As Jill Bender emphasises, we need to understand the interrelations between ‘micromoments’ of everyday violence and ‘macromoments’ such as colonial warfare and punitive expeditions.95 Not only were both types of violence related to each other, exemplary violence was connected through individuals who transferred their ‘knowledge’ across colonial settings.96 In terms of macro-processes of violence, colonial warfare was invariably brutal and informed by assumptions regarding the ‘uncivilised’ nature of the 87 Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide?’ pp. 89–90. Of course the issue of ‘intent’ has been central to debates on the Holocaust: see Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, Chapter 2. 88 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:2 (2006), 467. 89 Bailkin, 90 Stone,

‘The Boot and the Spleen’, p. 467.

‘Defending the Plural’, p. 52.

91 See: Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster, ‘Colonial Judiciaries, Aboriginal Protection and South Australia’s Policy of Punishing “with Exemplary Severity”’, Australian Historical Studies, 41:3 (2010), 319–36. 92 Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 1. 93 Kolsky,

Colonial Justice in British India, p. 2.

94 Lemkin

discusses ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’: Axis Rule, p. 91.

95 Jill

C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 19, p. 144. 96 Bender,

The 1857 Indian Uprising, pp. 132–33.

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‘native’. As Charles Callwell, a theorist on ‘small wars’ stated, wars against ‘savages’ could mean ‘committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction’. Callwell admitted that it was ‘desirable’ to achieve ‘not merely the defeat of the hostile forces but their destruction’.97 British colonial practices in the face of resistance certainly followed Callwell’s advice that ‘fanatics and savages … must be thoroughly brought to book and cowed or they will rise again’.98 Considering the fact that colonial wars could quickly become wars against an entire group of people, particularly in the context of guerrilla-style opposition, Moses has highlighted that, ‘Colonial war could mean total war on a local scale’.99 The nature of these conflicts meant that open battle and clear targets were rare, leading the campaign to escalate against the population as a whole.100 ‘Insurrections’ and recalcitrant ‘natives’ were met with extreme violence, justified by the ‘savage nature’ of the ‘natives’. Colonial practices of violence were deemed ‘civilised’ because of the use of modern weaponry such as the Maxim gun, which are presented as ‘cold’ and distant, thereby underplaying the role of face-to-face killing.101 However, the effects of British tactics were horrific, as demonstrated in the case of the Reconquest of Sudan. At the behest of Horatio Herbert Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, the campaign’s finale turned into a one-sided massacre and the Anglo-Egyptian army decimated the Mahdia army, including those who were wounded or tried to surrender.102 Historians have further encouraged a viewpoint which emphasises the ‘cold’ effects of technology, including Vinay Lal whose work underestimates the role of face-to-face killing in his suggestion that the troops at Omdurman and the Schreibtischtäter of the Holocaust were comparatively similar—not least owing to the massacre of wounded troops—and the bloody realities of colonial warfare.103 As part of the concept of ‘civilised warfare’ colonial practices of violence encouraged the development of particularly destructive weaponry, including dum-dum bullets and lyddite shells. The former was particularly brutal, however, it was believed by the colonists that such levels of destruction were necessary; justifications for the use of dum-dum bullets (banned by the Petersburg Declaration in 1868) turned to racist arguments such as the following: ‘Civilised man is much

97 Charles

Edward Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd edn (London: General Staff, War Office, 1906 [1896, 1899]), p. 42, p. 159. 98 Callwell, 99 Moses,

Small Wars, p. 42, p. 148.

‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 26.

100 Callwell,

Small Wars.

101 Joanna

Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 2000 [1999]). 102 Gordon, 103 Vinay

‘Colonial Violence’.

Lal, ‘The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of Genocide’, A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds), Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 131–32. See Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’, p. 8.

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more susceptible to injury than savages… the savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable, and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded’.104 Violence was fundamental to the British imperial project from the very beginning, both in establishing and maintaining British rule. Indeed, rather than a ‘long peace’, Britain was continuously at war throughout the nineteenth century.105 Throughout its lifetime the British Empire consistently utilised extreme violence to extend its reach, particularly in suppressing resistance to it. This assessment includes settler colonialism in North America and Australia, which began under the British.106 Studies are demonstrating that British colonial authorities sought to ‘nip in the bud’ outbreaks of violence and resistance to colonial rule—an approach that links settler and administrative colonialism. In this way, we can identify the brutality of the latter, as well as the ‘usual suspect’ of settler violence.107 Colonial administrators were key to the outbreak and radicalisation of violence, in the face of any voiced or suspected indigenous opposition to what was often the incremental takeover of their land and institutions by the British.108 This violence was underpinned by notions of ‘natives’ as ‘inferior’ and ‘savage’, as expressed by Callwell and his contemporaries.109 An example of exemplary violence is the suppression of the ‘mutineers’ in the Indian Uprising of 1857; ‘punishment’ was brutal and included being tied to the mouth of a canon and blown up.110 Hence, exemplary violence was used repeatedly to make an ‘example’ of those who posed an actual or potential threat to British colonial rule. Such an approach was also supported in settler colonies; in Tom Lawson’s investigation into the destruction that was unleashed by the British upon the indigenous population of Tasmania in what he has termed, ‘A British Genocide’, he describes the desire of the British government to demonstrate ‘absolute force’ against the Aborigines and ‘the full might of the British Empire’.111 The perpetration of 104 Cited in Edward M. Spiers, ‘The Use of the Dum Dum Bullet in Colonial Warfare’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4:1 (1975), 7. See Alex J. Bellamy, ‘Mass Killing and the Politics of Legitimacy: Empire and the Ideology of Selective Extermination’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 58:2 (2012), 159–80. 105 See Sheldon Anderson, ‘Metternich, Bismarck, and the Myth of the “Long Peace,” 1815–1914’, Peace & Change, 32:3 (2007), 301. 106 See Ann Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, p. 231. 107 Kim A. Wagner, “‘Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present, 233:1 (2016), 207; idem, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85:1 (2018), 218. 108 Michelle

Gordon, Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 109 See

for example, Garnet Wolseley, ‘The Negro as a Soldier’, Fortnightly Review, 44 (1888), 689–703.

110 Kim A. Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017), Chapter 10. 111 Lawson,

The Last Man, p. 51.

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extreme colonial violence across the empire demonstrated time and again the willingness of politicians in London and Britain’s military ‘men on the spot’ to condone and conduct campaigns of extreme violence in the name of the empire. Lawson’s study on Tasmania concludes that the genocidal violence took place ‘almost exclusively under direct British rule, and was committed by British colonists and settlers who either worked for the British Crown or for British companies, and who moved between Britain and the Antipodes’.112 Such histories evidently need to be integrated into ‘British History’. Studies of colonial violence are challenging ideas of an alleged British propensity for moderation including the violence utilised against indigenous opposition in the interwar period in which British colonists faced ‘crises of empire’.113 As ‘small wars’ turned into ‘counterinsurgency’ (COIN), a ‘British way’ was assumed, which included ‘minimum force’ and a focus on ‘hearts and minds’.114 These assumptions have fed into interpretations of British decolonisation. However, contrary to Arendt’s claim in 1951 ‘That the British liquidated rule voluntarily is still one of the most momentous events of twentieth-century history’,115 new studies—based on archival research—show that this was not the case; independence was not simply handed over willingly and peacefully and the lengths that were gone to in order to keep areas of empire under British influence have been highlighted. Britain did not do ‘a better job’ than anyone else,116 even if the violence of the French that was enacted against Algeria was ‘of a different order’.117 Studies of the processes of decolonisation in particular have challenged assumptions of British moderation.118 As Cesarani’s study of COIN in Palestine (1945–7) in the context of decolonisation and the aftermath of the Holocaust showed, here as elsewhere, Britain clung to power until the bitter end across the empire.119 Studies of British responses in Palestine have highlighted British brutalities against both the Arab and Jewish populations. In response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–9), police officers tried to knock down Arabs with their vehicles, as one Palestine policeman put it in a letter home: ‘running over an Arab is the same 112 Lawson,

The Last Man, pp. 18–19.

113 Martin

Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler (eds), Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 114 Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23:4–5 (2012), special issue: British Ways of CounterInsurgency: A Historical Perspective. 115 Arendt,

preface to the first edition, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xvii.

116 David

Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), p. 5. 117 Dan Stone, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Postwar Europe as History’, in Stone, The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 15. 118 For an overview of the historiography of counterinsurgency and decolonisation see: Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘British Counter-Insurgency: A Historiographical Reflection’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23: 4–5 (2002), 781–98. 119 Cesarani,

Major Farran’s Hat.

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as a dog in England except we do not report it’.120 British tactics in the face of COIN by a Jewish ‘insurgency’ included ‘screening’, interrogation and ‘special squads’, as well as the utilisation of the ‘expertise’ of ex-Black and Tans who took their practices from Ireland to the Palestine Police Force.121 Studies such as Cesarani’s highlight the ways in which practices of violence through ‘lessons’ and ‘networks’ were utilised across the empire and here is just one example of military men who took with them techniques of violence that could be transferred from one setting to another. Another example is General George Erskine who utilised the method of cordon and search, firstly in Palestine, and later in the violent processes of decolonisation in Kenya (1952–60). On 24 April 1954 the notorious roundups of Operation Anvil began and ‘purged’ the African areas of Nairobi, sending thousands into the camp system or ‘Pipeline’, which as Cesarani stated operated in ‘gross violation of every international convention governing human rights’.122 The British Empire was of great relevance to the aftermaths of the Holocaust throughout the immediate post-war period. Indeed, as Cesarani succinctly pointed out, ‘In 1947 the British were holding more Jews behind barbed wire than the Germans had been in 1937’ in detention camps, as part of their role of detaining Jews trying to get to Palestine after the Holocaust. Though as Stone rightly stated, those Jews detained by the British in Cyprus certainly faired better than those forced into camps within an imperial context (though of course they were still detained within a ‘colonial setting’).123 Nevertheless, after ‘liberation’124 ‘the fate of the Jews continued to be determined by war—although now it was the Cold War and Britain’s war against Jews in Palestine’.125 Of course, the brutalities of the flailing empire were not only felt in Palestine; the end of empire in Ireland, Kenya and Malaya was also notable for systematic atrocities.126 The case of British violence against the Mau Mau in Kenya is a key example in this debate, not least because of the use of the Holocaust paradigm by Caroline Elkins in her work, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.127 While Elkins may refer to the Soviet ‘gulag’ in her title, it is the Holocaust narrative that is most apparent 120 Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English Historical Review, 124:507 (2009), 332. 121 Cesarani,

Major Farran’s Hat, p. 9.

122 Cesarani,

Major Farran’s Hat, p. 215.

123 Stone, 124 See,

Concentration Camps, pp. 95–96, p. 98.

Stone, Liberation of the Camps.

125 Cesarani,

Final Solution.

126 For

example, Karl Hack, ‘Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23:4–5 (2012), 671–99. 127 In

relation to the Congo see, Sarah De Mul, ‘The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost ’, Criticism, 53:4 (2011), 587– 606.

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throughout this work.128 Elkins adopts language that is reminiscent of Nazi and Soviet violence to described the brutal processes of decolonisation; during the aforementioned Operation Anvil, as Elkins describes, violent techniques were used to ‘cleanse’ Nairobi of its Kikuyu residents (suspected Mau Mau, an anti-colonial movement) through roundups and forced removal. As Elkins describes, this action was intended to catch the entire population ‘off guard’, as loud speakers blared out instructions. The tropes of the Holocaust are in evidence throughout Elkins’ book—including descriptions of ‘packed rail cars’; Operation Anvil has been described as ‘Gestapolike’.129 Clearly, the forced removal of people in overcrowded conditions to inhospitable areas is reminiscent of both Soviet and Nazi policies. Seemingly the effects of the ‘screenings’ were similar to those of the Nazi ghettos and camps: ‘Men and women were often reduced to looking and smelling like the animals they were claimed to be’.130 Elkins was not the first to make these connections and already in the 1950s the question was asked whether these camps were ‘Kenya’s Belsen?’131 Regarding Elkins’ study one cannot help but be moved by the brutalities she describes based on the details provided to her in oral interviews by survivors.132 Elkins frames her argument within the context of genocide studies,133 although the connections she makes between the events in Kenya and other genocides (which she refers to) are not fully explored including the Armenian genocide, Nazi Germany and Rwanda.134 Elkins’ approach has been criticised for making ‘too much of an “eliminationist” analysis modelled on that of Daniel Goldhagen’.135 Clearly one should not feel it necessary to legitimise the study of British colonial violence by applying the tropes of the Holocaust to examples of colonial violence. One striking aspect of Elkins’ study is the irony that British actions were in direct contravention of the newly established European Convention on Human Rights in the aftermath of WWII. Further irony is noted by David Anderson who has found that 1090 Kikuyu people went to the gallows in state executions (1952– 8), at the same time that British politicians were considering the abolition of

128 Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). 129 Elkins,

Britain’s Gulag, p. 121.

130 Elkins,

Britain’s Gulag, p. 97. See Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’, p. 7.

131 Anderson, 132 Elkins,

Histories of the Hanged, p. 297.

Britain’s Gulag, p. 67.

133 Huw Bennett disputes this approach in Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 108 and Martin Crook, ‘The Mau Mau Genocide: A Neo-Lemkinian Analysis’, Journal of Human Rights in the Commonwealth, 1:1 (2013), 18–37. 134 Elkins,

Britain’s Gulag, see p. 49, p. 89, p. 90.

135 Marshall

S. Clough, Review of ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya’, The Journal of Military History, 69:3 (2005), 886.

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hanging at home.136 Hence, after having fought the ‘good war’, Britain went on to break the resulting human rights’ conventions in an attempt to hold on to empire,137 deeming these laws to be inapplicable to ‘savage natives’ who should not be afforded ‘international citizenship’ in Malaya and Kenya for example.138 The irony of this violence in light of British exultations of ‘never again’ is noted by Stone: the colonial powers were now, ‘using violence involving carpet bombing, expulsions, massacres of civilians, and torture in attempts to suppress anti-colonial movements’.139 If we can conclude that there was a ‘British way in colonial warfare/COIN’ it was based on a catalogue of extreme violence, which was drawn upon subject to the conditions on the ground; these methods were readily utilised when deemed ‘necessary’. In the face of indigenous opposition throughout the colonial relationship, British colonists and military men demonstrated that the empire was not built on a propensity for ‘benevolence’. There were moments in which the British Empire laid bare the truth of its ‘civilising mission’; the colonies were fought for until the bitter end and with tactics that were consistent with the violence of the colonial relationship hitherto.

Concluding Remarks Clearly increased Holocaust awareness in the UK is to be welcomed, however, I argue that explorations of the Holocaust need to be accompanied—not replaced—by greater examination and self-reflection related to British history and violence: we need to move away from an approach that continually portrays Britain as the rescuer and defender of victims of genocide and mass violence. Considering the Holocaust within a wider framework of violence enhances rather than precludes an understanding of the processes of violence. Future research on the British Empire needs to go beyond the hagiography of individuals and British troops, not least in relation to military men who were consistently in charge of campaigns of extreme brutality, such as Kitchener and Garnet Wolseley. The ‘Rhodes must fall’ movement speaks to this issue, but it is clearly contentious and hindered by the current British political climate.140 In placing Britain’s colonial and military men in a wider context of European violence, the Täterforschung of Holocaust and genocide studies will prove instructive, taking into account, of course, the unique circumstances in each case.141 Holocaust Studies can also prove useful in illuminating

136 Anderson, 137 Elkins,

Histories of the Hanged, p. 7.

Britain’s Gulag, p. 96.

138 Elkins,

Britain’s Gulag, p. 214.

139 Stone,

Concentration Camps, p. 102.

140 See

John Newsinger, ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’, Race & Class, 58:2 (2016), 70–8.

141 One

example is a consideration of Lord Cromer, Consul-General of Egypt in 1896 within the context of Arendt’s study of Adolf Eichmann: Yehouda Shenhav, ‘Beyond

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other aspects of European colonial violence, such as atrocity photography.142 Comparative studies related to the victims are also being made, bringing those who suffered across a spatial and temporal range of mass violence into one conceptual framework.143 It is clear that much work is still to be done; we must resist ‘balance sheet’ approaches to the empire such as Nigel Biggar’s ‘Ethics and Empire’ project.144 Rather than isolated instances, such violence was part of the logic and traditions of British colonial violence in establishing and maintaining the empire. A ‘moral audit’ is not the goal, but rather an approach that includes archival research and sensible comparisons with other empires and cases of violence.145 Indeed, as Cesarani highlighted while we do not speak of the important outcomes of World War II related to the United Nations and decolonisation, ‘you will find people who will say still… well British colonisation was a horrendous experience, but it did leave something positive behind’: railways, education systems etc.146 Furthermore, much colonial violence has been underplayed or overlooked as a result of the fact that studies of colonial ‘insurrections’ have been held within the confines of ‘conventional’ military history.147 As scholars continue to explore these issues one must hope that the scholarship will filter through to public debates regarding empire. A challenge for scholars of colonial violence is the fact that much suffering went undocumented.148 The archives that one needs to use are ‘colonial’ by nature and are often kept within the confines of military history in regimental archives. However, while testimonies are often missing from nineteenth-century victims of European colonial violence across the globe, as historians, we can read between the lines, or ‘against the grain’.149 “Instrumental Rationality”: Lord Cromer and the Imperial Roots of Eichmann’s Bureaucracy’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:4 (2013), 379–99 and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). 142 For example, Michelle Gordon, ‘Viewing Violence in the British Empire: Images of Atrocity from the Battle of Omdurman, 1898’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2:2 (2019), 65–100. Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2004). 143 Kitty Millet, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 144 See,

Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘Imperial History Wars’, History Workshop Online, 19 March 2018, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/imperial-history-wars: accessed 9 May 2018.

145 Piers

Brendon, ‘A Moral Audit of the British Empire’, History Today, 57:10 (2007),

44–47. 146 ‘Did the British Empire or the Nazis have more Impact on the Modern World?’ BBC World Service, 20 February 2013. 147 Wagner, 148 A

‘Seeing Like a Soldier’, p. 25.

case in point is the Sierra Leone ‘Hut Tax’ War: Gordon, Extreme Violence, p. 127.

149 Ann

Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2 (2002), 99–100. This task has been made even more difficult: Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Britain Destroyed Records of Colonial Crimes’, Guardian, 18 April 2012.

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Within the recent resurgence in interest in the British Empire key figures in the public eye, including politicians, have continued to emphasise a positive image of the British Empire and the need for it to remain central to perceptions of ‘Britishness’. Public figures, ranging from Michael Palin, William Hague and Gordon Brown have emphasised the need to be proud of the empire—rather than ashamed; Brown asserted in 2005 that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over’.150 However, one question would be: when was this apology made? I am not necessarily advocating the need for an apology, but rather an acknowledgement and open discussion of Britain’s role in violence—it is time we critically engaged with our imperial past. As Lawson suggests, Holocaust consciousness has done little ‘to engender critical thinking around the discourses of race and nation’ hitherto.151 That this is not happening more broadly in British society is evidenced by a poll taken in 2015, which found that only 19% of participants viewed the empire in a negative light/‘something to be ashamed of’.152 Clearly, self-reflection has hitherto not been ‘for the British’, but this wilful neglect needs to change, as does a propensity for imperial nostalgia.153 As Richard Drayton advocates, we need a ‘post-patriotic approach’.154 We can also recognise a trend in which the increased focus on Holocaust and genocide studies has led to a burgeoning body of work that is integrating the ways in which the British Empire was inherently violent for those who found themselves ‘colonised’ within it. It is hoped that both scholars of empire and genocide will provide empirical studies that convey the ways in which violence was an integral component of the British imperial project. While Stone rightly highlighted the fact that the situation was changing in relation to Britain’s approach to the empire, it is nevertheless the case, over a decade later, that in the realm of public discourse, this change is slow and arguably stagnant in post-referendum Britain: now more than ever we need ‘challenging histories’, not selective ones.155

150 Owen Jones, ‘William Hague is Wrong… We Must Own Up to Our Brutal Colonial Past’, The Independent, 3 September 2012. 151 Lawson,

‘Coming to Terms with the Past’, p. 145.

152 See,

Will Dahlgreen, ‘The British Empire is “Something to be Proud of”,’ 26 July 2014, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire: accessed 1 September 2018. 153 Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide’, p. 2418 and Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Penguin, 2017), p. xxvii. 154 Richard Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Moral Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46:3 (2011), 671–85. 155 Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 175. See, Edwards and Mead, ‘Absent Histories’, p. 19 and Jenny Kidd, ‘Challenging History: Summative Document’, November 2009, https://www.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/84082/Challenging-HistorySummative-Document.pdf: accessed 1 September 2018.

PART V

Cultural Representations

CHAPTER 12

Beyond the Cesspit Beneath: The BBC and the Holocaust James Jordan

In her introduction to This New Noise journalist Charlotte Higgins expresses the widely held view of the BBC as ‘an institution at the heart of Britain. The BBC defines and expresses Britishness—to those who live in the UK and the rest of the world’.1 It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that the BBC’s relationship to the Holocaust mirrors that of British memory more widely, moving from ignorance to revelation and engagement, from overlooked tragedy to moral touchstone used to underpin British values. In exploring that relationship the work of Jean Seaton (1987) and Jeremy Harris (1996) laid out some of the foundations, examining what the BBC and by extension Britain knew about and how it responded to the news from Europe.2 Seaton, for example, concluded that ‘It is now evident that there was plenty of knowledge available and indeed disseminated by the BBC, both at home and abroad, about the extermination of the Jews between 1940 and 1945.’3 Harris, on the other 1 Charlotte Higgins, This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of

the BBC (London: Guardian Books, 2015), p. xi. 2 In ‘Reporting Atrocities: The BBC and the Holocaust’, in The Media in British Politics, edited by Jean Seaton and Ben Pimlott (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987), pp. 154– 182; and Jeremy D. Harris, ‘Broadcasting the Massacres: An Analysis of the BBC’s Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem Studies, volume 25, 1996, pp. 65–98. 3 Seaton, ‘Reporting Atrocities’, pp. 175–176. J. Jordan (B) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_12

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hand, felt that ‘It ought to be evident from this article that the BBC Home Service’s coverage of the Holocaust was very limited.’4 While there were reports of Jewish interest on the Home Service news bulletins, reports which have subsequently been covered in more depth by Gabriel Milland’s thesis from 1998, these did not necessarily report the murderous nature of Nazi policy.5 ‘Reports such as these,’ Harris concluded, ‘hardly brought home the realities of life under the Nazis.’ Harris’s article drew from a 1993 award-winning edition of the BBC’s own radio series Document in which producer Nigel Acheson and writer Denys Blakeway explored in more detail what the BBC knew and when, ‘[providing] evidence that as early as June 1942, the venerable BBC itself had specific information regarding Nazi extermination activities. In addition, they uncovered patterns of anti-Semitism that kept this information from those whose lives were directly at risk, as well as those who could have interceded.’6 More recent work, including again the BBC’s own programmes and web pages, has continued to develop further this field of study, looking at, for example, how the war and Nazi persecution impacted on the make up of the BBC’s staff, the output of the Overseas Services, and the establishment and work of BBC Monitoring. In the case of the work of Michael Fleming this has meant a detailed examination of what the BBC and Britain did or did not know of Auschwitz.7 The following explores Britain’s and the BBC’s relationship to the Holocaust through a discussion of the BBC’s news and talks broadcasts outlined above, before then turning to the previously underused and largely ignored realm of contemporary radio drama. In particular it examines I am a Jew (1940) and No Luggage, No Return (1943), two features depicting respectively life in Berlin for a German Jewish family in the wake of the November pogroms of 1938, and death in Poland after persecution had become extermination. While the first looked at the effect on the victims, the second considered ‘the reaction of atrocity on the men who carry it out.’ ∗ ∗ ∗ In the London Evening Standard in September 2018, Ed Balls and Eric Pickles, co-chairs of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, suggested that 4 Harris,

p. 96.

5 Gabriel

Milland, ‘Some Faint Hope and Courage: the BBC and the Final Solution’, 1942–45, University of Leicester, 1998. https://figshare.com/articles/Some_faint_hope_ and_courage_the_BBC_and_the_final_solution_1942-45/10179242.

6 Document:

‘The Unspeakable Atrocity’, Radio 4, 26 August 1993. http://www. peabodyawards.com/award-profile/document-the-unspeakable-atrocity. See also Stephen Ward, ‘Why the BBC Ignored the Holocaust’, The Independent on Sunday, 22 August 1993. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/why-the-bbc-ignored-the-holoca ust-anti-semitism-in-the-top-ranks-of-broadcasting-and-foreign-office-1462664.html. 7 Michael Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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in years to come the UK’s proposed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre ‘will tell visitors the story of the times we as a country stood up to intolerance and hatred. It is crucial, if this is to be a memorial for the 21st century, that future generations continue to be exposed to the lessons of the Holocaust.’ They continued: It’s been more than 70 years since the first realisation of what happened in the Holocaust, since the first broadcast by Richard Dimbleby from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which profoundly shocked the people of this country.8

Balls and Pickles’s statement highlights succinctly the persistent way in which the Holocaust has come to be used to support Britain’s image as a country of tolerance, while also suggesting that its population was unaware of what was happening to the Jews of Europe before Dimbleby’s iconic broadcast. Yet there is a wealth of previous scholarship that counters this, showing that Britain’s knowledge of and response to the persecution of European Jewry was respectively more advanced and more problematic than is claimed. That failure of memory can be seen specifically in respect of liberation. In her 1987 article, Jean Seaton suggested that it was only with liberation that ‘[the] enormity of what had been happening to the Jews began to be revealed.’9 And Harris, like Seaton before him, also placed Dimbleby’s account of liberation at the centre of the British public’s knowledge of the murder of the Jews, suggesting that before that point ‘very little was in fact reported about the horrific conditions that the Jews under Nazi rule were suffering during the years of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”’ And yet, while the significance— and indeed quality—of those initial reports of liberation, is not questioned, Dimbleby’s report, particularly as broadcast on 19 April 1945, was far from the first report to reach Britain and indeed had struggled to be heard that evening. As has been noted before, the extract broadcast that evening on War Report was only a brief section from a far longer piece, a description of ‘what [Dimbleby] saw inside one of Belsen’s wooden huts’ with no reference to the Jews.10,11 Milland and more recently Judith Petersen have shown that the edited broadcast on the Home Service removed the more graphic detail, suggesting that intentionally or not the audience was in fact being protected from the 8 https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/why-a-new-memorial-to-the-holoca

ust-is-essential-a3926426.html 9 Jean

Seaton, ‘Reporting Atrocities: The BBC and the Holocaust’, in The Media in British Politics, edited by Jean Seaton and Ben Pimlott (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987), pp. 154–182, p. 157. 10 BBC

WAC R28/175 News Radio News Reel, Pelletier to Dimbleby 24 April 1945.

11 Fellow

journalist Chester Wilmot had recommended without success that the BBC broadcast Dimbleby’s piece in its entirety (14 minutes). BBC WAC R28/222/3 Reports on Western Front Material 1945 for material covering 24 hrs uo to 19 April.

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worst of the horror that was being uncovered rather than being exposed to it. Moreover, those initial broadcasts tended to focus on the impact on the liberators rather than the victims, a focus that was to change as more camps were liberated. ‘Can we make sure that a BBC correspondent with recording gear will be on the spot when Dachau is uncovered,’ asked H Rooney Pelletier: Assuming that conditions will be similar to those at Buchenwald, it might be wise to give our correspondents a clear directive as to the angle they should adopt. In other words, while believing strongly that Nazi misdeeds must be exposed under the strongest possible light, I fear that by the time Dachau comes along we may have had so many concentration camp stories as to be a little insensitive and uninterested. [In future] stress the personalities… and the reasons for their being there—in other words tell the story through the prisoners rather than through the correspondent…12

What becomes clear across the past thirty years of scholarship and looking back through the BBC’s archives is that even if liberation was for some the dawning of realisation of the horrors, it was hardly the first time that the British public had been told about what was happening to the Jews of Europe, including details of the ‘Final Solution’. The BBC had in fact reported on this subject ever since Hitler first came to power, and not only in news bulletins. In late 1938 and early 1939, for example, a selection of programmes looked at the Jewish question through the issue of refugees. On the fledgling television service, Guest Night (BBC, tx. 6 March 1939) addressed ‘The Refugee Problem’, including interviews with Sir Henry Bunbury, representing the German Jewish Aid Committee and a German Jewish nurse who had fled Germany and was now living in the UK. The studio discussion that evening was complemented with films shot specially for the broadcast of the work being undertaken at Woburn House and of children from the Kindertransport arriving at Liverpool Street Station.13 One month earlier on the radio The Under Twenty Club (London Regional, tx. 7 February 1939) also looked at refugees, telling the story of Peter Schmidt, again a German Jewish refugee who had fled to the UK. Schmidt told host Howard Marshall of how life in Germany had changed after Kristallnacht: ‘On November 10th [1938] all the Jewish men in my city were arrested and put in concentration camps. It was said that we were responsible for the murder of German diplomatic official. The murder took place in another country – in Paris—but we were all arrested in my city in Germany’. He described the brutality of the Nazis and the journey to Dachau where he found himself one of 12,000 Jews: ‘We Jews were told that there were only two ways to get out. One was death and the 12 BBC WAC R28/175 News: Radio NewsReel 1944-5, AONTE H Rooney Pelletier to C(N), 19 April 1945. Ok, came the reply, but only if this meant ‘no physical horrors or at least not principally. 13 BBC WAC T32-181 TV Talks Guest Night. Producer Mary Adams has initially asked if Lord Baldwin would be available to give a separate talk on the issue.

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other way was to prove that you could leave Germany and go to another country’.14 Those two examples highlighted individual experiences, whereas others presented the ongoing persecution within a broader context. For example, in the sixth talk in his series on The History of the Jews (London Regional, 25 May 1939), the Rev Dr James Parkes warned that the history of the Jews currently being written was ‘one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the Jews … the effects of centuries of prejudice, ignorance and hostility on the part of non- Jews’. He continued: The ruthless expulsion of the Jews first from official and cultural life, then from industry and commerce, is only the logical result of the continual proclamation that all that was wrong in German life was due to the Jews. In the territory which is now Germany over a million Jews lived in 1933. Only a quarter of them or less, including such men as Einstein and Freud, succeeded in finding refuge abroad. The rest are besieging the Consulates of countries which might allow them to enter. … On top of these tragedies in Europe the Palestine situation has become increasingly difficult. But it is not the first time in their long history that Jews have faced apparently overwhelming difficulties and survived the shipwreck of their hopes. Today again they are facing an uncertain future with courage and an undaunted determination to survive. Yet they cannot do it by themselves. They must depend also on the ability of the democratic countries of the world to maintain their tradition of toleration, and recover their tradition of hospitality to the oppressed. It is an old saying that every country has the Jews it deserves, and I for my part believe that if the democracies behave generously to their unhappy Jewish neighbours they will gain much more than they will lose.15

Parkes was a longstanding advocate for the Jews of Europe who believed that the promise of post-war retribution and justice was insufficient when people were being murdered in the present. In March 1941 he proposed a series of talks titled ‘A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question’ which would repeat some of the above material, but with an increased sense of urgency. This, he argued, was ‘a matter Christians cannot neglect, not only because of past responsibility (I don’t propose to stress this) but because the Jews can solve none of their problems by themselves, and therefore need understanding and help from others of the kind which they – like anyone else – would be entitled to expect from Christians’. His talk would place emphasis on the continuities between Judaism and Christianity before considering ‘the common statement that antisemitism is growing in the country, and whether one ought to do anything about it’. His notes show that here again he proposed direct opposition to such attitudes:

14 Under 15 The

Twenty Club, 7 February 1939.

History of the Jews, Regional, 25 May 1939. Transcript reprinted in The Listener, 8 June 1939.

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A. one ought to help where possible Jews to adjust themselves (especially evacuated Jews and Jewish children, and refugees B. that the feeling one finds that ‘the Jews’ are corrupting our economic life, so that Christians ought to take a stand against them, wants completely rejecting. Take all the stand anyone likes against economic corruption, but don’t confuse it with Jewish question, since all Jews not involved and all those involved not Jews.

The proposal was rejected.16 It was in this period of persecution, prejudice and forced emigration that the BBC broadcast the feature I am a Jew: ‘Matters are not minced in this stirring and tragic story. Concentration camps and suicides may not make for bright listening, but it is unlikely that many listeners will remain unmoved by this tragic, dramatic statement’.17 Translated from Georg Andreas’s German original by Geoffrey R. Edwards and produced by Howard Rose, the experienced BBC producer who was responsible alongside Val Gielgud for developing radio drama, I am a Jew was broadcast on the Home Service on Thursday 28 March 1940, four days after Easter Sunday. The play is set in Berlin in 1938, entirely within the living room of the flat of Professor Ludwig Gehrbach (played by Milton Rosmer). As the play opens Gehrbach is arriving home. He is bleeding, his face having been cut by the stones thrown at him on the streets of Berlin. The Gehrbachs’ flat is home to a large accultured and assimilated family, including the Professor’s children Klara (Irene Rooke), Fritz (Frank Allenby) and Robert (Abraham Sofaer), daughterin-law Trude (Barbara Couper), Klara’s 19-year-old daughter Hilde (Nadine March) and Hansl (Neville Gates), Robert’s son who is soon to start school. Robert is 38, ‘keen featured, intellectual face, and big horn-rimmed glasses’. In response to the Nazi persecution he has decided to ‘let his hair and beard begin to grow’, with the consequence that he is more visibly ‘Jewish’; as a result he, too, has been attacked, but in a different way: around his neck, but worn ‘with a sort of pride’, is a large label which bears the words ‘I am a Stinking Jew’. He rages at the indignity even as he remains defiant: ‘Our race has persisted for thousands of years in the face of worse than this! You thought the Jews were emancipated. We weren’t. We’ve only had our roots cut’. Hilde, the professor’s granddaughter, is 19, cheeky and often vulgar. Whereas Robert is moving back to embrace a more traditional, less assimilated Jewishness, consciously embracing an ‘old world’ appearance which marks him as Jewish to the Nazis, Hilde is drawn towards the new, concealing her Jewishness in order to pass as Aryan. Her hair ‘seems to get fairer every day’ and she is seeing a young man named Kurt, a member of the Hitler Youth who takes her dancing and out for drives in his sports car. 16 BBC WAC R3/16/2 Home Board Minutes. Minute 147. Also R34/277 Policy Antisemitism. 17 Radio

Times, 22 March 1940, p. 32.

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Trude:

Does he know you’re a ….

Hilde:

Of course he doesn’t! I look more Aryan than he does!

249

Hilde is also increasingly scared by and critical of her grandfather’s appearance and in particular his refusal to conceal his identity: ‘I can’t think why Grandfather doesn’t shave off his beard. Any fool can see he’s a…’ (p. 2), once again the ellipsis at the end of the sentence leaving the word Jew unspoken.

Hilde blames her Jewishness for her lack of freedom, meaning that she seems unable to speak Jew, preferring instead to resort to the use of Nazi propaganda and antisemitic stereotypes when looking to justify her behaviour: Why am I treated like a leper unless I give a false name? Why? Because we’ve got to reap what you’ve sown! And it’s about time you realised it! Germany hasn’t turned against you for nothing … You… have polluted our German theatres with your foreign filth, your women are painted Jezebels who lure Germans into your nets by teaching them your lusts! […] You’ve used your science to weaken German faith […] You have had German maids and made them slave for you from morning till night […] You’ve had everything – money, position – when the rest of Germany was starving. You used it all to work against Germany in your secret societies. You had damn well everything … while we had nothing …. And you left us to foot your rotten bill – to pay the price of your wickedness!’

Robert takes this as confirmation of his own fears, blaming the outburst on Emancipation and integration; Hilde however believes that her dead father, Robert’s brother, would approve if he were still living: ‘He wouldn’t want us back in the Ghetto. He’d have seen us dead first’ (p. 8). It is an ominously prescient warning of what is to come both within the play and in the years that followed. As the play continues it seems that to be Jewish is only perceived negatively. Klara, Hilde’s mother, wants Hilde to marry Stefan, a family friend, but Hilde is not interested. Kurt is big and handsome, strong and sunburned, whereas Stefan? ‘I couldn’t cross the street with Stefan without some beastly thing happening – he’s got Jew-boy written all over him’ (p. 9). And Robert’s son Hansl returns from his first day at school with a new name—‘I am “Jewboy Hans Israel Gehrbach”’—and nickname of ‘Jew Baby’: ‘I know that we Jews have brought misfortune on Germany. All Jews are dishonest, cowards, adulterers’ (p. 18). By the end of the play, Hilde is making ready to leave Germany thanks to false papers procured by her Hitler Youth boyfriend, while the rest of the family is either dead, in a concentration camp or suffering in another way. Trude, for example, whose husband was murdered three months before, discovers she is pregnant. This, however, is not a cause for celebration for the family:

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J. JORDAN

Is it right, is it fair, to bring a child into this – hell? … You carry hope within you – now. But when your child lies in your arms, and its eyes first see beyond them into the hate that surrounds us … What will you say?

To round off the seemingly unending horror, little Hansl, who having been told yes in response to his question ‘Shall I always be a Jew?’, commits suicide, using a medical tube to ingest gas in his grandfather’s laboratory. Robert carries his son’s limp body out into the street: ‘Out of my way! I bear the son of man, and he is dead! […] I am going to the beasts! God’s life is done… our God is dead’ (p. 37). This decides matters for Trude – she does not want her baby: A mother must do the best for her child. I am a good mother … better than Mary the mother of Jesus. My child shall not be born to be crucified. Good-bye my little one … You will sleep in peace for ever… You will never know the fate of a Jew.

But in the final moment there is hope. Before Trude can act on her desire she collapses. When she recovers consciousness, she has undergone an epiphany: she wants to keep the child, placing her faith not just in God but humanity. She is clearly addressing the listening audience when she explains we have endured insupportable sufferings, unspeakable shame has been put upon us, and the end of our martyrdom is not yet. Do not forget us; help us to regain our faith in the dignity of man… help us… we are too weak alone. Trude concludes the play: ‘He shall be happy… I shall show him… I shall fold his little hands and teach him to pray. Dear God, I thank thee for my life. The world is beautiful, and people are kind’ (p. 38). The Manchester Guardian praised the play as a ‘powerful and moving’ piece of drama: ‘All the published evidence goes to show that the sufferings involved were no more than the common lot of Jews in Hitler’s Germany’.18 The Glasgow Herald went further: There was a haunting and distressing undercurrent to the play … which came not from the tragedy driven home by the play itself, but from the shamed thought in the mind of the listener that this mirror could have been held up to horrible reality – so far as its revelation of truth was concerned – any time during the last six years. Yet only now has the great listening public been invited to look at it. […] It was a report on reality, a document transfigured chiefly by a dramatic localisation of reality in the history of a group of people- imagined history no doubt but … [one] for which there are in Germany innumerable parallels in fact.19

18 ‘Play

Based on Nazi Persecution of the Jews’, Manchester Guardian, 30 March 1940.

19 ‘Jew

in Germany’, Glasgow Herald, 30 March 1940.

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However, while the Morningside column of the Glasgow Evening Times was also horrified by the play, this was for different reasons: In the course of this play one player in particular blasphemed God many times, using terms such as ‘liar,’ ‘cheat,’ etc. Thinking this blasphemy would not continue, I didn’t switch off as the play interested me greatly having as its theme the Jewish persecution in Germany, but to my horror the language used became more and more corrupt as time went on. Why should the BBC censor (provided there is one) allow this type of programme to be broadcast.’

The Catholic Herald went further still, condemning the play as an insult to the legacy of Sir John Reith: In this play one of the characters, a Jewish expectant mother, asking a doctor to commit an abortion, spoke these words: ‘I am a better mother than Mary, the mother of Jesus. I wouldn’t bring a child of mine into the world to be crucified.’ Our correspondent very rightly wrote to the BBC asking ‘how such words could be passed by your censors in a Christian country, ruled by a Christian king, and at the moment engaged at war for the principles of Christianity?’20

The response to I am a Jew is indicative of the range of responses one found in Britain to the persecution of the Jews, and yet the play offers a strikingly bold attempt at bringing that persecution into homes of the domestic audience. It is also noticeable that this was a drama at a time when the BBC tended to cover the subject in news broadcasts for fear that any of the content be dismissed as fiction. Writing in 1995s What did you do in the War, Auntie (London: BBC Books, 1995), the book published by the BBC to accompany the television series of the same name, Tom Hickman recognised that there had long been ‘allegations that the BBC was over-cautious in reporting the Holocaust or even that it deliberately played it down. For Leonard Miall, who was in charge of the European Services news talks during the war: We [The BBC] were very careful to try and avoid giving currency to rumours which might not be true and which would then jeopardize our general credibility. We broadcast a great deal about people being sent off to these camps. But what actually happened when they got there was not provable.21

As has already been noted, this was only part of the story and in fact news of the ongoing persecution could be heard on the Overseas and European

20 Catholic

Herald, DATE.

21 Hickman,

pp. 205–206.

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J. JORDAN

Services.22 In June 1942, for example, Jerzy Szapiro provided an account for Radio Newsreel of the Nazi atrocities, based upon the Bund report: Men and boys were herded together in public squares or cemeteries and killed by machine guns or grenades. They had to dig their own graves beforehand. Children and women were not spared; children in orphanages shot; old people in almshouses, the sick in hospitals. For a time there was quiet in West Poland, then the terror spread back to these territories occupied by the Germans in the early days. A special van fitted as a gas chamber is on tour in Western Poland picking up its victims in small townships and villages. Sometimes a thousand Jews are gassed daily. In March, twenty-five thousand were deported from Lublin in sealed goods vans. All trace of them has been lost.23

But in general the BBC failed to report on the murderous nature of the Nazi project. As Tom Hickman agreed, tentatively, in the television version of What Did You Do in the War, Auntie?: ‘A question mark – perhaps – hangs over whether the BBC could have done more after December 1942, when Churchill [sic] made a Parliamentary statement about the fate of the Jews and the House of Commons stood in silence’.24 Certainly with hindsight and given the work already undertaken on the BBC’s and Britain’s response to this moment, it appears that Eden’s words were not met with deeds. Indeed one year on, one can detect the frustration felt by campaigning MP Eleanor Rathbone in her suggestion that the BBC broadcast a talk on Jewish Persecution.25 This might take the form of a Sunday night postscript or individual talk reminding the public about Eden’s speech of the year before which ‘[exposed] the main facts about the massacre of the Jews’: The idea would be, without going into too much ghastly details, to remind the public of the continuing massacres and deportations; to give a sort of warning to the Nazis and the satellites that these things will not be forgotten and that it would be better for them to stop them; to say something of the overwhelming testimony of the British desire for generous measures of rescue, but of how little we have been able to do… finally and perhaps most important, to pay a tribute to the world’s debt to the Jewish people now suffering because of their race, mentioning some of the facts about their war service in the Armed Forces 22 Fleming, p. 60: ‘Broadcasting news of the Holocaust to the domestic audience was a different matter. The issues of believability, British anti-Semitism and maintaining BBC creditability all played a role in restricting the dissemination of information about atrocities against Jews, to listeners in Britain.’ 23 ‘Unprecedented

Massacre’, London Calling, August 1942.

24 United

Nations Declaration, HC Deb, 17 December 1942, vol 385, cc20827, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1942/dec/17/united-nationsdeclaration, accessed 1 October 2019. 25 BBC WAC R1/11 Board of Governor Minutes, 11 November 1943, minute 413. Letter Rathbone to Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

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and otherwise. […] It does seem form this and from much else as thought the Governments preferred to let the Jewish persecutions be forgotten, perhaps because they have a bad conscience about the little they have done for rescue.26

In considering the proposal, the Board of Governors, guided by the advice of Director General Robert Foot and William Haley, recommended that in line with existing policy ‘the BBC should not try to counter antisemitism by talks, discussions or features; but should report in news bulletins such creditable facts about Jews as might arise’. This continued: … we should not promote ourselves or accept any propaganda in the way of talks, discussion, features with the object of trying to correct the undoubted anti-Semitic feeling which is held very largely throughout the country; but that we should confine ourselves to reporting in the news bulletins the facts as they are reported from time to time of Jewish persecutions as well as any notable achievements by Jews, particularly in connection with the war effort (eg recent case of Jewish soldier who won the VC).’

After full consideration, he added, ‘we are convinced that in the interests of the Jews themselves, this is the right policy to adopt at the present time, and any other policy would tend to increase rather than decrease the anti-Jewish feeling in this country’.27 ‘If this policy is right’, the meeting concluded, then ‘Miss Rathbone’s request … must be refused’, although there was ‘no objection to a factual talk’ reminding listeners of Eden’s declaration ‘and giving such facts of atrocities on Jews committed under the Nazi regime since Mr Eden’s statement was made as may have been established as authentic’.28 That factual talk came in a remarkable special item at the end of the BBC’s 1 pm News on 5 December 1943, read by Frederick Allen: It is a year ago this month since the Foreign Secretary speaking in the House of Commons warned the German Government that those responsible for terrible crimes against the Jews should not escape retribution at the hands of the United Nations. Here is a short report, complied with every care, to tell listeners some of the things that Germans have done to the Jews since that declaration was made.

As Allen continued there could be no doubt that here, over a year before liberation, the public was being told of the systematic murder of the Jews, detailing the deportation to Poland from across Europe and estimating that

26 BBC

WAC R34/614/2 Programme Policy Meeting Docs 1943/44, document P54/43.

27 BBC

WAC R34/614/2 Programme Policy.

28 BBC

WAC R34/615/1 Programme Policy Minutes 1943, meeting, 26 November 1943, minute 333. Dated 22 November 1943.

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J. JORDAN

‘[by] the end of March it is estimated that one million – yes, one million – Jews had been executed or had died in Polish camps’. The report also spoke of how this happened: Most of Warsaw’s Jews perished in the infamous Treblinka camp. […] One report says that after a forty-eight hour train journey without food or water, those who survived were driven to the camp. The men were separated from the women and children. Then the German spoke: “Up till now you have worked so little for the German State. That is why you have been sent here to work more. This is a transit camp. Leave your clothing here, and after a bath you will get two sets of new clothing.” Some believed him. … Then the men, and the women and children were led into separate courtyards. From there they reached the so-called baths – which were gas chambers. There was a little screaming, and then silence. Gangs of Jews were forced to clear out the gas chambers, and bury the dead. The clothing is sorted out for despatch for German use. Those able-bodied men who were picked out for this work were spared, for the time being – but not for long. The man who escaped says that these picked men have a maximum expectation of life of twenty days. They also die by the same route, in relays of a hundred. The Germans want no living Jewish witnesses of the horrors they commit in Treblinka.

After the report had finished the announcer advised the listening public that the American Institute for Jewish Questions had estimated that ‘well over three million of the Jews in Europe have been killed since the beginning of the war’. There is little ambiguity here, with the broadcast clearly identifying locations and methods, detailing the horrific methods used and the numbers dead. It had taken a year since Eden’s statement but here at last was a news report on the Home Service which gave unequivocal evidence of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. And yet not even this was the first time that the name Treblinka had been heard, or indeed reference made to the planned extermination of European Jewry. Six months earlier, at 9.40 p.m. on Monday 14 June 1943, while the BBC’s Forces Programme welcomed the much-anticipated return to the airwaves of George Formby in Here’s George, the Home Service broadcast No Luggage, No Return, twenty minutes of ‘dramatised reflections on the extermination of the Jews in Poland’.29 As the Radio Times explained in more detail on that week’s front cover, just beneath a few lines promoting the return of Formby and under the sub-heading of ‘Railroad Tragedy’: No Luggage, No Return on Monday night, is a short dramatized glimpse of the nightmare traffic which forms part of the German system of extermination of

29 Birmingham

Mail, 14 June 1943, p. 7.

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the Jews in Poland. The story reveals the reaction of atrocity on the men who carry it out.30

It was a watershed moment. Although there had been other plays on the Home Service that addressed Nazi antisemitism and persecution of the Jews— and did so directly and explicitly such as 1940s I am a Jew—this was the first time that a domestic audience had heard a dramatisation which represented not just persecution but the planned extermination of an entire race.31 That lack of ambiguity was better captured by its appearance in some regional newspapers where it was listed simply as ‘9.40 Extermination of Jewish People in Poland’. This was done not through a recounting of the experiences of the victim, offering unimaginable tales of horror which had the potential to numb the senses, but through the eyes of ‘the men who carry it out’, seeming to offer a degree of empathy with and sympathy for the men charged with organising the genocide. Furthermore, it named explicitly the site of extermination as Poland and specifically the death camp at Treblinka. Tellingly though, although Treblinka was named, it was referred to throughout as Tremblinka, a mistake found elsewhere in the early accounts of atrocity to reach the west.32 The play’s producer was Walter Rilla, who had had been born in Germany in August 1894. Rilla had studied philosophy and psychiatry in Berlin, Bonn, Breslau and Lausanne, and then worked as an actor, producer and writer in the German arts world. Like many other members of that arts intelligentsia, particularly those with Jewish family, he left Germany to escape from Nazi rule, emigrating to the UK in 1934 where he was employed as an actor on the stage and screen, being given his first role by Alexander Korda. He joined the BBC in October 1939 as German Announcer and translator in the Overseas Department, becoming German Programme assistant in January 1941, then Senior Producer, earning a reputation as ‘one of the most gifted all rounders in the German unit. As an announcer he is undoubtedly the best we have, being a most intelligent, resourceful reader with an exceptionally rich and agreeable voice. He is also the equal of our best translators and altogether a most valuable member of the unit’.33 He transferred to the Features and Drama department in 1941, where he applied his experience to become a

30 Radio 31 Hull

Times, 11 June 1943, p. 8.

Daily Mail, 14 June 1943, p. 3 and Gloucester Citizen, 14 June 1943, p. 7.

32 For a play of this type to be broadcast to a domestic audience as early as the summer of 1943 is striking, and yet this was not the first production of the play. It had already been produced for the BBC’s Overseas Service and transmitted from Evesham/Wood Norton, ‘one of the largest broadcasting centres in Europe with an average output of 1300 programmes a week’, across the BBC’s African, North American, Pacific and Eastern Services on the 12th and 13th March 1943, http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/bui ldings/wood-norton. 33 Annual

report 1939.

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J. JORDAN

greatly valued producer and editor.34 He resigned in October 1945 to take up production work in the theatre. Walter left Germany for Vienna a fortnight after AH came to power. When it became clear that he was broadcasting for the BBC ‘I was deprived of my German citizenship… all sorts of threats were used against me and there is not much space left in the whole of Europe where i could let myself be seen without risking to be shot at sight by the Nazis - to say nothing of the fate that would be waiting for me in a German concentration camp’. If Rilla’s career was indicative of the way in which the BBC utilised those who had been forced out by the Nazis, the play’s writer, Norman Collins, was a homegrown talent. Collins is perhaps best remembered today as the author of the novel London Belongs to Me, later made into a film starring Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim. He had joined the BBC in 1941 at the age of 33, having already worked for Oxford University Press and the News Chronicle before becoming deputy chairman at Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1934. Initially a talks assistant in the Empire Service, by April 1941 he had been promoted to Empire Talks Manager. Two years later he was made General Overseas Services Manager and then Director. By January 1946, only five years after joining the BBC, he became head of the Light Programme. A little over a year later he was Head of the Television Service and then Controller of Television by February 1948. His resignation in 1951 to move to commercial television brought to an end a prodigious ten-year career at the BBC during which time he had been responsible for introducing a number of now famous programmes including Dick Barton and Woman’s Hour, as well as overseeing the pioneering coverage of the 1948 London Olympics on television. During the Empire Service’s (the precursor to the Overseas) regular weekly meeting on 17 February 1943, it was agreed by the service heads that ‘in the absence of further Government policy pronouncement or special guidance’ it was ‘agreed [that the] reporting of important speeches [should] remain [the] first duty’.35 At that meeting Collins volunteered to submit a suggestion for a feature that would deal with the subject. He duly wrote the script for No Luggage in seemingly no time at all and it was broadcast within one month. Its content appears to have drawn inspiration in part from the news from Poland that had recently reached the UK, and had been featured on a BBC News bulletin of 14 February 1943: The terrible mass execution of Jews in Poland [which] goes on without pause. In one district alone six thousand are being killed daily. Before they die, they are stripped of their clothes which are sent back to Germany. Not a single Jew

34 BBC WAC L1/363 Left Staff Walter Rilla. During his time at the BBC he was responsible for a number of drams and features on a similar theme such as Diary of Chaos: The Story of a Girl from Warsaw (Home, 2 September 1942). 35 BBC WAC R13-24 Empire Service Weekly Meeting Minutes 1941–1943: Empire Services Meeting, Wednesday, 17 February 1943.

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is left in the ghetto at Warsaw, where before the mass murders began there were 430 thousand.36

For undertaking the writing Collins was paid a fee of 5 guineas on top of his salary, an unusual move given that he was already employed by the BBC full time. That additional payment was agreed by SJ (Seymour) de Lotbiniere, the Director of Empire Programmes and caused considerable administrative problems, with debates about whether Collins was entitled to the payment or not. In agreeing to the payment it was noted that this was an exception to the rule: This is a special case…. We had for some time been wanting a programme which would deal suitably with the very difficult problem of Jewish persecution and Jewish refugees. No suitable suggestions were forthcoming for sometime until finally, when we returned to the subject at Empire Services Meeting …, Empire Talks Manager said that he had given a good deal of thought to the subject and was prepared to write a feature programme on the subject in his spare time. The programme was written, as I know personally, entirely in Mr Collins spare time and when submitted was accepted by the Service Directors with enthusiasm.37

Lotbiniere would note a month later that ‘I now realise, much too late, that my only course was to say to him: “We like your idea very much; it suits us down to the ground – since we are looking for exactly this sort of handling of the Nazi purge of the Jews; but since in no circumstances can we pay you for it we must forget all about it”’.38 No Luggage, No Return featured only four cast members, each playing a character identified simply in turn as First Voice, Second Voice, Third Voice and Fourth Voice. It opened with an extract from Bloch’s Schelomo, a piece used regularly on the BBC to signify a programme with a Jewish theme. This was followed by the sound of ‘[t]wo ordinary English voices … in conversation’. First Voice (Arthur Young) was ‘round, full complacent’, indicative of ‘an easy-going character’, while Second Voice (Laidman Browne) was ‘harder, crisper, more definite’, the voice of a younger man. The two men, for they were cast as men although the script identifies them only as voices, are discussing the latest news and, in particular, reports from Europe that Hitler intends to exterminate the Jews. The first, older voice is incredulous: First Voice:

But do you think he means it? Really means it, I mean.

Second Voice:

Certainly sounds as though he does. It’s a kind of theme with him. He’s always talking about exterminating a few more Jews.

36 [Note. 37 The

The original typed transcript gives the figure as forty three thousand.]’

Empire service, 17 March 1943.

38 Memo,

27 April 1943.

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J. JORDAN

First Voice:

Ah, there you have it. A few more. I’ve never said individual Jews haven’t been done to death in the concentration camps. Or in their own homes for that matter. My point is you can’t exterminate a whole people […] there’s a lot of difference between bumping off one or two people here and there and trying to stamp out an entire race. […] I’m not pretending Jews in Germany haven’t had a bad time, poor devils. You’re always reading about it – yellow stars on their coats, different seats in public parks, having to scrub pavements, all that. But that isn’t extermination. Frankly I don’t believe it. […] There must be millions of Jews. Just try to work it out for yourself. Think of the organisation, think of the man-power. Think of… think of the train service alone.

And at that moment the sound of a train whistle acted as a sound bridge to transport the action from England to an office overlooking a railway line somewhere in mainland Europe. The voices of the two Englishmen are replaced by those of two Nazi functionaries. Again the first of the two voices (Third Voice) belongs to an older man, in this case ‘a tired elderly man’ full of uncertainty; the second (Fourth Voice) is a younger man: it is ‘very hard’, ‘inflexible’ and ‘unpleasant’. The whistle belongs to the 10.18 train from Warsaw to Treblinka, a ‘special train to the extermination camp’ comprised of three parts, with ‘[t]wenty four sealed coaches in each part’. It is the responsibility of the two men to ensure the smooth and efficient running of the trains, a time-consuming and seemingly never-ending job, ‘nothing but overtime. Overtime. Overtime’. Third Voice (Ronald Simpson) represents the views of an older generation. He is unhappy in his work, lamenting that ‘It isn’t a travel agent they [his superiors] want. It’s an undertaker. And this isn’t an office. It’s a mortuary. A morgue’. There is no concealing the murderous nature of his work or the victims. And although he does not ‘think that all Jews are necessarily bad’ (indeed he remembers a ‘very nice Jew’ he knew in pre-war Frankfurt with whom he would play chess and drink beer) he complains that there are ‘enough Jews in Poland already, without transporting all these others’. It is Fourth Voice (Philip Cunningham), the younger man, who explains the reason behind their actions, making clear that this is not emigration but something more final: ‘It has always been the Fuehrer’s policy to exterminate all Jews. There would be no point in clearing up Poland if Germany itself is left infested’. As the two men talk, their conversation a mirror of the one between the two English voices, they discuss the scale of the extermination in which they participate, working out the number of passengers each train takes to Treblinka:

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Fourth Voice:

259

The answer is simple. There are twenty-four coaches. 140 passengers in each coach. It is three thousand three hundred and sixty if they have been filled properly. The two men are also responsible for the embarkation and departure of a midnight train which will carry 938 passengers in sealed wagons to their deaths in Treblinka: ‘Nine hundred and thirty-eight. No luggage. No return. It’s a strange world.’

Third Voice:

Right under my window. I know. I shall sit here and think about them. Nine hundred and thirty eight of ‘em, men and women and children, all packed in, standing. It’s all right for the men and women. They’re looking forward to dying. But the children – that little girl, Otto – they don’t understand enough even to look forward to that. (Pause) Do you know, sometimes I feel I ought to get inside along with them. I and some others. Too many of the wrong people get left behind.

Fourth Voice:

Herr Superintendent, at times I think you are a very bad Nazi.

Third Voice:

At times I am a very tired Nazi.

The play’s closing words belong to ‘very tired Nazi’ as he makes arrangements for the train’s return journey as the seemingly endless cycle of death continues: Clear the line at 16 hours [sic] for a train down from Treblinka. It is a fast goods. Nothing but clothing inside. Just boots and clothing, all that is left of the Jews that went down to Treblinka yesterday. And tomorrow there will be another nine hundred and thirty-eight pairs. Nine hundred and thirty-eight pairs of boots, and nine hundred and thirty-eight suits of clothing. They won’t be needing them. They won’t feel the cold any more.

The notes on Collins’ Left staff file suggest that the programme was a success on the Overseas service and that perhaps prompted its transfer to the Home Service. There, however, it received only 5.2% of the audience, approximately 1.6 million listeners as opposed to nearly 8 million who tuned into the popular escapism offered by ‘Here’s George’ on the Forces Programme.39 But it was a critical success with the Manchester Guardian at least: No Luggage, No Return … was an extremely impressive and horrifying account of the extermination of the Jewish people in Poland. Its main theme was the story of how the Jews are loaded into trains which carry them from Warsaw to the extermination camps, and how these trains make the return journey loaded

39 Formby

was heard by 24.9% of the population, which was substantial. The Home Service tended to suffer in terms of listeners when compared to Forces, with the ratio being approximately 2:1 in favour of Forces.

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only with the clothes and boots of the victims that they have carried the day before. This broadcast, once heard, was never to be forgotten.40

But it and the Jews were forgotten almost immediately. To conclude, Jean Seaton argued in 1987 that it was impossible to understand the BBC’s reporting of Nazi atrocities without also understanding the context of British antisemitism. Similarly Jeremey Harris has concluded that the coverage was often lacking because of fears of stoking British and BBC’s own ‘latent antisemitism’, a point of view supported by the BBC’s own Document and What did you do in the War, Auntie. But even within this cautious environment there were remarkable programmes being made in unexpected places, with drama and features tackling head on the questions which the policy was to avoid. And yet these programmes are now largely forgotten in favour of a narrative which suggests, still, that Britain knew nothing of the full extent until liberation.

40 Manchester

Guardian, 16 June 1943. Although it was not heard on the BBC again until 2017 the play was subsequently transmitted by the Palestine Broadcasting Service on 18 July 1943 and in Australia later that year.

CHAPTER 13

British Cinema and the Holocaust Barry Langford

British film has amply reflected the Holocaust’s fitful and uncertain progress, charted by Andy Pearce, Tony Kushner and others, from the margins of national consciousness towards its (not uncontroversial) prominence in British public culture in the twenty-first century. Like British society as a whole, British cinema’s response to the Holocaust has also been characterised by phases of intense fascination and engagement amidst longer periods of indifference, incomprehension and even evasion. And even if the overall trend in film too has been one of increasing visibility, this narrative has not been remotely linear or straightforward. The widespread postwar perception that because the Holocaust did not take place on British soil and British citizens were not its victims, it had no obvious “place” in British national history, still less in the narrative of heroic and ultimately triumphant wartime struggle, undoubtedly discouraged British filmmakers from venturing into difficult and presumably uncommercial territory: the paucity of scholarship, official commemoration and general public interest in the subject could only reinforce these choices. British witnessing of the Holocaust—through press reports and filmed footage of Bergen-Belsen, liberated by British forces close to the end of the European war—without question imprinted itself indelibly on the national collective memory. But the very specific nature of Britons’ encounters with the final abysmal stage of the Holocaust also left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding in regard to the exact nature, purpose and process of Nazi crimes that B. Langford (B) Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_13

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in turn barred imaginative access to the narratives of political and moral crisis, persecution, survival, resistance and rescue that gradually came to characterise continental European cinematic responses to the Holocaust. With significant but rare exceptions, British cinema’s engagement with the Jewish tragedy has until very recently been belated, partial and conflicted. The following chronological account of representations of the Holocaust on British cinema screens will confirm that the last two decades have certainly seen the Holocaust emerge from the margins of British film as the defining moral and interpretive framework of the Second World War and even of modernity itself. This reflects the general contemporary perception of the Shoah in the UK as elsewhere in Europe and America. However, there is no teleological narrative here; no metanarrative which would see the partial, limited and—by twenty-first century standards—often erroneous accounts of the Holocaust in films of earlier decades as halting steps along the way to the more fully realised and multi-faceted depictions of more recent years. Rather, this chapter will emphasise the ways in which British “Holocaust film” responds to the shifting contexts of British film culture as a whole as well as the evolution of British Holocaust consciousness, which film has at different times and in different ways reflected and occasionally helped shape. I will suggest that the seventy years since the liberation of the camps—Britain’s closest encounter with the Nazi genocide which itself continues to shape the contours of British collective memory—can be sub-divided into several more-or-less distinct phases: once the initial blaze of horrified publicity attendant on Allied troops’ discovery of German concentration camps in the last weeks of the war had waned, during the subsequent two decades Nazi wartime atrocities were almost never directly addressed, still less seriously explored in British feature films—indeed, they were actively avoided as subject matter (though a variety of submerged and/or allegorical references are to be found in sometimes unexpected parts of the cinematic environment). A brief phase of increased visibility during the 1970s, responding both to sharpening public awareness of the Holocaust and to the changing production contexts of British filmmaking, is succeeded by another period of general abeyance even as Holocaust education and scholarship and public debate and commemoration all expand enormously. This does not change in the immediate aftermath of Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, US 1993), notwithstanding or perhaps because of the latter’s enormous impact in the UK as worldwide: but by the start of the twenty-first century, with the Holocaust now established as a central “location” in British culture, a stream of productions addressing different aspects of the Holocaust and also its postwar legacies indicate that the Shoah has become a viable option—commercially and, just as important, cognitively—for British filmmakers. As numerous commentators have ruefully noted, defining “British cinema” is rarely altogether straightforward, especially after the collapse of the British

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studio system towards the end of the 1960s.1 Even before then, and almost invariably thereafter, much British theatrical film production relied on overseas funding: in the 1950s and 1960s, most often from Hollywood studios (“runaway” productions benefiting from subsidised production costs under the Eady Levy); once Hollywood backing waned in the 1970s, a variety of cofinancing strategies often involving European as well as American (studio and independent) producers, distributors and broadcasters. This complex production context has inevitably posed questions of creative control and often made it hard to pinpoint the distinctively “national” character of British/Britishproduced films. The sporadic but persistent (and more often than not unsuccessful as well as ruinously expensive) attempts by British producers to break into the lucrative American market have tended to blur further the “Britishness” of many of their productions. This chapter will broadly follow established scholarly practice—itself partly modelled on UK government qualifying criteria for various tax breaks and (indirect) state or lottery support—of treating as “British” those films with significant financial backing from British production companies, filmed wholly or partly in the UK (including studio facilities such as Shepperton and Pinewood), and involving at least some key British creative personnel (directors, writers, lead actors), while conversely excluding films with no British contribution beyond production finance (so, for example, Sophie’s Choice [Alan J. Pakula, 1982], produced and funded by Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment but in all other respects a wholly US venture—and received as such—is not discussed here).2 Though far from an exact science, this helps establish a broadly stable frame of reference.

Belsen and the Liberated Camps As intermittent as its encounters with the Holocaust have been, in at least one singular respect British cinema’s contribution to the cinematic legacy and visual archive of the Holocaust is both pre-eminent and indispensable: the extensive filmed record of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British and Canadian troops in April 1945, the apocalyptic environment they entered, and the ensuing efforts by British medical units to deal with the medical and humanitarian emergency they faced. This footage comprises both spontaneously captured actuality from the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) accompanying the 11th Armoured Division into the camp, newsreel coverage from the days after the liberation, and—the lengthiest portion— further extensive filming conducted by the AFPU over the next several weeks

1 The

most recent historical survey of British film production finance opens by quoting Ernest Betts’ 1973 aphorism that “the most striking fact about the British film industry is that it is not British.” See Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild, The British Film Business (Chichester: John Wiley, 2002), p. xi.

2 See

below on ITC’s 1970 co-productions.

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under the supervision of Sidney Bernstein, head of the Films Division of the British Ministry of Information (MOI) in the liberated areas. The aims and production history of Bernstein’s film have been explored in several authoritative studies within the last decade, so a summary rehearsal of the story will suffice here.3 Having arrived in Belsen a week after British forces first entered the camp—shooting silent footage that quickly found its way into cinema newsreel reports—Bernstein determined to assemble a wide-ranging feature-length documentary survey of the major camps liberated by Allied forces, both within the prewar borders of the Reich and in the former General Government (German-occupied Poland). To this end he procured more sophisticated equipment for the British crew at Belsen— including sound recorders for interviews with survivors, SS men and Allied soldiers, and lighting to enable shooting of interiors, i.e. inside camp huts and blockhouses—to supplement the combat units’ hand-held wind-up cameras; drew together a first-class editorial team in London to review and assemble the footage as it arrived; and obtained prints of the previously produced and circulated—but, prior to the Western Allies’ discovery of the German camps, sceptically received—Soviet films of Majdanek and Auschwitz. As Bernstein planned it, the film was not intended for domestic consumption in the UK but aimed at German audiences: to deliver irrefutable proof of the full enormity of Nazi crimes, enforce recognition among the German population as a whole of their complicity, and in so doing reduce support for the expected guerrilla resistance campaign by diehard Nazi loyalists. With these aims, the project initially received strong support from the joint Allied command and the MOI, and Bernstein was able to liaise closely with his counterparts in the US Army Information Division to obtain footage of liberated camps in the central-southern (American) sector, including Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. By the late summer of 1945, a detailed continuity had been prepared for the film—now with the notably unsensational working title German Concentrations Camps Factual Survey—alongside a narration co-written by Colin Wills and Richard Crossman. However, the sheer amount of footage arriving at the editorial team’s London base—and the growing complexity of the project, as Bernstein’s team sought to discern the nature of the diverse parts of the Nazi camp system, prolonged the film’s completion well beyond its original target date in July. Frustrated by these delays, the US withdrew from the project (producing instead Death Mills, a much shorter and more stridently accusatory film on the camps supervised by Billy Wilder, eventually released 3 On

the aims and production history of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, see Kay Gladstone, “Separate Intentions: The Allied Screening of Concentration Camp Documentaries in Defeated Germany in 1945–46: Death Mills and Memory of the Camps,” in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, eds., Holocaust and the Moving Image (London: Wallflower, 2005), pp. 50–64; John Michalczyk, Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 31–46.

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in January 1946), leaving Bernstein’s production under the sole control of the MOI. As autumn approached, however, the British government’s political priorities had shifted: given the absence of the anticipated armed resistance to the Allied occupation and, even more pertinently, the urgent need to solicit the German population’s active and willing participation in the immense task of recovery and regeneration, the film’s original didactic purposes came to seem less pressing. A general sentiment of fatigue at “atrocity images” was also widespread both in the occupation administration in Germany and in London. In this altered climate support for Bernstein’s film waned and in September, following a screening of a rough assembly of the first five reels of the film (of an intended six), the project was permanently shelved. The uncompleted film, unedited raw footage and other production materials—including, crucially, the typed continuity and script—were eventually deposited at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London in 1952, where they remained uncatalogued, unexamined and unviewed until the 1980s. Following the identification of the 100-odd reels of film labelled simply “German Concentration Camps” as Bernstein’s film, the truncated 1945 assembly was broadcast in 1984 with some additional explanatory material and a voiceover narration as Memory of the Camps. Starting in 2008, an IWM team set out to remaster and complete the film precisely according to the original team’s intentions, following the extant script and continuity (and without correcting the 1945 filmmakers’ errors of fact or emphasis in light of subsequent scholarship), a project that culminated in the documentary Night Will Fall (André Singer, 2014) and the theatrical presentation and DVD release of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey in early 2015, almost sixty years later than originally envisaged.4 Notwithstanding the publicity on its reappearance both in 1984 and in 2014 (which also tended to over-emphasise Alfred Hitchcock’s brief and limited role as directorial consultant), German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was never a “lost” film—it was, rather, an overlooked and uncurated one. (Some of the material shot under Bernstein’s supervision was in fact very widely seen, having formed part of the IWM’s archival collection drawn on by landmark documentaries such as Night and Fog [Alan Resnais, Fr 1955], The Sorrow and the Pity [Marcel Ophuls, Fr 1969] and The World At War: “Genocide” [Michael Darlow, UK 1974].) The unforgettable impact on British public opinion of reports from Belsen (both newsreels and Richard Dimbleby’s famous BBC radio broadcast) has been widely discussed—so too the ways in which the uncontextualized images of masses of starved and diseased inmates and cadavers were to distort subsequent understandings of

4 On the restoration and completion of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, see Toby Haggith, “Restoring and Completing German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014), Formerly Known as Memory of the Camps”, Journal of Film Preservation April 2015, pp. 95–101.

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the Holocaust in Britain for decades thereafter.5 Had German Concentration Camps Factual Survey been completed and released in 1945, might it have promoted a different and more rounded subsequent understanding of the Holocaust (bearing in mind too its original target audience, not British but German)? It seems unlikely. Identifying Jews among the camps’ victims on just two occasions (twice as often as Night and Fog a decade later), German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is in truth not a film about the Holocaust as it is understood today—nor could it have been, given the very partial incomplete understanding of Nazi racial policy and the complex narrative of the extermination process itself (the film makes no mention of either the Reinhard extermination camps nor the death marches from the East), as well as the biases of British official attitudes and the constraints of what Tony Kushner famously terms the “liberal imagination.”6 Bernstein made sure to include both Majdanek and Auschwitz—then little-known and emphatically not today’s global metonym of industrialised mass murder—and stressed the monstrous death tolls (significantly inflated here, in line with Soviet propaganda) at these camps: but the connection between the victims of the eastern camps and those liberated by the Western Allies in Belsen, Dachau and elsewhere goes unexplained. Viewing the film today, perhaps most striking is the lack of any real discussion of Nazi racial (and social) ideology as the driving force behind the camp system as a whole and the extermination of the Jews in particular.7 The horrors of Belsen appear as inevitable yet strangely unaccountable consequences of Nazism (images of the Nuremberg rallies and Hitler’s early triumphs introduce the film, but there are no excerpts of Hitler’s antisemitic speeches)—the terrible terminus, as the narration concludes (consistently reiterating broader German complicity with Nazi crimes), “of the incredible journey Germans embarked upon 12 years ago.” Setting aside historical or political perspectives that were unavailable and/or uncongenial to its makers, perhaps the most striking aspect of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey today—one that also distinguishes it from other post-liberation films of the camps, notably the US Death Mills —is its determination to preserve (or recover) the humanity of the victims at Belsen, both the living and the dead. In this respect the film departs somewhat from the grotesque imagery of piles of emaciated cadavers with which Belsen will always be associated. Although its evidentiary mission inevitably mandates numerous shots of fields of the numberless dead, the film is also notable for a large number of close-up shots of faces (often disfigured by violent death 5 See

Tony Kushner, “The Memory of Belsen,” Journal of Holocaust Education 5 (1996), 2–3: pp. 181–205.

6 Tony

Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): on contemporary understandings of Belsen, see pp. 213–225.

7 Though

Toby Haggith notes that the camera units’ “dope sheets” (shot lists) make it clear British cameramen realised that the majority of the inmates at Belsen were indeed Jews: see “Filming the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen,” in Haggith and Newman, Holocaust and the Moving Image, pp. 33–49, especially p. 44.

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or decomposition) of individual victims: images that are shockingly confrontational yet also strangely compassionate, as if the camera seeks to offer victims posthumous restitution through a measure of personal integrity denied them in the manner of their deaths. (Notably absent from the film are the infamous images of piles of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves.) Other shots find SS men lugging individual bodies to graves (the symbolic spectacle of murderers turned gravediggers is stressed), their victims’ lifeless heads lolling on their shoulders in a dreadful enforced intimacy. In a subsequent section, the film attends to not only the medical attention but also the social rituals—washing in warm water, choosing new clothes, etc.—by which camp survivors begin their journey back to dignity and common humanity. These distinctive elements in the Belsen sequence shot by Bernstein’s cameraman— and absent from the US Army footage at Dachau and elsewhere, let alone the staged Soviet film of Auschwitz, where survivors once again donned their camp stripes and reoccupied the bunkhouses for the cameras’ benefit a month after liberation—testify to a humanist ethos that sets German Concentration Camps Factual Survey apart from other, more stridently rhetorical and accusatory, contemporary films and newsreel reports of the camps and in some respects looks forward to more reflective, lyrical and anguished films such as Night and Fog. If German Concentration Camps Factual Survey betrays a certain reluctance to engage with the abstractions of political ideology—a preference for empirical evidence that might itself be stereotypically considered thoroughly “British”—this can also be seen in the Ealing drama Frieda (Basil Dearden, 1947), a very rare postwar feature directly addressing German war guilt that also reflects the cultural impact of Belsen. Spanning the end of the war and the first six months of peace, the film portrays the range of reactions in a small southern English town to the title character’s arrival as German bride of an English pilot she helped escape from a P.O.W. camp. The biggest crises in Frieda’s integration into English life are precipitated by viewing a newsreel report from Belsen (documentary excerpts are interpolated into the film), and later by the unexpected arrival of her unrepentantly Nazi brother, a former concentration camp guard. These episodes provoke intensive debate among the characters about the nature of “Germanism” and whether Germans can truly move beyond the Nazi years (and should be given the chance to do so). Frieda mobilises a distinction—which was in 1947 just starting to become geopolitically important in the context of strategic realignment in the nascent Cold War—between a “hard core” of fanatical Nazis and a larger German community that either never accepted Nazi ideology, or could swiftly be rehabilitated from it (and thus reintegrated into the Western alliance). Ultimately, the film rejects the brother’s völkisch insistence on German consanguinity: yet even in this refutation the particulars of the Nazi worldview—beyond its

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fearsome brutality and the fanaticism with which he adheres to it—remain opaque.8 An unabashedly didactic film (a quality for which it was marked down by several contemporary reviewers), Frieda in fact simultaneously acknowledges the importance of ideology and recoils from this admission, notably in its presentation of the implacably anti-German views attributed to Frieda’s sisterin-law Nell, a local MP. Throughout the film Nell stridently insists not only on collective German guilt but on the innately and incorrigibly destructive nature of the German national character.9 Only following Frieda’s attempted suicide does she accept that she has courted the same malign prejudice she so vehemently denounces: as the film’s final lines declare, “You cannot treat human beings as though they were less than human—without becoming less than human yourself.” Yet neither Nell nor any other characters explicitly associates her own categorical denunciations of all Germans, whose malign traits she views as inherited—“in the blood”—with Nazi racial doctrine and its ultimate consequences in Belsen. Perhaps the point was felt to be too obvious to need underscoring—though in contemporary reviews only the Telegraph remarked the parallel. Equally possible, Nazi race ideology was neither fully comprehended nor regarded as a significant explanatory factor for German war crimes and the distinctive nature of the Nazi state.

From the Postwar Period to the 1970s: Traces, Fragments and Co-financing As the Second World War combat film became a mainstay of British film production in the 1950s, the focus on British forces’ principal theatres of combat operations (North Africa, Western Europe, the Far East, the air war and the Battle of the Atlantic) pushed the experiences of civilian populations in German-occupied Europe to the margins. Even stories of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and commando operations behind German lines tended to focus narrowly on resistance fighters and cat-and-mouse struggles against the Gestapo more than the details of German occupation. (The female protagonists of both Odette [Herbert Wilcox, 1950] and Carve Her Name With Pride [Lewis Gilbert, 1958] are imprisoned in Ravensbrück but the nature and conditions of the camp are in both cases sketchily portrayed and considerably softened.) Most fundamentally, while fifties British war films were actually far

8 On

Frieda, see Terry Lovell, “Frieda,” in Geoff Hurd, ed., National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London: BFI, 1984), pp. 30–34; Charlotte Brunsdon and Rachel Moseley, “‘She’s a Foreigner Who’s Become a British Subject’: Frieda,” in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan, and Paul Wells, eds., Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwat British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), pp. 129–136.

9 Robert

Murphy associates Nell’s attitude with the violent anti-Germanism of Robert Vansittart and Hugh Dalton, British Cinema and the Second World War (London: Continuum 2000), pp. 183–183.

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more complex, ambivalent and deglamorized than is often recalled, nonetheless the codification of a national narrative of British pluck and hard-won final victory left little imaginative or ideological space in which to explore the very different and stubbornly unrecuperable story—one that, unlike armed combat, also lacked any readily available or legible generic paradigm or framework—of mass death and industrialised murder.10 It is surely very telling that of the profusion of bestselling British war narratives filmed during the period, almost the only one bearing meaningful witness to the Holocaust, the prisoner-of-war story The Password Is Courage, when filmed in 1962 preferred to truncate its narrative in 1943 rather than trying to include Charles Coward’s (now disputed) experiences as a prisoner in the E715 P.O.W. enclosure at Auschwitz-Monowitz. (The film originally concluded with a sequence of still drawings accompanied by voiceover narration covering the “potentially difficult” Auschwitz episode.11 ) In the absence of direct depictions of the Holocaust in postwar British cinema, some commentators have suggested that submerged or metaphorical Holocaust themes can be found “displaced” in prominent genres of the period such as fantasy and horror. Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle from 1957–1973, for example, which focused on the eponymous scientist rather than his creations (in part because the classic Karloff version of the monster was trademarked by Universal), explored the consequences of medical and scientific experimentation on human subjects untrammelled by moral or professional code, resonating with popular awareness of criminal experiments in Nazi camps. (Interestingly, the Gainsborough production Portrait from Life [1950], in which a British officer trawls the postwar DP camps in search of a beautiful Jewish girl, was the directorial debut of Terence Fisher, subsequently the leading director of Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle.) The grand evolutionary fantasy of Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1968) daringly collided the seminal wartime myth of British collective indomitability, the Blitz and its literally alien (in the film, Martian; in popular memory, continental European) antitheses of inter-communal violence and racial war, hinting also at what was then a far-from-cliched connection between rationalised scientific modernity and mass extermination. Several scholars have identified the presence of suppressed Holocaust motifs in the later films of Stanley Kubrick (from the mid-1960s, living and working exclusively in Britain) including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1972) and The Shining (1980),12 10 On the Second World War combat film and the Holocaust as its generic anathema, see Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 105–131 and 262–266. 11 This

sequence was subsequently deleted from broadcast and home video releases. See http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/die_geschichte_des_romans_the_password_is_ courage_von_john_castle. 12 See

Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Barry Langford, “Screening the Holocaust: The Case of Stanley Kubrick,” in Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson, eds., The Edinburgh Companion

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while Caroline Kay has detected “traces” of the Holocaust in The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Michael Reeves’ blood-soaked Civil War melodrama Witchfinder General (1969), in which the undeveloped beauty of the seventeenth-century English countryside supplies a cruelly ironic counterpoint to a political and moral environment ravaged and degraded by ceaseless war, is also obviously a reflection on the much more recent conflict: by exploring the “dull, cowardly acquiescence in spite and cruelty” of ordinary citizens13 the film again in some ways anticipates later Holocaust research. This trail of half-buried citations or invocations might suggest that despite general public and official indifference to the Holocaust, at some level of the collective unconscious British culture was grappling with its legacy and the meanings, however imperfectly grasped those could have been given the deficit of Holocaust scholarship and education alike throughout this period. There were of course occasions on which the Holocaust forced itself to the forefront of international, including British, public consciousness, such as the 1952 publication of Anne Frank’s Diary (followed by George Stevens’ 1959 Hollywood film of the stage adaptation) and the Eichmann trial in 1961. These episodes established bridgeheads towards a fuller understanding of how the deeply imprinted image of Belsen connected to what was by the late 1960s starting to be more generally referred to as the “Holocaust.” Not until the 1970s, however, did more explicit treatments of Holocaust themes start to become a recurrent feature of British films. Andy Pearce has established that the decade marked a significant development of British Holocaust consciousness, including the gradual displacement of Belsen by Auschwitz as the focus of education and commemoration, an improved understanding of the systematic, Europe-wide nature of the deportation and extermination programme and the specificity of the fate of the Jews within it, and a greater visibility of survivors.14 As Pearce notes, this shift was conducted through a “cultural turn” in which moving image media played a key role: however, the principal vector was not film but television, with the broadcasts of the World at War episode “Genocide” in 1974, the US mini-series Holocaust in 1978, and the documentary Kitty: Return to Auschwitz (ITV 1979) all commanding large audiences and prompting extensive public comment and debate. The decade also saw a wide variety of other Holocaust-related

to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012), pp. 134–150; Nathan Abrams, “What Was HAL? IBM, Jewishness, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37 (2017), 3: pp. 416–435. Kubrick planned an adaptation of Louis Begley’s novelised Holocaust memoir Aryan Papers, but abandoned the project following the release of Schindler’s List in 1993. 13 Robert 14 See

Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992), p. 192.

Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 165–185.

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programming, both drama and documentary, including the earlier US miniseries QB VII (1974, tx. BBC1 1976), Marcel Ophuls’ documentary The Memory of Justice (tx. BBC2 1976), and the counter-factual drama serial An Englishman’s Castle (BBC2 1978) (set in a Nazi-dominated contemporary Britain).15 The British film industry was in many ways ill-placed either to capitalise upon or to contribute to this cultural turn as cinema attendances reached a postwar nadir and the number and quality of British releases also declined. In a market dominated by low-budget genre production—notably, the sex comedies and TV spin-offs with which the period is indelibly associated in popular memory, alongside the last knockings of both Hammer horror and the Carry On series—and a fragile and often chaotic production financing context, British producers were only intermittently able to secure the resources for more ambitious dramatic subjects. When they did, they tended to favour either economically budgeted contemporary dramas and thrillers or occasional classic literary adaptations and costume films.16 One industry development however did supply a production context in which to explore Holocaust themes, albeit often glancingly or indeed speciously. The withdrawal of almost 90% of US production finance from the UK between 1969 and 1974 as Hollywood studios confronted their own turn-of-the-decade financial crisis saw a compensating rise in international co-productions partnering British producers with continental European companies.17 These co-productions inaugurated a more extensive engagement with the Holocaust by British (or part-British) films: the narratives of the conspiracy thriller The Odessa File (Ronald Neame, 1974), a British-German venture, and a set of ambitious big-budget films produced by Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment18 in a variety of genres including the war/combat film (Cross of Iron, Sam Peckinpah, 1977), suspense thriller (The Boys From Brazil, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978), disaster film (The Cassandra Crossing, George Pan Cosmatos 1976) and old-style star-studded “roadshow” picture (Voyage

15 For

a detailed survey of British television responses to the Holocaust, see James Jordan, “Assimilated, Integrated, Other: An Introduction to Jews in British Television,” in Hannah Ewence and Tony Kushner, eds., Whatever Happened to British Jewish Studies? (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), pp. 259–274; James Jordan, “‘And the Trouble Is Where to Begin to Spring Surprises on You, Perhaps a Place You Might Least Like to Remember’: This Is Your Life and the BBC’s Images of the Holocaust in the Twenty Years Before Holocaust,” in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, eds., Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering War and Genocide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 90–114. 16 For an overview of production finance and its outcomes in the period, see Justin Smith, “Glam, Spam and Uncle Sam: Funding Diversity in 1970s British Film Production,” in Robert Shail, ed., Seventies British Cinema (London: BFI, 2008), pp. 67–80. 17 See Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927 –1984 (London: BFI, 1985), pp. 201–210. 18 The company is variously cited as Associated Films, ITC Films and Associated Communication Corporation.

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of the Damned, Stuart Rosenberg, 1976), all explicitly referenced the Holocaust.19 (Another ITC war film discussed here, The Eagle Has Landed [John Sturges, 1976], set and filmed mostly in the UK, was a US/UK production co-financed by Columbia Pictures.) That this should occur (only) in productions specifically targeted at an international market—marked onscreen by a general absence of British protagonists (even when played by British stars, such as Michael Caine’s Wehrmacht officer in The Eagle Has Landed and Laurence Olivier’s turn as a Simon Wiesenthal-lookalike Nazi hunter in The Boys From Brazil 20 ), and cosmopolitan casts including European stars (performing in English) such as Maximilian Schell, Max von Sydow, Oskar Werner, Maria Schell and others—may suggest the persistence of the perception of the Holocaust as “Other” in relation to British national history and correspondingly its national cinema: the European dimension of these films so to speak “legitimates” their inclusion of overt Holocaust motifs. At the same time, taken together the relative profusion of these elements (compared to their almost complete absence hitherto in British film) clearly reflects the sharpening and evolving perception, in Britain as elsewhere, of the destruction of European Jewry—crystallising out of the general postwar image of German atrocities and war crimes—as a defining aspect of Nazism if not, yet, of the war as a whole. The variable narrative weight this group of films accord the Holocaust has no particular correlation with their equally variable artistic quality. The utterly risible disaster film The Cassandra Crossing, for example, gives considerable screen time and dramatic emphasis to an elderly Holocaust survivor (played by legendary Method acting coach Lee Strasberg) who is retraumatised when a plague-infected trans-continental express is diverted to quarantine in a remote wilderness region of Poland. In fact, though the film is far too shambolic to sustain any coherent thematic reading, it suggests a half-baked allegory—either of the Holocaust itself or, possibly, its unexpiated legacy—as the train is redirected from its intended destination in Stockholm, via Nuremberg (!) where it is brutally sealed by armed soldiers, and on to Poland via the titular crossing— a disused and unsafe mountain viaduct where nefarious military authorities plan to crash the train and dispose of the passengers/victims/witnesses. By contrast, the most important and impressive of these films in purely cinematic terms, Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, bar a few lines of dialogue makes no direct reference to the Holocaust in a narrative unflinchingly focused on the bloody military combat on the Eastern Front and on the classic combat film classconflict between front-line infantry and martinet staff officers. However, the film’s depiction of the horrors of total war consistently emphasises civilian suffering; and, in an end-credits montage blending archive footage of Nazi

19 As

noted above, Sophie’s Choice was also wholly funded by ITC, though released after several high-budget failures—most infamously Raise the Titanic! [Jerry Jameson, UK/UK 1980] had brought about the company’s demise. 20 Wiesenthal

himself is portrayed by Shmuel Rodensky in The Odessa File.

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leaders, military and civilian casualties, war crimes and Holocaust victims— alongside imagery from subsequent conflicts including Vietnam—Peckinpah makes it clear that the tradition of the Hollywood (and British) war film, depicting military conflict in isolation from its moral and political contexts, is no longer sustainable. The Cassandra Crossing ’s banal portrayal of the anguished survivor certainly has scarcely a fraction the impact of, for example, the tortured title character in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, US 1965); but it does reflect the increasing cultural visibility of Holocaust survivors in this period. So too does The Odessa File, where a survivor’s diary prompts an investigative reporter to infiltrate a secret network of former SS officers in 1963 West Germany in pursuit of Eduard Roschmann, (historical) former commandant of the Riga concentration camp.21 The Odessa File also breaks new ground by incorporating a seven-minute black-and-white flashback sequence dramatising the diary that marks the first attempt in a British feature film directly to depict Jewish life in the camps, however inexactly. Viewed today, in fact, all of these films offer a useful insight into the available frameworks for understanding Nazism and the Holocaust three decades on from the liberation of the camps. For example, they generally preserve the tradition (as seen earlier in Frieda: in fact, this is a representational trope repeatedly reworked in British war films) that insists on the clear distinction between a murderous cadre of ideologically committed murderous Nazi fanatics and decent “ordinary” Germans—including, in these films, German soldiers—to whom Nazi actions and values are repugnant. In both The Odessa File and The Eagle Has Landed, honourable Wehrmacht officers ahistorically draw weapons on the SS—in the latter, in defence of Warsaw Jews awaiting deportation in the aftermath of the Ghetto Uprising. In Voyage of the Damned—which dramatises the infamous passage of over 900 German Jewish refugees on the German liner St Louis, whose desperate search for refuge attracted worldwide attention and controversy after they were denied asylum in Cuba—the officers and crew of the St Louis are mostly united behind their decent and humane captain (Max von Sydow), not only removing Hitler’s bust and converting a dining room into a temporary synagogue, but colluding in his plan to scuttle the ship rather than return their Jewish passengers to Germany: only a handful of stokers, radicalised by an Abwehr infiltrator, express any pro-Nazi or antisemitic views. By confining such sentiments to the below-decks manual labourers, Voyage of the Damned reverts to the image of Nazis—pervasive in the prewar and wartime period—as lumpen thugs. Other films tend to prefer the model of the exquisitely but perversely cultured sociopath that gained currency in bestselling thrillers from the 1960s onwards, many of which capitalised on the popular imaginary of diehard Nazis conspiring to establish a Fourth Reich. 21 Roschmann’s portrayal in the film reputedly played a part in his subsequent identification in Argentina, though he was never brought to trial.

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Such fantasies—including Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File and Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil —repeatedly depicted networks of underground Nazis monopolising high-status positions in postwar societies and propagated a new mythical image of Nazis, transformed from their traditional portrayal as homicidal thugs into supervillains—murderous, sophisticated, highly intelligent and monstrously efficient.22 In The Odessa File, Roschmann has become the CEO of a major international aerospace and weaponry manufacturer, while The Boys from Brazil elevates Josef Mengele from murderous provincial quack to pathbreaking genetic scientist and intimate of the Führer, cloning a new generation of Hitlers. Such narratives betray what Susan Sontag called the “fascination” of Nazism, hypostatised, glamorised and dehistoricised as a token of “absolute” evil; however, to the extent that atrocious allure of Nazis-as-supervillains ultimately relies on the Holocaust as the “ultimate crime,” the very gradual materialisation of the Holocaust itself, from half-understood atrocity myth into complex and multi-faceted historical event, in turn starts to demystify the Nazi myth. The 1970s thrillers certainly did not accomplish this but collectively may have helped pave the way for later films that did; when the Holocaust re-emerged as a significant presence in British films, Nazi supervillains would be conspicuous by their absence.

Into the Twenty-First Century As things turned out, the minor cycle of British Holocaust films (or films with some Holocaust themes) in the seventies did not establish an enduring bridgehead for the last two decades of the twentieth century: in fact, following the release of The Boys from Brazil in 1978 it would be 19 years until the next theatrically released British Holocaust feature. This long interregnum owes more to the continuing travails of the British film industry than to any discrete narrative of “British Holocaust film” as such—though the disappointing box-office performance of all ITC’s Holocaust-related dramas bar Sophie’s Choice could scarcely have encouraged further ventures in this vein. In any event, even as the release of a number of large-scale Hollywood productions—including Sophie’s Choice, the NBC mini-series War and Remembrance (US 1988), Triumph of the Spirit (Robert M. Young, US 1989), Jakob the Liar (Peter Kassozitz, US 1999) and of course Schindler’s List —mapped out the emergent parameters of a Holocaust “genre” increasingly dominated, in line with the popular imagination, by the iconography of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Britain’s capacity for big-budget production was prostrated by the collapse of ITC/Associated in 1982, followed in 1987 by Goldcrest, the next (and to date last) attempt to build an internationally-scaled British producer-distributor 22 Although clearly of an altogether different order of artistic achievement to the potboilers and their movie adaptations discussed here, George Steiner’s contemporaneous ascription to the aged Hitler himself of philosophically complex—if highly perverse—eschatological positions in his novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (London: Faber, 1981) both reflects and contributes to the image of the “uber-Nazi.”

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capable of competing with Hollywood. Equally, this was a time when a discourse of “Holocaust exceptionalism”—the conviction that the Holocaust posed uniquely difficult problems of representational ethics, perhaps particularly for mimetic visual fictions—was rapidly disseminating from philosophy and critical theory into the broader culture (with Lanzmann’s Shoah, released theatrically in 1985 and first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 the following year, an important vector). Under-capitalised and low on creative confidence, British cinema seemed to have little to contribute. Genre production remained an industry mainstay and as in previous decades the Holocaust had no obvious purchase on the dominant British genres of the 80s and 90s—heritage film and romantic comedy—or the social realism of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. It would take the election of the New Labour government in 1997 armed with an ambitious cultural “project”—which included making Holocaust remembrance for the first time a central part of British national culture—to bring onstream novel sources and mechanisms of film funding (the National Lottery and the UK Film Council) and give British film the financial stability to be able to explore once again such complex—and, Schindler’s List notwithstanding, commercially challenging—subject matter. Still, given the concurrent intensification of Holocaust discourses in the public sphere—driven by public and political events including the revelations of the Cambodian genocide, the 40th and 50th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War (the former prompting the first television broadcast of the incomplete and unrestored German Concentration Camps Factual Survey), and perhaps most importantly the return of genocidal violence to the European mainland in the Balkan civil wars— notwithstanding its absence from British cinema screens, the Holocaust was not entirely absent from British filmmaking in this period.23 Goldcrest’s critically and commercially successful drama The Killing Fields (Roland Joffe, 1984), for example, dramatised what was widely characterised as the “Asian Holocaust” of Cambodia. Meanwhile, the Jewish Holocaust itself was directly depicted in two very different feature-length made-for-television films, the British-American co-production Escape from Sobibor (Jack Gold, CBS/ITV 1987) and the surreal black comedy Genghis Cohn (Elijah Moshinsky, BBC 1994). Escape from Sobibor does not enjoy a high critical reputation24 —and it is true that, though shot (somewhat ironically, in light of subsequent events) in 23 The frequently posited analogy of Bosnian Serb and German crimes was made on British screens in the 2003 Prime Suspect episode “The Last Witness”: DCI Jane Tennison’s (Helen Mirren) pursuit of a Bosnian Serb war criminal is spurred by her father’s (Frank Finlay) recollection of his experiences as an infantryman entering the German concentration camps (in a speech closely recalling a monologue in Trevor Griffiths’ 1975 play Comedians ). 24 Omer

Bartov describes it as “one of the worst Holocaust movies ever made” and a “cinematic catastrophe”: The “Jew” in Cinema: From the Golem to “Don’t Touch My Holocaust” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 354 n. 145.

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present-day Serbia, the film’s flat, blandly “televisual” style recalls Holocaust (which also portrayed the Sobibor uprising) more than the “cinematic” look that was starting to emerge around this time in ambitious broadcast dramas such as The Singing Detective (BBC 1986). At the same time, it is striking that such a story—its title seeming to presume audience awareness of a Holocaust site that surely only a tiny percentage could even have heard of—should have been the focus of a prime-time drama at all, let alone one lasting almost three hours25 and drawing over 13 million viewers. The very existence of Escape from Sobibor might seem to bear out Deborah Staines’ claim that “throughout the 1980s and 1990s…there was a cultural demand on cinema to perform memories” of the Holocaust—including its radically unfamiliar episodes.26 It also reflects a continuing shift towards Holocaust victims as subjects rather than objects in popular Holocaust narratives. Seven years later—broadcast just as Schindler’s List was reaching British cinemas but making no attempt whatsoever to compete on Spielberg’s epic terms—Genghis Cohn 27 also avoided Auschwitz in favour of far more unconventional terrain, the “Holocaust by bullets,” and repressed memory in postwar West Germany. As formally and thematically ambitious as Escape from Sobibor was conservative (and far less widely-seen28 ), Moshinsky’s film in some ways anticipates the mixed aesthetic economy of Holocaust representation that would emerge in the twenty-first century. The story of a former camp commandant (Robert Lindsay) possessed by the dybbuk of one of his victims, Jewish comic Cohn (Anthony Sher), whose expiation requires that his murderers29 themselves take the vacated place of Germany’s vanished Jews and accordingly experience prejudice, social marginalisation and victimisation, Genghis Cohn is an allegory of vergangenheitsbewältigung. The serial murder case being investigated by the commandant, now a provincial police chief, suggests the inevitable recurrence of violence in the historically amnesiac culture of fifties Germany. The two decades since 1997 have seen upwards of a dozen Holocaustthemed British feature films, including Bent (Sean Mathis, 1997, adapted from Martin Sherman’s 1979 play), Conspiracy (Frank Pierson, US/UK 2001), The Pianist (Roman Polanski, US/UK/Fr 2002), The Aryan Couple (John Daly, US/UK 2004), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008), The 25 Escape

from Sobibor was broadcast in two different versions: the UK version ran from 176 minutes, a full 23 minutes longer than the US cut. The film’s origins, motives and production are discussed by its British director Jack Gold in “Escape From Sobibor: A Film Made for Television Depicting the Mass Escape from the Sobibor Extermination Camp,” in Haggith and Newman, Holocaust and the Moving Image, pp. 198–202.

26 Deborah

R. Staines, “Auschwitz and the Camera,” Mortality, 7 (2002), 1: p. 27.

27 Adapted

by John Wells from Romain Gary’s 1967 novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn (trans. Camilla Sykes, London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). 28 The

film was broadcast on BBC2 in the “Screen Two” original drama strand.

29 Plural:

at the end of the film, having “converted” the commandant Cohn’s spirit moves on to one of the former camp guards.

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Reader (Stephen Daldry, US/UK/Germany 2008), Good (Vincente Amorim, UK/Germ 2008, adapted from C. P. Taylor’s 1981 play), The Debt (John Madden, US/UK 2011, a remake of the 2007 Israeli film of the same title), Woman in Gold (Simon Curtis, 2015), Chosen (Jasmin Dizdar, 2016), Denial (Mick Jackson, US/UK 2016) and The Zookeeper’s Wife (Niki Caro, US/UK 2017), as well as the television film God On Trial (Andy DeEmmony, 2008) and the award-winning short Torte Bluma (Benjamin Ross, US/UK 2005).30 There is no obvious single thread or approach linking this quite diverse group of films, though collectively they map out a quite distinct terrain compared to action-oriented Hollywood Holocaust films of the same period such as Uprising (Jon Avnet, US 2001), Defiance (Edward Zwick, US 2008) or Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US 2010). Notably, a number (Conspiracy, Torte Bluma, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , The Reader, Good) have perpetrator protagonists or co-protagonists—adopting a perspective that Hollywood films in particular (at least since the Erich Dorf strand in Holocaust ) have treated as morally objectionable. Possibly the Hollywood habit of casting English actors as Nazis and SS—from Donald Pleasance as Himmler in The Eagle Has Landed and Ian Holm as Himmler, David Warner as Heydrich and Tom Bell as Eichmann in Holocaust, to Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List —as well as a long domestic tradition of male anti-heroes has made this more congenial terrain for British cinema. A further strand (The Reader, The Debt, Woman in Gold, Denial ) deals in various ways with the Holocaust’s psychological, political and moral consequences and legacies. Arguably, in fact, the least successful British films are those like Chosen and The Zookeeper’s Wife that ape the Hollywood style and its characteristic arc of resistance and/or redemption. Several films draw directly on recent historical research—including upto-date scholarship—including Torte Bluma (based on an episode in Gitta Sereny’s celebrated 1973 study of former Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, Into That Darkness ), Woman in Gold (about the looting of Jewish-owned art and the resistance of Austrian courts to its restitution), and most obviously Conspiracy, which dramatises the Wannsee Conference (speculatively, necessarily so given the deliberate suppression of detailed minutes) in something like real time. Denial —dramatising the David Irving libel trial—actually centres on the nature and protocols of legitimate historical scholarship and why their defence is critical for democratic society. Of course this respect for historiographical integrity is not universal, as (despite its reflexive inclusion of a propaganda film-within-the-film modelled after “The Führer Gives the Jews a Town”) The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas amply demonstrates. The film’s deficiencies as kitsch, in its strategies of audience identification at least as much as its obvious historical solecisms, have been discussed often enough

30 Full

disclosure: the present writer was the screenwriter of Torte Bluma.

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not to need rehearsing again here31 : one can at least note that in contrast to Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, It 1998), the Holocaust film it perhaps most resembles, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas does at least carry through its otherwise fatuous depiction of children’s existence in Auschwitz to a bleakly inescapable conclusion. Conspiracy can be considered as part of this group not only for the historical labour of retrieving an event that—like the Holocaust itself—was intended to leave no trace behind, but for highlighting the ways in which the outward forms of civil society and rational modernity (the professional meeting, the interrogation of legal protocols) in themselves offer no defence against barbarism, absent a sustaining ethical and moral framework. Kenneth Branagh’s strutting, preening performance as Heydrich may be the closest twenty-first century British films have come to the Nazi supervillain beloved of the 1970s, but Conspiracy makes no pretence that its assembled bureaucrats are anything more than common criminals whose moral squalor at times revolts even themselves. What all these films do have in common is that, unlike the 1970s cycle, the Holocaust is neither marginal nor reduced to a plot device (as in The Odessa File), but is emphatically central. Doubtless this reflects the generally accepted perception by the turn of the millennium of the Holocaust as a defining episode in modern history and European or indeed world culture, as well as a much more extensive comprehension of the singularity of Jewish fate. Equally, although Jewish suffering is equally central, in these films we also find acknowledged Nazi crimes against Sinti/Roma (Chosen), the disabled (Good) and gay men (Bent )—indicating perhaps that “Holocaust exceptionalism,” largely abandoned by contemporary scholarship, has started to give way in popular culture too to a more broader contextualised understanding of the Jewish Holocaust alongside Nazi eugenics and social policy. It may therefore be significant that Bent, which depicts the persecution of gay men in Dachau, inaugurated this new cycle of British Holocaust films—not least given the ongoing controversy around the anti-gay legislation promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments. The citation of the Holocaust offers a means of intervening in contemporary British cultural and political debates by providing (as with Bent ) a counter-narrative to repressive normative positions. This in turn reflects the ways in which, as an increasingly central dimension of British national culture, an expanded “Holocaust consciousness” has enabled a diverse range of Holocaust allusions and appropriations in films well beyond the obvious examples.32

31 See for example Robert Eaglestone, “Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction,” in Jenni Adams and Sue Vice, eds., Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), pp. 13–24. 32 For a more general discussion of this trend, see Barry Langford, “Globalising the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture,” in Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon, and Libby Saxton, eds., Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (London: Legenda, 2013), pp. 112–131.

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For example, the animated children’s film Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, US/UK 2000), relating the escape attempt of a flock of battery hens from their grim captivity at the hands of the sadistic Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, is in large part a genial parody of various fondly remembered British POW films of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the plot development that makes the chickens’ escape vital and urgent—Mrs. Tweedy’s decision to abandon egg production for more profitable “homemade” (in fact, industrially produced) chicken pies—introduces unmistakable Holocaust tropes into the generic mix. Whereas the POW genre is typified by sturdy manliness and the optimistic, “have-a-go” spirit of its indomitable and inventive officer-class escapologists, Holocaust films—and above all films depicting the death camps, even those portraying attempts at resistance or escape—are marked by strong elements of abjection and despair. Yet the Tweedys’ conversion of their battery farm into an industrialised slaughterhouse—which entails the construction of a huge and infernal pie-making apparatus, complete with smoking chimney-stack, in a converted barn—completes a set of iconographic markers that similarly “convert” Chicken Run into a kind of Holocaust narrative. On the muddy “Appelplatz” in front of their hutch, beneath perpetually overcast skies, the terrorised (and of course almost entirely female) chickens are subjected to daily inspections, with “selections” (for the Tweedys’ dining table) of the weakest, and with the impending (and eventually, to the chickens’ mortal terror, recognised) certainty of wholesale extermination, that have no real analogue in the POW film but are readily recognisable from similar tableaux in Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List and other filmic portrayals of Auschwitz. Similarly, on the syntactic axis Chicken Run’s dramatic focus on the concept of industrialised mass death (albeit out of commercial, hence rational, rather than purely ideological motives) places a key Holocaust motif at the centre of the film. The chickens’ escape is not (as in conventional POW films) a statement of irrepressible individualism (Steve McQueen as “the Cooler King”) and/or military duty, but an existential necessity. That it is driven by excess rather than privation (the chickens are overfed to fatten them for the chopping block, rather than worked and starved to death) might be seen as a knowing, macabre reversal of the conventions of Holocaust narratives.

Conclusion If nothing else, by alloying its jokey take on one of British cinema’s most enduring wartime myths with material for so long regarded as alien if not antithetical, Chicken Run confirms not only the extent to which the Holocaust has penetrated and changed dominant British constructions of the Second World War, but that twenty-first century British cinema is—finally—a fully engaged part of this national conversation. As we have seen, the Holocaust’s limited visibility in British film for most of the postwar period reflected not only

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the complexities and uncertainties of British national “Holocaust consciousness” across this period, but the precarious economic situation and diminished cultural significance and confidence of the British film industry during long years of retrenchment and occasional outright crisis. The complexities of contemporary film financing and distribution, all typically conducted on an international and multi-platform basis (many of the recent films discussed above are co-productions of various kinds) make it increasingly difficult today to speak of “national cinemas” as once conceived: a “British” film today, like any other, must address audiences well beyond national borders, and equally its cinematic vernacular must strike a balance between stylistically constituted (and marketable) notions of “Britishness” on the one hand, and accessibility to audiences far beyond that social and cultural imaginary on the other. In fact, as a cultural “location” now arguably as prominent in Britain as in the US and Europe, the Holocaust allows British filmmakers a means to engage domestic audiences while at the same time declaring the larger representational (artistic, moral, political) ambitions of British cinema. This “fungibility” of the Holocaust would suggest that its renewed recent visibility in British cinema may persist even as we move definitively into the “post-memory” era.

CHAPTER 14

British Holocaust Literature Sue Vice

British Holocaust literature forms an expansive and wide-ranging canon of work. This is perhaps surprising, given the country’s political and historical relation to the events of the time. Apart from the Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands, Britain was not occupied during the war, and its national literature of historical violence and self-scrutiny tends, rather, to focus on postcolonial topics. Yet Holocaust literature in Britain spans all literary genres, including reportage on war-crimes trials, testimony by refugees and survivors, fiction, poetry, drama and screenplays, and there is little to suggest that the end of such production is in sight. However, the position of Britain during the war, and in the war’s aftermath in relation to national memory-cultures, makes the nature and role of this material highly distinctive, and different from that either of European literary output, or that of other Anglophone nations. For this reason, the following commentary is arranged according to the themes specific to British Holocaust literature, as well as those generic categories which characterize Holocaust cultural production more generally. The earliest examples of reportage in the immediate post-war era are written from the perspective of those administering justice, the narrative stance of an onlooker that is continued in the fictional works which have followed up to the present. While memoirs and other writings by refugees and survivors in Britain might focus on the painful experience of exile and loss, these are nonetheless narratives of survival, set in a country S. Vice (B) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_14

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which was at war with that of their persecutors. In this way, Britain’s historical relationship to the genocide that took place in wartime Europe has its literary equivalent.

War-Crimes Trials Some of the earliest writings on what was not at the time yet known as the Holocaust take the form of war-crimes trial reportage by British writers.1 These early writers on the Nazis’ crimes do not see these events through a present-day perspective on genocide, informed as such a view is by decades of investigation and analysis. In her account of the Nuremberg Trials, Rebecca West’s reference to the works of Rudyard Kipling as a way for the outsider to imagine the atmosphere at Nuremberg suggests that she saw it initially in the terms of British colonial jurisdiction over less powerful others.2 However, these early writers are nonetheless alert to the kinds of topic that continue to preoccupy commentators, including the notions of motivation and responsibility in relation to individual perpetrators, and those individuals’ attitudes to their victims. Both the journalists mentioned here, Rebecca West and Sybille Bedford, write from a British perspective on the war-crimes trials they attended, informed in Bedford’s case by her particular knowledge as a German-born naturalized Briton. While West’s accounts of the Nuremberg Trials centre for the most part on the Nazis themselves, Bedford’s later reports on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, at which 300 such eyewitnesses appeared, demonstrate a greater recognition of a survivor perspective. Although by the time of these trials in 1965 the notion of genocide had been recognized as an international crime and codified in a 1948 United Nations convention for its prevention and punishment, the defendants at Frankfurt were tried only for murders they had personally committed, rather than involvement in the wider crime.3 Bedford attempts in her account to bridge this gap between unprecedented crime and individual responsibility. The Frankfurt Trials’ move towards what Annette Wieviorka calls ‘the era of the witness’4 through its inclusion of survivor testifiers was itself in part effected by other such war-crimes trials, including the Eichmann Trial of 1961, at which for the first time survivors’ testimony had played a central role.

1 See

Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

2 Rebecca

West, A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1955), p. 9.

3 William

A. Schabas, ‘Origins of the Genocide Convention: From Nuremberg to Paris’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 40 (1, 2008): 34–55, available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol40/iss1/4; Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

4 Annette

Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

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Rebecca West’s pieces for the New Yorker were originally published in 1946 and appeared in revised shape in the volume A Train of Powder in 1955, entitled in their later form ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’. West’s focus is on the architects and architectonics of the Third Reich, as these are revealed in court. Her account begins with the defendants, who included such figures as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg, and her efforts to decipher connections between the individuals on the benches and the details of their crimes as these emerged during the trial. Among the ways in which West conveys what she sees as the ‘diminution’ of the defendants’ personalities, and the eerie ordinariness by means of which ‘none of them looked as if he could ever have exercised any valid authority’,5 is by describing them, perhaps unexpectedly, in feminized terms. Thus, she claims that Baldur von Schirach, who had been the Head of the Hitler Youth, resembles a ‘neat and mousy governess … as it might be Jane Eyre’, while Göring, whether clad in his loose-fitting German Airforce uniform or ‘a light beach suit in the worst of playful taste’, has ‘an air of pregnancy’.6 By contrast, the murdered Jews themselves are mentioned infrequently by West, identified for the most part in quoted utterances by unrepentant locals. Only once is the experience of a Jewish victim cited, as might be expected in the context of a trial which was not centred on testimony from survivors. West observes that the defendants ‘wriggled on their seats’ when Sir Hartley Shawcross, the lead British prosecutor, quoted a witness describing ‘a Jewish father who, standing with his little son in front of a firing squad, “pointed to the sky, stroked his head, and seemed to explain something to him”’. West’s analysis of the defendants’ reaction to this description of a mass shooting is that they were acting like ‘children rated by a schoolmaster’. But whereas the father in Shawcross’s account takes the most adult role possible towards his son, the accused seem to regress to the level of boys themselves, as if in denial of the gravity of their misdeeds. As West puts it, ‘There was a mystery there: that Mr Prunes and Prisms should have committed such a huge, cold crime’.7 The use of this phrase, drawn from Dickens via Oscar Wilde, acts to redouble the incongruous demeanour of these former Nazis by recourse to a specifically British kind of social nicety. By contrast to the ‘lavishness’ of West’s style,8 Sybille Bedford’s report on the 1963–5 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial is written with what Elaine Ho

5 West,

A Train of Powder, p. 5.

6 Ibid.,

p. 6.

7 Ibid.,

p. 20. See also Lyndsey Stonebridge’s discussion of ‘the only piece of evidence for Nazi crimes that [West] writes about’, a fragment of tattooed skin, in an instance which ‘exceeds her frame of rhetorical reference’, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 104.

8 Stonebridge,

The Judicial Imagination, p. 41.

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calls ‘noticeable reticence’, alongside, at least at first, an absence of narratorial commentary.9 Yet Bedford’s account, written just a few years after the watershed event of the Eichmann Trial of 1961, addresses the Jewish genocide more directly than does West. Bedford was born in Germany, but left in the 1920s and spent the rest of her life abroad, subsequently returning only ‘as a reporter’, as she put it in an interview.10 Bedford covered the trial of 22 former SS guards for the Observer and the Saturday Evening Post, and it is the material from the latter, published in 1966, that was reprinted in the early editions of a collection of her writings, As It Was (1990). In contrast to Nuremberg, the Auschwitz Trial included testimony from many eyewitness survivors alongside defendant statements, and Bedford is once more engaged by speculation on the latter as well as their victims. As does Rebecca West, Bedford attempts to divine a sense of intention and responsibility from the defendants’ appearance, by noting the gulf between surface and action. This might suggest the influence of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), although it was Arendt who wrote to Bedford asking for her reportage on the Frankfurt Trials, and the latter’s conclusions are more straightforwardly condemnatory than Arendt’s.11 A defendant’s banal appearance only serves to enhance the enormity of their actions. Thus, of Robert Mulka, who was Rudolf Höss’s adjutant at Auschwitz for nine months in mid1942, Bedford writes that he resembled ‘a not undistinguished clergyman in mild distress’.12 As Bedford leads us to see, by citing Mulka’s own words, such ‘distress’ was solely on his own account. In Bedford’s account, such everydayness acts in juxtaposition with overt ideological horror, when the judge follows Mulka’s admission to knowledge of the gas chambers with a question about his thoughts on the arrival of thousands of people at the camp. Bedford allows Mulka to speak for himself: Mulka (Weakly, an old man not sure of his ground): One wanted to liberate the Reich from the Jews.13

In lieu of any comment, Bedford places after Mulka’s avowal that of another defendant, Karl Höcker, a ‘middleman of death’14 who had worked as adjutant 9 Elaine

Ho, ‘Everyday Law in the Court Writing of Sybille Bedford’, in Marcus Wan (ed.), Reading the Legal Case: Cross-Currents Between Law and the Humanities (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 61–79, 76.

10 Susha

Guppy, ‘Interview with Sybille Bedford’, Paris Review 126 (1993): 230–249, 239.

11 Letter

from Hannah Arendt to Sybille Bedford, 4 July 1966, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mha rendt&fileName=02/020150/020150page.db&recNum=0. Arendt cites Bedford in her ‘Auschwitz on Trial’, reprinted in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), p. 253. 12 Sybille

Bedford, As It Was (London: Picador, 1990), p. 219.

13 Ibid.,

p. 221.

14 Ibid.,

p. 223.

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to Richard Baer, the commandant of Auschwitz towards the war’s end. The judge asks whether Höcker believed that the children in the camp had to be killed because they were a ‘public danger’, and receives the response: Höcker: Well, they were Jews.

Such evidence leads Bedford to address the danger of racial thinking directly. As she puts it, ‘The belief in race as the determining factor of human quality’ is not just ‘false and wicked’, but a ‘hopeless and defeatist creed’ constructed on the principle of ‘damnation by birth’.15 Like West’s, Bedford’s writings offer a version of their own onlooker testimony and immediate reaction to the perpetrators. Bedford’s background gave her a particular understanding of the crimes revealed at Frankfurt. The readers of the British mass-circulation newspapers in which her reports appeared had become accustomed, certainly since the Eichmann Trial’s coverage on television and radio as well in print, to considering the mass-murder of the Jews as a discrete crime, and to hearing about its detail from eyewitness survivors.

The Kindertransport The very varied written accounts of the Kindertransport in British culture are usually seen as a variety of Holocaust literature, although they can also be viewed as examples of refugee and exile writing. Individuals’ self-designation itself varies, depending for instance on their age on arrival and the fate of their families. Some memoirs and other kinds of autobiographically inflected writing appeared in the first two decades after the war, notably Karen Gershon’s ‘collective autobiography’ We Came Alone (1966), compiled from the statements of anonymous former ‘Kinder’. However, most writings appeared much later, particularly after the fiftieth reunion of former Kindertransportees in 1989, organized by Bertha Leverton, which brought the history of the initiative to public attention and gave the refugees a sense of communal identity. The genre of Kindertransport writing is joined by that of individuals who arrived in Britain before the war from occupied Europe by means other than the Kindertransport initiative itself. Judith Kerr’s trilogy of autobiographically based novels, starting with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), falls into this category, and constitutes a ‘portrait of the artist’ and growing-up narrative set within particular circumstances. The novels enact the emergence of an English-speaking adult and writer out of a German childhood. By contrast, Anna Borchard’s We are Strangers Here (1942), an autobiographically inspired novel based on her experience of internment on the Isle of Man in wartime Britain, is clearly marked by its subject-matter as the work of an adult refugee. The representation of the Kindertransport has a long history, one that began with autobiographical writing and memoirs, and has turned more 15 Ibid.,

p. 249.

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recently into the occasion for a more symbolic and fictional approach. The Kindertransport—literally, ‘children’s transport’—is the term given to a series of initiatives established to bring unaccompanied children under the age of 17 to Britain in the period between Kristallnacht, the pogrom which took place on 9 November 1938, and the outbreak of war less than a year later. The children came from Germany and the German-occupied territories of Austria and Czechoslovakia, reaching a total of 10,000. The history of the Kindertransport has almost legendary status, and has become a source of national pride in Britain. Even if the memoirs and other writings are at times accounts of deracination and bereavement, they have contributed to such mythification by constituting narratives of salvation and survival. The story of Nicholas Winton, who was responsible for the rescue of 900 children, has become increasingly well-known since the initiative’s fiftieth anniversary and even more so in the new millennium, up to the time of his death in 2015. The Kindertransport’s humanitarian achievement has been used as a standard by which to judge less generous governmental responses to contemporary refugee crises. However, the conditions of the Kindertransport initiative were not as generous as they might seem, since the children’s parents were usually not able to join them and often did not survive the war, while the Kinder themselves were viewed as temporary refugees who would eventually return to their countries of origin. The figure of 10,000 rescued stands meagrely against the total number of lives lost in the Holocaust, of which 1.5 million were children. Such a perception is reflected in the subtitle of Melanie Lowy’s account, A Childhood Memoir: A Double Childhood (2011), in which her perception of ‘idyllic’ life in Britain is set alongside wartime knowledge of genocide. This means that although the Kindertransport story is often seen as one suitable for introducing young readers to the Holocaust itself, as for instance in Irene Watts’s graphic novel Seeking Refuge (2017), or in relation to concepts of displacement and uprooting, it can only be so by sidestepping the background of a genocide that could not be prevented. Many individuals left Britain after the war and settled in North America or Israel, as is shown by a number of fiction and non-fiction works for which this further journey is the conclusion. While Lore Segal’s novel Other People’s Houses (1964) and Edith Milton’s memoir The Tiger in the Attic (2005) both centre with notable fondness on their experiences in Britain before moving on to the USA, Alison Pick’s novel Far to Go (2010) focuses almost exclusively on the Czech past and Canadian present, rather than the British interlude. Further, as some of the Kindertransport writings show, the children’s experience was not a uniformly happy one, their feelings of estrangement and homesickness sometimes compounded by instances of unwelcoming or abusive behaviour on the part of their fosterers and others. Despite its celebratory aspect, particularly in official and popular memory, historical truths of this kind have made the Kindertransport experience one that also signifies alienation and the repression of painful subjective truths

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and memories. Such a different construal appears particularly in literary works which focus on the existential cost of displacement and loss, using the Kindertransport as its symbol. This is evident in the backgrounds of some of the characters in Anita Brookner’s novels, for instance The Latecomers (1988), and in Diane Samuels’s award-winning play Kindertransport , first staged in 1993. Although Samuels’ play is titled to imply an exclusively historical focus, its non-realist mode also uses this story as an extreme example of the demands of psychic and cultural assimilation. As is the case in Pick’s novel, the trope in Kindertransport of a second-generation uncovering of the lost past of a parent or acquaintance allows this specific experience to convey more general matters of occluded and traumatic memory and their present-day effects. This is especially clear in the case of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001), written in his native language by a German-born author living in Britain, in which personal and national constructions of the past are questioned by means of a fictional former ‘Kind’ recovering his lost memory.

The Occupation of the Channel Islands The Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945, during which time Alderney was evacuated and turned into a prison camp for Russian and other forced labourers, several hundred of whom died there. On the other islands, including Jersey and Guernsey, where the inhabitants remained, over 1000 local people were deported to Germany on account of resistance activities and as reprisals, while three Jewish women were deported to Auschwitz where they were killed. Despite the length of the Occupation, it is an event that has remained on the edge of consciousness in mainland Britain. This is the result of the Islands’ distance in geographical and political terms from the United Kingdom, as well as the uncomfortable template their history offers for what the invasion of the mainland might have been like. For the most part, it has been judged suitable for such genre fiction as Jerrard Tickell’s 1951 comic novel Appointment with Venus, about the wartime evacuation of a valuable cow from a fictional Channel Island; as well as such thrillers as Tim Binding’s Island Madness (1988), set in Guernsey, and Guy Walters’s The Occupation (2004), in Jersey, where the moral ambiguities of British responses to the Nazi presence become part of a suspense-plot in each case. Although more awareness of the Occupation has followed the opening of Channel Island and Russian archives in the 1990s, its depiction often follows the stereotypical extremes of emphasizing either heroic endurance or abject accommodation. This is evident in the Occupation’s literary legacy. The Islands’ moral capitulations are represented in literary works including Julia Pascal’s play Theresa (1990). By contrast, a narrative of heroism and resistance is clear in the American author Mary-Ann Shaffer’s best-selling novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Pie Society (2008), and the film Another Mother’s Son (Christopher Menaul, UK 2017). In either view, the Channel

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Islands’ history of five gruelling years of occupation conflicts with the British national myth of wartime moral and military triumph. The fates of historical female figures emphasize the divergent emphases of these literary works. Pascal’s Theresa is an experimental drama based on the life of Theresa Steiner, a Jewish refugee from Austria who was sent from Guernsey to her death in Auschwitz through what the playwright shows to be the betrayal of local officials. Both Shaffer’s novel and Menaul’s film centre on the history of a Jersey woman, Louisa Gould, who was deported to Ravensbrück, where she died, for sheltering an escaped Russian prisoner-of-war. The very form of Pascal’s play is used to dramatize the shocking fact of the Nuremberg Laws’ institution on British soil. For example, the practice of verbatim theatre, that of quoting historical documents, is used to convey the restrictions against Jews announced in the local paper. The division of the utterances between two different characters, a Gestapo officer and William Sculpher, a Guernsey policeman, as they read out the newspaper announcement reveals the shared responsibility for the fate of Theresa and the Islands’ two other Jewish women: GESTAPO OFFICER: Jews cannot take part in SCULPHER: ‘Wholesale and retail trade’. GESTAPO OFFICER: ‘Hotel and catering industry’.16

Although the Gestapo were not present on Jersey, the appearance of such a figure in this fictional context acts in a counterfactual way. It prompts the audience to perceive not only the immediate threat to Theresa in the world of the play, but to consider the disavowed possibility of the Nazi occupation of Britain and what form it might have taken. The history of the Channel Islands can offer a microcosmic example of how the Nazi invasion of mainland Britain might have occurred. Fictional imaginings of a Nazi-occupied Britain and their popularity could be seen as an expression of national anxiety about how events would really have turned out. However, the details of the Holocaust itself remain outside such a counterfactual vision. The specific fate of British Jews, and the behaviour of their fellow-Britons in relation to them, cannot be imagined. Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB (1978), in which Britain surrendered to the Nazis in 1941, situates its fictional British concentration camp at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire. The barely conceivable nature of a Nazi-occupied Britain is redoubled by the irony of this location. Its encapsulation of Englishness is made clear, as much by the name ‘Wenlock’ being chosen for one of the mascots of the 2012 London Olympics, as by the location’s appearance in works by such varied British artists as the poet A.E. Housman, the composer Vaughan Williams and the painter L.S. Lowry. Yet the camp remains in the background, a 16 Julia Pascal, The Holocaust Trilogy: Theresa, A Dead Woman on Holiday, The Dybbuk (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 43.

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briefly mentioned detail whose operations are not represented. Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), set in 1964 after the Nazis have won the war, focuses more on the state-sponsored public amnesia about the Holocaust than about the role of the conquered Britain. Finally, C.J. Sansom’s novel Dominion (2012) depicts a Britain twelve years after its surrender to Nazi Germany in 1952. Sansom’s novel represents subversively British versions of well-known antisemitic atrocities, including placing a round-up in London’s Tottenham Court Road and situating a transit camp on the Isle of Wight, from which Jews will be ‘sent east’. Yet the concept of genocide taking place in Britain is not shown, and the resolution of the novel’s plot sees the Jews who had been interned on the Isle of Wight allowed to return home unharmed. As is the case with Deighton’s and Harris’s novels, the fate of the Jews in Dominion is invoked simply in the service of the thriller plot and as a way of measuring the cost of Britain’s surrender, rather than on its own account. While all three counterfactual novels deconstruct the notion of British immunity to fascism or collusion with occupying forces, none ventures to imagine the possibility of genocide— in the terms suggested by the playwright Edward Bond, whose poem ‘If’ wonders what would have happened ‘if Auschwitz had been in Hampshire’, concluding that, ‘The smoke would have drifted over these green hills’.17

Testimony Although the British Library oral history catalogue lists almost 2000 items under the heading of ‘Jewish survivors of the Holocaust’ living in Britain, the examples of published testimony about existence in Nazi-occupied Europe by British survivors are not numerous. Such ground-breaking British-based publishing initiatives as Vallentine Mitchell’s ‘Library of Holocaust Testimonies’ series, and Beth Shalom’s ‘Witness Collection’, were launched as early as the 1990s and include accounts by British survivors including Trude Levi and Victoria Ancona-Vincent, which would otherwise not have appeared in the public realm. The authors of those testimonies which do exist in a British context have often become well-known as public figures for their campaigning work or other achievements, as much as for the literary or philosophical qualities of their testimonial writing. Equally, Britain’s wartime position has had clear effects on the way these narratives are patterned and on their literary construction. It means that these accounts—apart from an exceptional example, An Englishman in Auschwitz (2001), by the London-born Leon Greenman who had been living in the Netherlands when he was deported—are all by individuals who arrived in Britain after the war’s end. The elements that characterize other such testimonies, those written by survivors who returned to their countries of birth, include ambivalent homecoming, sensations of recrimination, of having been betrayed by their homeland or neighbours, and 17 Edward

Bond, ‘If’, in Hilda Schiff (ed.), Holocaust Poetry (London: St. Martins, 1996), pp. 155–156.

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feeling obliged to move on elsewhere. These features are necessarily absent from testimonies written by Britons. As Ruth Gilbert argues, Holocaust consciousness in Britain developed slowly, taking shape more surely in the 1990s.18 This was the result of several initiatives, including the teaching of Holocaust history in schools being made compulsory as part of the National Curriculum. The permanent Holocaust exhibition opened at the Imperial War Museum in 2000, and in the following year, a national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration was instituted. Such a gradual development of circumstances conducive to survivors’ stories being told is conveyed by title of Helen Lewis’s 1992 testimony, A Time to Speak, which quotes Ecclesiastes to convey its author’s initial reluctance, in her new life as a choreographer in Belfast, to relate her story during the immediate post-war years. Neither the actor Joan McCready, who performed a dramatic monologue based on Time to Speak in Ireland, the UK and USA in 2017, nor her husband Sam McCready, who adapted it, knew anything about Lewis’s history for much of a longstanding friendship.19 Lewis was prompted to recount her experiences, as a dancer in Prague followed by imprisonment in Terezín and then Auschwitz, by a sense of fading public awareness of the Holocaust, and being urged to do so by the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, who is himself well-known as a poet writing on Holocaust themes. This widely noted pattern among Holocaust survivors of initial silence, occasioned by the wish to start afresh and leave the past behind, as well as the fear that stories of atrocity would not be welcomed, is perhaps compounded by a sense of the particular British pressures to acculturate—as implied by the title of a history of British-Jewish life, Todd Endelman’s Radical Assimilation (1990). Another belated testimony, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s Inherit the Truth (1996), recounts the detail of the author’s German childhood and incarceration in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. It assumes a self-consciously historical format, as implied by its subtitle, The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen. Like Lewis’s, Lasker-Wallfisch’s memoir was originally written as a private document to allow her children to ‘inherit the truth’ of her experiences. However, as is customary in testimony of this kind, a tension between this documentary impulse and the logic of memory is evident, not least in the difficulty the author experiences in relation to maintaining a linear chronology. For instance, a letter from Eric Williams, written in 1974 about his ‘Wooden Horse’ escape from Stalag Luft III in 1943, helped by documents forged in a German paper factory by Anita and her sister Renate, is reproduced during an account of October 1941—where it acts as a flashforward to the post-war era. Choosing to single out this episode also acts as 18 Ruth

Gilbert, Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish Literature (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 42.

19 Joanne Sweeney, ‘Actress Joan McCready Tells Story of Her Friend Helen Lewis’s Auschwitz Survival’, Irish News 6 March 2017.

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an implicit premonition of Wallfisch’s post-war identification with Britishness, and its myths of wartime ingenuity and resistance such as that personified by Williams. Although Lasker-Wallfisch’s post-war life, including her fame in Britain as a musician and founder-member of the English Chamber Orchestra, is not directly represented, and she describes it as ‘another story’,20 it is implied by the very existence of this English-language text, in which the author describes her efforts to learn the new language even in Belsen. Her contrasting wish to discard the identifications of her childhood is conveyed in a letter LaskerWallfisch wrote to her sister Marianne, who was already resident in Britain, in 1945: as she puts it, ‘the most difficult thing to stomach is that we are German Jews’ (115). In this way, Lasker-Wallfisch’s testimony enacts the transition from German child to British adult, as a way of outlining her Holocaust experiences.

Poetry The role of poetry in Holocaust representation is a famously contested one. Theodor Adorno’s caveat, ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’, has been revisited by the writer himself, as his later comment shows: ‘[p]erennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’.21 Adorno’s initial proscription acknowledges the danger of placing aesthetic pleasure above an ethical awareness which the composition or contemplation of poetry might involve, as well as making an acknowledgement of high culture’s failure to guard against the barbarism of which it might then become a part. On the other hand, Adorno’s retraction places emphasis on the expressive potential of such writing. The title and argument of Susan Gubar’s study of Holocaust poetry, Poetry after Auschwitz (2003), reveals the extent to which Adorno’s proscription has been flouted. This is in part because, as a genre, poetry has distinctive features in representing a Holocaust consciousness. It can evade conventional narrative, in its resemblance rather to traumatic flashes of unassimilable experience, fragmentary insight or contemplation, as well as voicing a linguistic and aesthetic self-consciousness. Poetry of this kind in a British context has taken varied forms. For some refugees or survivors, it has offered an alternative or adjunct to testimonial memory. Gerda Mayer, who arrived in Britain from Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport, is unusual in having written consistently since the mid1960s, in a way that meditates on her experiences. Mayer’s poem ‘Babes in 20 Anita

Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 1939–1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (London: Giles de la Mare, 1996), p. 144.

21 Theodor

Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 34; Theodor Adorno, ‘After Auschwitz’, in Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 362.

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the Woods’,22 is an advance example of the fairytale being adopted as a vehicle by which to express the atavism of Nazism with surprising directness (more recent examples of British fictional output of this kind are Eva Figes’ Tales of Innocence and Experience, 2003, and Eliza Granville’s Gretel and the Dark, 2014). The poem’s subtitle, ‘I.M. Hans and Susi Kraus’, hints at the historical foundation for this disquieting revisioning of the Grimms’ tale of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the well-known story’ in which ‘two little children who crossed/A dark and dangerous forest were lost’. The first name of Hans, Mayer’s cousin who was murdered with his sister Susi at Auschwitz, partially echoes that of his fairytale namesake. The ambiguity of ‘lost’ here, suggesting both that the children lost their way and that they perished, is clarified in the poem’s final stanza, where the nursery-rhyme rhythm and couplets bluntly emphasize the finality of their fate: Alas for the Happy Ending Of how the tables were turned; There was no reversal of fortune – It was Hansel and Gretel who burned.

The children’s fate makes horrifyingly real the conceit of the Grimms’ story, which concludes with Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch into her own oven, while the capitalizing of ‘Happy Ending’ reveals its stock fictive role, of no help to Hans and Susi. In an intriguing twist on Adorno’s implication about the dark shadow cast on to poetic history, here Mayer approaches the horror of children’s murder by means of a different cultural myth. Although some of Mayer’s poetry does take a lyric or first-person speaker’s standpoint, in focusing more directly on her own memories, ‘Babes in the Woods’ imitates the external third-person narrative of storytelling. A different combination of a first-person with an external viewpoint is apparent in Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘September Song’.23 Like the poet Tony Harrison, whose Holocaust-related poetry is linked to his memories of sheltering from wartime attacks on Leeds, Hill’s childhood experiences of witnessing German bombings of his home-town of Bromsgrove, and nearby Coventry, significantly influenced his writing in adult life.24 Hill’s homage to the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan reveals a debt to a European poetic heritage as well as his preoccupation with the victims of historical violence. ‘September Song’ is one of Hill’s best-known poems to address the subject of the Holocaust, and is in part an elegy for the form itself, which is no longer

22 Gerda

Mayer, Treble Poets 2 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), p. 56.

23 Geoffrey

Hill, ‘September Song’, New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).

24 See

Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’, The Guardian 10 August 2002.

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valid in the post-war era.25 Its concern is with the fate of an unnamed child, about whom the poem’s speaker knows only the dates of birth and deportation, prompting a musing on what it means for post-Holocaust subjects to contemplate such events. However, not only was the poem’s original title to be ‘Elegy’, as Antony Rowland has shown, but the now-anonymous child was also named in Hill’s draft versions.26 In the published version, ‘September Song’ makes its reference much broader, and its speaker’s mixture of distance from the events related, along with a sober horror, could be described as that of a specifically British version of what Claire Tylee calls a ‘secondary witness’.27 This is enacted in the poem’s epigraph, ‘Born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42’, as well as its second-person address, to a vanished individual about whom the speaker notes, ‘Undesirable you may have been’, but ‘untouchable you were not’. The linguistic similarity of the adjectives emphasizes the irony that rejection still requires engagement and effort. Hill has described the background to the poem in interviews, as one arising from a visit he paid to an exhibition of children’s art in Terezín, where he was struck by the birth-date of the anonymous child being one day after his own. The poem’s address echoes this mixture of closeness with distance. Although intimate-sounding, the second-person pronouns register the gulf between onlooker and victim, and the poem’s speaker places this awareness within brackets: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true)

The poem’s conclusion equally invokes a historical rather than subjective mourning: The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

These lines imply that even the ‘harmless’ fires of the present remind the speaker of those of the murderous past, and that the tears which follow, although they are not explicitly described, represent a mourning for human history. Like Bond’s poem ‘If’, the implication is that the smoke might drift over Britain’s landscape. It might seem that, following the examples of Hill and Harrison, the British poets who are most likely to act as secondary witnesses in writing about the 25 Jahan

Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 8.

26 Antony Rowland, ‘Reading Holocaust Poetry: Singularity and Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song”’, Textual Practice 30 (1, 2016): 69–88, 79. 27 Claire Tylee, ‘British Holocaust Poetry’, in Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 598.

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Holocaust are those who were born before the war, and experienced it as it happened. In this sense, the Holocaust is part of the living memory of their era, and its immediacy or even its importance might be lost for those of the generations that have followed. Marjorie Perloff argues that ‘contemporary Holocaust poetry’ can only either be anachronistic, or ‘not really about the Holocaust’ in using its imagery as an approach to another subject.28 However, generations of post-war British and Irish poets have continued to write about the genocide, including James Fenton, the Hungarian-born George Szirtes, and the Northern Irish writer Tom Paulin. The Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s poem sequence Gossamer Walls (2002) has detached itself from the memory of the war in its drawing throughout on the voices of survivors which are ‘reinscribed’ in his verse, emphasizing the priority of eyewitness testimony and the poet’s looking backwards at these works.29

The Novel The response of British writers to the Holocaust is most widespread and heterogeneous in novelistic form. Such material has become a part of British literary culture, even if the works in question allude to Holocaust material rather than placing it centre-stage. The earliest examples of post-war fiction are, like West’s war-crimes trial reportage, not yet able to acknowledge the specific wartime fate of the Jews, nor do they invoke the concept of the Holocaust itself, a term whose widespread use is usually attributed to the 1978 broadcast of the television series Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky). This is revealed by the fact that significant British writers as different as Agatha Christie, for instance in her detective novel A Murder Is Announced (1950), and Iris Murdoch, in The Nice and the Good (1968), have included both pre-war refugees and post-war Holocaust survivors as characters; while Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) is set in Jerusalem at the time of the Eichmann Trial, which is attended by the protagonist, Barbara Vaughan, and thus includes verbatim quotations from the trial as if witnessed by her. In more recent examples which do acknowledge the specificity of the fate of the Jews, British Holocaust fiction often reflects on the intersection of British cultural life with European genocide, in a wide range of modes. This is usually for the effect of emphasizing, even in implicit form, the cultural and ethical divide between Britain and Nazi Europe. The dark satire of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest (2014) presents the Auschwitz world as absurd, including a parody of the characters’ German from a decidedly Anglophone viewpoint; 28 Marjorie Perloff, ‘Can a Contemporary Poet Write About the Holocaust?’ Michigan Quarterly Review XLV (2) 2006. 29 Joseph Heininger, ‘Micheal O’Siadhail’s Inscriptions of Holocaust Survivors’ Writings in The Gossamer Wall: “A Summons to Try to Look, to Try to See”’, in Helen Maxson and Dan Morris (eds.), Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), p. 155.

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while Natasha Solomons’s Mr. Rosenblum’s List: Or, Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (2010) is, rather, a comedy of assimilation, in which the eponymous refugee establishes his own golf-club when native Britons refuse to let him join theirs. A focus on British locations and experiences has the effect of ironic contrast in, for instance, David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes (2004), where an initial critique of the British wartime policy of interning ‘enemy aliens’ resolves itself finally into emphasizing the extent of the gulf between the British and the German camp system. In Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992), a British woman on honeymoon in France after the war’s end is confronted by the remnants of Nazism in the form of the title’s former Gestapo guarddogs, in a manner that locates the dangers of the past outside Britain itself. In a way that transplants the action entirely outside Britain, Stephan Collishaw’s novel The Last Girl (2003) is set in the Vilnius of the 1990s, and concerns the memories of the protagonist, the poet Steponas Daumatas, of his failure during the war to rescue a Jewish woman and her child. As suggested by the likeness between Steponas’s first name and that of the author, as well as their shared profession of writer, the notion of an onlooker who is powerless to act reflects back on the British context despite its formal absence from the novel. Yet these examples cannot wholly be described as Holocaust novels, since its presence is either tangential or acts as a backdrop to the main action. The Holocaust and its victims are minor characters for Christie and Murdoch. While the history of Christie’s character Mitzi in A Murder Is Announced is not given in detail, since its function is to provide her with the motivation of righteous indignation in the unfolding of the plot,30 Murdoch’s Willy Kost in The Nice and the Good does eventually relate his wartime story to another character, but we are not privy to what he says. In each case, for rather different reasons, the Holocaust experience itself remains outside the novel’s conceptual field. It is perpetrators, rather than survivors, who are the focus of attention in Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate. For the most part, the Nazis are also the eyewitnesses in Amis’s The Zone of Interest, where in any case they could be viewed as stand-ins for ‘people who think they have a right to live at the expense of others’,31 in an allegory of Britain’s own rigid class system. It is refugees rather than survivors who appear in Solomons’ and Baddiel’s writing, while McEwan’s is an allegory about European memory and politics. Collishaw’s novel does not enter the Holocaust world of ghetto and camp, its viewpoint remaining one that is remorseful yet outside those realms. The two novels that I will focus on here have a different emphasis on the Holocaust universe in bringing together British and Jewish wartime history. This functions as a means of imagining the role of genocidal antisemitism in relation to British Jews. In this way, these works use elements of imaginary historical reconstruction, in order to represent the Holocaust as a strand of 30 See Victoria Stewart, ‘Glimpsing the Holocaust in Post-war Detective Fiction’, Patterns of Prejudice 53 (1, 2019): 74–85. 31 Gaby

Wood, Review, The Telegraph, 28 August 2014.

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self-definition in contemporary Jewish life. The novels of this kind are Jeremy Dyson’s What Happens Now (2006) and Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006), both of which take a standpoint that is definitionally that of a British secondary witness. The title of Jeremy Dyson’s novel What Happens Now places it selfconsciously within a transnational canon of Holocaust writing. Its echo of Primo Levi’s 1986 novel If Not Now, When?, about a Jewish partisan in wartime Byelorussia, invokes a title that itself draws on the rabbinical advocacy of committed action.32 In ironic contrast to Levi’s resister, Dyson’s protagonist Alistair is a bystander. The novel is set in 1981, when this 15-year-old Leeds schoolboy is offered a part in a children’s television play about the war. These events are interleaved with Alistair’s life some 18 years later, as he tries to atone for what he sees as his failure to prevent a tragedy in 1981. The action of the play itself underlies the events of the novel. Entitled A Candle in the Darkness, it is a dramatized version of a Holocaust diary about life in hiding. Alistair plays Marcel, the younger brother of the Romanian diarist Leila Vinteuil, whose Jewish family hid from the Nazis in a cellar until they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz. Along with Leila and her family in the cellar is ‘another boy’, someone ‘older’ who was ‘her boyfriend or something’.33 Leila’s story is clearly an instance of the ‘refiguring’ of Anne Frank’s,34 whose attic hiding-place was shared with her father Otto’s business partner Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste, and their son Peter, who did indeed become Anne’s ‘boyfriend or something’. Although she later distanced herself from him, Anne confided in her diary about Peter on 22 March 1944: ‘it is getting more and more wonderful here. I believe, Kitty, that we may have a real love in the Secret Annexe’.35 A more overt approach of this kind, focusing on the relationship between Anne and Peter, is evident in other examples of British refigurings of Frank’s story, for instance Sharon Dogar’s novel Annexed (2010). The conceit of the play-within-a-novel enables us to see Alistair’s growing inability to distinguish fiction from reality, past from present. He takes on the guise of Leila’s brother in almost literal terms, and the wardrobe-manager is delighted that the other boy’s outfit ‘fits you perfectly’, as she puts it.36 Alistair’s costume, consisting of ‘a large yellow star’ pinned to the left side of a thick grey coat, and a ‘small brown cap’, makes him think, of his reflection in the mirror: ‘He looked like somebody else, but somebody he knew or somebody he’d seen’. The posture Alistair then ‘impulsively’ assumes allows the 32 The

original phrase by Rabbi Hillel appears in the Mishnah.

33 Dyson,

What Happens Now, p. 48.

34 Sara

Horowitz, ‘The Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank’, in Barbara KirschenblattGimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (eds.), Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 215–253, 215. 35 Anne

Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (New York: Book Club Associates, 1999), p. 184.

36 Dyson,

What Happens Now, p. 62.

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reader to recognize this ‘somebody’, although the text itself withholds identification: ‘he held [out] both his arms, bending them at the elbows, palms flat and outwards as if to say don’t shoot’.37 Alistair thus sees himself, as if in a ‘tableau’, mimicking the infamous photograph of a small boy being arrested by the SS during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.38 Dyson’s reproducing in his novel, albeit without naming them, the emblematic Holocaust figures of Anne Frank and the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, is a way of bringing the Holocaust into the British present. In What Happens Now, the connection between the Holocaust and BritishJewish life is represented implicitly in terms of a division between the European past and British present. By contrast, in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights, the relationship between wartime genocide and Britishness constitutes the book’s explicit concern. Although the narrator, the Mancunian cartoonist Max Glickman, is admonished by his mother to the effect that, ‘The only camp you ever went to was Butlins’, he also recalls making contingency plans with his childhood friend Manny Washinsky, for the ‘Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky’.39 Such a conviction resounds with historical bathos. Yet it turns out that the effects of the Holocaust do reside in unexpectedly close proximity to Max’s Crumpsall home. Max’s friend Manny’s contemporary re-enactment of Holocaust atrocities in Manchester takes a shocking form, one born of a crazed incredulity at the Nazis’ actions. Manny kills his parents, and both Max and the reader learn of this parricide from Max’s mother: ‘Channa and Selick have been found dead.’ ‘Christ!’ ‘In their beds, Max. They think gassed.’ ‘Gassed!’ ‘I know.’40

Max adds that ‘gassed’ is ‘one of those words’ made ‘unholy just as ground is made unholy’, and, in response to such an observation, the critic Sam Jordison praises this exchange for its ‘seriously funny’ engagement with the post-Holocaust tainting of language.41 But Max’s distanced, British perspective, that of someone ‘born safely, at a lucky time’,42 transforms even this

37 Ibid. 38 See Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004), on this image from the Stroop Report. 39 Howard 40 Ibid., 41 Sam

Jacobson, Kalooki Nights (London: Cape, 2006), pp. 19, 472.

p. 49.

Jordison, review, The Guardian, 20 September 2010.

42 Jacobson,

Kalooki Nights, p. 5.

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linguistic truism. Of Max’s list of ‘unholy’ words—‘gassed, camp, extermination, concentration, experiment, march, train, rally, German’—only half were neutral in the first place. It is rather that the word ‘gassed’ is transferred from its Holocaust context to a British one, not as an empty signifier given malign meaning, but as an action repeated in the present. Max concludes simply that Manny was overly ‘engrossed in the history of the Holocaust’.43 The latter’s actions were inspired by the wartime example of ‘the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist George Renno’, who said at trial when questioned about the gassings he had undertaken at Schloss Hartheim that, ‘Turning on the tap . . . was no big deal’.44 Here, Max goes against his own observation about words becoming ‘unholy’ by association, since a new word is needed for Renno’s singular avocation: to this end, he splices together ‘euthanasist’ and ‘enthusiast’. Manny’s ‘research’ determined that, on the contrary, ‘turning the tap on was a big deal’,45 a statement which led to a verdict of ‘mental impairment’ at his trial. This plot element constitutes an ironic view of British-Jewish responses to the Holocaust. On the one hand, as Max puts it of himself and his peers: ‘By any of the usual definitions of the word victim, of course, I wasn’t one’; on the other, the very contemplation of the Holocaust has brought Manny to the certainty that ‘whatever had happened once could happen again’.46 In the novels by Dyson and Jacobson, an inseparable combination of British and Jewish Holocaust consciousness is represented. It is Britain’s ‘bystander’ role in the Holocaust that produces the same pattern in Alistair’s story in What Happens Now, while Jacobson’s novel satirizes the dangers of becoming engrossed in and overly identifying with the Holocaust past. Both novels reveal the extent to which the events of the Holocaust haunt Jewish subjects in a British context even in the twenty-first century. The exploration of such unforgettability is placed alongside the threat that such present-day preoccupation may turn into banality or self-pity. It is partly to guard against such a degradation that both turn to the documentary record to shore up their narratives, incorporating the real-life imagery of life in hiding, in ghettos and camps into their British plots.

Conclusion Although it is hard to draw definite conclusions about such varied material as that placed under the heading of British Holocaust literature, there are nonetheless some common features to be discerned. While these elements are often the representational version of historical events, they also reveal the persistence of national myth-making and its counterpart of national amnesia. 43 Ibid.,

p. 59.

44 Ibid.,

pp. 59, 437.

45 Ibid.,

p. 61.

46 Ibid.,

pp. 5, 440.

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Refugee writing, including that by those who arrived on the Kindertransports, takes a significant role for the very reason that Britain was never occupied by the Nazis. Such a truth makes these stories of flight, evasion and survival not only the more typical ones in Britain, but those which might be especially welcomed as emphasizing the nation’s self-image as offering a safe haven. The broadcast in 1979 of a Yorkshire Television documentary about the survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon’s experiences, Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, prompted a widespread public response of sympathy and compassion, as the director Peter Morley, who was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, notes in his autobiography A Life Rewound (2010). Viewers in Britain clearly felt themselves free to respond in such a way, unhampered by any uncomfortable self-scrutiny that might have accompanied such a broadcast in those countries which were occupied during the war, or one on a topic apparently closer to home, for instance the slave-trade, imperial history or contemporary experiences of racism in Britain. The testimonies of Holocaust survivors are rare for the same historical reasons, and the painful truths they emphasize, of individuals undergoing state-sponsored persecution, deportation, imprisonment and the threat of being killed in the concentration and extermination camps, can be seen and condemned from a distance in a British context. However, the ethical distance of Britain from the individuals and events of the Holocaust years is of course not always as great as it appears. Perhaps emboldened by his separation from the British national narrative, the Irish writer John Boyne, well-known for his novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), includes in the sequel, The Boy at the Top of the Mountain (2015), fictionalized versions of such other perturbing events as Edward VIII’s attempt to curry favour with Hitler to further his own royal ambitions. Yet this link between British and Nazi history, despite its basis in the historical record, has the effect of increasing the allegorical and didactic nature of the novel. While The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas uses the notion of the fence at Auschwitz that separates two young boys as a figure for any kind of political division or partition, including that in Ireland itself,47 a generalized lesson about the dangers of feeling empowered by status to lose one’s ethical sense is imparted by The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. The notion of Britain as a rescuer nation has been challenged not only by the historical record, but by the striking number of fictional tales which depict what could be called bystander anguish. Acting along with the Channel Islands’ Occupation as a contradictory element to the national celebratory narrative of wartime victory, any representation of the helpless onlooker emphasizes anew the uncomfortable truth that, despite Britain’s sense of ‘standing alone’ against the Nazis, the Holocaust could not be prevented. It is perhaps this figure of the anguished bystander which is the most distinctive British contribution to Holocaust literature, as an ethical as well as a historically motivated trope. It allows for the continued representation of the 47 Thanks

to Robert Eaglestone for discussing this with me.

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Holocaust in such literary production, since the events are always presented at a remove, rather than in the moment of their occurrence, allowing for an ever-increasing expanse of hindsight. It remains to be seen what will become of British Holocaust literature in the period after the UK’s departure from the EU in the wake of the referendum of 2016. This event might bring about or necessitate a different mode of writing, since it appears to undermine the ‘transnational turn’ in memory studies. Such a transnational view, as Aleida Assmann argues, ‘fosters a rethinking and reconfiguring of national memories in the context of transnational connectedness’.48 Holocaust literature, whether consisting of autobiography, fictions of secondary witness, imagined identification or even moral exceptionalism, might be the site for continuing such connectedness.

48 Aleida

546.

Assmann, ‘Transnational Memories’, European Review 22 (4, 2014): 546–556,

PART VI

The Holocaust in British Society

CHAPTER 15

A Defining Decade? Swastikas, Eichmann and Arson in 1960s Britain Nigel Copsey

It is easy to write off the scrawling of swastikas on synagogues as the operation of a lunatic fringe. But where does lunacy end and a dangerous minority faction begin? (Sunday Times, 3 January 1960)

Late on Christmas Eve, 1959, a memorial stone to victims of National Socialism in Cologne was defaced. Black paint was smeared over the second sentence of the inscription “Here lie seven victims of the Gestapo. This memorial recalls Germany’s most shameful period 1933-1945”. Shortly after, in the early hours of Christmas Day, red and white paint was smeared on the new synagogue in Cologne’s Roonstrasse. “Out with the Jews” and “Germans say: out with the Jews!” were daubed on an outside wall; an entrance to the synagogue was defaced with swastikas; a swastika was also smeared on an inside porch. What followed, and be mindful that this was an age well before the global hyper-connectivity of the internet, was truly extraordinary. During the next six weeks a “rash” of antisemitic incidents afflicted not only the Federal Republic of Germany but also many other West European countries too, and even stretched beyond European shores, to North America, South America, South Africa, and Australia (Hong Kong was not immune). Yet this global “swastika epidemic”, “rash”, or “plague” as it was variously dubbed—the Institute of Jewish Affairs estimated nearly 1000 incidents, in N. Copsey (B) School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_15

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243 cities and towns, across 34 countries1 —has now almost totally disappeared from historical and popular memory. Particularly so when it comes to Britain. It might come as a surprise therefore that the British press reported more than 40 antisemitic incidents between 31 December 1959 and 9 January 1960.2 Perhaps more surprising still, the Board of Deputies of British Jews estimated that during six weeks of the “epidemic” no fewer than 160 separate incidents occurred across some 60 different localities in this country.3 Such was its extent, one far right publication pronounced Britain the “Runner up to Western Germany in the swastika painting cup”.4 When we come to reflect on domestic antisemitism in post-war Britain, the conventional wisdom is that “our” antisemitism was highly marginal, especially during the 1960s. Britain’s Jews were, according to Robert S. Wistrich, enjoying “a new affluence and acceptance by the late 1950s”.5 A number of factors account for why domestic antisemitism was such a marginal issue. These included, as Colin Holmes has previously noted, the so-called “recoil effect” of the Holocaust, the favourable image of Jews which derived from the building and defence of Israel, the presence of easier targets, such as Blacks and newcomers from the Indian sub-continent, the relative affluence of post-war Britain and the alignment of interests between successive British governments and Anglo-Jewry.6

Notwithstanding an obvious need to qualify Britain’s “unsurpassed tradition of tolerance”7 —1960 was ushered in on a “new wave” of antisemitism after all—the point of this chapter is not to inflate degrees of domestic antisemitism. For those seeking a more critical approach to domestic antisemitism and to the myths of British “tolerance” and “exceptionalism”, historians such as Tony Kushner, David Cesarani, Bryan Cheyette, and Bill

1 Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain, Information, Vol. XV, No. 3, March 1960, p. 2. 2 American

Jewish Congress, “Chart of Recent World-Wide Anti-Semitic Defacements”, 14 January 1960 (NY: AJC Commission on International Affairs).

3 Board

of Deputies of British Jews, Annual Report 1960 (London: Woburn House, 1961),

p. 29. 4 Combat,

newspaper of the British National Party, No. 6, May–June 1960.

5 Robert

S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism in Europe Since the Holocaust, Working Papers on Contemporary Anti-Semitism (NY: American Jewish Committee, 1993), p. 6.

6 Colin

Homes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration & British Society, 1871–1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 245.

7 As

a Times editorial, 5 January 1960, described it.

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Williams are the essential points of reference.8 Rather, my aim is to shed some new light on those we dismiss all too curtly as the “lunatic fringe”. Let us first heed George Thayer’s observation, made in his study of the British political fringe published in 1965, Perhaps the first point that should be noted is that the British political fringe, so often described as the “lunatic fringe”, is by no means inhabited by madmen […] It would also be a distortion of the truth to conclude, as the term “lunatic fringe” implies, that these people are, on the whole, less intelligent and less capable than the more “normal” political moderates.9

Or, as a Sunday Times (3/1/60) editorial put it, We should also remember that the lunatics perceive themselves, not as lunatics, but as the only sane people around. Many are zealous evangelists who seriously seek to convert enough of their fellow citizens to make their views effective. And some of them could.

This chapter will focus on the outlier rather than the wider public (though how a fringe behaves can also tell us much about the wider society in which it operates). And my contention here is that in the (inglorious) history of extreme-right antisemitic organisation in this country, the 1960s need to be reprised as a defining decade, as a decade that mattered.

The “Swastika Epidemic” In the wake of media reports on events in Cologne (28 and 29 December 1959), and up to 28 January 1960, the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recorded no fewer than 470 antisemitic incidents across the Federal Republic (including West Berlin). The peak of recorded incidents occurred on 7 January 1960, with 58 incidents reported on that day alone. Incidents ranged from acts directed against particular objects (cemeteries, monuments, restitution agencies, churches); acts directed against individual Jews, or the property of Jews; indiscriminate smearing (buildings, phone booths, bridges, railway carriages); through to public statements of an antisemitic nature, and to the distribution of pro-Nazi literature. Around one-third of incidents were suspected to have been carried out by children 8 See for example, Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” n English Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); David Cesarani (ed.), The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990); Bill Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners: Manchester and the Rescue of the Victims of European Fascism, 1933–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 9 George

Thayer, The British Political Fringe (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), p. 238.

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(including drawing swastikas “innocuously” in the snow). Most offenders were adolescents aged between 16 and 20 years, with a significant proportion also coming from the 20–30 age range. Arnold Strunk and Paul Schönen, the two offenders arrested and charged in relation to the original incidents in Cologne were both in their mid-twenties.10 On the very same day as their offences took place, an anonymous telephone call, together with information given by Ernst Custodis, the newly appointed Cologne District leader of the far right Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP),11 meant that Strunk and Schönen, both DRP members since mid-1958, were arrested swiftly. The two DRP comrades had informed Custodis of their plan on 19 December 1959, and had sought his participation. With their affiliations to the far right becoming widely known, so it raised the terrifying spectre of an evil Nazism reborn. In a feature on the “Swastika Menace” for Pathé News (14.1.60), screened in 400 cinemas across Britain, and exported to no fewer than 87 different countries,12 viewers were told in shocking terms that: From Cologne, third largest city of Western Germany, came news that shocked the Free World. Nazism, foulest creed of the 20th Century, had shown its bloodstained hands again. The swastika, symbol of Hitlerism, had been daubed on a synagogue. It made headline news in the German Press – every Press. The Jew-baiters were on the prowl.

This is a country where a failure to weed out former Nazis from positions of authority in politics, judiciary, education and industry had already drawn critical comment.13 For five days, from 25 December to 30 December 1959, antisemitic incidents remained contained to the Federal Republic. From the evening of 30 December 1959 the “contagion” then spread to Britain, France, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Greece, South Africa, and Australia. For five consecutive nights, antisemitic slogans were painted on various buildings in Melbourne. Incidents were first reported in the United States from 2 January 1960 (there were an estimated 637 incidents in 236 cities in the continental United States)14 ; in Latin America from 6 January, and in Canada from 8 January. Communist East Germany, which defined itself as the “anti-fascist 10 See “The Anti-Semitic and Nazi Incidents”, White Paper of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, 1960. 11 Originally founded in 1950, the DRP struggled to make any electoral impact. It typically polled around 1 per cent of the vote, although it did manage to capture over 5 per cent in regional elections in the Rhineland-Palatinate in 1959. 12 See

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Daily News Bulletin, 14 January 1960.

13 The

Board of Deputies of British Jews had passed a resolution in February 1959 calling on the Federal Republic to remove from positions of influence those who taken an active part in the public life of the Nazi regime. 14 See Howard J. Ehrlich, “The Swastika Epidemic of 1959–1960: Anti-Semitism and Community Characteristics”, Social Problems, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1962, pp. 264–72.

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state”, fell victim too. On 6 January a shop window in East Berlin was defaced with a swastika and the slogan “Juden Raus”.15 In Britain, the first incident occurred over the night of 30 December 1959. Self-evidently mimicking the scrawling at the Cologne synagogue, two swastikas with the words “JUDEN RAUS” were smeared on the doors of the Kensington Park Road synagogue in London’s Notting Hill. An anonymous caller telephoned the Press Association claiming responsibility; the story was subsequently circulated to the press. Significantly, as the Jewish Board of Deputies’ Defence Committee chronicled it, the press took it up “with a vigour which in the opinion of many was considerably overdone”.16 Within a few days, reports of more swastikas and antisemitic slogans came from across London and its suburbs. The steps of the offices of the Jewish Chronicle were defaced and a ground floor window was broken; a swastika and the words “Juden Raus” were scrawled on the offices of the Board of Deputies, where a ground floor window was also smashed; the main entrance door and walls to the offices of the World Jewish Congress were smeared in red swastikas. Synagogues at Willesden, Kingston and Upton Park were defaced; swastikas were painted on the inside porch of Wildenstein Art Gallery; the gates at the Bushey Jewish cemetery were also defaced. As in Germany, non-Jewish buildings—an Anglican church in Battersea and a Catholic church in Dartford—were daubed with swastikas too. An indication of possible far right culpability came when the Press Association received an anonymous telephone call on 2 January 1960 claiming responsibility for the defacements of the offices of the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies. The caller claimed to represent the “British Nazi Movement” and warned that: We have issued an ultimatum to the Jewish Board of Deputies warning them that unless their pressure on the German authorities to persecute German nationalists ceases forthwith we shall commence attacks on Jewish property throughout Britain. We have sent this ultimatum tonight.17

The Jewish Chronicle also received a call from “Mr Sanderson” (whom apparently had a “military, well-spoken voice”) claiming to be spokesperson for the “British Nazi Movement”. “Sanderson” warned the Jewish Chronicle that the movement had been collecting names of prominent Jews who would be held hostage in order to trade for the release of prisoners that were being held for the anti-Jewish incidents in Germany. “Sanderson” named three prominent Jews: Sydney Silverman (Labour MP for Nelson and Colne), Ian 15 “Chart

of Recent World-Wide Defacements”, p. 4.

16 “A

Survey of the Situation”, paper circulated to the meeting of Jewish Defence Committee, 6 January 1960, Board of Deputies: Defence Committee Papers, Wiener Library (WL). 17 The

Times, 4 January 1960.

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Mikardo (former Labour MP for Reading) and Dr Barnett Stross (Labour MP for Stoke-in-Trent).18 Threatening telephone calls were made not only to Mikardo, Stross and Silverman but also to the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Israel Brodie; to Isodore Epstein, the principal of the Jews’ College in London, and to Barnett Janner, Labour MP for Leicester North-West and president of the Board of Deputies. Warnings were issued to them to desist immediately from criticising the activities of the swastika-daubers in Germany. The Federal Republic’s embassy in London received a telegram signed by the “British Nazi Movement” warning that “if nationalists persecuted, property of German Adenauer supporters here will be attacked”.19 Threatening letters were sent to Coventry East Labour MP, Richard Crossman (who was “an innocent lackey of the Jews”), and to Eton and Slough Labour MP, Fenner Brockway (a long-time proponent of legislation against racial discrimination).20 A telephone threat from the “British Nazi Movement” was also made to the Anglo-Jewish historian Dr. Cecil Roth who in his History of the Jews in England, published in 1941, had applauded English tolerance, and had considered antisemitism an “un-English” phenomenon. The caller threatened to set Roth’s Oxford home on fire if he did not withdraw his books from sale.21 In a further “cultural” turn, a swastika would be found smeared on the Royal Festival Hall in London with the message “Less Jewish Music”. Ominously, over the course of the following few days, reports came of swastika-daubing incidents from Leeds, Newcastle, Bolton (where the slogan “Juden Raus” was wrongly spelled “Jugen”), Dartford, Salford, Glasgow, Worcester, Belfast, Axminster, Bristol, Cardiff, Kingston, Manchester, and York. By the weekend of 9–10 January, more swastikas and antisemitic slogans appeared in London, and also in Southend, Carlisle, Birmingham, St Anne’son-Sea Lancashire, and at a Jewish cemetery in Brighton. A swastika flag was spotted flying from a 450ft. television mast in Bolton.22 Responding to the incidents in Germany and Britain, trenchant condemnation followed in both the national press (e.g. Times; Sunday Times; Sunday Express; Daily Telegraph; Guardian; Daily Mail ; Daily Herald) and provincial press (e.g. Yorkshire Post; Liverpool Echo; Birmingham Post; Western Mail; Manchester Evening News; Bristol Evening Post ).23 Conservative, Labour and

18 See

Jewish Chronicle, 8 January 1960.

19 See

Wiener Library Bulletin, Vol XIV, No. 1, 1960, p. 4.

20 The

Times, 12 January 1960. Confusingly, these two letters purportedly came from “The People’s Liberation Army”. Brockway had been trying since the mid-1950s to get a bill through that would make racial discrimination in public places illegal and incitement to racial hatred illegal. See article by Brockway in Searchlight, No. 1, spring 1965, p. 5. 21 Jewish

Chronicle, 8 January 1960.

22 See

The Times, 11 January 1960.

23 See

Jewish Chronicle, 8 January 1960.

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Liberal parties all expressed their outright condemnation.24 Tory Home Secretary, R. A. (Rab) Butler responded that he shared the concern of Britain’s Jewish community but he was convinced that it was largely the work of irresponsible juvenile delinquents, and lacked any “deeper” significance. The Board of Deputies shared this view, and whilst measures were taken to protect communal property by the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX), there was no need for a combative response. A newly formed Jewish anti-fascist “60 Group” (precursor to the 62 Group)25 agreed to stand down, with individual members encouraged to join defence activities organised by AJEX.26 On 17 January there was a silent protest march from Marble Arch in central London to the Federal Republic’s Embassy organised by the Association of Jewish ExServicemen. In a show of solidarity an estimated 35,000 people (one-third non-Jews) participated. By the Friday of that week, the signs were encouraging: AJEX had withdrawn nightly patrols of United Synagogues in London. Nonetheless other synagogues in both London and the provinces continued to be patrolled.27 It was mid-February before this swastika spree finally stopped.

A Far Right, or Another Conspiracy? If in the Federal Republic, a link to the far right was evident (but even here the waters became muddied, as we shall see), in Britain it did not seem so clear-cut. Threats were received from the “British Nazi Movement” but such a party/movement did not exist. There was, in fact, no evidence of any organised “Nazi” party directing the antisemitic night-daubers, nor was there any evidence of any kind of international neo-Nazi conspiracy either. There were rumours of such a conspiracy emanating from sources in Switzerland that alleged that it was part of a concerted campaign by former SS officers with headquarters in Malmö in Sweden, but there was little substance to them.28 In fact of those arrested and convicted in Britain (numbering less than ten), most were youths aged between 18 and 21, engaging in “nonpolitical” acts of juvenile delinquency with no ostensible connections to any antisemitic organisations.29 One perpetrator claimed that he had never heard of the concentration camps and gas chambers, and was said to have gone “white” when shown pictures from Lord Russell’s 1954 book, The Scourge of the Swastika.30 24 Ibid. 25 On

the 62 Group, see Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 98–104. 26 WL:

Jewish Defence Committee Minutes, 9 February 1960.

27 Jewish

Chronicle, 22 January 1960.

28 Ibid. 29 See Board of Deputies of British Jews, Annual Report 1960 (London: Woburn House, 1961), p. 29. 30 See

The Times, 19 January 1960.

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Most history teaching in Britain’s schools stopped in 1914, if not before, and a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust was common place, especially amongst young people. One headmaster wrote to the Guardian (16/1/60) expressing his shock that the current editions of encyclopaedias made “no mention of Belsen or Buchenwald” (note the lack of reference to Auschwitz here, since the British public’s encounter with the “Holocaust” was still defined by newsreel images of the liberation of Belsen). As Andy Pearce’s study of Holocaust consciousness has suggested, for most Britons in 1960, the Holocaust was, if not meaningless, not particularly meaningful either.31 This was still a time when the genocide of European Jewry was lost in the broader cultural narrative of Second World War heroism, and moral superiority over the “evil Nazis” (more often than not simply conflated with all “Germans”, or the “Hun”). Tellingly, in the midst of the “swastika epidemic” there were reports of British businesses engaging in an anti-German boycott. It was rumoured that Germans were being dismissed and that firms were refusing to sell German goods. Although unfounded, such reports of British “anti-Germanism” were taken seriously in Bonn.32 Yet it would seem that for many young people, a swastika-daubing was neither antisemitic nor anti-German, but merely an act of youthful rebellion, a prank. There was even one incident of a group of five schoolchildren having painted a swastika on a school wall with the words “Ned Raus” (“Ned” was the school nickname for the headmaster).33 Even so, as the Guardian (14.1.60) pointed out in a perceptive editorial, “Not all the swastika smears can be explained in this way […] doctors too, have to distinguish between chickenpox and smallpox: their efforts would be less appreciated if they got too frequently mixed up between the two”. It was surely no coincidence that the original synagogue incident in Notting Hill was located in an area of ongoing fascist activity. The most openly antisemitic organisation in Britain in 1960 was the British National Party (BNP, no relation to today’s party). This had been formed in February 1960 from a merger of the National Labour Party (NLP) and the White Defence League (WDL). Both were splinter groups from the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL). The NLP, led by John Bean, was grouped around several former members of the South and East London LEL; the WDL led by Coventry schoolteacher and rabid antisemite, Colin Jordan, had a central office located at “Arnold Leese House”,34 Princedale Road, in Notting Hill, a short walk

31 See

Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 22.

32 See

The Guardian, 15 January 1960.

33 See

The Times, 23 January 1960.

34 Arnold

Leese had led the vehemently antisemitic Imperial Fascist League during the 1930s (he had criticised Mosley as a “kosher fascist”). Leese died in 1956. His widow then allowed Colin Jordan use of the property in Notting Hill. The property was eventually bequeathed to Jordan when Leese’s widow died in 1974.

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away from the synagogue on Kensington Park Road. A card bearing a sixpointed star of David, which was of “so loathsome a description – it would have done credit to the imagination of Goebbels or Rosenberg”, was displayed in its window.35 Unsurprisingly, Jordan was visited by Special Branch officials. Jordan denied any involvement, but according to Jordan’s sympathetic biographer Stephen Frost, “In his later years, Colin Jordan frequently hinted that he was one of those directly involved in this long running and much publicised campaign”. A leading figure in the soon-to-be formed British National Party would be the NLP’s John Tyndall. After Tyndall’s death in 2005, Jordan would suggest that Tyndall was also “party to some of these actions around London and in the Home Counties”.36 The name “Sanderson” points towards another leading activist, a young Denis Pirie, otherwise known as “Sandy”.37 Closer still to the Notting Hill synagogue—across the street in fact— was the headquarters of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. By late 1950s, however, in its official policy at least, the “Jewish problem” had been largely displaced by the “Colour problem”. Whilst there was still residual antisemitism within the Union Movement, Mosley was keen to distance himself from the rabid antisemitism of those that even he dismissed as the “lunatic fringe”.38 Mosley had contested the North Kensington seat in the October 1959 general election and had been campaigning in this area for close to a year. For good reason too, since Notting Hill had been at the forefront of racial tensions in Britain following the disturbances there in 1958. Throughout his election campaign, Mosley “took care not to mention Jews and concentrated almost entirely on local issues, coloured immigration and the housing problem, both subjects which appealed to local listeners”.39 Although humiliated—he lost his deposit—there was little in the offing to suggest that Mosley intended a return to open antisemitism. He responded to the antisemitic incidents issuing his disclaimer on 7 January 1960. The Union Movement, Mosley said, “was not, and never had been, an anti-Semitic organisation”.40 Mosley admitted that his movement might attack some Jews for what they do; it did not attack Jews for what they are (this was his standard rebuttal: he was not antisemitic, because for him, antisemitism “is hatred of all Jews on account of their race”).41 But for the likes of Colin Jordan, this missed the essential point that the “Jewish problem” was “fundamental because Jewish power over Britain is 35 See

The New Statesman, 9 January 1960, pp. 31–2.

36 Stephen

L. Frost, “Twaz a Good Fight!”The Life of Colin Jordan (Heckmondwike: NS Press, 2014), pp. 47–8. 37 See

Terry Cooper, Death by Dior (London: Dynasty Press, 2013), p. 50.

38 See

Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 126. 39 WL: 40 The

Jewish Defence Committee Current Notes, September–October 1959. Guardian, 8 January 1960.

41 For more on Mosley’s (unconvincing) rationale, see Oswald Mosley, Mosley Right or Wrong? (London: Lion Books, 1961), p. 131.

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the greatest single explanation of Britain’s plight today” and “[…] Jews do what they do, inimical to real British interests, precisely because of what they are, namely Jews by race, and thereby members of a foreign nation seeking world supremacy”.42 Jordan’s views struck a responsive chord with Britain’s coterie of post-war racial nationalists. Not only was Mosley “unreliable” when it came to the “Jewish problem”, his reading of the “Colour problem” was also insufficiently “racial” too. To declare, as Mosley did, that “Race is important, but is not everything”43 was heresy to racial nationalists like the White Defence League’s Colin Jordan and the National Labour Party’s John Tyndall and John Bean. For these racial nationalists, all roads led back to the “Jewish problem”. In 1959 Tyndall asked the question: Whose is the power behind the scenes which campaigns to bring Negroes and other alien races over here – against their interests, and force them upon us white people – against our interests? If coloured immigration as has been shown, serves the interests of neither Black nor White – then whose interests does it serve?

The answer, according to Tyndall, was Jewry: […] the Jews realise that by mixing the Black and White races they will set in motion a process which will destroy the whole structure of White civilisation, and undermine White world-leadership – which will subsequently pass into their hands!

“No one knows better”, Tyndall warned, than the Jews “that the mixing of the races brings about a decline in the quality of the higher race”, and so “Until we realise their significance we can only half-tackle the colour problem”.44 In 2002, when interviewed about the WDL-NLP merger, John Bean styled it a “marriage of convenience”. For sure, the NLP had more members, between two and three hundred, but it was also in debt and had no premises. As Bean said, The National Labour Party had three times the membership of the White Defence League but less financial backing. The NLP was particularly hamstrung by the lack of a central office. Colin Jordan of the WDL had the secure ownership of a three storey building, with a shop front, in London’s West Kensington.45 42 Emphasis 43 Mosley

as original, Combat, No. 9, December 1960.

Right or Wrong?, p. 130.

44 John

Tyndall, “Jews Back the Black Invasion”, Combat, No. 4, autumn 1959. Emphasis as original.

45 Freedom Struggle: An Interview with John Bean (Ulster: Glenwood Publications, 2002), p. 11.

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In early 1960 passers-by might have noticed that the shop frontage of the premises at 74 Princedale Road had been repainted; the words “British National Party” now replaced “White Defence League”. Jordan was named the new BNP National Organiser; John Bean Deputy National Organiser, with Bean retaining editorial control of the NLP (now BNP) newspaper Combat. It was in Combat that the BNP would publish its response to the “swastika rash”. Already, within the first week of January 1960 John Bean had denied his party’s involvement, informing the Daily Telegraph (6/1/60) that he had “[…] no knowledge of who may have perpetrated these acts in Britain. We do not hold with that type of propaganda and if we put up slogans they would be in English so that people would understand them”. Predictably, when Combat did comment in more depth, the “swastika rash” was the fault of the Jews: “In Britain, we have every reason to believe that the painting of the Notting Hill synagogue, which started the British outbreak, was done by the Jews themselves.46 The BNP’s reason: to add weight to calls for the introduction of anti-discriminatory legislation, which the Jews had been trying to get passed “on and off for twelve years” (in 1947, concerned at the revival of fascist antisemitism in East London, Labour Home Secretary Chuter Ede had considered a ban on “fascist” organisations/meetings and “antisemitism”).47 There was no law against racial or religious hatred in force in Britain in 1960 (it would be 1965 before the first Race Relations Bill was passed).48 Prior to 1965 any person who made a speech at a public meeting that incited racial hatred could be prosecuted under Section 5 of the 1936 Public Order Act (for provoking a breach of the peace). Written incitement could be prosecuted for seditious libel (with the intention of promoting violence by stirring up hostility and ill-will between different classes of Her Majesty’s subjects). However, in 1947 James Caunt, editor of the Morecambe and Heysham Visitor was acquitted of charges of having published seditious and libellous material against Jews (there was no offence of group or community defamation). At the peak of the antisemitic outbreaks, conscious of such loopholes in the law, Sir Leslie Plummer, Labour MP for Deptford49 announced his intention to draft a bill to legislate specifically against racial and religious insult. In late January 1960 Plummer asked the Home Secretary to request that Special Branch pay particular attention to the activities of the National Labour Party, which he described as a “squalid movement”, a “Fascist organisation 46 Combat,

No. 6, May–June 1960.

47 Ibid. 48 On the 1965 Race Relations Act, see Gavin Schaffer, “Legislating Against Hatred: Meaning and Motive in Section Six of the Race Relations Act of 1965”, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2014, pp. 251–75. The NSM sent letters to MPs warning them that support for the Race Relations Bill would constitute an act of treason, and “that it will be treated as such in the National Socialist Britain of the future, and those of you primarily responsible will then be brought to trial for this crime”. 49 The BNP was active in this multi-racial constituency, capturing around 10 per cent of the vote in the borough in the April 1961 LCC elections.

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which has uttered threats against my hon. Friends and against myself, and is organising anti-Semitic outbreaks in London?”50 Needless to say, the NLP was not best pleased and challenged Plummer to repeat this statement outside the House.51 Then in early February, as promised, Plummer introduced a private member’s bill, the Racial and Religious Insults Bill. Plummer looked to make it an offence to insult or conspire to insult a person or persons on the grounds of race and religion. He wanted swastika-daubing to carry a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment. Plummer, too, received threats (at least a dozen anonymous telephone messages and around two dozen letters). Police guarded his Hampstead flat for 12 days from the end of April through to the beginning of May.52 Whilst the Board of Deputies supported the Bill, the reality was that Anglo-Jewry split over the issue. With support unforthcoming from either the Government or Shadow Cabinet, and opposed by a number of Conservative backbenchers, the Bill was dropped. For the Union Movement, the swastika-daubing was also the work of nefarious conspiracy, not a specifically Jewish one as such, but a worldwide one organised by the “communist international network”. “We are now in possession of the following remarkable revelations. The whole thing was a communist-organised plot to separate the Germans from the rest of Europe”. According to the Union Movement, Communists “used a violent antisemitism manufactured in Moscow to divide the West, injure Germany, and strike a blow at all they call “fascist””.53 Suspiciously—it would emerge from their testimony—both Strunk and Schönen had visited the Soviet-occupied zone. Although they denied any connection between their previous visits to the GDR and antisemitic incidents, Schönen had “occasionally” worn an SED (Socialist Unity Party) badge in the Federal Republic, and both Strunk and Schönen had close contact with two East German teachers (one of whom was a member of the SED) and had also visited a Russian military canteen.54 That Communists in Cold War Europe were engaged in a propaganda campaign to discredit the Federal Republic as “fascist”, “militarist” and “revanchist” is beyond doubt. The aim of such a campaign was to isolate the Federal Republic from its Western allies, and to assist in bringing about formal diplomatic recognition of the Soviet-occupied zone. From the mid-1950s, a SED-sponsored “Committee for German Unity” published a series of Englishlanguage texts that claimed that “reactionary, fascist theory is once more in full bloom” in the Federal Republic.55 This line was also pedalled by the East 50 Hansard, 51 Combat, 52 The

616, Col. 360, 28 January 1960.

No. 6, May–June 1960.

Times, 6 August 1960.

53 Action,

No. 96, 15 July 1962. Emphasis as original. On the “swastika epidemic” as an instrument of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, see Joseph P. Kamp, The Bigots Behind the Swastika Spree (New York: Headlines, 1960). 54 “The

Anti-Semitic and Nazi Incidents”, White Paper, p. 36.

55 Ibid.,

p. 31.

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Belin-based Democratic German Report, a fortnightly English-language publication, published and edited by the defector John Peet.56 The incidents in Cologne were, according to Peet, symptomatic of a West German state where former Nazis held key posts in politics, the judiciary, education, industry and the military.57 According to one US Senator this propaganda was being deliberately targeted at Britain where “antinazism is frequently combined with a strong general dislike of Germans and Germany”.58 While there was no incontrovertible evidence that the original trigger incidents were part of some deeply laid plan masterminded by Communists, what did emerge was that several members of the Free (Communist) German Youth were apprehended for swastika-daubing incidents.59 The Federal Republic claimed that in January 1959, at a Central Committee meeting of the SED, a decision had been taken to organise a series of antisemitic incidents across a number of towns in the Federal Republic, to be carried out by “action commandos”.60 Nonetheless, it was still not possible to prove categorically “that any of the arrested offenders were carrying out orders forming part of the plans of such an “action commando””.61 Over three decades later, discovered in the Stasi archives, was the evidence that Communists did infiltrate far right organisations, and did stage antisemitic attacks in West Germany in the 1960s.62 But as far as the incidents in Britain were concerned, there is no evidence whatsoever that they were Communist-inspired, although the Union Movement did point out that the outbreak allowed the British Communist Party’s Daily Worker, “to come out with big scare headlines in its usual humbugging style”.63 Of more importance in this country was the effect that these events would have on domestic antisemitic organisations, that is to say, as a stimulus to their further radicalisation. Significantly, this hardening of Britain’s antisemitic far right, as we shall see, would assume two key forms: the first Holocaust revisionism; the second, synagogue arson.

56 For more on John Peet, see Stefen Berger and Norman LaPorte, “John Peet: An Englishman in the German Democratic Republic”, History, Vol. 89, No. 1, 2004, pp. 49–69. 57 See

Democratic German Report, Vol. IX, No. 1, 8 January 1960, p. 2.

58 See

remarks prepared by Senator Dodd, Congressional Record, 15 March 1960, p. 5206.

59 “The

Anti-Semitic and Nazi Incidents”, White Paper, p. 20.

60 Ibid.,

pp. 33–4.

61 Ibid.,

pp. 31–2.

62 See

Washington Post, 28 February 1993.

63 Action,

No. 96, 15 July 1962, p. 6.

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Eichmann For sure, widespread international condemnation of the “swastika epidemic”— the American liberal poet Carl Sandburg even advocated the death penalty for anyone caught painting swastikas—raised hackles on Britain’s far right. It all amounted to a “Love the Jew” month where, […] great play was made of the “six million dead” – or is it ten? In the Daily Telegraph of February 3, appeared a photograph of Adenauer laying a wreath by the memorial stone at the site of the Belsen concentration camp. On the memorial stone it stated that 30,000 Jews were killed there. Now the writer has always believed that Belsen was the largest camp, and that there were only five others. Assuming that they were as large as Belsen, this makes a total of 180,000 Jews who were killed – a far cry from six million.64

With Jordan chief instigator, the BNP was now on the verge of going public with a campaign exposing the “myth of the six million”. Once the sensational news broke in May 1960 that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial in Jerusalem, the temptation to do so became overwhelming. Later that month, a vexed Jordan set the tone at the BNP’s first national rally in Trafalgar Square with his “vicious attacks on Jews”.65 In January 1961, anticipating a further rash of antisemitic incidents arising from Eichmann’s forthcoming trial, the Jewish Defence Committee discussed precautionary measures, including the guarding of synagogue properties.66 On the night of 4 February 1961 several synagogues in London (Dollis Hill; Cricklewood; Shepherd’s Bush) and the offices of the Zionist Federation had their front doors daubed with swastikas.67 That this had been the handiwork of the British National Party is highly probable. Yet for Jordan, who would refer to the BNP’s “Free Eichmann” campaign as “Operation Counterblast”, daubing swastikas on synagogues was not enough. More importantly, he wanted to use the Eichmann “show-trial” to undermine the official version of the Holocaust.68 To that end, Jordan produced an “atrocity supplement” to Combat. Party members were told to give it the widest possible circulation. Several provincial newspapers penned editorials condemning the supplement, labelling it “nasty” and “despicable”.69 As historian Paul Jackson has pointed out, “the inner

64 Combat, 65 WL:

No. 6, May–June 1960.

Jewish Defence Committee Minutes, 13 June 1960.

66 Ibid.,

4 January 1961.

67 Ibid.,

7 February 1961.

68 Frost,

Twaz a Good Fight!, pp. 72–3.

69 WDL:

Jewish Defence Committee, Current Notes, March/April/May 1961.

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two pages of the supplement set out many of the standard tropes of Holocaust denial literature”.70 One section in particular, entitled “The Great Lie of the Six Million”, challenged the numbers. Eichmann was, for the BNP, a “fabricated monster”. How could Eichmann be responsible for the murder of six million Jews when the “true figure” of the number of deaths in the concentration camps was closer to 300,000 Germans and Jews? And, Even this is an estimate for all camp inmates and for deaths due to all factors, including natural ones, in a total camp population of millions during that period; and at a time when 3,000,000 German soldiers, 2,000,000 German civilians, and millions of other Europeans, including hundreds of thousands of British soldiers and civilians were being killed in the catastrophic war the Jews had worked to bring about. When the Jews, through the medium of the Eichmann Trial, scream their monstrous lie of the six million, let us remember the millions of Gentiles who died because the Jews wanted their war or revenge.71

Writing in 1980, Jordan ruminated upon this supplement. It was, he said, an important milestone in the history of Holocaust revisionism in Britain. “The first, detailed refutation of the Holocaust myth in the UK was in 1961 in the supplement I produced for the then magazine Combat, edited by John Bean, in answer to the Eichmann trial”, Jordan maintained.72 Was this supplement really the “first, detailed refutation”? Probably, yet the birth of Holocaust revisionism in this country does have a longer history. Mosley had already cast doubt on the scale of Nazi atrocities at the very first press conference of the Union Movement on 28 November 1947.73 As recently as November 1958, an article entitled the “The Big Belsen Mystery” appeared in the Union Movement’s Action paper, which questioned whether the scale of Nazi atrocities had been “grossly exaggerated”.74 In February 1959, the Jewish Defence Committee reported on literature circulating in the Kensal Rise district of north-west London that claimed that the Diary of Anne Frank was “largely a falsification”.75 Nonetheless, Jordan rightly deserves his (loathsome) place in the annals of Holocaust revisionism. For Frost, Jordan’s was a “radical step” and it “would lead to many more revisionist writers tackling the enormous subject over the following decades […]”76 “It is probable”, remarked the Board of Deputies of British Jews in its annual report for 1961, 70 See

Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 98. My thanks go to Paul Jackson for supplying me with a copy of the supplement.

71 Combat, 72 Gothic

73 Macklin, 74 See

No. 11, March–April 1961. Emphasis as original.

Ripples, No. 3, June 1980. My thanks to Graham Macklin for this reference. Deeply Dyed in Black, p. 118.

WL: Jewish Defence Committee, Current Notes, October/November 1958.

75 WL:

Jewish Defence Committee Report, 5 February 1959.

76 Frost,

Twaz a Good Fight!, p. 78.

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N. COPSEY

“that post-war anti-semitic propaganda in Britain reached its height in this publication”.77 There was also more to this “Operation Counterblast” than posting the “atrocity supplement” through letterboxes. Antisemitic posters were soon found on London underground stations. On 15 April 1961 BNP members paraded through various parts of London’s West End, with placards reading “Eichmann – What About Jewish Atrocities?” and “Jews Caused World War II”. The following day, a group of BNP members protested outside the Board of Deputies at Woburn House before venturing to London’s East End to hold a meeting in Bethnal Green where the speakers railed against Israel for its persecution of Eichmann. Meanwhile, a Land Rover driven by John Bean, pulled up outside a Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration Meeting at the Princes Theatre in central London. The police instructed Bean to move on, he refused, and Bean along with seven other BNP members, including Colin Jordan, were subsequently arrested and charged with insulting behaviour. On 30 April 1961, at a further BNP rally at Trafalgar Square, Jordan made a point of attacking the “injustices” of the Eichmann trial. Tellingly, Jordan promised his rain-soaked audience that the BNP “shall hold our own Eichmann trial and standing in the dock will be the Jews”.78 At the same time Jordan was becoming increasingly involved in Holocaust revisionist international networks. None of this would gain any traction with the wider British public, however. For the most part, “both the national and provincial press gave little space to the activities of the British National Party”.79 To Jordan’s chagrin, generous column space was given over to reporting the proceedings of the Eichmann trial. There were daily reports from the court-room; the Daily Telegraph was devoting around three-quarters of a page every day to the trial. Television and radio coverage was also extensive.80 A fervent Jordan was undeterred. Bolstered by his developing international recognition amongst fellow neoNazis, by December 1961 Jordan had now turned his attention to a “Free Hess” campaign. It seems that no fewer than 10,000 “Free Hess” posters were printed in Britain in six different languages; 8000 were distributed abroad. Posters were plastered on walls in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere. Two BNP members were arrested in Golders Green in north London—an area with a large number of Jewish residents—after police caught them illegally sticking up “Release Hess” posters.81 Reflecting upon his time with Colin Jordan, John Bean would later claim that the “principal lesson” that he soon found out was that his “attempt 77 Board of Deputies of British Jews, Annual Report 1961 (London: Woburn House, 1962), p. 32. 78 See

WL: Jewish Defence Committee, Current Notes, March/April/May 1961.

79 Board 80 WL:

of Deputies of British Jews, Annual Report 1961, p. 38.

Jewish Defence Committee, Current Notes, March/April/May 1961.

81 Combat,

No. 15, January–February 1962.

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to ride the neo-Nazi Tiger was doomed to failure”.82 By early 1962, Bean, alongside Andrew Fountaine, the BNP’s Norfolk-landowning president, had decided that Jordan’s “fuehrer obsession” was becoming too much. Fountaine remarked dryly that Jordan was “like an ingrowing toenail”.83 Bean told a Daily Mail reporter that “All Jordan ever wanted to be was a disciple of Hitler. By aping the jackboots, uniforms, customs and ideology of Germany in the 30s he was doing us more harm than good”.84 Bean was referencing “The Spearhead”, an elite paramilitary unit that Jordan and Tyndall had formed. Jordan was the “Spearhead Commander”; Tyndall was the “Spearhead Group Leader for London”. In August 1961 the “Spearhead”, dressed in grey shirts, Sam Browne belts, and boots, engaged in drill training in the grounds of a derelict school in Kent (unbeknown to the group it was under surveillance from two Special Branch officers). Now expelled from the BNP, Jordan and Tyndall (along with Denis Pirie) launched the National Socialist Movement on 20 April 1962 (Hitler’s birthday). It would be wrong to see this break with the BNP as a consequence of struggle between “moderates” (Bean and Fountaine) and “militants” (Jordan and Tyndall). For what concerned the “moderates” was neither the rabid antisemitism nor the Holocaust revisionism, but the need to “rein in” the “Spearhead” so that it did not contravene the Public Order Act.85 Jordan had already been warned in September 1961 that the activities of the “Spearhead” might constitute offences against the Public Order Act. In mid1962, following the Eichmann trial verdict, and after the expulsion of the “Spearhead”, it is worth noting that Bean wrote that the Jews, […] had their vengeance when Eichmann was hanged and his ashes thrown into the sea, but right to the end Eichmann denied them their final victory by refusing to break down after his two years’ ordeal and like those who were killed before him – on flimsier evidence and often Communist evidence at that – he went to the hangman’s noose denying the greatest lie of the twentieth century; the lie of the six million dead.86

82 Freedom

Struggle, p. 11.

83 Quoted

in News of the World, 9 June 1962.

84 Quoted

in Daily Mail, 10 August 1962.

85 See

John Bean, Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain’s Far Right (London: New Millennium, 1999), p. 152. 86 Combat,

No. 17, May–June 1962. On John Bean’s subsequent “whitewashing” of the BNP’s anti-Semitism, see Graham Macklin, “Modernizing the Past for the Future”, in Nigel Copsey and Graham Macklin (eds.), The British National Party: Contemporary Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 19–37.

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Synagogue Arson On 15 October 1962, in London’s Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, Colin Jordan was sentenced to nine months imprisonment for: There being an association called “Spearhead”, the members of which were organised and (1) trained and (2) equipped in such a manner as to arouse reasonable apprehension that they were organised and (1) trained and (2) equipped for the process of enabling them to be employed for the use or display of physical force in promoting a political object, he took part in so organising them, contrary to Section 2 (1) (b) of the Public Order Act, 1936.87

Charges were also brought against Jordan’s three co-defendants: John Tyndall, Dennis Pirie, and Roland Kerr-Ritchie. Tyndall, who was now regarded as Britain’s “No.2. Nazi” was sentenced to six months; Pirie and Kerr-Ritchie both received sentences of three months. Central to the prosecution case were the seven tins of sodium chlorate weed-killer which were allegedly found in the cellar of 74 Princedale Road. One tin had been labelled “Jew-Killer”; and on the back there was a scribbled instruction, “Place a few crystals in a sealed room filled with Jews”.88 That Jordan had declared in his confrontational defence that “We are National Socialists and we are anti-Jewish and we are proud of it”, was honest, if somewhat ill-advised.89 Before the “Spearhead” trial Jordan and Tyndall had already appeared in the dock. Both had been arrested after a National Socialist Movement meeting in Trafalgar Square (1.7.62) for using insulting words whereby a breach of the peace was likely to be occasioned. At this meeting, held under the provocative banner “Free Britain from Jewish Control” and ending in pandemonium, Tyndall had referred to Jews as “poisonous maggots”; Jordan had declared that “Hitler was right!” Both speeches were then used in the prosecution evidence at the later Old Bailey trial. On Jordan’s release from prison, Frost reveals that, […] one of his NSM activists presented Colin Jordan with a hardback copy of a new book which had recently appeared in mainstream bookshops, it was entitled, “The Destruction of Dresden”, written by a relatively new writer of the history of the Second World War, a certain David Irving. The enthusiastic NSM activist had inscribed a dedication to Colin on the inside of the fly-sheet on the book, it read “To my Leader, Colin Jordan, to mark the occasion of his return to the Fight. I offer this further ammunition.”90 87 (T)he

(N)ational (A)rchives, DPP2 4078–4080: Case Papers relating to trial of DUKES, Paul; CHANT, Graham; RAINBIRD, Colin; HUGHES, Hugh; SPARKS, Malcolm; and GORDON, Alex (all members of National Socialist Movement, Woodford group): arson (of synagogues in East London). 88 Frost,

Twaz a Good Fight!, p. 138.

89 Ibid.,

p. 144.

90 Frost,

pp. 125–6.

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Public notoriety followed the publicity that the NSM elicited (and there were more sensationalist headlines, relating to a NSM summer camp in the Cotswolds).91 Significantly, news of the NSM soon crossed the Channel, where an article in France-Soir caught the attention of one Françoise Dior, niece of the French high-end fashion designer Christian Dior. She was deeply antisemitic and hers was a personal hatred (she apparently blamed Jews for the death of Christian Dior).92 It was Françoise Dior’s determination to marry one of the leaders of the “British Nazis” that led to a schism within the NSM—she was first engaged to Tyndall but then married Jordan. In May 1964 most NSM members left the movement and followed the jilted Tyndall to form the Greater Britain Movement. But Dior would play a further key role: she would soon become the driving force behind the NSM’s radicalisation. Dior’s marriage to Jordan, which took place on 5 October 1963 at Coventry Register Office, was no marriage made in heaven (or, should that be Nazi Valhalla?). Whilst both shared a love of Adolf Hitler, Colin Jordan would spend most of his week with his widowed mother at 42 Tudor Avenue, Coventry; his estranged wife meanwhile stopped in London, at 74 Princedale Road, in the regular company of a small group of impressionable young activists. After Jordan’s split with Tyndall the NSM in London had now contracted to around 20 “fully active supporters”.93 Many of them fell under the spell of the “Queen of the Nazis”. From 13 March 1965 through to the end of July, a series of attempts were made to burn down synagogues in London and the metropolitan area: at Brondesbury, Edmonton, Tottenham, Bayswater, Boreham Wood, Palmers Green, Finchley Road, Stanmore, Lea Bridge Road in Clapton, and at Beehive Lane in Ilford. There were also arson attempts at a Jewish Day Nursey in Maida Vale, a Jewish religious school in Stoke Newington, Jewish butchers’ shops in Southgate and Willesden, and the home of a Jewish taxi-driver who apparently had some altercation with Françoise Jordan. A system of guards and overnight patrols was introduced by AJEX.94 But AJEX insisted that there was no evidence to suggest that that was this was a centrally directed or planned campaign.95 If the numbers involved probably never exceeded more than a dozen, the arsonists were not “juvenile delinquents” or “hooligans”; it also appears to have had some central direction. In February 1966 six members of the NSM were convicted on charges of arson at the Clapton and Ilford synagogues. One 91 On

this episode, see Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement, pp. 112–

4. 92 Cooper,

Death by Dior, p. 69.

93 According

to report on National Socialist Movement contained in TNA DPP2 4078– 4080: Case Papers. 94 Board of Deputies of British Jews, Annual Report 1965 (London: Woburn House, 1966), p. 40. 95 See

“Racialists in Britain”, Wiener Library Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1965, pp. 9–14.

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of the defendants, Paul Dukes, had given a pre-trial statement to the police that revealed that “Colin Jordan was present at one of our meetings and said it was a good idea to set fire to Jewish synagogues, but he could not give official backing to the scheme”.96 At a second trial in April 1966, when four other NSM members pleaded guilty to arson, they claimed that Françoise Jordan had “always encouraged us to do these burnings, but did not want to get the name of the movement involved”.97 Francoise Jordan was clearly implicated as the agent provocateur. The problem for the authorities was that this agent provocateur was outside British jurisdiction. She was now back in France (sentenced in October 1966 to four months’ imprisonment for fly-posting a pro-Nazi sticker on the British Embassy in Paris). After her release, however, she would return to Britain (she had been stripped of her French nationality). In August 1967 she was arrested and placed on remand in Holloway Prison. At her trial, in January 1968, Françoise Jordan was jailed for eighteen months for conspiring with three NSM activists, David Thorne, John Evans and Raymond Hemsworth to set fire to synagogues between 1 March and 1 August 1965. She told her investigating officer that she would like to see synagogues blown up by an Act of Parliament. Asked if she was responsible for the arsons, she replied: “I do not start fires. If I say I want something done which should be done and it is done, I am not responsible if I am not there”.98 On being found guilty, she turned to the jury, gave the Nazi salute and called out, “Heil Hitler!”99 As for Colin Jordan, he had already been sentenced in January 1967 for offences against the new Race Relations Act. By the time he was released from prison a year later, Britain’s far right had moved on. A new political party had been born—the National Front (NF)—with its sights set on breaking into the political mainstream. For the leaders of this new party, who wanted at least “semi-respectability”, their problem with Colin Jordan (he never joined the NF) was that any involvement of “CJ” in their political party was an election loser, the press would seize on his “Hitlerite” credentials to undermine any professed “respectability”.100

96 See

The Times, 23 November 1965.

97 The

Guardian, 15 March 1966.

98 See

“The Copper, the Neo-Nazi and the Shul Arson Sprees”, Jewish Chronicle, 10 August 2017 (online at https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/the-copper-bert-wickst ead-the-neo-nazi-francoise-jordan-and-the-shul-arson-spree-1.442757). 99 The

Guardian, 18 January 1968.

100 Frost,

Twaz a Good Fight!, p. 218.

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Conclusion: A Defining Decade? For understandable reasons, historians of British fascism, and of fascist-related antisemitism, get drawn to the 1930s, the decade of Mosley’s Blackshirts and Cable Street.101 More recently, however, historians have extended their chronological scope to the immediate post-war period.102 This chapter makes a case for extending it further still. The 1960s certainly did matter. And this decade mattered for the radicalisation of antisemitic organisation. As we have seen, this radicalisation manifested through both Colin Jordan’s more detailed elaboration of Holocaust revisionism, and through the escalation of antisemitic hate. At the beginning of the decade, there were the swastika-daubers, the telephoned threats as part of the (global) “swastika epidemic”. And it seems highly probable that the far right was behind at least some of these incidents, particularly those in and around London. By mid-decade this far right antisemitic hate had escalated to more serious incidents of synagogue arson. We might chose to “end” this radical phase in January 1968 when Françoise Jordan raised the Nazi salute as she was taken from the dock. We might chose to end it earlier, when the National Front was formed for the official launch of the NF on 7 February 1967 was a new departure. What the Front represented was broad acceptance across the extremist fringe that the use of neo-Nazi imagery, paramilitary uniforms, and declarations that “Hitler was right” had been a mistake.103 And when this “non-Nazi democratic political movement” captured nearly a quarter of a million votes in local elections in 1977, beating the Liberals in the Greater London Council elections in no fewer than 33 seats, the so-called “lunatic fringe” was now being talked about as Britain’s fourth political party, poised to even displace the Liberals as “our” third political party. Yet we need to be careful here. This “de-radicalised” departure was more about presentation than forsaking antisemitic ideology. The National Activities Organiser of the Front, Martin Webster, had joined the NSM when he was 19 years old. When members of the NF were arrested for throwing a petrol bomb at a synagogue in Sheffield in 1969, Webster’s claims that the Front was not chained to the old ideologies of the 1930s did not ring true.104 Neither was it such a surprise when, in 1978, investigations offered convincing evidence that the notorious Holocaust revisionist pamphlet Did 101 See,

in relation to this period, Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–40 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

102 See for example, Joe Mulhall, British Fascism After the Holocaust (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 103 For a recent study of Britain’s far right since the formation of the NF, see Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.), “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right Since 1967 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 104 For Martin Webster’s response, in the form of his letter published in the Hornsey Journal, see Spearhead, No. 27, November 1969, p. 5.

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Six Million Really Die? was the work of the National Front. As a Granada World in Action TV documentary (viewed by more than 10 million) revealed, this pamphlet was written under the pseudonym Richard Harwood by the NF’s Richard Verrall, editor of the party’s monthly, Spearhead. Final proof came when experts revealed that letters of complaint written to the Independent Broadcasting Authority by the-then NF Chairman used the very same typewriter as the author of Did Six Million Really Die? 105 The NF Chairman at that time was none other than John Tyndall. In the August 1978 issue of Spearhead, Tyndall wrote of his experience of being interviewed for this documentary, On arriving we were shown into a studio room in which the programme personnel present might have deceived us into thinking they were part of the congregation of the local synagogue […] having strayed into an underworld inhabited by creatures of reptilian aspect, covered in a coating of green slime […] each of us could feel only that he was facing something Satanic, the aura of dark, subversive forces being overwhelming. Here in the alien eyes surrounding us on all sides was the world revolution.

Plus ça change? The outward appearance may have changed but the fundamentals remained the same. Letting it slip that his thoughts on Jews had evidently not altered from the decade before, Tyndall then concluded: For if such a satanic power can be used to blacken and slander our movement the mind boggles at what other purposes it can be used for. It behoves every responsible Briton, pro-National Front or otherwise, to wake up to this power before its tentacles crush what remains of the life of our nation.106

105 See Martin Walker, “Typewriter Analysis Ties Front to Jew-Bait Pamphlet”, in The Defender, issue no. 1, May–June 1979 (published by Board of Deputies of British Jews). 106 John Tyndall, “The Zionist Lie Machine Does Its Worst”, Spearhead, No. 120, August 1978, pp. 10–11, 15.

CHAPTER 16

The Legacy of the Holocaust, Jewish History and British Antisemitism: The ‘Jew Murderer’ and the Murder of the Jews Tony Kushner

In recent decades, much progress has been made in outlining and understanding contemporaneous and later British confrontations with the Holocaust. This includes work on immigration policy,1 educational and memorialisation initiatives,2 intellectual and religious responses3 and even the law.4 The impact on British culture and cultural reactions to the Holocaust is, with some exceptions, less developed.5 Moreover, as Chad Macdonald highlights in this volume, much of the work produced has tended to be ‘top down’ with 1 The most outstanding work remains Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York: Routledge, 2014). 3 Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006) is one of the most sophisticated. 4 Didi Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 5. 5 See, however, Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) which includes a contribution from James Jordan on his sustained research project on the BBC and the Holocaust which is revealing a wealth of material in different genres.

T. Kushner (B) History Department, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_16

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the focus on governmental and elite interventions.6 In contrast, my contribution to this volume will provide a ‘history from below’ and will also attempt a detailed interrogation of a neglected—but critical—question: what impact did the Holocaust have on the articulation of British antisemitism and wider attitudes towards the Jews of Britain, past and present? The study of British antisemitism is notoriously tricky with politics (especially directly or indirectly referencing the Middle East) making this a field in which angels may fear to tread and certainly where many fools have rushed into comment. Strongly held mythologies about the nation have also played a significant and distorting role. On the one hand, there is an assumption that Britain is somehow exceptional in not following the modern European path of hostility towards the Jews—the Second World War highlighting the fundamental differences compared to the continent. According to this logic, if antisemitism is frequently likened to a disease (with metaphors such as ‘plague’ and ‘virus’ often employed), then Britain since the readmission of the Jews in the mid-seventeenth century has somehow been ‘naturally’ immune to infection from it. On the other, there has been at times an over-eager desire to ‘prove’ the contrary, thereby falling into the danger of overstating its existence. There is a consensus, however, that knowledge and recognition of the Holocaust in the post-war era acted as a barrier to (at least) the public articulation of antisemitism, rendering it unrespectable and somehow ‘unEnglish’. In his relentless and unwieldy Trials of the Diaspora: A History of AntiSemitism in England (2010), Anthony Julius has expressed the common sense view: ‘The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism’.7 In fact, Julius shows in his national case study that this has been far from the case. Other work on the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ posits—with no underlying evidence—that the restraining influence of the Holocaust has worn off since the late twentieth century, enabling a fresh wave of hostility to emerge, especially from the left-liberal world, in a new chapter of the ‘longest hatred’.8 In what was an influential article published in the Washington Post in 2002, Charles Krauthammer claimed ‘In Europe it is not very safe to be a Jew’. To this provocative statement this leading American commentator added

6 This

is part of his wider doctoral research on postwar Britain and the Holocaust and the importance of individual agency. For an early attempt at ‘history from below’, see Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

7 Anthony

Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 64.

8 Robert

Wistrich, The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Methuen, 1991); idem, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), Introduction: ‘The Return of Anti-Semitism’. In spite of this sub-heading, Wistrich comments (p. 27), ‘Postwar Soviet anti-Semitism is one of many examples that sharply contradict the myth that the Holocaust somehow neutralized the Judeophobic virus.’ Wistrich still seems to indicate that there had been a change in attitudes and responses in the ‘liberal’ West, but this was beginning to fade.

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How could this be? The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent up anti-Semitism, the release - with Israel as the trigger - of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomoly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked … But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.9

Methodologically, at a superficial level at least, continuities are easier to chart in the non-traumatic history of prejudice than outlining subtle but important transformations. For example, the anecdotal approach of Julius, in which similar comments made in England about Jews from the seventeenth through to the twenty-first centuries, are utilised to prove persistence. Unfortunately in accumulating so much evidence, historical context is often lacking from this lawyer-scholar. Equally, there is little balance in evaluating the overall significance of who is expressing animosity to make Julius’s argument convincing. In this respect, whether hostility was articulated in the private or public sphere (and, in turn how large and influential these were) matters. In addition, Julius rejects out of hand the concept of ambivalence towards Jews, developed by a new generation of scholars, most importantly Bryan Cheyette from the 1980s onwards. Such work has shown that whether in British culture or politics, outright and undifferentiated hostility to all Jews has been relatively rare whereas the bifurcated construction of those who are deemed desirable/undesirable (and similarly deserving of sympathy or not) has been the norm.10 Any study of the place and treatment of ‘the Jew’/the Jews needs to keep these complexities in mind. It remains that the ‘common sense’ view should not be rejected out of hand. George Orwell, wrestling (if only partially successfully) in the Second World War with his own antipathies towards the Jews,11 wrote in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) that whilst antisemitism had not disappeared in Britain, it was now less readily articulated: ‘Anyone educated enough to have heard

9 Charles Krauthammer, ‘Europe and “Those People”’, Washington Post, 26 April 2002. For a critique and balanced counter-argument, see Antony Lerman, ‘Sense on Antisemitism’, in Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmim (eds), A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain (London: Profile Books, 2003), pp. 54–67. An earlier version of this was published in Prospect, August 2002. 10 Julius,

Trials of the Diaspora, p. 421 in relation to H.G. Wells. See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter 4 for a more nuanced interpretation.

11 For a brief but perceptive analysis of Orwell in this respect, see Les Back, ‘Writing in and Against Time’, in Martin Bulmer and John Solomos (eds), Researching Race and Racism (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 207–10. See also David Walton, ‘George Orwell and Antisemitism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 16, no. 1 (1982), pp. 19–34.

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the word “antisemitism” claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature’.12 A neat example of this in practice was provided in different editions of novels by Graham Greene in the Nazi era. In Brighton Rock, originally published in 1938, the gang leader, Colleoni, is a Jew—a necessary literary device for Greene to reveal the character’s immoral and indeed satanic nature. As Andrea Freud Loewenstein has illustrated, when re-published in 1943 and subsequently, Colleoni had become of Italian origin. The post-war reader, as Loewenstein notes, may now encounter ‘Colleoni and his cohorts and wonder at Greene’s strange venom against Italians, and at the oddly familiar racial stereotypes he seems to attach to this group’.13 Yet returning to Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism’, the great writer, astute as ever, commented ‘Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps to exacerbate it’.14 Orwell hoped for a detailed psychological investigation of antisemitism, one that would lead to self-searching at the level of the individual. In this respect, he encouraged Mass-Observation which had been carrying out such research since 1939, extensively if not always systemically.15 The organisation continued this work after 1945 but it was starved of funds and its first phase came to a close in 1951. It left behind, if nothing else with regard to its work on antisemitism, a mountain of material (‘data’, in sociology speak), that is still not fully exploited or worked through.16 Orwell himself in his extended treatment of the problem, was unsure of how to assess its extent: ‘There is more antisemitism in England than we care to admit, and the war has accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if one thinks in terms of decades rather than years’. Yet in the same essay he asserted (perhaps too boldly as the example of the original version of Brighton Rock illustrates) that after the Nazi rise to power ‘the “Jew joke” disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or a short story came to be regarded as antisemitism’.17 The impact of the Holocaust on British (and other) views on and behaviour towards the Jews thus remains unclear and largely unresearched. Tony Lerman, 12 George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters of George Orwell, vol. 111 As I Please (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 375–6. The article was written in May 1945. 13 Andrea

Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 264, 309.

14 Orwell,

‘Notes on Nationalism’, pp. 375–6.

15 George

Orwell, ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, in Orwell and Angus (eds), As I Please, p. 336 which was written in early 1945 and originally published in the Contemporary Jewish Record, April 1945.

16 Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’ and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 17 Orwell,

‘Antisemitism in Britain’, pp. 336, 340.

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one of the few to approach the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ with a sense of equilibrium and historical awareness, has confronted the ‘end of the Holocaust taboo’ thesis. He asks ‘After all, who would openly admit to wishing to find an excuse to offload feelings of guilt about the Holocaust? In any case, the taboo has not operated in quite the way people assume’. Lerman highlights the importance of chronology and confrontation: ‘The awareness of a unique and recognizable event called the “Holocaust” did not emerge fully formed after 1945’. Conversely, he adds that now that awareness of the event itself ‘clouds our ability to make sense of what is going on [with contemporary antisemitism]’.18 What follows is a local case study which will explore whether the influence of the Holocaust can be detected through memory work and representation in the treatment of a remarkable if brutal moment in early Georgian history. It has been chosen carefully as a way of confronting the dilemmas outlined by Tony Lerman. First, it took place in an obscure part of rural England and one which still remains somewhat isolated. As will emerge, the ‘local’ has been influenced by the ‘global’—at some moments more than others— in confronting this event.19 Yet its very marginality in terms of space and place has meant that it is a good example to analyse. It is not, of course, untainted by outside forces which would be difficult with the exponential growth of print and then very recently electronic media from the early modern period onwards. Even so, that much of the discussion about it was rarely given national coverage (and much took place in the private or semi-private domain), meant it was less likely to have been affected by the tendency Orwell referred to in 1945—that is, in his words, the ‘concealment of antisemitic feeling [obscuring] the whole picture’.20 And, by employing an intensive micro-history approach, that very concealment, through close reading of the varied sources including their silences, will be revealing in itself. Second is the location of this incident and its subsequent memory. It took place in Sussex which, as Robert Colls suggests is one of the key counties in the construction of Englishness and the idea of ‘The real England’ (though Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock revealed a very different reality in what became its largest town).21 More specifically, the event occurred near the village of Ditchling which evokes, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘Skylarks, cricket and Dame Vera [Lynn]’ (the last mentioned being perhaps the most iconic figure of Britain’s Home Front and the most famous resident of this mid-Sussex locality). Ditchling is thus ‘the essence of an English village’.22 ‘Steeped in history’, Ditchling has been described as ‘visually stunning; from 18 Lerman,

‘Sense on Antisemitism’, pp. 59, 65.

19 Doreen

Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop, no. 39 (Spring 1995), pp. 182–92. 20 Orwell,

‘Antisemitism in Britain’, p. 340.

21 Robert

Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 110.

22 Sally

Varlow, ‘Skylarks, Cricket and Dame Vera’, Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2001.

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the High Street with its glorious vista towards Ditchling Beacon to winding, tucked away lanes, it contains an unusually high number of historic buildings’.23 The title given by (Jewish) film maker and late resident of Ditchling, Luke Holland, to his five part 2006 Storyville series, sums up its status: it is A Very English Village.24 On the surface, the timeless pastoral of rural Sussex sets it apart from the horrors of ‘there’ and the killing fields of the Holocaust. Indeed, the prominent literary critic, R.D. Charques in 1936 was inspired to write after encountering the county’s iconic Seven Sisters where the Sussex Downs met the sea that he felt he was ‘far away from “war and rumours of war, untroubled by dictatorships and concentration camps, delivered from the theories of Utopia and portents of ruin”’.25 It would take someone of the remarkable imagination of actor and writer Dirk Bogarde to connect the two which he did in 1991. Bogarde, who against literary and academic snobbery that he had made it up, in fact witnessed during the second half of April 1945 the early days of Belsen after its liberation, and returned to the subject of the Holocaust in a series of book reviews, talks and interviews in the last decades of the twentieth century. Horrified by the gutter antisemitism and Holocaust denial his memories and observations had stirred, Bogarde reflected on the Sussex village where he had grown up, Cuckfield—equally historic and eye-pleasing as Ditchling from which it was just five miles away.26 How, wondered Bogarde, ‘could such hatred still exist? Most especially in this land of mine, on this treasured soil, never occupied since the Normans? The land which had given the world the terms “fair play” and “tolerance”?’ Transposing the scenes he had witnessed in Belsen with those of his Sussex childhood, Bogarde at first reassured his readers that ‘It is as obscene to imagine a killing camp set down in the fields around Cuckfield and everyone pretending it was not there’. But Bogarde probed deeper, asking ‘could it happen here?’, revealing his own class snobbery in the process: Control, power, with permission. Not here? You think? But we have them already made: the Union-Jack underpants fraternity who wreck Spanish bars, Channel ferries, railway carriages, football stadiums. Drunk with beer and rage, mindless, stuffed with false National Pride, they rampage everywhere. And who stops them?27 23 Ruth 24 The

Lawrence, ‘Delightful Ditchling’, Sussex Living, April 2017, p. 62.

series is available as a DVD by ZEF Productions.

25 R.D. Charques, This Other Eden (London: Peter Davies, 1936), pp. 51–2, quoted and with commentary in Peter Brandon, The Discovery of Sussex (Andover: Phillimore, 2010), p. 11. 26 For more general analysis, see Tony Kushner and Aimee Bunting, ‘Constructing a British Holocaust Narrative: A Cultural Reading of British Co-Presents to the Shoah’, in Susanne Plietzsch and Armin Eidherr (eds), Durchbicke. Horizonte judischer Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2018), pp. 146–69. 27 Dirk

Bogarde, ‘How Could Such Hatred Exist?’, Daily Telegraph, 10 August 1991.

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It is too easy to imagine places such as Ditchling and Cuckfield as unchanging and unaffected by modernity, including the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whilst to an extent a statistical quirk, that two otherwise unconnected victims of 9/11 were from Ditchling who died alongside the scores of other nationalities in this epoch-changing act of terrorism, confirms that no man, or in this case village, is an island.28 As will emerge, there are also connections that link, direct or otherwise, Ditchling and the Holocaust. But the focus here will be on an event that occurred in 1734 which had a Jewish (and an anti-Jewish) theme running through its subsequent narration. ∗ ∗ ∗ On the Sunday evening of 26 May 1734 in a small inn on Ditchling Common, less than two miles from the village and remote even by the standards of the eighteenth-century countryside, Jacob Harris murdered the publican, Richard Miles, his wife Dorothy and an unnamed servant.29 Why Harris committed this triple murder is unclear although it has been assumed (without any definitive proof) that robbery was his motive. That Harris knew Miles and had stayed in the pub for the two preceding nights complicates the story and it is more than possible that both were smugglers (and Harris perhaps also a highwayman) and that the two had a falling out over the course of the weekend. All three victims had their throats cut in what must have been a blood bath, especially as of the three, only Dorothy died closely after the wounds were inflicted by Harris. Miles survived long enough to call for help and to employ militia to catch the culprit. That Harris was apprehended quickly on Miles’ intelligence and in a known smuggler haunt some twenty miles away suggests that they were part of a wider criminal fraternity. Harris was found guilty of murder (though not of theft) and was hanged in Horsham and brought back to the scene of the crime in Ditchling Common to be gibbeted.30 For the purposes of this contribution, it needs to be clarified that almost no doubt exists about the case. The conclusion has to be that Jacob Harris was guilty of the triple murder. He was brought back to Ditchling to be identified by Miles and there seems no logical reason why the dying man would pass the blame onto someone who was innocent, especially as the publican had lost his wife in the attack. Harris’s motives will never be fully known, but as we will see, there has been an attempt to suggest his innocence in recent years which itself suggests a changing (and, at times, over-) sensitivity towards the Jewish past. It has led to new narratives that are lacking in historical credibility but revealing of twenty-first century mentalities. 28 See Mid-Sussex Times, 6 December 2001. This appalling coincidence prompted Luke Holland to make his A Very English Village. 29 For contemporary details see National Archive ASSI 94/572 which provides the coroner’s report and gaol calendar. The press, both London and provincial, gave extensive details of the attacks. See, for example, Weekly Miscellany, 8 June 1734. 30 Ibid.

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In the Victorian era there was insistence about the specific identity of Jacob Harris: he was labelled as a ‘Jew pedlar’.31 According to the Sussex Archaeology Society, he was simply a ‘Jew murderer’,32 and in a late nineteenth-century newspaper article, less offensively but equally anthropologically precise, as ‘Jacob the Jew’.33 In the hands of popular travel writers such as E.V. Lucas, who was particularly drawn to Sussex, there was the need to inform his Edwardian readers that ‘Jacob’s Post’, the surviving part of the gibbet, whilst having ‘a popular and almost endearing sound’, was in fact named after ‘a Jew pedlar of astonishing turpitude’.34 There is no contemporary proof that Jacob Harris was a pedlar. The coroner’s report described him as a ‘labourer’ but this was eighteenth-century legal praxis to identify those with no clear occupation.35 Richard Miles, who said he only knew the suspect by the name of James, described him as a smuggler.36 It took the vivid prejudice and bad practice of a prolific Victorian antiquarian, the Reverend Edward Turner, to invent Jacob’s mode of living. Transcribing the eighteenth-century diary of John Stapley, who lived not far from Ditchling in Hickstead Place, the subscribers to the Sussex Archaeological Collections could read in 1866 how in Stapley’s entry of 26 May 1734 ‘Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar by trade, and travelling the country with his wares, having murdered at Ditchling Common, one Miles, his wife, and maid, and then plundered the house, was captured at Turner’s Hill’.37 In fact, the original diary is terse and has none of the racial and vocational details concocted by Turner: ‘one Jacob Harris did murder one miles his wife & maid’.38 In his study of antisemitism written late in the war and published in 1946, Jean Paul Sartre noted that ‘The Jew is one whom men consider a Jew’. Whilst failing to give Jews any agency of their own (he continues by suggesting that they had ‘no history’), Sartre’s analysis was an important intervention in the study of the psychology of the antisemite.39 In this case, however, there is strong evidence that Jacob Harris was Jewish: it was not just a Victorian invention to construct a morality story of the evil outsider carrying out a barbarous 31 Reverend Thomas Hutchinson, ‘Ditchling’, Sussex Archaelogical Collections, vol. 13 (1861), p. 247. 32 Index

to Sussex Archaeological Collections, vol. 13 (1861), p. 328.

33 ‘Our

Gossip Corner’, Mid-Sussex Times, 15 May 1888.

34 E.V.

Lucas, Highways and Byways in Sussex (London: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 208–9.

35 National

Archives ASSI 94/572. My thanks to Julie Gammon for help with the legal aspects of this case. 36 Grub

Street Journal, 6 June 1734.

37 Reverend

Edward Turner, ‘The Stapley Diary’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, vol. 18 (1866), p. 160. 38 HIC/472, 39 Jean

East Sussex Record Office, The Keep.

Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1948 [1946]), pp. 64–9, 91. For a critique, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Litman Library, 2007), p. 32.

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crime in the quiet of the English countryside during the ‘uncivilised’ eighteenth century. One of the (many) surnames the perpetrator used was Hirsch, or Hirsh,40 and his first name was given in the financial records relating to his gibbeting as ‘Hirshal’—both strongly indicating German Jewish origin.41 Additionally, a contemporary press account after he was found guilty at court referred to ‘The Trial of Daves, a Jew, for the Murder of Richard Mills [sic], his Wife, and Maid Servant at Ditchelling in Sussex’—even if this was the only one of the many devoted to the case which identified him as such.42 There is also ‘The Ballad of Jacob Harris [or Hirsch]’ which survived through oral tradition. There are various versions, but in what was the most produced, the murderer is described as ‘This rogue, the Jew, Jacob by name’.43 Dating this ballad is extremely difficult as it bypassed the folk collectors of the nineteenth century—a result again of Ditchling’s isolation (the nearest train station was several miles away). Linguistic evidence and style does suggest it is contemporary to the murders as is its detailed nature. It is possible that it was sold as a broadside, possibly at the gibbeting, but if this was the case, no copies survive. Beyond that, local folk singers and family tradition ensured its survival. At some point, probably in the late nineteenth century, a complete, hand written version of the ballad was framed and displayed in the pub where the murders were carried out—the Royal Oak.44 Whether Jacob was Jewish or not and the ballad contemporary, whilst of historical significance, is not directly relevant to the overall analysis here. What is important is that Jacob Harris was at least later assumed to be Jewish and the ballad dedicated to his misdeeds regarded as a contemporary account. ‘Jew pedlar’ was the most common moniker given to Jacob Harris from the mid-Victorian era onwards through to the 1920s. It reflected a wider cultural discourse in which Jews (including even those of learning and political fame such as Benjamin Disraeli) were put in their occupational place even after it ceased to have any sociological accuracy.45 But after 1933, following George Orwell’s thesis, is it possible to detect a change in representations of the crime and derogatory comments about Jacob’s Jewishness? In what appears to be the first full published version of the ballad, to mark the bicentenary of the murders in 1934 the Mid-Sussex Times reproduced the 40 See,

for example, London Journal, 24 August 1734.

41 National 42 From

Archives T 90/146.

Walker’s Weekly Penny Journal reprinted in Daily Journal, 17 August 1734.

43 The

first full printed version I have found was in Mid-Sussex Times, 29 May 1934 to mark the bicentenary of the murders.

44 Information

provided by Fred Avery of the Burgess Hill Museum who remembers its display in the Royal Oak. Email to the author, 5 October 2016. 45 See, for example, Charles Harper, The Brighton Road (London: Cecil Palmer, 1922, 3rd edition), p. 225. Anthony Wohl, ‘“Ben Juju”: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon’, in Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner (eds), Disraeli’s Jewishness (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), pp. 117–20.

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line linking Jacob not just to roguery but to him being a Jew.46 It did so without comment, the local newspaper continuing its interest in the story since the late nineteenth century in which it had no hesitation in labelling him as a ‘Jew pedlar’. In turn, this was identically reproduced in Mid-Sussex Through the Ages (1938), a chronology in which 1734 was devoted to ‘Jacob Harris, a Jew’.47 This suggests stasis but shortly after a different rendition of the ballad was reproduced in the Sussex County Magazine. Published in July 1939, it was part of a series of articles devoted to the Sussex Assizes and Quarter Sessions by William Albery, a talented and energetic antiquarian. Albery noted that ‘The earliest case of capital punishment at Horsham [his home town] of which private and published, in addition to official, particulars can be found, is that of Jacob Harris, the pedlar.’48 The lack of particularity is then continued in the reproduction of the ballad itself in which the decisive line is given as ‘This rogue, the man Jacob by name’.49 There are other minor differences which could also suggest that Albery, who went to Ditchling Common to research the article,50 had simply written down a local version that had been recited to him. Yet the refusal to label Jacob as a ‘Jew pedlar’ in what was a very detailed account (which in turn was repeated just after the war in his general history of Horsham), suggests that Albery had deliberately omitted such a description.51 A progressive and an internationalist ‘who had imbibed the literature of the working class struggle either through his liberal sympathies or nascent socialist ideas’,52 it is more than possible that Albery had wanted to avoid anything that might stoke up antisemitism in the devil’s decade. Indeed, Albery worked in tandem with paleographer, Lucy Drucker, who was of German Jewish origin and with whom he enjoyed a close scholarly relationship.53 Albery may well have been particularly sensitive for the inter-war period, but the example he provided in reproducing the ballad without racialisation became the dominant one after 1945. Whether in the form of local walking tour guides,54 Sussex folk singer Gordon Hall’s recording of ‘The Ballad of 46 Mid-Sussex

Times, 29 May 1934.

47 Albert

Gregory, Mid-Sussex Through the Ages (Haywards Heath: Mid-Sussex Times, 1938), pp. 61–2. 48 William Albery, ‘Sussex Assizes and Quarter Sessions: Crimes and Punishments’, Sussex County Magazine, vol. 8, no. 7 (July 1939), p. 479. 49 Ibid. 50 See

the correspondence with Arthur Beckett, editor of the Sussex County Magazine, in Horsham Museum, Albery papers 910. 51 William Albery, A Millennium of Facts: The History of Horsham and Sussex 947 –1947 (Horsham: Horsham Museum Society, 1947), Chapter 6. 52 Description by Jeremy Knight in J. Poole (ed.), Reminiscences of Horsham: Recollections of Henry Burstow (Horsham: Horsham Museum, 2016), p. 7. 53 See

the correspondence in Albery’s papers, Horsham Museum.

54 Ditchling,

Westmeston, and Streat Footpaths Society, In Sight of Ditchling Beacon: Ten Circular Walks Around the South Downs, Ditchling Common and the Sussex Weald (Ditchling: Ditchling, Westmeston and Streat Footpaths Society, 1998).

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Jacob Hirsch’,55 and at the site of the gibbeting itself,56 Jacob is only a rogue and no longer ‘This rogue, the Jew, Jacob by name’. All three examples are from the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium. They, and other examples from different genres which point in the same direction, suggest a growing awareness of the dangers of reproducing past prejudice in the world of modern day heritage in order to avoid offence or controversy. A very recent work, which provides The A-Z of Curious Sussex (including ‘strange stories of mysteries, crimes and eccentrics’), utilises dubious sources such as the Reverend Turner’s version of the Stapley diary and others which present Jacob’s Jewishness pathologically. Tellingly, in this 2017 version, despite (or perhaps because) of its slippery research foundation, the author makes nothing of his ethnic/religious origins.57 There are other examples, of course, in which heritage work, as critiqued by David Lowenthal, lacks any critical approach to the past and fails to problematise challenging artefacts and texts.58 For example, the ubiquitous ‘Golliwog’ is still widely available in British gift shops and displayed without comment in museums where the profit motive is to the fore—regardless of the social impact such material culture still possesses.59 Others still (and heritage examples will be provided later in this article regarding Jacob Harris), where a narrative is constructed reflecting not past but present antisemitic/racist discourse following Reverend Turner’s Victorian pattern of distortion. Alternatively, the superficial sanitisation of ‘history’ through heritage work, however wellmeaning, can remove the sheer existence of minority presence in the desire to avoid confronting the messiness and often troubling nature of Britain’s diverse and not infrequently intolerant past. Jacob can thus cease not only to be the ‘Jew rogue’ but Jewish at all. Heritage work in our case study can thus go in many different—but equally revealing—directions. The county, with its seaside attractions, ancient settlements, countryside and closeness to the capital was soon established on the national tourist map from the nineteenth century onwards in what has been described as ‘Sussexmania’.60 A travel guide literature emerged alongside it which flourished in the twentieth century. In the words of Arthur Mee, perhaps the most successful of such writers at a national level as exemplified by his King’s England series which aimed to provide ‘A New Domesday Book of 10,000 Towns and Villages’:

55 This 56 ‘A

1995 recording is in the British Library sound archive, ICDR 0010059.

Deadly Dead’, heritage information board, 2000, Jacob’s Post, Ditchling Common.

57 Wendy

Hughes, The A-Z of Curious Sussex (Stroud: The History Press, 2017), pp. 40–1.

58 David

Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a defence of heritage as a potentially progressive and inclusive force, see Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994). 59 See,

for example, in the Museum of Brands, author visit, 5 April 2018.

60 Brandon,

The Discovery of Sussex, p. 11.

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T. KUSHNER

Our England is a garden, says Mr Kipling, and he was thinking of Sussex. In all our journeyings we have seen nothing more beautiful. For millions of people this strip of England bordered by the Channel for nearly eighty miles, crammed with hundreds of enchanting villages and with the South Downs running through, is the natural glory of our island.61

Ditchling (and the even smaller village of Wivelsfield which was closer to the crime and where Richard and Dorothy Miles were buried), featured regularly in works that not only described the landscape but also local histories. In them, the story of Jacob Harris was mentioned to provide some gothic horror, especially as the marked site of the gibbeting and the pub in which the murders had occurred could be visited with relative ease—certainly for visitors with cars or bikes and even those willing to walk some distance across the Sussex landscape. And in such narratives, there is a marked change between the preand post-war descriptions of Jacob Harris. In the prolific S.P.B. Mais’s Sussex (1929) the reader joins the author as ‘We cross Ditchling Common, famous for its gibbet of the Jew, Jacob Harris’,62 and in a Bell’s Pocket Guide to the English Counties of the same name, S.E. Winbolt a year earlier had noted that ‘Jacob Harris, a Jew, murdered three persons at an inn on the common’.63 After the war, more typical was a BBC Radio Sussex Guide to ‘Hidden Sussex’ from 1984 which attempted precision (even if the details were wrong) in explaining ‘murder most foul’ and the origins of Jacob’s Post: ‘And who was Jacob? His full name was Jacob Harris, and he was a pedlar from Horsham’.64 A study of the ‘customs, curiosities and country lore’ of Sussex, published in 1990, was equally sure of Jacob’s occupation and the elements of the crimes he committed, but no more: ‘In 1734 Jacob Harris, a travelling pedlar, murdered Richard Miles by cutting his throat and stole his victim’s riding coat, valued at 10 shillings’.65 As noted, before the Second World War there were those such as William Albery who de-racialised the crime and in this he was not alone. The guide to Sussex (1937) in Arthur Mee’s ‘King’s England’ series has already been mentioned and in it Jacob’s (admittedly constructed) occupation is highlighted but not his name and religion: ‘on the common is Ditchling Gibbet, railed round with a cockerel on the top, grim witness of that day in 1734 when they hung a pedlar here for murdering three people at an inn’.66 It

61 Arthur

Mee, The King’s England: Sussex. The Garden by the Sea (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937), p. 1. 62 S.P.B. 63 S.E.

Mais, Sussex (London: Richards Press, 1929), p. 135.

Winbolt, Sussex (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1928), p. 88.

64 Warden 65 Tony

Swinfen and David Arscott (Brighton: BBC Radio Sussex, 1984), p. 152.

Wales, Sussex: Customs, Curiosities & Country Lore (Southampton: Ensign, 1990),

p. 22. 66 Mee,

The King’s England, p. 117.

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perhaps reflected wider tendencies of Mee whose idealised vision of Englishness emphasised its alleged tolerance and fairness.67 In the same volume, for example, is a deep felt tribute to the Indian soldiers ‘who gave their lives for us’, commemorated by the Chattri, the site where the Hindus and Sikhs who died in the Royal Pavilion hospital, were set on a funeral pyre on the Sussex Downs. It was, in Mee’s words, ‘one of the most moving monuments of the [First World] War’.68 Equally, the reverse tendency—that of adding an antisemitic twist to the story of Jacob Harris—has not totally disappeared after 1945. In more obscure and localised publications, racially unreconstructed versions have been published as late as the final quarter of the twentieth century. In Rupert Taylor’s East Sussex Village Book (1986/1999), for example, the entry devoted to Wivelsfield is dominated by the crime: The Royal Oak was the scene of a celebrated murder on May 26th, 1734. Money was the motive behind the dark deed, because a Jewish pedlar called Jacob Harris overheard the landlord Richard Miles boasting that the inn had made a profit of £20 that week, a small fortune to a wanderer like Harris.69

The same author’s Murders of Old Sussex (1991) goes further, letting his imagination run riot. In the Royal Oak ‘Nobody took much notice of the bearded, hawk-faced man nursing his drink at the end of the bar, attired in brimmed hat and bottle-green overcoat that stretched to his ankles’ (it should be noted here that contemporary accounts of Jacob describe him as clean shaven and as a ‘fellow well dress[e]d’ with few descriptors of what Sander Gilman has analysed as the ‘Jew’s Body’).70 Taylor is adamant in his labelling of the criminal: ‘Jacob the Jew … was a familiar enough figure in this part of mid-Sussex where he plied his trade as a pedlar … [E]veryone knew Jacob and his reputation for driving a hard bargain’.71 Even here, there is some evidence of self-awareness, if not sufficient to stop such stereotypical and derogatory descriptions of Jacob: ‘He was known as the Jewish Pedlar, which suggests at least a degree of anti-Semitism and maybe this rankled particularly as he stood apart from the crowd on that jolly May evening in 1734’. The £20 that the landlord had boasted about would, Taylor

67 Maisie Robson, Arthur Mee’s Dream of England (Barnsley: Eynsford Hill Press, 2002), pp. 11–2. 68 Mee,

The King’s England, pp. 280–1.

69 Rupert

Taylor, The East Sussex Village Book (Newbury: Countryside Books, 1999 [1986]), p. 185. 70 Rupert

Taylor, Murders of Old Sussex (Newbury: Countryside Books, 1991), p. 49; Grub Street Journal, 6 June 1734 for contemporary descriptions and Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991).

71 Taylor,

Murders of Old Sussex, p. 49.

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conjected, be enough to ‘start a new life in a place where his race and livelihood would not be the object of contempt’.72 Here, a post-war awareness of the impact of hostility on the Jewish psyche is evident, but, as Orwell observed of his English contemporaries in the Second World War, it is still not sufficient to prompt a thorough self-examination and thus repression of articulating a negative Semitic discourse. Whilst no doubt with limited circulation, the influence of Taylor’s account can still be detected on another local author’s narrative. In Arthur Ayers’ Murder at the Inn, the unpublished version of which was written in the mid1990s, Jacob Harris is again the ‘Jewish pedlar’ and there is even less restraint than that present within the Murders of Old Sussex. He is a ‘bearded, hawkfaced Jew’. Throughout this gruesome account, Jacob Harris is ‘the Jew’ or the ‘Jewish pedlar’.73 It is thus even more revealing that in a later selfpublished version, Murder at the Royal Oak Inn (2017), such racialisation has now disappeared. The descriptions are identical, but the word ‘Jew’ is notable by its absence. Only at the very end, when Jacob Harris is in his cell awaiting hanging, are his origins referred to: ‘Jacob arose when a rabbi entered his cell. He was Jewish. “Go away” Jacob cried out, “I don’t want your help”’.74 Even if operating at the very fringes of the public sphere, there is a moderation of the earlier, private text, one that perhaps also reflects the twenty years that has passed and a greater awareness of what is, and is not permissible to articulate in a culture, society and politics where the Holocaust was becoming less ‘alien’ in Britain and expressions of overt racial prejudice less socially respectable. That Jacob might also have been part of a wider Jewish culture and religion, if somewhat naively expressed, is also now evident. This change can be illustrated by two local publications which have in common the study of a village in the Sussex Weald with an intimate connection to the murders—West Hoathly. It was here, allegedly, that Jacob Harris initially sought refuge in the Cat Inn before fleeing further and being caught a mile or so away in a smuggler’s house at Turner’s Hill. Based on solid research and with literary merit, Ursula Ridley’s locally published The Story of a Forest Village (1971), introduced ‘conversations of a fanciful character between real persons for the sake of giving the feelings of a Wealden village at a particular time’.75 In it, she imagines what led ‘Jacob Hirsch, a Jewish pedlar from Ditchling’, to carry out the murders. Robbery is again the motive but Jacob is frustrated that after attacking the three people, he finds that the money chest is empty. Throughout the account, which understandably focuses on his stay

72 Ibid.,

p. 50.

73 Typescript 74 Arthur

in Ditchling Museum archive.

Ayers, Murder at the Royal Oak Inn (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source, 2017),

p. 37. 75 Ursula

Ridley, The Story of a Forest Village (West Hoathly: Friends of the Priest House, 1971), p. 2.

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in West Hoathly, Jacob—a voiceless character throughout—is constantly ‘The Jew’.76 The chronological narrative of this ‘faction’ (the literary genre in which ‘real’ events are used/extrapolated to create a fictional narrative) quickly moves on from the eighteenth century, and in the last pages of Ridley’s history, a brief summary is given of the impact of the Second World War on West Hoathly. One sentence is devoted to a large house near the village where Anna Freud and her psychiatric team treated the very youngest of the Holocaust survivors who had been brought to Britain in 1945: ‘At Bulldogs Bank, a few little children saved from German concentration camps, their identity and nationality unknown, played contentedly in the woods’.77 Much is contained or implied in this compact sentence. The vagueness of who the children were stands in stark contrast to her racial labelling of Jacob Harris/Hirsch. Moreover, their suffering (and where it took place) is passed over quickly and the emphasis is placed on the apparent ease with which their well-being is restored by the English pastoral, reflecting wider tendencies of how the Holocaust has been confronted in post-war Britain with universalising tendencies and redemptive endings. It is a narrative, however, that at least provides the possibility that these six young orphans were still part of the local landscape. It confirmed Anna Freud’s (and her collaborator, Sophie Dann’s) own contemporary and extremely detached and clinical account where, whilst the emphasis is on the profound psychic damage inflicted on the children, their progress in dealing with the Sussex countryside was at least acknowledged by these two Jewish refugees from Nazism who looked after the children. Freud and Dann highlighted how at first the children found the outdoors totally alien: ‘They did not know the name of a single plant and had never picked or handled flowers’. Soon, however, they were able to distinguish ‘weeds from plants’ and in this process ‘were greatly helped in making up for lost time by the interest of the village people’.78 Later, Gertrud Dann, Sophie’s sister who also looked after the children, in the briefest of memoirs provided a more intimate and self-reflexive account and recalled that: The lovely house in the beautiful surroundings in the small village of West Hoathly was a haven of peace for the poor orphans and for us too. Mrs. Clarke’s [who had provided Bulldog Banks] unending kindness and understanding, the great friendliness of the villagers, the beautiful countryside and the great care, all helped the children to calm down and develop so well that after a year they could join the older children at Weir Courtney near Lingfield [a larger

76 Ibid.,

pp. 103–5.

77 Ibid.,

p. 118.

78 Anna

Freud and Sophie Dann, ‘An Experiment in Group Upbringing’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 6 (1951), p. 156.

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house over the border in Surrey], from where most of them were eventually adopted.79

Forty years after Ursula Ridley’s linked histories of West Hoathly, a 2010 study of the same area provides a very different reading of the Second World War era and local connections to it: Seventy years on, the war generation is gradually disappearing and it is important that their story of events is recorded for future generations. That is particularly true of the survivors of the Jewish [my emphasis] Holocaust; there are a growing number of people who for their own needs and political purposes are anxious to rewrite history by denying the [H]olocaust.

The author, Janet Bateson, adds that ‘Child survivors of the Nazi death camp came to the [area] in 1945, orphaned children who had witnessed the horrors of life and death in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz’.80 Her account outlines local responses (good and bad) to these newcomers and to earlier Jewish refugees from Nazism. It also, however, includes extensive testimony of the former children themselves—life stories that were not collected or seen as significant in the world of British heritage and history until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Such sensitivity and inclusivity is, it must be highlighted, a very recent development and one that was certainly not present in the Freud-Dann report where the children were quoted sparingly and only to illustrate the scale of the mental injuries inflicted on them with a fixation on the sexualised behaviour of their charges. Returning to Jacob Harris, awareness of the damages caused by antisemitism has led to a tendency more recently to represent him as somehow a victim—despite the horrors of his crime. This is most notable at the fastfading heritage display at the place where his gibbeting took place which itself requires brief attention to show the balance of continuity and change. Other than a passing reference, over a century later, to the state of decay of his skeleton in the gibbet, with only the head remaining by the 1760s, nothing is known of the eighteenth-century history of the site.81 But by the 1820s, legal documents relating to road improvements and farm advertisements referred to the site as ‘Jacob’s Post’—usages which required precision and everyday familiarity. In turn it suggests an earlier process of nomenclature had taken place, if only at a local and informal level.82 It was not until the mid-nineteenth

79 Gertrud 80 Janet

81 Anon, 82 See

Dann, memoirs [no date], in West Sussex County Archives, MSS 36/782.

Bateson, Around Lingfield at War (Stroud: Amberley, 2010), pp. 7–8. ‘Turnips and “Black-Eyed Susan”’, Mid-Sussex Times, 11 September 1883.

‘Plan of the Road Through Ditchling and Lindfield’, November 1824 in The Keep archive, QDP/88/1; Sussex Advertiser, 10 March 1823 for the sale of farm equipment at Hick’s Farm, Jacob’s Post.

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century that Sussex antiquarians gave the site more national prominence,83 and by the fin de siècle it was on the tourist route for cycling clubs and the pioneers of car driving as a leisure pursuit or as a meeting point for hunts with wild animals brought into provide the prey.84 As early as 1888, the local newspaper could with some justification suggest that Ditchling Common contained ‘The far-famed post … [of] Jacob the Jew’.85 As happened at other gibbets, rather than act as a deterrent, they became places where transgressors of authority could be celebrated and become part of folk tradition.86 If, by the end of the Victorian age, first the body of Jacob Harris and then the gibbet post had largely lost their alleged magical properties (curing toothache and aiding fertility), it was still regarded as a site of gothic horror. Even then, it did not preclude a degree of empathy with the perpetrator, partly because of the indignities he was subject to. ‘Poor old Jacob!’, as a local newspaper reflected in 1908.87 This was still a long way, however, from suggesting his innocence. Yet early in the twenty-first century, the Ditchling Common Country Park under the East Sussex County Council and sponsored by the Royal Oak pub, erected a heritage board at the site of the gibbeting entitled ‘A Deadly Deed’ which went a step further.88 The display board and accompanying leaflet follow the dominant post-war path in describing Jacob Harris neutrally as a ‘travelling pedlar’. Significantly, however, his specific origins are then referred to but in a totally new way: ‘Jacob was also known by the Jewish name Yacob Hirsh and some say he was no more than a convenient scapegoat’.89 The rendering of Jacob as ‘Yacob’ in Hebrew is not incorrect in itself although there is no contemporary reference to the murderer using this name, even though this was one area in which he did assert his own agency (aside, of course, from the small matter of the crimes themselves). As with the introduction of a rabbi in his final hours in Arthur Ayers’s fictional version, it hints of a deeper Jewish past than the previous designation ‘Jew pedlar’ would allow. There is, however, still an assumption and limitation lurking here that in that vague construct, ‘the past’: as with Sartre’s analysis Jews were, and always remain victims which defines their very

83 The most quoted example was R.W.B. (Robert Blencowe), ‘The Last Gibbet in England’, Notes and Queries, no. 37 (13 September 1856), p. 216 which was reproduced in journals and newspapers across the British Isles and beyond. 84 See,

for example, Mid-Sussex Times, 12 September 1911; Isle of Wight Observer, 30 April

1910. 85 Mid-Sussex

Times, 15 May 1888.

86 Zoe

Dyndor, ‘The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in MidEighteenth-Century England’, in R. Ward (ed.), A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 102–25. 87 Mid-Sussex 88 An

Times, 15 September 1908.

accompanying leaflet with the same text is available in Ditchling Museum, accession 2003.3854.1. 89 Ibid.

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being. It also reflects a failure to address the details of the case and what Yacob/Jacob was exactly a scapegoat for. A more interesting, complex and convincing literary response has come through local teacher, Robert Tomlin, who in 1976 and then 1998 wrote and produced two versions of the story, acted by the local primary school in Ditchling. In the first, simply entitled ‘Jacob Harris’, the author provides a clear statement of what the man did which undermines the message of the later heritage site: ‘That the historical Jacob Harris was a bad man is without question; that he committed three murders by slitting his victims’ throats is not open to much doubt’. But as Tomlin also noted, ‘why he did it is not really clear at all’. The author then provides three possibilities which he leaves openended: ‘Was he a smuggler who was being double-crossed, an ordinary pedlar who could take no more undisguised anti-semitism, or just a pathological killer?’90 It is worth pondering further at the second solution posited by Tomlin. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, outside the capital where the only three synagogues existed, most Jews in England (their numbers totalling only a few thousand) were pedlars and it seems more than likely that Jacob Harris might have first come to the Sussex countryside in that guise. Yet even if he was a pedlar to begin with, the contemporary evidence throughout the eighteenth century is of an ambivalence towards those Jews in that occupation. They were subject to violence at times, but also welcomed for their goods which would otherwise have been unobtainable in remote areas and also because they provided news, variety and difference to mundane everyday life in the countryside and small villages.91 Just as the naming of ‘Jacob’s Post’ suggested a degree of affection (and one that annoyed Victorian and later moralists), so the wider issue of Jewish pedlars (and their representation in material—especially pottery—and print culture) suggest a complex set of responses to their local presence from the eighteenth century onwards. They were thus not always regarded as ‘matter out of place’.92 It is true that in both his play versions, Robert Tomlin presents Jacob as a wronged man, but significantly he does so by taking all references to Jewishness out of the story. Instead, he is the brother of Richard Miles who has cheated him out of his

90 ‘Jacob Harris, an introduction’ (1976). I am extremely grateful to Robert Tomlin for copying me both versions of these plays. 91 Cecil Roth, ‘The Jew Peddler—An 18th Century Rural Character’, in idem, Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), pp. 130–8; Betty Naggar, Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers 1740–1940 (Camberley: Poeryphytogenitus, 1992) and more generally, Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 92 Mary

Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1996 [1966]). See the extensive print and porcelain collection at the London Jewish Museum for varied representations of the Jewish pedlar.

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inheritance.93 Agency and voice are thus restored to Jacob Harris, if at the cost here of his Jewishness. Tomlin in his historical notes to his first ‘Jacob’ play is almost certainly right in guessing that Harris was a smuggling partner of Miles and that the killing of three people in quick succession suggests a degree of mental instability. Yet rather than simply a victim of antisemitism, Harris was a tough Jew (possibly of German bettel juden origin) who intimately knew his way around the criminal fraternity of the Sussex landscape—a part of it and not apart from it.94 The possibility of this (unsavoury) integration has yet to be fully understood in any form of representation or heritage work of the incident so far. Whilst other factors may be at work, including lack of knowledge of British Jewish social studies, recent Holocaust sensitivity has, ironically, I would suggest, hindered understanding of Jacob Harris’s independence as a historical actor—just as Semitic discourse in the past could only understand him as a ‘Jew murderer’. Thus in Paul Monod’s brilliant cultural history of another eighteenth-century Sussex murder and subsequent gibbeting of the perpetrator, which took place in Rye some nine years later, it is suggested that whilst Jacob Harris might well have been guilty, ‘the severity of his treatment cannot be separated from his religion and ethnicity’. Monod continues in his 2003 study that It is unlikely that Harris’s body would have been exposed on a gibbet if he had not been a Jew, and therefore ineligible for Christian resurrection at the Last Judgement. Besides, an itinerant Jewish peddler would not have had friends or relations in the Sussex countryside who might have tried to rescue his corpse.95

In fact, gibbeting was widespread across England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, as has been suggested here, within his own criminal circle, Harris appears to have been extremely well-integrated. It is telling that Monod’s example of local antisemitism whereby Jews paid three and a half times the amount to use the port of Rye relates only to the medieval period and not to the 1730s.96 Thus whilst in its way parochial, it has been shown that the telling and re-telling of Jacob Harris’s story reveals much about patterns of antisemitism and the place of ‘the Jew’ in British society both before and after the Holocaust. Historical geographer, Doreen Massey, observes that ‘The identity of 93 Tomlin,

‘Jacob Harris’.

94 These

were Jews who moved around central Europe in gangs which combined begging and crime. See Otto Ulbricht, ‘Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period’, in R. Pos-chia Hsia and H. Lehmann (eds), In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 49–70. 95 Paul Monod, The Murder of Mr. Grebell: Madness and Civility in an English Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 32–3 which uses Turner’s adulturated version of the Stapley diary uncritically. 96 Ibid.

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places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant’.97 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the story of Jacob Harris has been increasingly obscured in Ditchling. The heritage site is in a state of decay and hard to find, the neighbouring Royal Oak was demolished in 2017 despite its historic significance and the new Ditchling Museum which opened in 2014 has removed its predecessor’s exhibition relating to Jacob Harris which featured prominently in the original display. Ironically, it now celebrates the colony of artists and craftsmen that came to the village before, during and after the First World War. The rampant paedophilia and incest of its most talented member, Eric Gill, has been acknowledged,98 but not the conspiratorial Catholic antisemitism of the group, linked closely to the ‘Chesterbelloc’ circle, which was articulated during the Nazi era and immediately after in the form of Holocaust denial, claims of Jewish power and snide personal attacks on individual Jews through the columns of the Weekly Review. According to this publication, even after the revelations from the Nazi camps in 1945, the Jews in Britain had ‘roots [which were] not … native to our soil’.99 It was printed and edited in Ditchling by one of the key members of this Catholic colony, Hilary Pepler, who played a role in the revival of volkisch far right activity in post-war Britain.100 As Doreen Massey also insists, ‘“local uniqueness” is always already a product of wider contacts’,101 and it is not only West Hoathly, the village where Jacob Harris was in hiding and then caught nearby, that has an intimate link to the Jewish victims of Nazism. A child refugee, Dorothy Bohm, who later became a famous photographer, was sent to the eccentric Dumbrells’ School in Ditchling recalling that it was ‘an extraordinary sort of change from the life I’d had before’—she was brought up in the large town of Konigsberg in East Prussia.102 Others such as Mrs Honni Schwenk found employment as domestic servants in Ditchling.103 Beyond that, mention has been made of film maker Luke Holland who has produced the most intensive filmic study of the village. In 1999, Holland, whose mother had come to Britain from Vienna as a Jewish refugee, produced a pathbreaking account of Holocaust survivor 97 Massey,

‘Places and Their Pasts’, p. 186.

extensively in ‘Eric Gill: The Body’, Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, April to September 2017. 98 Most

99 ‘Foreign

Advisors’, Weekly Review, 4 October 1945.

100 See

the Weekly Review, 1938 to its demise in 1947. Peplar was involved in the leadership of the British People’s Party which contained ex-members of the British Union of Fascists.

101 Massey,

‘Places and Their Pasts’, p. 183.

102 See

her interview in ‘Refugee Voices’, interview 82, accessible through the London Jewish Museum. 103 In

fact she was found to be ‘illegally employed’ in a guest house and had to be removed to a domestic position in Worthing. See Worthing Refugee Committee records, MS 27.824, West Sussex Record Office.

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Rudy Kennedy which exposed the neglected story of Jewish slave labourers in Nazi Europe. The film covered the five year struggle to gain compensation from the German government and firms who had benefited from this lethal exploitation and helped achieve this belated recognition and legal redress.104 This documentary was shown at the thriving Ditchling Film Society in 2002 as part of local Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations with Kennedy in attendance. Holland told the audience that it had ‘been a privilege to take this film around the world, but the opportunity to screen it to my friends and neighbours in Ditchling is a source of special satisfaction’.105 Following Massey, this was indeed bringing the Holocaust ‘back home’.106 It was fitting that at the time of this event, Kennedy came to dinner at Luke Holland’s house and the other dinner guest was Dame Vera Lynn.107 This was English domestication of the Holocaust,108 but in an inclusive way and far from the racist dystopia imagined by Dirk Bogarde. In this respect, it is fitting that both Holland’s I Was a Slave Labourer and his A Very English Village were part of the BBC’s ‘Storyville’ series and both, in his words, were ‘digging for memory’. As Luke Holland noted in relation to the latter documentary, when he and his family relocated from London to Ditchling, it got me thinking about margin and centre. When we moved down to Sussex I thought that was it. I’d be out of the loop, but Ditchling is at the centre of something and we are connected to the world. I think those connections impose on us certain obligations. We can’t retreat from the obligation that we owe to the world.109

It is fitting also that the places intimately associated with the story of Jacob Harris have later stories that make them equally part of Holocaust history. To conclude, this contribution has illustrated how patterns of antisemitism have changed in Britain not simply pre- and post-Holocaust but at many different points in the modern history of the country. Of equal importance is how since the eighteenth century, the treatment of the Jews and representations of them have been contested and that ambivalence has been the norm. It is, however, possible to locate an influence of the Holocaust although 104 This

was broadcast on BBC 2, 16 October 1999.

105 Mid-Sussex

Times, 17 January 2002.

106 The

title of the late David Cesarani’s documentary making the case for a Holocaust museum in Britain which was broadcast on BBC 2, 14 January 1995. 107 See email from Luke Holland to Rudy Kennedy in MS 311/32/19b, University of Southampton archive. 108 Aimee

Bunting, ‘Britain and the Holocaust: Then and Now’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2006) which in this respect builds on Dan Stone, ‘The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945–6’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 2 (1999), pp. 13–29. 109 BBC Four interview with Luke Holland, 2007, in Sussex South Downs Guide. See www.sussex-southdowns-guide.com, accessed 19 November 2017.

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it is one that is far from straightforward. Negative semitic discourse, deeply ingrained in culture, has not disappeared and to expect otherwise, even in a post-Shoah world, is to misunderstand how slowly attitudes, and behaviour emerging from them, change. ‘The Jew’ is still often mistaken for real Jews who are, as all humans, messy, contradictory and near-impossible to categorise. And even awareness of the Holocaust has not stopped the problems inherent of what Gavin Langmuir referred to as ‘majority national history’ where ‘we hear of persecution and changes of legal status, but not of change in occupation or outlook … reinforc[ing] dubious stereotypes’.110 This has been true of almost all post-war representations of Jacob Harris—even those that insist on his victimhood or his alleged pedlar status. He, like many others, has been presented as the figure of Ahasueros, the perpetual ‘Wandering Jew’.111 To understand British responses to the Holocaust, therefore, it is necessary first to get to grips with the still ongoing, fluid and complex attitudes towards ‘the Jew’ and the dangers inherent in majority histories and many different forms of heritage that either do not allow at all or sufficiently for Jewish agency. George Orwell simplified matters in believing that negative use of the Jew figure in the public domain had ended in ‘liberal’ England following the Nazi rise to power. He was, however, absolutely correct in recognising that deeper change would be a long time in coming and that when it was attempted it would be partial and inconsistent, reflecting trends that had occurred over decades (and, as shown with the events of May 1734, over centuries). Thus connecting the ‘Jew murderer’ to Jewish history, including the murder of the Jews, reveals how much hard memory work and even deeper analysis is still required. Indeed, it is the case that Britain and the Holocaust reflects ‘an enduring and a complicated relationship’ but one that is rarely acknowledged in the public sphere with any nuance or subtlety.112 On the contrary, to juxtapose the ‘here’ of Britain (including its Jews and responses to the past and present) with the ‘there’ of the Holocaust risks celebratory approaches to the former and demonisation of the continent as exemplified by the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre project from 2016 onwards. Post-Brexit that danger is even greater. This chapter is therefore a small contribution to that difficult but necessary process of problematising that relationship. Ultimately, it aims to add light and shade in understanding both ‘sides’ of Britain and the Holocaust, drawing out their direct and indirect connections in the process—as, of course, is this volume as a whole.

110 Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 32. 111 Galit

Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes (eds), The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

112 Bunting,

‘Britain and the Holocaust’, p. 1.

CHAPTER 17

‘I Belong Here. I Know I Ought Never to Have Come Back, Because It Has Proved I’ve Never Been Away’: Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Documentaries of Return Isabel Wollaston Kitty Hart-Moxon is, with the possible exception of Ben Helfgott, the most well known and influential Holocaust survivor in Britain today. Both could be described as a ‘celebrity survivor,’ to use Jeffrey Shandler term for individuals who have told their story in multiple contexts and are ‘well known for being Holocaust survivors.’1 Helfgot influence is primarily rooted in his role as founder then Chair of the 45 Aid Society for Holocaust Survivors, of which he is now Honorary President. Having previously been awarded an MBE, he was knighted in 2018. By contrast, Kitty’s influence stems primarily from her commitment to Holocaust education and her accessibility: she is a much sought after interviewee, public speaker and a go-to person when the media want an articulate, forthright survivor perspective on Holocaust-related anniversaries or controversies. Kitty’s testimony features in the permanent exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum (previously Beth Shalom), which also created a popular travelling exhibition Another Time, Another Place based on her story. Kitty has published two memoirs (I am Alive and Return to Auschwitz) and has recorded extensive audio and video testimonies, e.g., for the IWM and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA). In addition, she has made four films focusing on her Holocaust journey. Kitty and Helfgott 1 Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New

Media Practices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), pp. 66–68. I. Wollaston (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_17

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have worked closely with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET, www.het. org.uk), and are both Honorary Patrons. Yet, whilst Helfgott is the subject of a published biography,2 relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Kitty’s testimonies and impact. This chapter explores the evolution and impact of Kitty’s public presentation of her story with brief reference to her two memoirs (given that these have been the main focus of what scholarly discussion there has been of Kitty’s testimonies to date3 ), followed by a more in-depth analysis of five TV documentaries broadcast between 1979 and 2015, i.e., at very different moments in the development of British Holocaust consciousness and memorialisation. Kitty is adamant that these films play a key role in communicating her story and have, largely untapped, potential as an educational resource. The films discussed are: 1. Kitty: Return to Auschwitz (Yorkshire TV, 1979); 2. Her contribution to Another Journey by Train (Channel 4, 1993), a controversial documentary climaxing with Kitty confronting four neoNazis in Auschwitz-Birkenau; 3. Death March: A Survivor’s Story (BBC2, 2002); 4. Story of a Lifetime: Kitty Hart-Moxon (BBC1, 2013), and 5. One Day in Auschwitz: Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Story of Survival (coproduced by the USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Communications, 2015). I will primarily focus on the first, which arguably marked Kitty’s emergence as a ‘celebrity survivor,’ and the last, given that it was explicitly conceived as an updating of, or coming full circle from, Kitty—Return to Auschwitz. I will comment more briefly on the other three which are far less well known and, with the exception of Another Journey by Train,4 have attracted no critical attention to date. This is primarily, I suspect, because Death March and the Story of a Lifetime episode were broadcast on regional British television, BBC 2 For

more on Ben Helfgott, see Michael Freedland, Ben Helfgott: The Story of One of the Boys (Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018).

3 See,

for example, Robert Eaglestone, ‘Identification and the Genre of Testimony’, Immigrants & Minorities 21, no. 1–2 (2002), 117–40, 134, and Esther Jilovsky, Remembering the Holocaust: Generations, Witnessing and Place (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Shandler offers the most in-depth published analysis to date of the evolution of Kitty’s testimony over the years and across a range of genres, paying particular attention to her two memoirs, and their various editions, as well as her lengthy video testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. He includes a detailed, thoughtful discussion of the relationship between Return to Auschwitz and the documentary Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, but makes only passing reference to Another Journey by Train, Death March and One Day in Auschwitz. See his Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, pp. 68–84.

4 See,

for example, Tamar Liebes, ‘Another Journey by Train: How Television Put Holocaust Victims on the Defensive’, Media, Culture & Society 17, no. 2 (1995), pp. 309–16.

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Midlands and BBC Northern Ireland respectively. However, Death March is the only one of these films not currently easily accessible online, e.g., via You Tube.

The Evolution of Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Holocaust Testimony Kitty describes herself as ‘a survivor witness with a unique experience’ and an ‘extremely complex’ story to tell.5 On the one hand, she confesses that she finds ‘it well-nigh impossible to recollect things in their proper sequence’6 ; on the other she is adamant that ‘years can go by, but your memory will not fade, certain events, if they are extraordinary, you never forget them.’7 Although much remains constant, her story and the formats in which she tells it has evolved considerably. Kitty wrote an unpublished account of her experiences in the DP camps soon after liberation. Her first memoir I am Alive was published in 1961, as a paperback in 1962, then a Corgi revised edition in 1974. She describes writing it as ‘a sort of purging of my personal lingering angers and fears,’ one that she came to view as something of a missed opportunity, partly because of her limited grasp of the idioms of written English, and partly because she felt British readers were not yet ready to hear what she really wanted to say.8 A substantially expanded and restructured second memoir Return to Auschwitz was published in 1981 (paperback 1982). The title explicitly linked the text to the Yorkshire TV documentary Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, with an additional chapter drawing heavily on dialogue from the film. Return to Auschwitz is more detailed, reflecting Kitty’s ongoing commitment to researching and learning more about her personal history,9 supplying historical context she felt was missing from I am Alive. A revised and expanded edition was published by Beth Shalom in 1997. As well as playing a significant role in editing the text, Stephen Smith, co-director of Beth Shalom, supplied a Foreword hailing it as ‘a valuable and important text, to students, historians and lay readers alike. It is a testimony of courage and of great sensitivity. It is by no means a work of great artistry, but nevertheless remains one of the most significant texts of this century, just simply because of the story it 5 Kitty

Hart-Moxon, Presentation, Workshop 6 on Education, Testimony in Education’, Stockholm International Forum, pp. 26–28 January 2000, www.d.dccam.org/Projects/ Affinity/SIF/DATA/2000/page1109.html.

6 Kitty

Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Grafton Books, 1982), p. 97

7 Kitty

Hart-Moxon, ‘Memories of the Holocaust’, BBC Radio Cornwall, 5 October, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cornwall/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_866 7000/8667578.stm (accessed 12 August 2018).

8 Hart, 9 Kitty

Return to Auschwitz, pp. 218–19.

comments ‘I have not become obsessed with my story, but whenever possible I try to research whatever I can about the places I was in, and the policies I was victim to.’ Return to Auschwitz (London: House of Stratus, 2000), p. 215.

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tells.’10 He persuaded Kitty to add a new concluding chapter, ‘Fifty five years on,’ commenting on the considerable changes in British Holocaust consciousness since the immediate postwar period.11 Further editions, omitting Smith’s Foreword, appeared in 2000 and 2007. I am Alive is solely text whereas photographs and maps are important elements of Return to Auschwitz: Martin Gilbert’s map of Kitty’s Holocaust journey is positioned prominently opposite the title page (it was omitted from the 1997 edition but returned in updated form in 2000 and 2007). The choice of photographs differs to a lesser or greater extent in each edition. The acknowledgements also differ between the two memoirs and various editions. Kitty’s struggle to adapt to life in postwar Britain is a central part of her narrative and is significantly foregrounded and expanded in Return to Auschwitz. It is a theme also touched upon in her documentaries. Of her arrival in Britain, she recalls: Nobody wanted to hear when I first came to England. As my uncle drove me and my mother from the docks he said ‘Remember, in my house I don’t want you to speak about anything that happened to you. I don’t want to know and I don’t want my girls upset.’ I was very angry at the indifference, the hostility, and the lack of understanding. It took 15 years for anyone to ask me the first question.12

Kitty complains that with rare, therefore memorable, exceptions, she and her mother were ‘left to cope’ with little emotional or practical support from relatives, the Jewish community, local and government authorities, pointedly commenting: ‘in some ways the suffering I endured in the early post-war years was worse than in the KZ. Personally I found that time more traumatic.’13

Kitty Hart-Moxon’s Documentaries of Return Kitty continues to research and retrace her story, refining its telling both to understand her experience more fully and communicate its complexity and significance effectively to others. Her films play an important part in this process because of the multidimensional nature of the medium compared to 10 Stephen Smith, ‘Foreword’, in Kitty Hart-Moxon, Return to Auschwitz (Laxton: Quill Press, 1997), xiii. 11 Developments between the 1981/82 and 1997 editions include the creation of the Holocaust Educational Trust in 1988, the inclusion of the Holocaust into the National Curriculum in 1991, and the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the opening of Beth Shalom, both in 1995. This momentum further increased by the time the 2000 and 2007 editions were published with the opening of a permanent Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London in 2000, and the creation of a national Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. 12 ‘Kitty Hart-Moxon OBE: Holocaust Survivor and Honorary Graduate (Hon DUniv, 2013)’, Old Joe: The University of Birmingham’s Alumni Magazine, July 2013, p. 14. 13 Hart,

Return to Auschwitz, 1982, p. 12.

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the written text. It could be argued that the sequence of documentaries has come full circle with One Day in Auschwitz representing a twenty-first-century re-make of Kitty—Return to Auschwitz. Significantly, in nearly all her talks, particularly at schools and universities, she shows an extended sequence from one of her films, usually Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, using it as a springboard to tell her story, identify and apply ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust to the present. A similar strategy is utilised in the section devoted to Kitty in the 2015 BBC documentary The Holocaust: A Story of Remembrance. Her documentaries of return cover two thirds of her Holocaust journey (from arrival in Auschwitz in April 1943 to liberation), but only partially fulfil her desire to do something similar for the early part of her story (prewar life in Bielsko, the Lublin ghetto, on the run in Zabia Wola and the surrounding forests, and ‘passing’ as an ethnic Polish forced labourer in a factory in Bitterfeld, Germany). Documentaries of return are a growing sub-genre of Holocaust film, particularly since the early 1990s. Notable examples include Elie Wiesel Going Home (1996); The Last Days (1998); Slaves of the Death Camps (1999); Martin (1999); Elie Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey at Auschwitz (2006) and Sonderkommando: The Living Dead of Auschwitz (2012). Sequences featuring Simon Srebnik in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) constitute an early influential example of this approach. In these films survivors retrace their Holocaust journey, often accompanied by relatives (particularly second- or third generation), sometimes with only the film director, interviewer, translator and/or historian or curator for company on-screen. The survivor searches for traces of their past, giving their testimony in the (sometimes approximate, sometimes actual) sites where key events took place. Sites serve as both trigger and barrier to memory, simultaneously bearing witness to and hiding or obfuscating the past.14 Documentaries of return portray multiple, sometimes conflicting memories, understandings of, and responses to the past, often staging interactions between the survivor and local inhabitants that serve to highlight latent or actively expressed antisemitism and/or the complexities of ‘ownership’ and restitution. As Brad Prager points out, such returns to the sites of a traumatic past are staged in ‘the hope that something cinematic will happen.’15 David Nelson, producer of Death March, maintains that ‘placing survivors in the physical context of their stories, even though places change,

14 Tm Cole offers a series of detailed exploration of the significance of return visits by survivors to Holocaust sites, see, for example, ‘Holocaust Tourism: The Strange Yet Familiar/The Familiar Yet Strange’, in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the PostHolocaust Era, eds. Diana Popescu and Tanja Schult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 93–106; ‘Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors’ Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz’, History & Memory 25, no. 2 (2013), 102–31, and ‘(Re)visiting Auschwitz: (Re)encountering the Holocaust in Its Landscapes’, Cultural History 2, no. 2 (2013), pp. 232–46. 15 Brad

Prager, After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film (London and New York, 2015), p. 16.

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adds a dimension impossible in audio or text.’16 At their best, documentaries of return offer intriguing explorations of the shifting, contested, nature of Holocaust memory and highlight the complex but central role landscape and materiality plays in this. At their worst, they rely on, even perpetuate, stereotypes, wallow in uncritical nostalgia for the pre-Holocaust Jewish past and/or encouraging an ‘unreflexive identification’ with the survivor, with the risk of lapsing into voyeurism.17 I believe that Kitty’s films avoid these pitfalls for the most part. Her documentaries of return, covering the period 1979–2015, also inadvertently capture and chart the extent to which the sites she returns to have themselves changed over time, most evident in the constantly evolving landscape and memorial site at Auschwitz. For Kitty, returning to key sites in her Holocaust ‘story’ is both challenging and rewarding, testing the reliability of her memories as she seeks to make sense of a powerful but sometimes fragmentary, even disjointed, sense of what happened to her. Her documentaries of return can be read as voyages of discovery and recovery, with the reliability of her memories both confirmed and challenged as she sometimes struggles to find her bearings in radically changed landscapes. The combination of excitement, apprehension, curiosity and confusion, followed by relief, as she identifies landmarks, buildings and other ‘triggers’ that help decode a landscape simultaneously familiar and alien is palpable, even visceral. We witness Kitty’s attempts to relate past and present, with the two fusing in disorienting ways. My title quotes her reaction on first returning to Auschwitz in November 1978, a place she recognises as, in some sense, both ‘home’ and her ‘school’ or ‘university’: I belong here. I knew I ought never to have come back, because it has proved I’ve never been away. The past I see is more real than the tidy pretence they have put in its place. The noises are as loud as they ever were: the screams, the shouts, the curses, the lash of the whips and thud of truncheons, the ravening dogs. Here was where I received my personal education. This is my old school. Whatever curriculum and discipline other people may cling to or rebel against from their schooldays, here is where my standards were established: to obey or try not to obey. To revolt against or slyly circumvent, and always, either way, to fear; standards which, no matter how distorted, can never be forgotten.18

16 David Nelson, ‘The Place of Film’, in Witness: The Holocaust Centre 10 Years On, ed. Wendy Whitworth (Laxton: Quill Press, 2005), p. 290. 17 See, for example, Griselda Pollock, ‘Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory’, in Visual Culture and Tourism, eds. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 175–89, 179 and 186–87; and Janet Walker, ‘Moving Testimonies: “Unhomed Geography” and the Holocaust Documentary of Return’, in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, eds. Jakob Lothe, James Phelan, and Susan Rubin Suleiman et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), pp. 269–88. 18 Hart,

Return to Auschwitz, 1982, pp. 220–21.

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Of her now considerable output, Kitty—Return to Auschwitz has had by far the greatest impact, both on the general public (the initial broadcast attracted 13 million viewers) and in its critical reception.19 The film has been hailed as ‘ground-breaking’20 and won several awards.21 Its director Peter Morley is guilty of hyperbole in claiming it established ‘a truth about this camp that is unchallengeable – and thanks to her courage and her eloquence, Kitty gave the word, Auschwitz, a new meaning.’22 Yet it is undeniably, as Andy Pearce suggests, both ‘a remarkable documentary’ and ‘an event of note’23 for a commercial TV channel to broadcast ‘what was in many respects a featurelength exploration into the dynamics and operation of Holocaust memory at a time when the genocide lacked social or cultural prominence.’24 According to Annette Insdorf the film was ‘a uniquely cinematic event, as historically significant as it is emotionally wrenching’,25 whilst for Griselda Pollock, it is ‘an extraordinary film … the first film made in Britain to invite a survivor, firstly, to tell her story, and then to consider accompanying a film crew to the site where the story had taken place.’26 The making and success of the film was of great personal significance for Kitty. According to Morley, returning to Auschwitz to make the film was something she was desperate to do27 : the visit was both a ‘pilgrimage’28 19 There

are brief discussions of Kitty—Return to Auschwitz in, for example, Sara Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 95–98; Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televizing the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 193–94; Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 221–24; Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2014), 174–75; Pollock, ‘Holocaust Tourism’, 182–84, and Cole, ‘Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway’, pp. 102–31.

20 Cole,

‘Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway’, 126 (note 4) and Prager, After the Fact, 16. In his Foreword to the 1997 edition of Return to Auschwitz, Stephen Smith describes it as ‘a pioneering film’ (xii). For Tony Kushner it was ‘an important and harrowing television documentary’, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 262. 21 The film won the Commonwealth Film and TV Festival Special Award (1980); the Prix Futura Documentary Award (Berlin 1981); the Royal Television Society Journalism Award for Best Documentary (1981); the American Clarion Award for the Best Network TV Program in the Human Rights Division, and the Tokyo Prize (1985). 22 Peter

Morley, A Life Unwound: Memoirs of a Freelance Producer and Director (New Romney: Bank House Books, 2010), p. 174.

23 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, p. 174.

24 Andy

Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979–2001’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008), 71–94, 74. 25 Insdorf,

Indelible Shadows, 224. She also describes it as ‘a profoundly moving and often shattering story’ (221).

26 Pollock,

‘Holocaust Tourism’, p. 182, 184.

27 Morley,

A Life Unwound, p. 168

28 Morley,

A Life Unwound, p. 169, 174.

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and a profoundly transformative cathartic experience.29 This perceived neediness on Kitty’s part led him to question the ethics and wisdom of such a trip. Indeed, he claims that he only agreed to go ahead when her eldest son, David, a qualified doctor, agreed to accompany her. Kitty, however, maintains David’s involvement was her suggestion, as was filming her testimony in situ in Auschwitz.30 Over the years Kitty has offered a number of explanations of her motives for wanting to make such a film: 1. She owed it to those who died and were unable to tell their own story, to ensure they were not forgotten.31 2. To educate the general public about the Holocaust in general, and Auschwitz in particular, communicating its continuing relevance to the present and thus combat indifference.32 3. Given her belief that Auschwitz was another planet, Kitty was convinced that her testimony about it would be more comprehensible if told on location there. In addition, given that, at the time, Auschwitz was relatively unknown and inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain to westerners, this filmed return by a survivor was the closest the vast majority watching would come to visiting it. 4. To enable David to ‘testify that your mother was here and you’ve been here with me, and tell your children what I’ve told you and shown you, so that it will never be completely erased from history.’33 By accompanying his mother as she re-encountered Auschwitz for the first time since she left in November 1944, and hearing her tell her story in the places where it happened, David becomes a crucial link in the chain of memory, who will be able to preserve and perpetuate his mother’s testimony, particularly when she is no longer able to do so in person. The visit represents a passing of the torch to the second generation and to the wider audience watching the documentary, embodying the principle underpinning Elie Wiesel’s oft-repeated mantra that ‘to listen to a witness is to become a witness’; a principle that underpins programmes 29 Morley

comments that, even more than public and critical acclaim, ‘the most valuable reward of all’ was ‘the lasting effect the return to Auschwitz had on Kitty herself. The film we made produced results that totally changed her attitude to her incarceration and to her survival’, and ‘a new attitude to life in general’. See his ‘Kitty—Return to Auschwitz’, in The Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, eds. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 154–60, p. 159. 30 See, for example, her discussion of the film in her video testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (9 June 1998), interview # 45132, segments # 482– 486. 31 Hart,

Return to Auschwitz, 1982, p. 230.

32 Hart,

Return to Auschwitz, 1982, p. 230.

33 Hart,

Return to Auschwitz, 1982, p. 221.

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such as the March of the Living (https://motl.org/), an international annual educational trip to Poland and Israel, during which Jewish youth visit Holocaust-related sites in the company of survivors, culminating in a pilgrimage from the Arbeit macht frei gate at Auschwitz I to the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau.34 5. Kitty is adamant that an encounter with the material reality of Auschwitz plays an essential role in Holocaust education, even if that encounter is, of necessity, mediated via film.35 She is utterly convinced of the evidential and emotional power of testimony communicated in the places where the events described happened, surrounded by material evidence such as the railway tracks, Rampe, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. It is no coincidence that Kitty has been such an active supporter of HET’s Lessons from Auschwitz project, which is premised on the principle that ‘hearing is not like seeing’ and advocates the pedagogical benefits of daylong educational visits to Auschwitz.36 The film itself has come to exist in three forms: the original circa 90-minute broadcast, a shorter circa 60-minute version for the ABC network and a circa 30-minute version created by Beth Shalom for educational purposes. The original documentary is top and tailed with sequences filmed in Birmingham, and is introduced as one woman’s story. A voiceover explains: for six years as a young girl she fought for her life against the system the Nazis had created to destroy her and all those like her. For two of those years she was a prisoner in Auschwitz…. Now after 34 years, Kitty Hart has decided to 34 See

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Eyewitness Testimony: Elie Wiesel (posted 28 August, 2013), www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxaQM09LPNI; and Eli Rubenstein, ‘The Day Words Failed Elie Wiesel’, Canadian Jewish News (20 July 2016), www. cjnews.com/perspectives/day-words-failed-elie-wiesel. Rubenstein is national director of March of the Living Canada. Wiesel was a staunch supporter of March of the Living from the start, co-leading the first March with Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. 35 Kitty

emotionally writes ‘let’s invite those people who say it never happened, invite them here, and ask them in person to explain these ashes and fragments of bone. And the empty gas canisters they keep in Auschwitz museum – if there were no gassings, where did all those canisters come from and what were they used for? My eyes didn’t play me false. I saw that sort of container being tipped into the vent. And I heard the sounds that followed.’ Return to Auschwitz, 1982, 226, see also p. 221. 36 Lessons

from Auschwitz is a four-part government-subsidised programme that will take a pair of students, aged 16–18, from each post-16 educational establishment to Auschwitz. The centrepiece is the day-long visit to Auschwitz. The visit is preceded by an orientation seminar (including a talk by a Holocaust survivor). Afterwards, there is a follow-up seminar to reflect on the visit and explore what participants had learned from the visit about the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. The fourth and final component is Next Steps, a requirement that to ‘design and carry out a plan to spread the lessons and take action’, becoming ambassadors for the LFA in their own school or local community. For more information see, www.het.org.uk/lessons-from-auschwitz-programme; and Henry Maitles and Paula Cowan, ‘“It Reminded Me of What Really Matters”: Teacher Responses to the Lessons from Auschwitz Project’, Educational Review 64, no. 2 (2012), pp. 131–43.

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go back to Auschwitz, to try to begin to explain what happened and how it happened, and how it was possible to go on living at all.

No mention is made of Kitty’s Jewishness, or that the majority of the victims of Auschwitz were killed because they were Jewish.37 From the outset, the film seeks to establish Kitty’s normality, professional competence, and Englishness, showing her grocery shopping in Safeway then working as a radiographer. It briefly covers her family background and childhood utilising a handful of archival photos and Kitty’s last school report from 1939 (described as ‘the only documentary evidence existing that the Felix family had ever lived in Bielsko’). There is a short account of her experiences prior to Auschwitz, so abridged as to be misleading in places. Kitty then explains why it is so important for her to return. Her poise and voice falter for the first time as she confides: Although I was psychologically ready for Auschwitz when I got there the very first time, I’m not sure whether I’m psychologically ready to go and face it this time. I don’t know what it will do to me to see it. I don’t know if I’ll be as detached as I was when I got there in the first place.

This admission introduces an element of suspense for the viewer (and, Morley insists, for the film crew) as we wonder how she will react as a taxi is shown pulling up outside Birkenau and she and David get out.38 Prior to filming Morley made a number of significant editorial decisions: the film would be in colour, there would be no use of archival footage of Auschwitz,39 and no staging, aside from the small matter of reinserting a survivor into present-day Auschwitz accompanied by her son! There would be no on-screen interviewer asking Kitty questions in Auschwitz. Instead, Kitty and David wore radio microphones and were filmed from a distance, frequently from behind, as the camera—and we the viewers—follow in their footsteps. Morley insists restraint was the governing principle: he, a cameraman and sound recordist kept their distance, recording events as they unfolded. He

37 According to Morley this was because “Kitty doesn’t particularly identify herself as being Jewish. I didn’t want to nail it to the bannerhead at the very beginning. I felt this film should be a new way of perceiving Auschwitz, and there were more non-Jews than Jews killed. I didn’t want this to be another thing about Jews and the Holocaust, but about people who were incarcerated and incinerated there”’ (Interviewed by Insdorf and cited in Indelible Shadows, p. 374 [note 2]). 38 As Pollock observes, Kitty’s initial indecision ‘becomes a potent signifier of what is at stake in the utter perversity of arriving at Auschwitz by cab, as if the place belonged in the realm of ordinary travel, of arrival and departure.’ ‘Holocaust Tourism’, p. 175. 39 Morley’s rationale for this decision was twofold: first, he recognised the immediacy and power of Kitty’s first-hand descriptions; second, the absence of graphic archival imagery meant that the film would be suitable for children to watch, something that was an important consideration if it was, potentially, to serve as an educational resource. Quoted in Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, p. 221.

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issued no instructions or advice to Kitty whilst filming her return visit.40 Interviewed in 2015 Kitty recalled, ‘the film crew were absolutely fantastic. They gave me complete control and freedom to make the documentary the way I wanted it to happen. Everything you see of me in Birkenau was spontaneous and not contrived in the slightest.’41 A voiceover provides links and brief explanatory context, but viewers are given the impression that they are eavesdropping on a private, spontaneous experience, one that is both a survivor’s first encounter with the site since 1944, and a mother struggling to communicate the realities of surviving Auschwitz for nearly two years, and, occasionally, justify herself to her uncomprehending son. David’s role is crucial. He is both insider (a son visibly struggling to understand what Kitty is telling him and to recognise his mother in the person who is in some ways reverting to her ‘Auschwitz self’ before his eyes as she reacquaints herself with, even re-inhabits, Auschwitz as ‘home’). As a non-survivor David is also an outsider, representative of, even standing in for, the viewers. The power of the film lies in this intimacy and its rawness, both in terms of Kitty’s reactions, and the rough edges in the sound and camera work: we occasionally lose visual contact and/or voices become muffled. Morley sought to communicate, he believed for the first time to British viewers, the vastness of Birkenau. He does this by interspersing long shots (Kitty and David as specks in the distance) and shots looking down upon them amongst camerawork that is predominantly at ground and/or eye-level. There are striking panning shots, both of the camp and the interiors of blocks, notably the latrines, a one-minute shot, played out in silence, that stylistically echoes Alain Resnais’ approach in his influential 1955 documentary Nuit et Broulliard (Night and Fog ). Morley seeks to keep things simple in accordance with his mantra of restraint, avoiding drawing viewers’ attention to the presence of the camera, e.g., by complex editing or cinematography. Such restraint sets the film apart, as does the rawness of Kitty’s reactions and her very visible emotion. On a number of occasions her voice falters and she lapses into silence, even breaks down in tears. This is in stark contrast to the poise and matter-of-factness of her later talks, interviews and filmed contributions.42 As filming progresses and she begins to find her bearings her initial uncertainty and inarticulacy dissipates. Kitty becomes increasingly fluent and animated as she retells, occasionally even re-enacts, key incidents from her past for David’s benefit, and, by extension, the viewers.’ She is increasingly brusque, reacting incredulously, even dismissively, to some of 40 Morley,

A Life Unwound, p. 156, 169.

41 Auschwitz

Study Group, Kitty Hart Moxon—Interview, 18 December 2015 [Online], http://www.auschwitzstudygroup.com/articles/4-kitty-hart-moxon-interview. 42 One interviewer observes, ‘her control is rigid because the imperative is to impart the facts, not to release her emotion. She learned how to manage her own mind long ago.’ Louette Harding, ‘One Woman Shares Her Extraordinary Story as a Concentration Camp Survivor’, You Magazine, Mail on Sunday, 24 January 2012, 31.

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David’s comments and questions. Having found her bearings amidst this much-changed landscape, she takes control, leading him from place to place, and, as the memories begin to flow, he can hardly get a word in edgeways. Whilst many of the stories told would be familiar to readers of I am Alive, it is noticeable how, in places, particularly the chapter on her return, her second memoir utilises her language from the film, so that it becomes difficult to untangle which came first, the written or spoken, even incarnated, word. Kitty’s contribution to Another Journey by Train is rooted in, yet fundamentally challenges, her belief in the evidential power of Auschwitz itself as an artefact and as physical, indisputable proof of what happened there. She is convinced that evidence, both in the material form of sites and artefacts, and the testimony of survivors who can say ‘I was there,’ ‘I saw,’ is indisputable. Kitty therefore interprets the four neo-Nazis’ refusal to listen to her and their decision to walk away, literally turning their backs on her, as implicit acknowledgement that no further argument is possible when confronted by such proof. She maintains that the neo-Nazis implicitly accept the truth of what she has to say, but have financial and/or ideological motivations for refusing to admit this, hence her provocative dismissal of them as phoney Nazis. Whilst one can question the motives, indeed ethics, of the filmmakers’ decision to set up filmed encounters between neo-Nazis and three different Holocaust survivors, in three different locations, there is a certain fascination in observing the different strategies the survivors adopt and the varied responses of the neoNazis in each case. Kitty is by far the most confrontational and provocative. She is more self-confident than in her first film, far more certain of herself and her surroundings. If we are to believe Morley when he insists that nothing in his film was staged but rather unfolded spontaneously, the Auschwitz sequence in Another Journey by Train could not be more staged, and is all the more disturbing because of that. Death March and Story of a Lifetime also feature a poised, confident Kitty, one thoroughly at ease telling her story in public and/or on camera. If anything, some of her stories are now almost too polished, and are most powerful when more spontaneous in the telling and less close to the wording of her earlier narrations of these ‘stock’ incidents in her testimony. In these later films Kitty is the confident expert. Present-day Auschwitz is no longer a place of (re-) discovery, but a destination with which she is familiar and where she is increasingly comfortable in her dual role as expert survivor witness and guide. Death March and Story of a Lifetime adopt the very approach Morley rejected. Both feature an on-screen interviewer. Death March was a joint venture between Kitty and Stephen Smith, retracing her post-Auschwitz Holocaust journey first to Gross-Rosen, then the death march, concluding with her liberation in Salzwedel. Kitty recalls: I was convinced that The Holocaust Centre needed to be involved in making this important documentary film. I knew that Stephen would be the right person

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to join me in the project because of his incredible insight and understanding of the events that had taken place. I also hoped that the film would become an addition to the Centre’s extensive archives, where it could possibly be used as a teaching aid for visiting students.43

With its focus on these much less well known, even forgotten sites, the film is presented as a voyage of discovery: will it prove possible to retrace her post-Auschwitz Holocaust journey? There are elements of staging with filming in winter to evoke the appalling conditions of her death march. Viewers are encouraged to believe that this is a spontaneous, unfolding journey, but permission must have been obtained in advance for some of the filming, e.g., inside former factory buildings. Death March uses approximates to stand in for what is absent, e.g., open coal trucks, similar, but subtly different from, the ones Kitty travelled in, whilst an underground cave stands in for the site of the Telefunken factory at Porta Westphalia which is no longer accessible. If Auschwitz was relatively unknown to a British audience in the late 1970s when Kitty—Return to Auschwitz was first broadcast, this is even truer of the death marches in the early 1990s.44 For both Kitty and Smith this seems to be the part of her story that makes least sense given the arbitrary and seemingly random decision-making surrounding the death marches. In an interview in 2015 Kitty reflects on this part of her Holocaust journey, suggesting that ‘the time after Auschwitz was possibly in some parts worse than Auschwitz.’45 Death March is a journey of personal discovery, but is also presented as uncovering significant historical detail, with much made of the discovery of a ‘secret’ telex from Albert Speer demanding the transfer of the Telefunken factory workforce from Poland to Porta Westphalia.46 In the film Smith plays multiple roles, as both insider and outsider, but primarily as a facilitator. In contrast to David’s naïve, even bemused, responses in Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, Smith’s knowledge and professional expertise complements and contextualises Kitty’s personal memories for the benefit of viewers, but he is nevertheless reliant on her acting as translator when they question local inhabitants. There is also evident warmth, even intimacy, in their relationship: they are friends as well as colleagues with a shared commitment to Holocaust education and commemoration. Smith enables Kitty to fulfil her long-held dream of making a second return documentary tracing

43 Kitty Hart-Moxon, ‘Death March’, in Witness: The Holocaust Centre 10 Years On (Laxton, 2005), p. 296. 44 It

is important to note that the film predates Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) by nearly 10 years.

45 Transcript of Caroline Pearce’s interview with Kitty Hart-Moxon for St. Albans Masorti Synagogue, 23 July 2015, http://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/ 128331/SAMS-Roots-Interview-transcript-Kitty-Hart-Moxon.pdf. 46 See,

for example, Kitty Hart-Moxon, ‘Death March’, in Witness, p. 296.

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the final stage of her Holocaust journey. He can open doors for her, facilitating access to some sites that might not otherwise have been possible. He is clearly someone Kitty respects and she is comfortable and relaxed in his company. Smith represents a more informed and knowing version of David: he asks questions, reacts to her stories as if hearing them for the first time, and offers comments or clarifications where he feels they are required for viewers watching at home. Background information and links are provided via John Craven’s measured voiceover, and graphics based on Gilbert’s map are utilised to chart each stage of the journey as it unfolds, helping viewers decode a landscape now containing limited physical traces and markers to enable Kitty to find her bearings. Few local inhabitants admit to knowing about the Nazi past of each location and whether there are any surviving physical traces to be found. Story of a Lifetime: Kitty Hart-Moxon differs in attempting to cover most of her Holocaust journey, whilst also providing an introduction to the role Auschwitz played in the Holocaust. It contains sequences with no direct relevance to her story as Kitty guides the interviewer, Stephen Nolan, around the permanent exhibition at Auschwitz I, where he has a brief exchange with a visitor about the impact the artefacts have had on them. This is the only one of the three films that visits sites (Bielsko, Lublin, and the forest near Zabia Wola) from the early part of Kitty’s Holocaust journey. Much to her annoyance, of many hours of filming, this story is reduced to roughly 25 minutes. As part of a series, the film follows an established format with Nolan as host being a prominent, even dominant, on-screen presence. The episode is as much about his responses to what he hears and sees, as it is about Kitty’s story. He is not a relative or colleague, and there is no obvious rapport or mutual professional respect, as there was with Smith in Death March. Restraint is conspicuous by its absence. The editing is prominent, particularly in sequences filmed in Auschwitz, with numerous ‘arty’ shots, e.g., through the barbed wire fence (including one of a rose on the barbed wire), the camp at different times of day to exploit light and shadow, and so on. Some sequences cut back and forth between shots of Auschwitz I and Birkenau without this being made clear to a viewer unfamiliar with the topography and complexity of the site. There is an intrusive soundtrack, employing music to influence the viewer’s mood. For someone familiar with Kitty’s story, the film is fascinating, particularly the sequences in Bielsko (including her childhood home), Lublin (including the church where she and her parents were helped by a Catholic priest, Fr Krasowski, who provided them with false papers) and the forest. Personally, I found the soundtrack and some of the ‘filler’ shots unnecessary and the editing distracting at times. Yet, when I showed the film to first year undergraduates, many of them found it more accessible than a sequence from Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, partly because of its compactness, and ability to summarise almost her complete Holocaust journey, partly because many found Nolan’s shtick appealing and the occasional comedic element startling, but, also, I suspect,

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because it felt contemporary and modern in contrast to the now rather dated style and ‘look’ of the earlier film. One Day in Auschwitz brings us full circle: it was explicitly conceived as an updating, for the digital/social media age of the early twenty-first century, of Kitty—Return to Auschwitz. Co-produced by the USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Communications to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the film was simultaneously premiered just before international Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2015) in over 220 countries. According to a press release: Now 89, Kitty returns to Auschwitz and shares the inspiring and admirable story of how her and her mother were able to survive despite the practically unimaginable circumstances.47

Whereas Kitty was previously accompanied by her son David, a representative of the second generation, she is now in the company of two girls of the age she was when in Auschwitz. Kelsey Grammer’s voiceover makes the intention clear from the start, whilst also suggesting that this may be Kitty’s last-ever ‘return’ to Auschwitz: ‘now she travels back one last time to answer the questions of a new generation.’ The two girls are Lydia Hollingsworth, a 15-year old pupil from Harpenden (where Kitty now lives), who was deeply moved on hearing Kitty speak at her school, and 17-year old Natalia Smith, the daughter of Stephen Smith, Executive Producer of the film in his current role as Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, who comments that she has known Kitty all her life. The film also features excerpts from an interview with Lucy Hart, Kitty’s granddaughter, representing the third generation, who states: ‘we [Kitty’s grandchildren] are the ultimate proof of her survival. If she hadn’t had the hope here to keep going, I wouldn’t be sitting here.’ What is fascinating are the contrasts between One Day in Auschwitz, filmed in 2014, and Kitty—Return to Auschwitz, filmed in 1978/9. Kitty is palpably ‘at home’ in Auschwitz: she knows exactly what to expect and is a confident, assured, expert guide patiently decoding and explaining the site for the benefit of her two teenage companions. It is striking how more informed the two are than David was when he accompanied Kitty on her first return. They agreed to participate precisely because they had already studied the Holocaust, knew who Kitty was and wanted to be part of this educational project aimed at enabling their peers to share that knowledge through watching the film. The filmic techniques employed could not be more different to the principles adopted by Peter Morley discussed above. One Day in Auschwitz has a

47 Liz Stewart, ‘Discovery Communications Honors 70th Anniversary of AuschwitzBirkenau Liberation with One Day in Auschwitz’, Discovery Communications, 22 January 2015, https://corporate.discovery.com/blog/2015/01/22/discovery-communicationshonors-70th-anniversary-of-auschwitz-birkenau-liberation-with-one-day-in-auschwitz/.

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clear historical and chronological structure,48 as the educational aim underpinning it is to communicate to those born in the twenty-first century what the Holocaust was and the role Auschwitz played within this. This broader historical context is partly communicated via Kelsey Grammer’s voiceover, but predominantly via commentary from Michael Berenbaum and Stephen Smith. Sequences of Kitty and the girls’ visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau are interspersed with filmed interviews with the three reflecting back on their visit. Kitty has a dual role, as both a survivor giving her testimony, and as an expert, equal or surpassing Berenbaum and Smith in authoritatively explaining to viewers the significance of what they are seeing and hearing. Much use is made of graphics and maps, as well as archival photographs and liberation film footage of Auschwitz then, and art created by prisoners, to convey to viewers the realities Kitty is describing but which are inevitably missing in the Auschwitz today that she is showing the two girls around. Although the filmmakers’ agenda is primarily educational (to communicate both the history and the ‘lessons’ of Auschwitz on the 70th anniversary of its liberation), there is also a clear memorial and commemorative aspect to the film. Kitty’s guided tour of Birkenau ends at the pool of ashes, next to the ruins of Kanada and of gas chamber and crematorium IV. Her sense of urgency is palpable as she seeks to communicate to the girls, and viewers at home, the significance of this seemingly innocuous location: Now, what I want to show you is the water. It’s incredibly important to tell you about this water. Men, women, children. All …it’s their final resting place. It’s a cemetery.

One of the last images of the film therefore strives to communicate what is absent, hidden even, by this jarringly verdant, beautiful landscape, and can only be accessed or ‘known’ via the testimony of victims (e.g., the texts buried in the grounds of the crematoria by members of the Sonderkommando) and survivors such as Kitty. After some brief final reflections on why it is so imperative to remember the film ends with the following text: Thirty members of Kitty’s family were murdered by the Nazis, including her father and grandmother. Kitty’s mother, Rosa Felix, lived the rest of her life in Birmingham, England, where she died peacefully in 1974 at age 84.

48 The film is divided into five sections: (1) Kitty’s family background and experiences prior to arriving in Auschwitz; (2) life in the camp, living conditions and the nature of survival; (3) the importance of mutual support and friendships, the importance of ‘organizing’, the ever-present threat of selections, the role of camp hospitals, the constant loss of friends and the temptation of despair and suicide; (4) the gas chambers and crematoria, the importance of resistance and the role of the Sonderkommando (including the uprising of 7 October 1944), Kitty’s experience in Kanada and transfer from Auschwitz; and (5) final reflections.

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Kitty Hart-Moxon currently lives in England. She has two sons and eight grandchildren. She continues to tell her story.

Thus, although film therefore ends on an upbeat positive note, highlighting the role of the survivor in ensuring that the story will be told, lessons learned and the dead not forgotten, viewers are simultaneously reminded that survivors were the exception, not the norm; and that the story of Auschwitz and other killing sites is primarily about the murdered millions of whom there is few, if any trace. If present-day Auschwitz is indeed a ‘cemetery,’ it is a strikingly unconventional one without graves. It is unfortunate that these films, all made with the hope that they would serve as educational tools, are now, with the notable exception of One Day in Auschwitz, unknown and relatively (or almost totally, in the case of Death March) inaccessible. Story of a Lifetime would certainly be a useful resource for teachers were it more widely available. At least Kitty—Return to Auschwitz is widely accessible online and as a DVD, because, although now dated, it remains a powerful and effective early example of a return documentary, and of memory making. Unintentionally, perhaps, all five films capture the Auschwitz site at different points in time. When I show second-year undergraduates taking my module Auschwitz in History and Memory clips of films such as Kitty—Return to Auschwitz and Shoah, I have to point out to those who have not been there that Auschwitz today looks very different. Inevitably, documentaries of return, in exploring the relationship between sites’ past and present, can only capture a particular moment in time and themselves quickly become dated historical artefacts. Kitty has made a number of films, partly because she is trying to capture different aspects of her story in each, but also because she learns from the process of making each one, just as she learns more about her experiences as she continues to read and research her personal history. She is fascinated by the medium of film; perhaps because it can capture a visual trace of the people and places she wishes to remember and wants her audience to learn about. It is as though she feels that she can be more herself in person on film, reaching a wider audience, and have both a more immediate, and—possibly—a more lasting impact than via the written word, particularly if a director gives her freedom and space to be herself, as did Peter Morley, or offers her a degree of editorial input, as with the decision of the USC Shoah Foundation to make her as an Executive Producer of One Day in Auschwitz. These films are fascinating for what they show us about Kitty and how her testimony and her approach to it evolves, what they capture of key locations in her story, what they tell us about the agenda of those who made them and of Holocaust consciousness at the time they were made. For them to be effective educational tools, they need to be more accessible and widely known. Given Kitty’s stature as a survivor and public figure, it is surprising and a shame that she, her memoirs and her films with the exception of Kitty—Return to Auschwitz and One Day in Auschwitz,

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have attracted relatively little public and/or critical attention. This situation is changing, as is evident from Shandler’s detailed and serious discussion of her work, published in 2017. This chapter seeks to build on that by offering a serious initial exploration of her films. That it is included in this Handbook on Britain and the Holocaust is particularly appropriate given her significance as an influential voice and influence on the development of British Holocaust consciousness. Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this chapter were delivered as lectures at the British Association for Holocaust Studies conference 2014 (University of Edinburgh) and at the Holocaust Educational Trust, Educators’ Forum, Leicester, 2014. My thanks to those present for their thoughtful responses.

PART VII

Public Pedagogy

CHAPTER 18

Holocaust Education in England: Concerns, Controversies and Challenges Stuart Foster

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust in schools has a long and established history in England1 and on the surface it would appear that Holocaust education has made considerable progress since it was first established in the curriculum in 1991. Furthermore, not only has the Holocaust maintained its pre-eminent position in the history National Curriculum through 5 major curriculum revisions over the past three decades, but, in the most recent 2014 curriculum iteration, the Holocaust now enjoys the privileged position of being the only compulsory subject of study in the twentieth century for students aged 11–14. Such prominence also has been bolstered by the work of a number of non-governmental organisations, the provision of significant funding from central government and other charitable trusts and the concomitant development of an array of educational materials, study visits, professional development programmes and textbooks for teachers and schools. Equally, 1 See Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York:

Routledge, 2014); Lucy Russell, “Teaching the Holocaust History: Policy and Classroom Perspectives”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2005. Britain has a devolved education system. As a result, funding, policy and curriculum developments vary within the separate nations of the United Kingdom (i.e., England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales). Although it is likely that similar issues and challenges are shared across Britain, this chapter broadly focuses on matters which relate to Holocaust education in England. S. Foster (B) UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_18

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Holocaust education has also been sustained and propelled by a number of significant national initiatives including, for example, the development of the permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2000 and the inauguration of the first of many subsequent “official” Holocaust Memorial Days in 2001.2 More recently the establishment of the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission in 2015 and the commitment to construct a national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre next to the Palace of Westminster, are evidence of a desire to ensure the Holocaust remains prominent in the national consciousness.3 In many respects, therefore, a casual observer might conclude that considerable progress has been made to strengthen the history and memory of the Holocaust in recent decades. And yet, despite these notable developments, a growing body of evidence indicates that far from being secure, there is actually a lack of knowledge and understanding among some teachers and many students.4 This suggests that approaches to Holocaust education and commemoration in schools require careful re-examination and significant change if young people are to develop both a better understanding of the Holocaust and an intelligent appreciation of Britain’s complex and difficult relationship to it. This chapter moves beyond the veneer of Holocaust education rhetoric with its grand and often platitudinous claims to carefully explore the rich body of empirical evidence now available on the subject. In the process, it addresses four vital questions. First, what do teachers and students in England know and understand about the Holocaust and how does this impact their practice and learning? Second, what are some of the principal explanations for salient limitations in knowledge and understanding? Third, what are the implications of these limitations for Holocaust memory and commemoration? Finally, what changes are required to ensure that the history and memory of the Holocaust in Britain is more robustly understood and secured?

2 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain.

3 Cabinet

Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: Cabinet Office, 2015). 4 Stuart

Foster, Alice Pettigrew, Andy Pearce, Rebecca Hale, Adrian Burgess, Paul Salmons, and Ruth-Anne Lenga, What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Institute of Education, 2016); Michael Gray, “Preconceptions of the Holocaust Among Thirteen and Fourteen Year Olds in English Schools”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Institute of Education, University of London, 2014; Alice Pettigrew, Stuart Foster, Jonathan Howson, Paul Salmons, RuthAnne Lenga, and Kay Andrews, Teaching About the Holocaust in English Secondary School: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practice (London: Institute of Education, 2009).

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Teachers’ and Students’ Knowledge and Understanding of the Holocaust Despite being a staple in the history National Curriculum throughout its existence, no formal guidance has ever been offered to teachers on fundamental issues regarding how, what, when, for how long, and why a complex and emotive subject such as the Holocaust should be taught.5 Rather, reference to the Holocaust within the broader framework of the National Curriculum throughout its various iterations has been consistently shorn of specific advice, recommendations, or even requirements.6 As a result, despite the various claims of impact made by various Holocaust organisations and educators, for several decades almost nothing was systematically known about teachers’ classroom practice. This situation changed in 2009. With the publication of Teaching About the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practice authored by researchers at the Institute of Education, detailed insights into how the subject was being taught in schools across England became available. Based on the survey responses of more than 2000 teachers and detailed interviews, this research shone light on a range of questions whose answers had hitherto been unknown. This included matters of curriculum (the subjects in which the Holocaust was taught, age groups, the duration of teaching), approach (teachers’ aims and rationale, definitions of the Holocaust, subject knowledge and expertise) and pedagogy (chosen content, resources, assessment strategies). In some aspects, the IOE’s landmark research demonstrated that teachers in England were very positive about, and devoted to, teaching about the Holocaust. For example, 94.7% of teachers stated that it would always be important to teach about the Holocaust in school and 85.1% agreed that it should be a compulsory part of the secondary school curriculum. Nevertheless, whilst the study featured some encouraging findings, in general it presented a troubling picture of the state of Holocaust teaching and learning in England. Attention 5 Stuart

Foster Eleni Karayianni, “Portrayals of the Holocaust in English History Textbooks, 1991–2016: Continuities Challenges and Concerns.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3) (2017): 314–344; Nicholas Kinloch, “Learning About the Holocaust: Moral or Historical Question?” Teaching History 93 (1998): 44–46; Andy Pearce, “The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3): 231–263; Alice Pettigrew, “Why Teach or Learn About the Holocaust? Teaching Aims and Student Knowledge in English Secondary Schools.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3) (2017): 263–288; Lucy Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History (London: Continuum, 2006); Paul Salmons, “Teaching or Preaching? The Holocaust and Intercultural Education in the UK.” Intercultural Education 14 (2) (2003): 139–149; Geoffrey Short, “Teaching About the Holocaust: A Consideration of Ethical and Pedagogic Issues.” Educational Studies 20 (1) (1994): 53–67; Idem., “Learning from Genocide? A Study in the Failure of Holocaust Education?” Intercultural Education 16 (4) (2005): 367–380.

6 Pettigrew,

et al., Teaching About the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools; Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain.

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to four areas of concern potentially illustrates some of the key issues identified in the 132-page study. The first salient issue of concern identified in the 2009 study related to how teachers “defined” the Holocaust. Significantly, almost two-thirds of teachers embraced an inclusive definition of the Holocaust which incorporated a range of victim groups (e.g., Jews, ‘Gypsies’, disabled people, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners or war, Black people, and other political and ethnic groups). In so doing, therefore, the majority of teachers employed a definition of the Holocaust that ran counter to the general consensus of academic historians and the pedagogical guidelines of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)7 which commonly emphasise that, with the possible exception of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti, it was only the Jewish population who were targeted for complete annihilation within Europe. As a consequence, leading scholars and authorities in the field argue that, although it is very important that students appreciate multiple victims of Nazi persecution and murder existed, a more precise definition (which focuses on the victimisation of European Jewry) is essential. Within the realm of definitions, the research revealed two overarching issues. First, very few teachers had fully considered the importance of establishing a clear definition of the Holocaust. Second, that in order to make the subject more “relevant” for students, too often teachers reverted to an inclusive definition which incorporated all victims. Unfortunately, this tendency to treat all victim groups in a similar manner in order to emphasise the generic evils of prejudice and discrimination, appeared to inhibit a more thoughtful understanding of the individual and distinctive experiences of each victim group. The second overarching issue of concern (intrinsically related to the first) focuses on how the 2009 research also demonstrated teachers’ widespread confusion over the aims of teaching about the Holocaust. In overview, an overriding tension appeared to exist between those teachers who presented the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon and those who sought to draw broader ‘universal lessons’ (e.g., tackling racism, challenging prejudice, respecting diversity) often divorced from any specific historical context. Of note, the research revealed that the vast majority of teachers (approximately 70%) taught about the Holocaust as a ‘universal warning’ with the aim

7 The

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance unites governments and experts to strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance and to uphold the commitments to the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. “The IHRA (formerly the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, or ITF) was initiated in 1998 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson. Today the IHRA’s membership consists of 31 member countries. IHRA has produced educational guidelines for teachers which cover nine primary areas including recommendations on “why, what and how to teach about the Holocaust”. The guidelines are internationally recognised as the key guiding principles for intelligent and sensitive Holocaust education (see, www.holocaustremembrance.com/educational-materials).

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of addressing broader trans-disciplinary goals such as ‘understanding the ramifications of racism and prejudice’ and/or ‘learning the lessons of the Holocaust to ensure that it never happens again’. For many teachers, therefore, the Holocaust appeared as a surrogate for, or symbol of, more universal dangers. As one teacher explained: It’s trying to make them realise that it is not something, which is one country, or one particular set of circumstances - that actually maybe it is something deeper about the human condition. It’s something that actually exists within all of us.

In direct contrast to this focus on universal goals, other teachers (approximately 25–30% of the sample), were keen to focus more specifically on understanding and explaining the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon in order that they could determine their own views on its significance and contemporary relevance. Accordingly, one history teacher argued: I mean, in very simple terms, my aim really is for the students to understand and appreciate how this is a significant event in history…. But, I don’t think it’s my job to tell them the morality of this. It is for them to work it out.

The obvious tension between these two polarised aims in teaching about the Holocaust has, of course, been identified in previous writing and research studies8 and they remain hugely significant. Arguably, however, it is potentially problematic that the vast majority of teachers appeared not to emphasise the historical and contingent context in which the Holocaust took place. Indeed, the absence of such important contextual knowledge appeared to lead to simplistic generalisations and abstract universal lessons—an outcome that arguably is particularly troubling in a subject in which so many popular myths and misconceptions prevail. In addition to a focus on teachers’ definitions and aims, the third area of the 2009 study that warrants particular scrutiny relates to teachers’ content choices. In the study, attention was given to what specific topics and issues

8 See for instance: Susan Hector, “Teaching the Holocaust in England” in Teaching the Holocaust: Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, edited by Ian Davies (London: Continuum, 2000): 105–116; Kinloch, “Learning About the Holocaust”; Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness; Pettigrew, “Why Teach or Learn About the Holocaust?”; Russell, Teaching About the Holocaust; Salmons, ‘“Teaching or Preaching?”’; Short, “Teaching About the Holocaust”; Idem., “Learning About Genocide”; Carrie Supple, “The Teaching of the Nazi Holocaust in North Tyneside, Newcastle and Northumberland Secondary Schools”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle: University of Newcastle, 1992; Samuel Totten, Stephen Feinberg, and William Fernekes. 2001. “The Significance of Rationale Statements in Developing a Sound Holocaust Education Program” in Teaching and Studying the Holocaust, edited by Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001): 1–16.

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teachers prioritised when teaching about the Holocaust.9 Teachers were, therefore, given a list of 35 “content topics” and asked to indicate along a five-point scale which they “never” taught to those they “always” taught. Understanding teachers’ rationales and priorities when making content choices was also a key focus during follow-up interviews. In broad overview, two content areas appeared to dominate teachers’ coverage of this period. The first, focused on the events of the 1930s in Germany (including Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi state; propaganda and stereotyping; increasing persecution of the Jews; the Nuremberg Laws; “Kristallnacht ”). The second, typically involved an explicit and extended focus on events and actions surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the surface, of course, some attention to these content areas is both legitimate and understandable. However, their very narrow and specific focus raises a number of significant issues. First and foremost, teachers’ content choices appeared to promote what might be described as a “Hitler-centric” and “perpetrator-oriented narrative.” In other words, the primary focus of teaching centred on what Hitler and the Nazis did to Jews and other victim groups without any serious attention to the personal narratives, history, agency and actions of the victims themselves. Many pedagogical experts and international Holocaust organisations, however, strongly suggest that students are unable to fully grasp the devastating impact of the Holocaust unless they know about pre-war Jewish life and the vibrancy of centuries-old Jewish communities throughout Europe. Unfortunately, however, the research revealed that very few teachers appeared to include this vital contextual knowledge and disciplinary understanding in their teaching. In a similar vein, teachers content choices indicated that the victims of the Holocaust typically were presented as a silent, anonymous and passive mass of people to whom things were done, rather than individuals who actively responded to the unfolding genocide. A second significant criticism of teacher content choices relates to a limited focus on important stages in the development of the Holocaust during the war years. For example, the 2009 study revealed that the radicalisation of Nazi policy from 1939, including the establishment of ghettos, the Wannsee Conference, the mass murders by the Einsatzgruppen, and the execution of Operation Reinhard (which resulted in the gassing of some 2 million Jews), were among the topics least likely to be taught in English schools. Limited attention also appeared to be given to the actions of Nazi collaborators across Europe with the potential consequence that few students would leave the classroom with any clear sense that the Holocaust was a continent-wide genocide involving the complicity and collaboration of millions of people. The fourth and final area of critique focuses on teachers’ knowledge of the Holocaust. Of note, although the researchers recognised that mapping 9 For the full list of content topics provided see Pettigrew et al., Teaching About the Holocaust in English Secondary School, Appendix V, pp. 124–125.

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teachers’ knowledge was a complex undertaking, the study revealed that many teachers had significant knowledge gaps. For example, only 48 of the 1816 teachers (2.6%) who responded to a series of six, single answer, multiple choice questions provided correct responses to every question, and only 687 teachers (37.8%) either provided one correct answer or answered every question incorrectly. These knowledge-based questions focused on key areas (e.g., victims of Nazi persecution; the names and locations of major killing centres; the British government’s response to the Holocaust; when and where the Holocaust took place). One knowledge-based question, for example, asked teachers what, in percentage terms, was the Jewish population in Germany in 1933. Teachers were offered 5 choices: more than 30%; approximately 15%; approximately 5%; less than 1%; not sure. The purpose of the question was to explore the extent to which teachers knew that the pre-war population was very small (i.e., less than 1% of the population). For, as Yehuda Bauer has argued, a striking and unprecedented feature of the Holocaust was the irrational way that a small, and traditionally loyal minority group was characterised as an existential and ubiquitous threat, to be eliminated at all costs.10 Of note, only a third of history and 20% of citizenship, English and religious education teachers provided the correct answer (i.e., less than 1%). Many teachers significantly exaggerated the pre-war Jewish population in Germany, with 40% of citizenship teachers, for example, overestimating the percentage by 15 or 30 times. Although this individual example can only provide a brief insight into levels of teacher knowledge, the collective failure of many teachers to correctly answer important knowledge-based questions does raise issues of potential concern. In overview, therefore, the 2009 national study of Holocaust teaching identified a series of significant issues. It strongly suggested that teachers often employed problematic definitions of the Holocaust, appeared confused over aims, lacked important chronological and contextual knowledge and typically focused on content which privileged Hitler and Germany-centred, perpetrator narratives. Furthermore, teachers commonly revealed that they found the Holocaust a difficult, complex and emotive subject to teach. On the basis of the study little doubt exists that many teachers often are ill-equipped to teach about the Holocaust in profound and meaningful ways. Of significance, 83% of teachers declared themselves “self-taught” with only a very small number having received any form of specialist professional development during their teaching career. In many respects, the findings of the 2009 “teacher” study alerted those in the field of Holocaust education to the serious national challenges that existed. Indeed, the scale of these challenges was brought into stark relief in 2016 with the publication of the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education’s groundbreaking study, What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools. Focused on the views of more than 10 Yehuda

Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

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8500 secondary school students in England it represented the most comprehensive and detailed study of Holocaust education ever produced anywhere in the world. The primary aim of the research was to provide a detailed national portrait of students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust in order that informed decisions could be made about how to improve teaching and learning.11 In overview, the study employed a mixed methods approach incorporating two core elements. First, a detailed 91-item survey was completed by 7952 students (including multiple choice, Likert-scale and free text questions). Second, a series of 49 focus-group interviews were conducted with 244 students in a range of schools across England. The survey and the interviews generated a wealth of data that permitted careful and complex analysis and resulted in a richly detailed 274-page final report. As with the teachers’ study of 2009, some of the research findings were positive and offered some promising foundations from which to build. For example, 83% of secondary school students surveyed believed the Holocaust was important to study, 81.8% found the subject interesting and 70% expressed a desire to learn more. The study also revealed that by age 15, 85% of students had learned about the Holocaust within school and most were familiar with the term. At some level at least, it appeared that the Holocaust had entered the consciousness of significant numbers of young people and this experience was generally perceived to be worthwhile and of interest. Furthermore, student knowledge and understanding typically improved with age and it commonly appeared more robust among students studying history aged 17–18. Nevertheless, despite these broadly positive findings, closer analysis revealed that significant numbers of students typically lacked core knowledge and many often harboured troubling myths and misconceptions about the Holocaust. For example, although students commonly knew that Jews were the victims of the genocide, most students were unable to articulate why Jews were attacked and most failed to recognise that the intention of the Nazis to murder all Jews everywhere they could reach them was a defining feature of the Jewish experience. Revealingly, 68% did not know what “antisemitism” meant and most appeared unaware of its long history and the racial dimensions of Nazi antisemitism. Many students’ understandings of the Holocaust also were often based on crude and ill-informed generalisations. For example, although 90% of students correctly identified Jews as victims, very few could precisely say what differentiated Jews from other identified victim groups (e.g., gay men, disabled people, Roma and Sinti). Typically, students erroneously assumed that all Nazi victims were targeted and treated in similar ways, chiefly because they were “different”. This apparent lack of salient knowledge appeared to inhibit deeper 11 It

is important to note that schools which had worked closely with the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education did not participate in the study. In other words, the national study was designed to reveal practice that was not directly influenced by the Centre.

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understanding of the Holocaust. Indeed, it led to the tendency for many students to lump all victim groups together as a faceless mass with no agency and stood in the way of an empathetic and contextual understanding of the diverse experiences of the victims. It also appeared to prevent any intelligent explanation of what caused the Holocaust and—without any appreciation of the vibrancy of life before the war—what was lost as a result of its devastation. Another cause for concern revealed by the research was that 73.9% of students overestimated the pre-war Jewish population in Germany by 15– 30 times and a third massively underestimated the scale of the murder, with 10.3% appearing to believe that no more than 100,000 Jews were killed. Similarly, many students appeared to accept stereotypical myths about the power, influence and size of the Jewish population in pre-war Germany and very few had any appreciation of the diversity of Jewish society and culture before the Second World War. If many students appeared confused over the distinctive experiences of different victim groups, the vast majority similarly had a very narrow understanding of who was responsible for perpetrating the Holocaust. For example, more than half (56.1%) of 11–14 year olds believed the Holocaust was solely attributable to Hitler and 81.9% ascribed responsibility to Hitler and/or the Nazis. Fewer than 10% attributed any blame or responsibility to the German people. Typically, students in Years 7–9 had a very limited understanding of the Nazis often seeing them as an elite paramilitary group rather than a political party that enjoyed the popular support of more than 13 million Germans in July 1932. Commonly missing from student responses, therefore, was knowledge of how many Germans—and citizens in other occupied states across Europe—were complicit. Indeed, this narrow Hitlercentric focus and the absence of important contextual knowledge appeared to inhibit students’ explanation and understanding of how and why the web of complicity extended across Europe and the extent to which vast numbers of “ordinary people” willingly participated in genocide, either out of greed, conviction, or peer pressure.12 In keeping with the dominance of students’ Hitler-centric focus, many also had a very German-centric view of the Holocaust and its geographical reach. For example, 50.7% incorrectly believed that the largest number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust came from Germany and 54.9% believed that mass murder occurred in Germany, not German-occupied Poland. Students 12 David

Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London: MacMillan, 2016); Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); Robert Welker, “Searching for the Educational Imperative in Holocaust Curricula” in New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars, edited by Rochelle Millen (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 99–121.

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also had a limited chronological and geographical understandings of the Holocaust. Most, for example, were unaware of the shifting nature of Nazi policy under the cover of war in Poland and other occupied countries and few were able to explain how the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 accelerated the process of mass killing. Of significance, for example, only 7.4% students understood that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the event that primarily “triggered the organised mass killing of Jews”, with 40.2% erroneously believing that mass killing began immediately after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Typically, students’ familiarity with mass killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau (or more accurately at Auschwitz) dominated students’ understanding of the “Final Solution”. Indeed, whereas, 71% recognised that Auschwitz was explicitly connected to the Holocaust, very few students associated Treblinka (14.9%) and Bergen-Belsen (15.2%) with it. Similarly, only a very small minority of students had any knowledge of the brutality of the “Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe—which some historians believe may have accounted for more than 2 million deaths13 —and, revealingly, only 24.3% recognised the term Einsatzgruppen. Students also appeared uncertain about how the Holocaust ended. For example, fewer than half of all students (46.1%) correctly knew the “end” of the Holocaust (in terms of mass killing) came as a result of the Allied liberation of lands occupied by the German army. Overall, therefore, students’ chronological and geographical knowledge of the Holocaust appeared weak and, as a consequence, their ability to identify key developments, turning points and important historical context was severely impeded. As suggested above, not enough space exists here to detail all the problems, issues and challenges identified in the 2016 study. It is, however, worth ending this overview with a brief reflection on what students appeared to know about Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust. In summary, survey responses indicated that most students operated with a very limited and often erroneous understanding of this aspect of British history. For example, 34.4% incorrectly reasoned that the Holocaust triggered Britain’s entry into war and a further 17.6% of students believed the British drew up rescue plans to save the Jews. Almost a quarter of students (23.8%) also incorrectly thought the British government did not know about the Holocaust until the end of the war in 1945. Evidence from both the survey and focus-group interviews clearly demonstrated that many students were ill-equipped to answer and assess vital and challenging issues such as: when and what Britain knew; what choices and 13 Michael

Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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possibilities were open to Britain and her Allies; and what actions were and were not taken. Of potential concern, it appeared that in the absence of robust substantive knowledge, many students reverted to common myths and misconceptions about Britain’s role which for the most part celebrated British actions and responses. For example, in interview students typically reasoned that Britain could not have known about the mass killing of Jews during the war otherwise they would have done something about it. Overall, what emerged most strongly was that students generally were unaware that Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust was highly complex and inherently controversial. It is, therefore, telling that despite the Holocaust being a salient feature of the history National Curriculum for more than a quarter of a century, few students were able to critically reflect on the complexities of Britain’s role during the Holocaust or challenge widespread and inaccurate representations.

Accounting for Limitations in Teachers’ and Students’ Knowledge and Understanding Accounting for the apparent limitations in both teachers’ and students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust is not a straightforward matter. That said, two broad explanations, which draw on my earlier work, appear salient.14 The first overarching explanation relates to the influence of prevailing educational structures, contexts and priorities. In terms of curricula, the Holocaust may be the only twentieth-century topic mandated in the history National Curriculum for 11–14 year olds, but its position is increasingly vulnerable. This troubling paradox stems from introduction of the Academies Act of 2010 whereby the government decreed that academies (which now amount to almost three-quarters of all secondary schools in England) no longer have to follow the National Curriculum. It is too early to tell what impact this will have in individual academies, but the very fact that teaching about the Holocaust is no longer mandatory in most secondary schools potentially threatens its educational salience. Nevertheless, even before the Academies Act was passed, no specific guidelines existed on how much curriculum time to devote to the Holocaust. Research suggested that typically schools spent 6 hours per year teaching the subject, however practice varied considerably.15 In recent decades increasing political pressure on schools to focus on the core subjects of maths, English and science has also led to a

14 Foster

et al., What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust?; Stuart Foster, “Myths, Misconceptions and Mis-Memory: Holocaust Education in England” in Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings, edited by Andy Pearce (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 239–256.

15 Pettigrew

et al., Teaching About the Holocaust.

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decline in the curriculum time allocated to history16 and this will undoubtedly continue to limit attention to teaching about the Holocaust in schools. These serious curriculum issues are further exacerbated by the fact that, unlike most other Western nations, the study of history in England is not mandatory for students after the age of 14. Indeed, only about a third of students study history aged 14–16 and only 6% study the subject from 16 to 18, and very few of these older history students will have opportunities to study the Holocaust in their final four years of schooling.17 The implications of these developments are very serious, as recent research reveals that whereas students who have studied the Holocaust in the final years of their schooling typically acquire more developed contextual and conceptual knowledge, those who opt not to study history beyond aged 14 have much more limited and problematic understandings. In terms of curriculum policy, therefore, it is deeply ironic that although recent governments have repeatedly championed the importance of Holocaust education and commemoration, its place in the school curriculum currently is considerably weaker than it was in previous decades. Due to the indeterminate and increasingly precarious position of the Holocaust in the school curriculum it is perhaps not surprising that teachers often have not considered the subject an educational priority. Furthermore, as very few students studying the Holocaust encounter it in examination courses, teachers often do not feel compelled to teach it in depth and with rigour. Of course, this does not mean that teachers don’t believe the Holocaust to be important, it does however potentially impact how the subject is approached and the levels of preparation and support that teachers receive. Indeed, one of the most significant findings of the 2009 research was, although many teachers found teaching the Holocaust to be very complex, challenging and emotive, 83% claimed not to have received any specialist professional development in the subject. Accordingly, despite some government investment in this area, it appears that not enough teachers have enjoyed access to high quality, research-informed professional development courses.18 Arguably it is this lack of access to co-ordinated, evidence-based and historically informed professional development that in large measure explains why teachers do not employ a critical and informed approach, but too often choose to teach the Holocaust in simplistic, reductive and lesson-centric ways. It also potentially explains why student knowledge and understanding very often is limited and underdeveloped. 16 David Canadine, Jenny Keating, and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 17 Foster 18 A

et al., What Do Students Know and Understand? pp. 215–216.

key problem for schools is the difficulty of releasing teachers from their daily teaching duties to attend professional development courses. With increasing pressure on school budgets, many schools are reluctant to pay for supply or substitute teachers to “cover” teacher participation on courses. Thus, fewer teachers are able to access professional development courses.

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Given the limitations in teachers’ knowledge and understanding it might be expected that professionally published school textbooks might help improve how the Holocaust is taught. Of note, 67% of teachers surveyed in the 2009 research study revealed they typically used textbooks to support learning. Many understandably believed that textbooks produced by recognised publishing companies would provide secure and accurate information and enhance teaching and learning. Unfortunately, however, a number of studies which have focused on the content and quality of history textbooks used in England are extremely critical of the way the Holocaust is portrayed.19 Astonishingly, rather than improving the quality of teaching and learning, these studies evidence how textbooks often perpetuate existing inaccuracies, myths and misconceptions. Overall, therefore, within the context of education many factors exist to help explain why teachers’ and students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust often is fragmentary and limited. These deficiencies often stem from poorly enforced national curriculum frameworks, a lack of emphasis on the Holocaust in national examinations, potentially harmful policy initiatives (e.g., academisation), limitations on teachers’ access to high-quality professional development and the widespread employment of inadequate school textbooks. The reasons for the multifarious limitations exposed by the 2009 and 2016 studies cannot, however, solely be attributed to failings within the education system. For teachers and students are situated within a broader socio-cultural context which both shapes and influences how individuals experience and interpret the world around them.20 The second factor that potentially explains why students and teachers often have a limited understanding of the Holocaust, therefore, relates to the way it is portrayed and perpetuated in the broader culture. Of significance, although the UCL’s 2016 study revealed that 66% of all students (aged 11–18) and 85% of students in Year 10 or above had learned about the Holocaust outside the classroom, as indicated above, their knowledge and understanding was typically weak. In other words, it appeared that student engagement with the Holocaust outside of the classroom did not

19 Peter Carrier, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Torben Messinger, The International Status of Education About the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula (Paris: UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, 2015); Stuart Foster and Adrian Burgess, “Problematic Portrayals and Contentious Content: Representations of the Holocaust in English History Textbooks.” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 5 (2) (2013): 20–38; Foster and Karayianni, “Portrayals of the Holocaust in English History Textbooks”; Barbara Wenzeler, “The Presentation of the Holocaust in German and English School History Textbooks: A Comparative Study.” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 3 (2) (2003): 107–118. 20 Doyle

E. Stevick and Deborah Michaels. 2013. “Empirical and Normative Foundations of Holocaust Education: Bringing Research and Advocacy into Dialogue.” Intercultural Education 24 (1–2) (2013): 1–18.

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improve their knowledge and understanding and arguably, in some cases, it seemed to impede it. Students encounter the Holocaust outside formal schooling in a range of ways and through a variety of media (e.g., through books, newspapers, magazines, television, film, theatre, the Internet, family stories, visits to museums and educational centres). The UCL study, for example, showed that 49% of students (Years 9–13)21 had read a book related to the Holocaust and 87.4% of students (Years 9–13) had watched a TV programme or a film about the Holocaust outside of the classroom. More detailed studies are needed to fully appreciate how students’ encounters with the Holocaust through popular culture impact their understanding and it is not possible here to fully outline existing scholarship on this issue. Nevertheless, perhaps one example, the film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , serves to illustrate how particular representations in popular culture can potentially have a negative impact on students’ understandings. The 2016 UCL study showed that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, adapted from John Boyne’s book of the same title, was seen by 84.4% of students who indicated they had watched a film about the Holocaust. This was by far the most watched film, with Schindler’s List (seen by 30.2%) as the second most viewed film. Essentially, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas tells the story of events surrounding a Nazi extermination camp through the eyes of two 8-year-old boys (i.e., the son of the Nazi commandant and a Jewish inmate of the nearby camp). Distributed internationally by Walt Disney studios, the film has been commercially successful. Significantly, however, it has been widely criticised by many historians and educators.22 For example, Michael Gray insists that the film is “highly problematic in terms of its historical inaccuracy and the questionable nature of the moral lessons it teaches.”23 Arguably, the most egregious representation of the Holocaust was the way in which the film suggests that most Germans (including the family of the camp commandant) did not know what was happening to the Jews. As such David Cesarani denounced the film as “utterly implausible…a travesty of facts… a distortion of history which, incredibly turns Germans into victims of the Holocaust.”24 Overall, little doubt exists that the film is riddled with historical inaccuracies and perpetuates common myths and misconceptions (e.g., many Germans were ignorant of the treatment and fate of the Jews, or that responsibility rested with the Nazi elite and did not involve the complicity of “ordinary people”). Unfortunately, however, students do not typically appear to have the 21 Years

9–13 broadly includes students who are 14–18 years of age.

22 David

Cesarani, “From the Pulpit: Striped Pyjamas.” Literary Review 359 (3) (2008); Michael Gray, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 20 (3) (2014): 109–136; Foster et al., What Do Students Know and Understand?. 23 Gray,

“Preconceptions of the Holocaust”, p. 178.

24 Cesarani,

“From the Pulpit”.

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knowledge-base or critical faculties to challenge such a problematic portrayal. Gray for example, reported, “many pupils appeared to accept it [the film] at face value”25 and Foster et al. noted how students in interview often referred to the film as “truthful” or “realistic” which, according to one student, helped them to get “to know what it was really like for Jews in World War II.”26 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas does not, of course, sit in isolation. In fact, the hugely popular film perfectly exemplifies what Cesarani described as “the yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject.”27 It is also typical of common representations of the Holocaust circulating in British culture and indicative of the general desire to present crude moral fables or simplistic lessons for instrumental and universalistic reasons. In so doing, however, these portrayals do violence to the historical record and, by extension to the knowledge and understanding of young people. As Paul Salmons argues, “The problem with such representations is that they are so popular precisely because they give the illusion of addressing the Holocaust while actually avoiding its most challenging issues” (e.g., about broader complicity and collaboration).28 Overall, therefore, given the ubiquity of such bland and simplistic representations of the Holocaust in British culture, it is perhaps not surprising that students’ understandings are so often distorted and impoverished.

Implications for Commemoration, Memory and Education As we consider how Holocaust education can be further developed and improved and as we move closer to the establishment of the Holocaust Learning Centre and Memorial in London, it is vital to re-think carefully the important relationships between commemoration, history, collective memory and education. This chapter has primarily focused on teaching and learning about the Holocaust and the limitations and challenges of existing school practice. It has also, albeit briefly, attempted to offer some dominant explanations for ongoing problems in the current educational landscape. The remainder of this chapter will now be devoted to a broad analysis of the implications of existing educational practice for collective memory, commemoration and historical understanding. To begin with the most obvious implication is that if students have an inaccurate understanding of the history of the Holocaust, how can they make meaning from it? This concern is perceptively advanced by Deborah Dwork 25 Gray,

“Preconceptions of the Holocaust”, p. 174.

26 Foster

et al., What Do Students Know and Understand? p. 93.

27 Cesarani, 28 Paul

Final Solution, xxv.

Salmons, “This Holocaust Memorial Day Don’t Oversimplify the Story” (2014). Online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/6335ae00-2cdc-371d8619-6976e7035050, accessed 9 February, 2018.

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who asserts “if the point of studying the past is to help us understand the present, students’ knowledge about the Holocaust is insufficient to help them negotiate the world in which they live.”29 Furthermore, it raises the issue of when young people “commemorate” or “remember” the Holocaust, what exactly is it that they are commemorating and remembering? Accordingly, Foster et al. argue: How secure is Holocaust memory if students: • don’t know more about the people they are commemorating? • don’t really understand why and how the Holocaust happened? • don’t understand the catastrophic impact of the Holocaust on millions of individuals and broader European society and culture.30

Unfortunately, in many instances it appears that rather than have a robust understanding of the historical Holocaust, most students seemed to be attracted to a “mythical” Holocaust. As Tim Cole and Duncan Bell have argued, attention to the emergence of a “mythical” Holocaust is not to claim that it did not exist, but rather to suggest that its representation is explicitly tied to narratives which evoke strong feelings and address contemporary values, often at the expense of historical accuracy.31 In this respect, in British culture the Holocaust has acquired powerful symbolic and universal significance in its demonstration of how initial prejudice and discrimination can ultimately lead to genocide. The problem with advancing a mythic Holocaust which presents a binary narrative of good versus evil (often resulting in simplistic “lessons”) is that it does an injustice to many of the complex and troubling aspects of this history. As Bauer argues, this attempt to misuse and “to distil the complexity of the Holocaust into a moral fable is bound to lead to oversimplification, halfunderstandings and superficial knowledge.”32 For example, as noted earlier, very few students appreciated the way in which “ordinary people” willingly participated in persecution and mass murder. In fact, student knowledge of large-scale collaboration and complicity both in Germany and across Europe was largely absent. This is, of course, a hugely significant issue. For, if young people do not have any understanding of how people throughout Europe 29 Deborah Dwork, “A Critical Assessment of a Landmark Study.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3) (2017): 385–395. 388. 30 Foster

et al., What Do Students Know and Understand? p. 219.

31 Tim

Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999); Duncan Bell, “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity.” British Journal of Sociology 54 (1) (2003): 63–81. 32 Yehuda

Bauer, “Foreword” to What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools, Stuart Foster, Alice Pettigrew, Andy Pearce, Rebecca Hale, Adrian Burgess, Paul Salmons, and Ruth-Anne Lenga (London: UCL Institute of Education, 2016): xi.

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became complicit in the Holocaust, they will fail to address one of its most compelling questions: How was it that not very long ago and not very far away, people conspired in the murder of their neighbours? Furthermore, this lack of knowledge and understanding will prevent students from asking meaningful questions about their own personal responsibility and agency in contemporary society. Indeed, it is only through engagement with the historical Holocaust and the particular context of the time that students can begin to consider such profound and troubling questions as: why did people act as they did? What would I have done? What relevance does this have for society today? In a similar vein, as detailed earlier, when considering who was responsible for the Holocaust most students focused on the actions of Hitler and his coterie of leading Nazis. For example, very few students appeared to appreciate that the persecution of the Jews did not begin with Hitler but was a feature of European history for centuries. In other words, very few understood that in the particular and contingent context of the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler tapped into and exploited deep-seated antisemitic prejudices already prevalent in German and European culture. Furthermore, the research revealed that very, very few students had even a very rudimentary understanding of the complex and often chaotic way that Nazi policy was implemented during the Holocaust. For most, its implementation was a simple matter of top-down orders being followed almost in blind obedience by soldiers, civilians, operatives and collaborators in local contexts. Such an understanding, of course, flies in the face of historical scholarship which has exposed this dominant myth to be untrue.33 Tom Lawson asserts, students’ understanding is “depressingly out of step with modern historiography…. Indeed, for many historians it was the lack of command and control, and central direction—in other words the chaotic nature of the state—that drove policy onwards.”34 Another troubling and widespread misunderstanding relates to students’ appreciation of where the victims of the Holocaust originated. For, a key finding of the UCL study was that a majority (50.7%) of students erroneously believed that the largest number of Jews murdered came from Germany. Lawson suggests, it is “difficult to exaggerate the significance of this statement. After all, if students do not understand where the victims of the Holocaust originated, they have almost no understanding of what was destroyed—in terms of the sheer variety of Jewish cultures and communities that perished.”35 33 See for instance, Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution; Browning, Ordinary Men; Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Idem, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Vintage, 2005); Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 34 Tom Lawson, “Britain’s Promise to Forget: Some Historiographical Reflections on What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust ?” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3) (2017): 345–363. 352. 35 Ibid.,

p. 359.

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Potentially, more problematic however, is that this ignorance suggests a lack of understanding of why Jews were targeted in the first place and, disturbingly, may derive from the false understanding (aggressively propagated by the Nazis) that Jews were an existential threat with considerable power and influence in Germany. Attention to these brief examples clearly exposes how students’ lack of knowledge act as significant barriers to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the Holocaust and intelligent considerations of its contemporary significance. They also demonstrate how myths and misconceptions can develop and crystallise in educational settings. For Pettigrew the implications for education are starkly apparent. She argues that “schools must do more than simply reproduce or reinforce the (mis)understandings and ‘common sense’ assumptions that many, if not most, of their students are likely already to have acquired.”36 The authors of the 2016 UCL report arrive at similar conclusions. They assert that “one of the most important aims of Holocaust should be to deepen young people’s knowledge and understanding of this history in order to develop their own independent capacity for critical thinking.”37 They argue: …educational spaces must be found or reclaimed in which it is possible to critically examine, deconstruct and challenge many of the core ideas and assumptions that underpin dominant contemporary British discourses on the Holocaust.38

This is, however, no easy task. For what appears most alarming, in UCL’s study of students’ knowledge and understanding, is that rather than counter and challenge dominant myths and misunderstandings of the Holocaust, contemporary discourse and culture appears to sustain and reinforce them. The implications for commemoration and memory are, of course, profound and raise serious concerns about whether or not developments such at the National Learning Centre will perpetuate the pre-eminence of a “mythic” Holocaust or, in contrast, critically challenge it. Unfortunately, analysis of the political discourse and official documentation surrounding the establishment of the Holocaust Learning Centre suggests it is possible that the former (i.e., the “mythic” representation) will dominate. Indeed, this realisation is acutely revealing in relationship to how Britain’s role in, and responses to, the Holocaust potentially will be narrated. Arguably the clearest indication of how Britain’s role will be portrayed in the National Learning Centre is contained in the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report, Britain’s Promise to Remember. The report boldly (if somewhat naively) articulates what the key “lessons” of the Holocaust are and further declares, “Ensuring the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust 36 Pettigrew, 37 Foster 38 Ibid.,

“Why Teach and Learn About the Holocaust?” p. 219.

et al., What Do Students Know and Understand? p. 219. p. 204.

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are never forgotten lies at the heart of Britain’s values as a nation.” Furthermore, with some caveats, it proudly declares that Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust is “a positive story of resilience and rebuilding.”39 This celebratory narrative is further advanced by the erstwhile MP Ian Austin, whose upbeat view of this history receives particular attention within the Report: Whilst Britain could have done more, no one can deny that when other European countries were rounding up their Jews and putting them on trains to concentration camps, Britain provided a safe haven for tens of thousands of refugees. In 1941, with Europe overrun and America not yet in the war, just one country – Britain – soldiered on, against all odds, fighting not just for our freedom, but for the world’s liberty too. I believe this period defines Britain and what it means to be British. It is Britain’s unique response to the Holocaust and its unique role in the war that gives us the right to claim a particular attachment to the values of democracy, equality, freedom, fairness, and tolerance.40

An argument can undoubtedly be advanced that in some respects the British story has positive dimensions. For example, an estimated 75,000 Jews entered Britain during the 1930s and, as a result of the Kindertransport programme, approximately 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children found refuge in Britain during 1938 and 1939.41 Moreover, after 1945, many survivors came to Britain to escape the horrors of the war and rebuild their lives, often very successfully.42 It is also irrefutable that Britain played an important role in defeating the Nazis and their allies and, as a result, hundreds and thousands of Jews potentially avoided murder. Nevertheless, a body of historical scholarship raises serious questions about the legitimacy of presenting Britain’s response in triumphalist tones.43 For example, it is widely recognised that severe restrictions and limitations often were placed on Jewish entry into Britain and the internment of refugees as enemy aliens in 1940 was fiercely discriminatory. Compelling evidence also exists to suggest that antisemitic prejudices were commonplace in Whitehall 39 Cabinet 40 Ibid.,

Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 21.

23.

41 Vera Fast, Childrens Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Rebekka Gopfert and Andrea Hammel,“Kindertransport: History and Memory.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23 (1) (2004): 21–27; Diane Samuels, Kindertransport (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 42 Martin Gilbert, The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996). 43 David

Cesarani and Tony Kushner, eds. The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Tony Kushner, Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies: How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler’s Final Solution (London: Mandarin 1991); Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1979).

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during the 1930s and 1940s and throughout this period the government intended that all refugees would be admitted only on a temporary basis, with the understanding that Jews would leave Britain in the future.44 It is also indisputable that the rescue of Jews was not a central aim of British policy during the war. Furthermore, although it is typically accepted that there were limitations on what the British could do, some historians are critical of Britain’s failure to take any direct and serious action to help the Jews during the war.45 In this context it is not surprising that some historians have criticised suggestions for how the Learning Centre might narrate and represent Britain’s role during the Holocaust. Kushner, for example, warns of the dangers of the state peddling a narrative which is “constructed, mythologised and instrumentalised” and developed with “little regard to detailed historical research.”46 He suggests that a storyline might emerge which is based upon “selective amnesia” amounting to “not so much memory work as memory comfort.”47 Similarly, Lawson is concerned that the Learning Centre will advance and perpetuate the myth of “British exceptionalism” and purvey the overarching message that the British acted with probity, honour and righteousness.48 Both are particularly concerned by the likelihood that the Learning Centre will exacerbate and widen the gulf between “historiography and memory” and, on the basis of the discourse contained within Britain’s Promise to Remember, potentially take “scholarship and memory work back at least to 1961.”49 Of course, the implications of these developments for the collective memory of the nation and the education of future generations of young people are acute. For, given students’ knowledge and understanding of the history of the Holocaust typically is weak, it is possible that the Learning Centre will amplify rather than rectify popular myths and misconceptions. As Lawson predicts, unless people are provided with the opportunity to reflect openly and honestly about the ways in which the Holocaust should challenge our world…Britain will continue to revel in a version of the Holocaust that pays rhetorical lip-service to remembering, but which continues to obscure and misunderstand.50 44 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); London, Whitehall and the Jews. 45 See

for instance, David Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust (London: Holocaust Educational Trust, 1998); London, Whitehall and the Jews; Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe.

46 Tony Kushner, “The Holocaust in the British Imagination: The Official Mind and Beyond, 1945 to the Present.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23 (3) (2017): 364–384. 365. 47 Ibid.,

378–379.

48 Lawson, 49 Kushner, 50 Lawson,

“Britain’s Promise to Forget”, p. 350. “The Holocaust in the British Imagination”, p. 378. “Britain’s Promise to Forget”, p. 360.

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He poignantly concludes, “it might just be that Britain’s Promise to Remember is a promise to forget”.

Final Thoughts: Securing the History and Memory of the Holocaust This chapter has attempted to offer a realistic, if somewhat sober, portrait of how the Holocaust is presented and understood in school settings across England. It has also offered possible explanations for why this might be and identified some problematic implications for Holocaust memory, commemoration and historical understanding. In many respects, therefore, it has offered a discouraging diagnosis of the current situation and presented a gloomy future prognosis. But all is not lost. In fact, with the required intelligence and commitment it is possible to envisage a future scenario which is profoundly more positive and hopeful. For significant and positive developments to happen a number of key changes are required. First and foremost, an imperative exists to ensure classroom teachers—particularly history teachers—are equipped with the knowledge, skills and understandings to address this most complex and vital subject. Crucial to the success of this enterprise is the need to provide teachers with a clear understanding of what happened during the Holocaust and to ensure that this knowledge is underpinned by a robust appreciation of current and emerging historical scholarship. Teachers of the Holocaust would also benefit from the release of more curriculum time, significant improvements in the quality and content of school textbooks, and the widespread availability of external guidance on how to develop pedagogical expertise. As detailed above, currently not enough teachers have access to high quality, research-informed professional development courses focused on teaching about the Holocaust. Significantly, however, when teachers do participate in such programmes a growing body of evidence suggests that their students’ knowledge and understanding profoundly improves.51 The ultimate goal of course is to improve the knowledge and understanding of millions of young people so that they are able to explore, make meaning from, critically assess and potentially contest the way in which the Holocaust is understood and portrayed in modern culture. In a similar way, it is hoped that rather than offer neatly packaged moral “lessons,” those who teach about the Holocaust and those who are engaged in significant educational projects such as the establishment of the National Learning Centre, will compel young people to consider the troubling complexity of the Holocaust. Engaging with the Holocaust should not be easy or comfortable. It should challenge our assumptions about the past and the world around us. It should also compel us 51 Impact

studies conducted by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education in 2016, 2017, and 2018 clearly evidence that student knowledge and understanding significantly improves when schools work closely with the Centre.

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to consider the significance of the Holocaust and its relevance to contemporary society. Realising these aims in educational and commemorative settings are aspirational and—potentially—unconventional, but they deserve our attention and ambition.

CHAPTER 19

Holocaust Representation in the Imperial War Museum, 2000–2020 Hannah Holtschneider

The representation of the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is intimately linked to British public discourses on the memory and meaning of the Holocaust for British national identity. The choice of the IWM as the location of a national Holocaust exhibition directly and indirectly reflects the place of the Holocaust in Britain’s national consciousness and its public history as propagated and disseminated through its educational institutions and public media. In many ways, the Holocaust sits awkwardly in a museum concerned with British experiences of war. The Second World War Britain fought was directed at the protection of the nation and the defeat of fascism on the continent, not at the prevention of the genocide of Jews in Europe. Nor were Britons active in the liberation of the camps; Bergen-Belsen was a surprise discovery rather than a deliberate rescue. And British Jews under Nazi occupation on the Channel Islands were not of immediate concern to the nation either, and were rather left to deportation to continental Europe and imprisonment and murder in concentration camps. And yet, the evolving place of the Holocaust in British national consciousness led Andy Pearce to conclude that already ‘The IWM’s approaches to the Holocaust prior to 1991 has [sic] much to tell us about the general condition of Holocaust consciousness’.1 Jennifer Hansen-Gluecklich echoes this observation in her 2014 study 1 Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York: Rout-

ledge, 2014), p. 111. H. Holtschneider (B) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_19

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Holocaust Memory Reframed stating that ‘each museum reveals the national Holocaust ideology of its context, including the way that the Holocaust is framed within the country’s “civil religion”’.2 As Pearce convincingly demonstrates, the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition (IWMHE) arises from a British national context of reflection on the Holocaust which had matured and solidified into a specific set of tropes from the 1980s onwards. Opened in 2000 the IWMHE presents a coherent interpretation of the history of the Holocaust for the British public which can be neatly slotted into the prevailing discourse on national identity and the use of the past for the needs of the present.3 This chapter, written in the centenary year of the founding of the IWM in 1917, aims to give an overview of the Holocaust representation in the IWMHE (2000–2020) as linked to public national discourses on the Holocaust and national identity in Britain. The focus is on the years preceding the opening of the IWMHE in 2000 to its renewal in 2020, thus addressing a distinctive period of public historiography of the Holocaust in the IWM of just over twenty years. The chapter concludes with a reflection on academic assessments of the IWMHE and its contribution to discussions of British national identity.

The Imperial War Museum, the IWMHE, and Discourses of National Identity The IWM was born out of the profound shock and devastation of World War I, in an effort to promote peace in the face of the terror and trauma of war. Founded in 1917 and established in 1920 by an Act of Parliament, the IWM was first of all intended to document World War I. As a national project, the IWM can thus be understood as a contribution to the evolving narrative of British national identity in the twentieth century; indeed, even today, museums remain among the forefront of institutions which ‘represent the nation to

2 Jennifer

Hansen-Gluecklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ, 2014), p. 4.

3 See

also Tim Cole, ‘Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK’, Journal of Israeli History 23:1 (2004), 136, who observes that in the IWMHE ‘the Holocaust acts as evidence of the justness of the Allied cause in World War II, exhibited throughout the museum. The Holocaust stands as the Hitlerite and Nazi crime, and thus the very antithesis of the Britishness central to this museum devoted to Britain’s military record in the twentieth century, and specifically its “finest hour.” The Holocaust is established as the crime that Britain fought against, and ultimately defeated as witnessed by the liberation of the camps.’

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“itself”’.4 The aims of the museum changed with its move from Crystal Palace to its current location in the former Bethlem Hospital in Lambeth, such that today the museum collects materials relating to all military conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces are engaged in since 1914.5 Sue Malvern’s assessment of the IWM’s conception of the nation as a homogenous entity with a very positive self-image,6 is echoed by more recent interpretations of the place of the Holocaust exhibition in the IWM narrative frame as a whole. Thus Tom Lawson argues that the Holocaust exhibition acts as a large scale, fully worked through example of ‘why we fight’. There are, it seems to me, few other ways to interpret the museum visitor’s literal journey in the exhibition from the darkness of Auschwitz to the light of British victory and the ephemera of war in the main atrium. Of course, this fits into a more widespread culture of Holocaust memory in Britain, which emphasises that the Holocaust is a story in which Britain played a role as refuge and liberator, and in which Britons can feel good about their past and their present.7

The IWM has undergone a number of redesigns since the 1920s, each progressing the national identity discourse according to the then current political and public educational agendas. Since the major redesign in the 1980s the IWM champions a version of experiential learning, borrowed from the living history movement which developed at that time. Thus until 2012, the galleries offered aspects of an immersive experience which was supposed also to convey a highly structured learning experience about the trenches of World War I and the London Blitz of World War II. Pearce reminds us that, pedagogically, experiential learning may encourage the learner to participate in the learning process with their own agency, or experiences may be offered through

4 Sue

Malvern, ‘War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefacts in the Imperial War Museum’, History Workshop Journal 40 (2000), 178f. For the relationship between museums and national identity cf. also McLean, F., ‘Museums and the Construction of National Identity: A Review’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 3:4 (1998); Sharon Macdonald, ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’, Museums and Society 1:1 (2003); and Robin Ostow, ed., (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium (Toronto, 2008).

5 Regarding

the founding history of the IWM cf. Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Museum as Memorial: The Origins of the Imperial War Museum’, Journal of Contemporary History 23:1 (1988).

6 Malvern, 7 Tom

‘War, Memory and Museums’, p. 178f.

Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum’ in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, edited by Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2013), 161. The effect of re-entering the atrium after visiting the Holocaust exhibition is maintained after it was remodelled in 2014; and the redesigned Holocaust and World War II galleries are due to open in 2020: http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/new-gallery-concepts-for-iwms-future-rev ealed (accessed 27.10.2017).

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controlled performances which transmit information without formal instruction, and do not encourage the learner to develop independent agency.8 Yet, in the past three decades museums have changed their focus from orienting the visitor to the objects on display to a visitor-centred approach in which exhibits are constructed to produce a particular experience for the visitor, often through the use of media. Thus, we note a shift from an engagement with original artefacts to a focus on simulation.9 In the IWM, this shift is noticeable in the redesign of the main galleries: these include a walk through a World War I trench with a plane hovering above, conveying experiences of physical confinement; and for World War II the focus on one family during wartime brings the opportunity to explore rooms in a 1940s house. While furnished with historical objects the tableaux-style blurs the boundaries between observation and simulated participation, akin to crossovers between the lives of visitors, actors, and other staff at heritage sites. At first glance it is difficult to understand the IWM as an appropriate place for a Holocaust exhibition in Britain. However, Pearce charts the developments which led to a Holocaust exhibition being housed permanently in the IWM as a process which gained momentum throughout the 1990s, and which can be seen as a direct product of the evolving narrative of the nation’s collective identity. Inscribing the Holocaust ‘within a wider frame of “Man’s inhumanity”’ served both the need to contextualise the Holocaust in the IWM’s narrative, and to universalise the message the exhibition could contribute to the nation’s historical narrative of itself.10 Indeed, Suzanne Bardgett, Project Director of the IWMHE and today Head of Research and Academic Partnerships at the IWM, argued that situating a Holocaust exhibition at the IWM was made possible through ‘the emergence of a more pluralistic society, more willing to accommodate the narratives of people who had been oppressed or whose suffering had brought them to this country as refugees’.11 In April 1996, and concluding a process of discussion which had seen plans for a Holocaust and genocide exhibition discarded in favour of an exclusive focus on the Holocaust, the then director of the IWM, Robert Crawford, announced the building of a Holocaust exhibition.12 This venture had the backing of all political parties represented in Parliament, and was funded largely by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The wide basis of support and funding 8 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness, p. 130.

9 Hansen-Gluecklich, 10 See

Holocaust Memory Reframed, 19, paraphrasing Henning.

Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness, p. 117.

11 Suzanne Bardgett, ‘The Depiction of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum Since 1961’, The Journal of Israeli History 23:1 (2004), 150f. 12 Bardgett, ‘The Depiction of the Holocaust’, 153. The 1995 plans proposed an exhibition on the Holocaust and genocide, a decision which faced much criticism and subsequently the remit was altered to focus exclusively on the Holocaust (Steve Cooke, ‘“Your Story Too?” The New Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum’, in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Volume 3: Memory, edited by John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell [New York, 2001], 594f.).

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for an exclusive focus on the Holocaust demonstrates how strongly public political consciousness of the Holocaust had taken hold in British society, as well as a desire to expand on this through the planned exhibition. Opening in June 2000, the IWMHE remains the only publicly funded Holocaust exhibition, though that is set to change with the decision to build a national Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Gardens adjacent to the Houses of Parliament.13 Critics worried whether the IWMHE might trivialise the subject because visitors needed to pass the ‘playful’ displays in the atrium, while others were concerned whether the IWM would be able to integrate the narrative of the Holocaust into the national identity discourse prevalent throughout the museum without curtailing critical engagement with Britain’s own war history.14 Meanwhile, museum staff were unsure that anyone would actually want to visit the IWMHE in the first place, seeing genocide as a subject driving people away.15 However, by the time the exhibition opened in summer 2000, the Holocaust, as the reference point of ‘evil’ and contrasting sharply with ‘British values’ of a liberal society, had become such an established and powerful public trope, articulating in shorthand what it means to be British, that visitor numbers and public acclaim were not something the curatorial team needed to worry about. As touched on above, the historical narrative presented throughout the IWM since the 1980s draws heavily on ideas derived from theatre and performance. While bearing in mind the limitations to learning when experience is reduced to the consumption of a performance, today museums often thrive on the notion that aspects of history may ‘come to life’ by situating a narrative in an original location or a simulated ‘authentic’ environment. The setting thus encourages visitors to become witnesses to historical events and, sometimes, even participate in their re-enactment.16 Critics, however, counter that such ‘ethnographic spectacularization’ (Nick Stanley) becomes very problematic when produced in relation to historical events which lack a positive, affirmative message. Thus Stanley sees the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) as a key example of the spectacularisation of history, 13 However, it is not the first Holocaust exhibition in the UK. In 1995 Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre opened, a privately-run enterprise born of the efforts of the Smith family (Stephen Smith, Making Memory: Creating Britain’s First Holocaust Centre [Newark, NJ, 2002]). 14 Bardgett,

‘The Depiction of the Holocaust’, p. 154f.

15 Bardgett,

‘The Depiction of the Holocaust’, 155. Similar discussions took place at the USHMM (Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum [New York, 1995], 193, 198). 16 Cf.

in particular Nick Stanley, Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures (London, 1998), 17, who discusses the contemporary fascination with approaching the world as a ‘spectacle’ and its consequences for the representation of history in museums.

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which employs all of the dramatic devices conceived for representing seemingly more benign historical narratives, ‘with one glaring omission – the actors’.17 In the USHMM, visitors are made part of the story they are set to explore, a device that reduces the gap between the display and the spectator.18 Similarly, the IWM can very well be seen as an ethnographic museum because of the national significance of its displays on the two World Wars which focus on the experiences of the nation at war. In the design of the IWMHE, the museum follows the lead of the USHMM, pursuing a storytelling approach with near-immersive environments of considerable theatricality. The document ‘Exhibition philosophy’ dating from April 1996 suggests that There is clearly scope to make subtle statements with the fabric of the display, but while this Exhibition will inevitably ‘recreate the past’ to a degree, it should avoid doing so in a nostalgic or pleasurable way. A pared-down, understated approach is what is needed, not a ‘sights, sounds and smells’ one. Such an approach may seem restricting, but it is felt that the story of what happened – and the artefacts and other evidence which document it – should stand on their own, and should need little in terms of support.19

That film-maker Martin Smith was involved in both the USHMM and the IWMHE, and the extensive consultation of the IWM with the USHMM, also point to some continuity between these institutions in the approach to the representation of the Holocaust.

Narrating the Holocaust in the IWMHE Suzanne Bardgett headed the team developing the IWHE working with specially commissioned designers and consultants, in addition to the in-house curators and educators of the IWM. The process was accompanied by an Academic Advisory Group which included Martin Gilbert, David Cesarani, Ben Helfgott, Martin Smith, and Tony Lerman. The team was afforded the extraordinarily long time of four years for completion of the exhibition, largely due to the sensitivity of the subject matter. By its very nature, exhibitions are collective products which need to satisfy a number of stakeholders with different concerns and agendas. A completed exhibition is always a compromise which seeks to hold these demands in a carefully balanced equilibrium. In the IWM the desire to offer an authoritative narrative limits the visitors’ 17 Ibid.,

p. 175f.

18 Ibid.,

p. 176.

19 Advisory

1996a).

Group, Minutes of the First Meeting, April 15, 1996 (Imperial War Museum

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opportunities to curate their own learning experience. In the IWMHE what the Nazis did has priority over how their victims perceived their situation, and there is no attempt to make the visitor privy to these curatorial choices, or involve visitors in the process of interpreting evidence, explaining how we know what we know about the Holocaust. The IWMHE opens with the following statement of purpose Under the cover of the Second World War, for the sake of their ‘New Order’, the Nazis sought to destroy all the Jews of Europe. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people. Six million people were murdered, including 1,500,000 children. This event is called the Holocaust. The Nazis enslaved and murdered millions of others as well. Gypsies, people with physical and mental disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, trade unionists, political opponents, prisoners of conscience, homosexuals, and others were killed in vast numbers. This exhibition looks at how and why these things happened.

While this opening statement focuses the visitor’s attention on the targets of the genocide, the mention of other victims also slots the Holocaust neatly into a universalising narrative of ‘man’s inhumanity’ with the Nazis figuring as the definitive symbols of evil. Against the backdrop of the wider IWM narrative of Britain fighting fascism and generally being presented as located on the ‘right side’ of history, the statement is a first step in successfully embedding the Holocaust in British national identity discourses. The strong relationship between Britishness, the history of World War II and the Holocaust continues to be reinforced in the display strategy of the exhibition which unfolds in an authoritative linear narrative. This is deemed necessary for the containment of a complex series of historical events, and as a device which allows the curators to control the visitor experience.20 The curatorial team decided on a factual presentation which seeks to refrain from memorialising tendencies and which does not offer directly any specific ‘lessons’ others may wish to derive from the Holocaust. By opting for ‘a “purist” approach, apparently seeking objectivity and historiographical consensus’, the curators suggest that their presentation merely involves the display of

20 This approach is evident from the earliest documents on the exhibition, such as the discussion paper ‘Exhibition philosophy’ (Advisory Group, Minutes of the First Meeting ). While such an approach is no longer popular with curators of other forms of exhibitions, the notion that there is a ‘one-way communication and an unmediated relationship between sending and receiving’ (Constance Perin, ‘The Communicative Circle: Museums and Communities’, in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Ivan Karp et al. [Washington, DC, 1992], 184) seems still to be current for the curators of the IWMHE.

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‘“hard facts”, rather than interpretation’.21 Inasmuch as the curators conceal their classificatory and interpretive curatorial practice, however, they refuse visitors the opportunity to engage directly with the interpretive processes necessary for any work of history. They thereby also dismiss the possibility of organising the exhibition narrative in a less linear fashion to reflect the complex intersections of various places and histories which today are subsumed under the broad term Holocaust.22 The approach taken in the IWMHE, then, does not offer the visitors agency in curating their own experience of and learning in the exhibition. Rather than distracting from the historical subject matter, such an approach could highlight the work of the historian in making sense of the evidence and constructing a plausible narrative which is then represented materially in the exhibition. In practice, then, the IWMHE unfolds its narrative on two floors. The upper floor introduces visitors to Nazi ideology and the beginning of the persecution of Jews in Germany, Jewish reactions to discrimination and violence such as emigration, and closes with the beginning of murder in the T4 euthanasia programme. From there, visitors descend to the lower floor which is given to the genocide unfolding along the progress of the war of aggression Nazi Germany fought in the east. Themes here are the murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen, the ghettoisation of the Jewish population, and the establishments of the Aktion Reinhard death camps.23 The exhibition culminates in a room size display model of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1944 at the height of the deportations of Jews from Hungary, and concludes with rooms addressing slave labour, rescue and resistance, the end of the war and war crimes trials. The storyline follows the progress from persecution to murder as perceived and executed by the perpetrators. Hence, the IWMHE privileges the perspective of the murderers, because this permits the development of a storyline which gives a common purpose to a series of otherwise seemingly disparate events. A corollary is that the Holocaust appears an inevitable consequence of Nazi policy, purposefully planned in advance and meticulously executed. As a 21 Tom Lawson, ‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory: A Review of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4:2 (2003), 175. 22 The April 1996 document ‘Exhibition philosophy’ states that ‘An overriding objective in establishing it [the exhibition] is to put the story on record for this and future generations. It will be told, as far as words are concerned, with the kind of authority and detachment one would find in an encyclopedia entry’. Other formulations outline the firmness with which the visitor is supposed to be led through the narrative: ‘Visitors will proceed around the Exhibition along a fixed route. There may be some scope for allowing the visitor some choice in viewing particular sections, but the main thread of the story must not be compromised’ (Advisory Group, Minutes of the First Meeting ). 23 Bełzec, ˙

Sobibór and Treblinka. Other death camps were located at Chełmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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result, the exhibition tends towards an intentionalist narrative with little attention given to the historiographical consensus of a functionalist interpretation of the events which led in a more haphazard and less planned fashion cumulatively to genocide.24 The perpetrator-led narrative is interrupted, but not undercut, by video testimony of survivors who made their home in Britain after the war. The testimony offers a victim perspective on every stage of the process from persecution, through ghettoisation, deportation, and murder in camps, as well as life following liberation. On the upper floor, the exhibition introduces a British perspective through a display on refugees with a focus on the Kindertransport . On the lower floor, three showcases detail ‘News Reaches Britain’ to enable the visitor to connect a contemporary British perspective on the unfolding genocide. At the conclusion of the exhibition, computer terminals offer visitors the opportunity to research topics not addressed in the IWMHE proper. These terminals may be seen as supplementary to or as a challenge to the narrative of the IWMHE which had to exclude more material than it could include in order to make it a compelling, coherent, and linear story. The visitor may be surprised by the wealth of issues that are addressed here but which are not flagged up before in the exhibition,25 including subjects of significance to Britain, such as the German occupation of the Channel Islands.26 This bundling of information at the end of the IWMHE when visitors are likely to have little energy left to assimilate anything beyond what they have just witnessed is a consequence of the linear and totalising approach taken by the IWM in this exhibition. Pioneered by Jeshajahu Weinberg at Beth Hatefutsoth in Tel Aviv and in the USHMM, the storytelling approach to the design of historical exhibitions has consequences for the ways in which exhibitions are able to facilitate access to historical materials and engage their visitors. Weinberg’s performance-oriented outlook places the visitor in a rich cameo furnished with replicas, dioramas, screens, and motion pictures, and thus relieves museums from acquiring and maintaining large collections of historical artefacts usually at the heart of

24 For a contrasting presentation see the functionalist narrative prefacing the memorial exhibition underneath the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. 25 See Isabel Wollaston, ‘Negotiating the Marketplace: The Role(s) of Holocaust Museums Today’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4 (2005), 69. 26 For example, the Channel Islands are listed here as a territory occupied by the Nazis, a topic missing in the main exhibition narrative (cf. also Cooke, ‘“Your Story Too?”’), where the only reference to the Channel Islands is the brief story in the caption to a photograph of Esther Lloyd who was arrested, deported and subsequently returned home after filing many appeals. The USHMM also struggled with displaying controversial issues (Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p. 216f.).

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object-led exhibitions, which is particularly helpful in the aftermath of genocide where few objects survive or are ‘attractive’ to display.27 In the USHMM Weinberg was interested in ‘visual historiography’, that is, in narrating the story of the Holocaust in such a way that the visitors would be led to an ‘emotional identification with the victims’ in order to be able to grasp the ‘moral implications of the absorbed historical information’.28 The IWMHE does not seek to ‘recreate’ an ‘experience’ of the Holocaust for visitors, nor provide opportunity for visitors to identify with victims. However, the internal exhibition architecture, the play of light and shadow, and the use of photomurals and enlarged images, imitate the visual strategies employed in the USHMM narrative. Indeed, the interior design of the IWMHE creates a ‘performing exhibition’, that is, the exhibition is a theatrical environment which provides ‘visceral, kinesthetic, haptic, and intimate qualities of bodily experience’.29 The cameo of photomurals is supplemented by artefacts designed to bring visitors close to the reality of life at the time the events of the Holocaust unfolded. According to Andrew Hoskins, this placement of artefacts into the exhibition narrative is a device to create ‘an exclusive “way of seeing”’,30 which excludes divergent narratives. Here, then, artefacts authenticate the photographic record and make the historical narrative tangible, even though the ephemera remain protected and removed from the visitor in glass cases.31 The complementary employment of photographs and artefacts at key moments in the exhibition establishes the ‘authenticity’ of the narrative throughout the exhibition; thus a restored handcart from the Warsaw ghetto is displayed in front of a historical photograph of such a handcart in use, transporting corpses through the ghetto streets.

27 Linenthal,

Preserving Memory, p. 142.

28 Linenthal,

Preserving Memory, p. 142. See also documentary film maker Martin Smith’s approach to his contribution to the USHMM narrative (Smith in Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust [Minneapolis, MN, 1998], p. 16).

29 Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford, 2007), 97. See also Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 3f. Andrew Hoskins, ‘Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age’, Media, Culture & Society 25:1 (2003) refers to the IWMHE as a ‘purist’ and documentary exhibition in which the built environment of the exhibition interior contributes to the narrative plausibility. 30 Hoskins, 31 See

‘Signs of the Holocaust’, p. 20.

also the problematic aspects of using artefacts to authenticate and ‘witness’ a historical narrative, albeit made with reference to the Jewish Museum Berlin: ‘the museum’s reliance on “witnessing objects” forms its own implicit lament, in that they are as close as we get to a person; belongings and images are often all that remain. Yet, by foregrounding this effect on this item (an entry etched into a diary, a bloodstained shirt), the object has the effect of foreclosing the life to which the museum attaches it by reducing it to its period of greatest suffering’ (Williams, Memorial Museums, 31, see also p. 33).

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Hansen-Gluecklich argues, in relation to the Holocaust, that museums and exhibitions struggle with competing needs that accompany the presentation of a historical narrative: they wish to (a) ‘give witness to the genocide’, (b) ‘facilitate remembrance’, (c) ‘educate their visitors’, and (d) ‘enable visitors to perceive the sacred’.32 The latter quality is associated with museums in general which are frequently described as shrines or sanctuaries and which are related to ritualistic behaviour and an expectation of a particular quality of 32 Hansen-Gluecklich,

Holocaust Memory Reframed, p. 19f.

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experience. Oren Baruch Stier argues that Holocaust exhibitions, in particular, construct objects connected with the genocide in ways similar to religious symbols and the meanings and practices invested in them.33 While the IWM may not wish to see visitors associate notions of the sacred with objects in its Holocaust exhibition, the symbolic emplotment of objects in the narrative sees them function as witnesses linking the visitor to the past on display. Indeed, the designers are clear about the dramatic qualities of the IWMHE stating that the exhibition was conceived as a completely integrated experience in space using every available medium; in a typical space you can find a seamless fusion of artefact display, home movie, testimony, newsreel, audio, cartography and biography and interior architecture. In devising this exhibition we used the techniques of film-making and storytelling. The Holocaust story falls into the classic shape of a threepart drama. It is a shape that Aristotle first defined and it is a shape that is still followed by most of the films – including all Hollywood blockbusters – that have reached the biggest audiences. By underlining the three-act shape we could find a structure that every member of the audience would recognize (even sublimally) and – more than that – it meant that we could access the power inherent in this structure.34

The three acts of a Greek drama lead the viewer safely from the formation of a crisis to its solution and thereby offers catharsis. The result is a narrative which all too easily slots into positive perceptions of British history and thus of British national identity, instilling and perpetuating a positive national self-understanding. This strategy of storytelling through display, has the consequence that the exhibition, for the purpose of presenting a coherent narrative, implicitly glosses over historiographical nuances, and excludes detail in its presentation of historical evidence. As Lawson argues, this approach has the consequence of obliterating any historical complexity which cannot be assimilated into a characterisation of the Nazi regime as a coherent, ideologically driven genocidal project which contrasts sharply with British liberal values. This narrative strategy is particularly evident when examining the display of the Aktion Reinhard camps which ‘were individual institutions, dedicated to discrete operations to remove singular national or regional Jewish communities rather than, as Auschwitz was, the focus of an apparently European-wide project’. Auschwitz ‘as the execution chamber of a singular regime and, most importantly, the culmination of a single anti-Semitic ideological obsession […] 33 Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst, MA, 2003), 110ff. and idem., Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick, NJ, 2015). For a discussion of Holocaust memorial museums and their interaction with Jewish religious frames of reference see Avril Alba, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). 34 Stephen

Greenberg, ‘The Vital Museum’, in Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibition, Museum Meanings, edited by Suzanne MacLeod (London, 2005), 230; see also Smith in Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows, p. 16.

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is emblematic not simply of a general constructed version of the Holocaust, but also of the very specific construction of the Shoah within the IWM’.35 Indeed, the IWMHE’s refusal to acknowledge that any presentation of historical facts already contains their interpretation, and that the arrangement of facts into a narrative is key to any representation in museums or elsewhere, integrates the exhibition seamlessly into Britain’s national story: But it is in the portrayal of Nazism as so utterly removed from liberal democratic modernity that we can begin to perceive clearly the function of the Holocaust in Britain’s national drama. Even the implied criticism of the Allied response to the Holocaust within the exhibition helps reinforce the gap between Nazism and ourselves. British and American refugee policy is criticised for being less than humanitarian, but the resulting exclusion of refugees is presented as a consequence of economic self-interest and political pragmatism - normative values and tendencies well within the visitor’s accepted political experience. There is to be no comparison between the ethno-nationalisms which excluded Europe’s Jews from Britain and America, and the racism which sent Jews to their deaths in the camps of occupied Poland.36

The linear approach favoured by the IWMHE eschews opportunities to allow the visitor sight of the curatorial process by making transparent aspects of the choices involved in creating an exhibition. Thus, the exhibition does not ask visitors to interpret the evidence of the genocide, but rather to consume the narrative as a total experience. Objects and images connected to the Holocaust are treated as self-explanatory. The process of artefacts becoming evidence for the illustration of a historical narrative—through collection, classification, archiving, and emplotment in a storyline—is not observable.37 However, visitors may react against the educational objectives of an exhibition, and therefore at least complicate the communication process envisaged by the curators.38 Indeed, visitors may refuse to be challenged by the displays 35 Lawson,

‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’, p. 181.

36 Lawson,

‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’, 182. Elsewhere, Lawson argues that the notion of the nation as a homogenous ethnic entity was prominent in the early part of the twentieth century, such that ‘the Allies and the Nazis shared a conception of a Jewish problem’, which informed the approach to Jewish refugees. In as much as British public discourses on the Holocaust, including the IWMHE, fail to acknowledge the antisemitic prejudice and lack of generosity towards refugees of the 1930s, the gap between Holocaust representation in the IWM and actual historiography remains striking and problematic (Tom Lawson, ‘Britain’s Promise to Forget: Some Historiographical Reflections on What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust?’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23:3 [2017], 351). 37 Cf.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on ethnographic objects being objects of ethnography, their changing character and meaning when removed from the context in which they were produced and used and then collected, organized and exhibited in museums (KirshenblattGimblett, Destination Culture, 3f.). 38 See, for example, Gary Edson and David Dean, The Handbook for Museums (London, 1996), p. 189.

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they encounter and interpret exhibitions in ways that are compatible with their worldview and prior knowledge.39

Conclusion IWMHE is thus situated in a complex web of Holocaust discourses in the British public sphere. In nearly two decades of its existence, the IWMHE has been welcomed, praised, used, and criticised. Each of these various assessments is associated with a particular public context: Jewish institutions and survivor organisation have welcomed and even praised the exhibition, educators and schools have used the displays as part of the mandatory teaching of the Holocaust at KS3 of the National Curriculum of England and Wales, and academics have chimed into the debate appreciating the opportunities created and lost by the construction of the IWMHE. Those who welcome and praise the IWMHE share a commitment to wellarticulated goals of Holocaust education, such as ‘never again’. A public exhibition which can be used by schools to enhance their teaching is seen as a particularly effective way to ensure that a specific set of lessons is imparted to the wider public. Such assessments of the goals of Holocaust education and of its effectiveness are rarely tested or supported with evidence, as the recent UCL survey of Holocaust education in Britain demonstrates.40 Rather, the educational aims can be harnessed to support many public causes of ‘good citizenship’ and strengthen a positive national self-image which contrasts sharply with the violent exclusivist and murderous articulation of nationalism by the Nazis. Indeed, citizenship education and the formation of a British national identity in opposition and contrast to the inhumanity and racism of the Nazis is a crucial aspect of positive engagements with the IWMHE.41 Whether the team curating the exhibition consciously sought to support these educational aims or not, the clear historical narrative guiding visitors through the exhibition simplifies the complex and expansive history of the Holocaust, and domesticates it for national educational and political agendas. Critics of the IWMHE hail from different academic disciplines and discourses. Those at home in museum studies, and education, approach the 39 Visitor

books offer an insight into the engagement of visitors with the exhibition. However, I would argue that these have to be evaluated with caution as perceptions of the exhibition and its subject matter are likely to change with growing distance from the time of the visit and hence may be unreliable indicators of the ‘success’ of an exhibition (see also John Falk and Lynn Diane Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, CA, 2000). 40 Stuart

Foster, Alice Pettigrew, Andy Pearce, Rebecca Hale, Adrian Burgess, Paul Salmons, and Ruth-Anne Lenga, What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Institute of Education, 2016). 41 See

also the overview discussion of the place of the Holocaust in the National Curriculum of England and Wales: Andy Pearce, ‘The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years’, Holocaust Studies 23:3 (2017), 231–262.

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Holocaust exhibition with a set of tools that can deconstruct the representational forms as much as they understand the pragmatic practical choices underpinning much of the work of exhibitions.42 Historians are no strangers to the museum either, and their disciplinary skills focus on the relationship of the representational choices supporting the historical narrative of the exhibition and their engagement with current Holocaust historiography.43 Assessments here range from the appreciative in the understanding that the general public will lack the skills to decode a complex narrative, and thus the simplification offered in the IWMHE is seen as defensible, to the critical by those who place more trust in the ability of the public to engage with complexities and a refusal to ‘dumb down’ for ‘the masses’. All evaluations reflect not only the disciplinary or professional backgrounds of those who articulate them, but also the speaker’s relationship to British public discourses on national history and identity. The public discourse on British national identity and its relationship to British history as a whole, and particularly with reference to Britain’s record in World War II are about to be linked even more firmly to the commemoration of aspects of the Holocaust than is evident in the IWMHE. In 2015 the UK government announced plans to establish a new national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Victoria Gardens, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. The government committed fifty million pounds to the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation for the project and in October 2017, the winner of the design competition for the Memorial was announced as Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects. When then Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the House of Commons on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2016, he linked the memorial firmly to present national political aims and values: ‘It [the memorial and learning centre] will stand beside Parliament as a permanent statement of our values as a nation and will be something for our children to visit for generations to come’.44 How the Learning Centre will relate to the IWMHE is unclear at the time of writing. Nor is it discernible just when the National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre will open and in what form. While the link between Holocaust memory and national identity is prominent in British public discourse, less consideration appears to be given to the London-centric nature of these memorial and educational initiatives. There are no plans for similar ventures in the other three nations of the United 42 See, for example, Cooke, ‘“Your Story Too?”’, and K. Hannah Holtschneider, The Holocaust and Representations of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum (London: Routledge, 2011), as well as Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness. 43 See,

for example, Tony Kushner, ‘The Holocaust and the Museum World in Britain: A Study of Ethnography’, in Representing the Holocaust: In Honour of Bryan Burns, edited by Sue Vice (London, 2003), 13–40; Lawson, ‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’, and ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide’; Cole, ‘Nativization and Nationalization’. 44 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-holocaust-memorial-will-stand-beside-par liament-as-permanent-statement-of-our-british-values (accessed 1.11.2017).

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Kingdom, and there is no government funding attached to enabling Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland to develop their own memorials and educational centres. Instead, London, as the capital city, is expected to remain the focal point of national Holocaust education and commemoration activities. Aside from the lack of clear pedagogical aims for Holocaust education, and a reduction of historiography to the support of national identity politics, the lack of attention to the regions far from London means that the majority of the UK’s population of all ages will have difficulty accessing the learning centre other than through online resources. It may be that the symbolism of a national Holocaust Memorial adjacent to the Houses of Parliament is the culmination of the memorial discourses rehearsed in several chapters in this book, and that the link between the Holocaust and British national values has become so close that it effectively undermines the efforts of historians to contribute to the public debate on British history and its complex entanglement in genocide across the centuries. Tim Cole’s conclusion regarding the IWMHE (and the USHMM) still rings true almost two decades later: These are not only national museums, but in some senses at least, nationalist museums. They are museums where the Holocaust is exhibited as the radical Other and the very antithesis of the contemporary nation state. […] However, there is surely something deeply ironic about the Holocaust of all historical events being utilized as a tool of nationalism. Even more: there is also something disturbing about such instrumentalization of this particular past.45

After two decades of uninterrupted use, the IWMHE is due an overhaul; not only do the displays show signs of deterioration, display strategy has evolved to favour a personalised approach oriented towards storytelling. Thus the new World War II and Holocaust galleries due to open in 2020 ‘draw heavily upon the unique personal stories that IWM’s collections contain to present a vivid narrative’, ‘to help people better understand and truly reflect on these world-changing events in our shared history’.46 The new Holocaust exhibition is thus departing from the IWMHE of the past two decades, and thus we move into a new period in the public historiography of the Holocaust in the IWM. Still, it may be too much to hope that the IWM takes the redesign of the IWMHE and the World War II galleries as an opportunity to reflect on Britain’s imperial past and its problematic links to a number of genocides.47

45 Cole,

‘Nativization and Nationalization’, p. 143.

46 https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/new-gallery-concepts-for-iwms-future-revealed

(accessed 18.7.2018). 47 Lawson,

‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide’, p. 160ff.

CHAPTER 20

Negotiating Memory and Agency: David Cesarani and the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition (2000) Chad McDonald

During the 1990s and early 2000s, David Cesarani cemented his place as a— if not the—key intellectual figure associated with Holocaust remembrance in Britain. This period marked significant changes in how the Holocaust was remembered in this country. Reflecting on the connection between Cesarani and Holocaust remembrance in Britain, Dan Stone has recently argued that if Holocaust consciousness seems deeply embedded in British society—in education (for all its shortcomings), in museums and memorials, in commemorative practices around Holocaust Memorial Day, in research institutions and in the more nebulous ‘collective memory’—this is largely thanks to David’s tireless campaigning.1

Cesarani did not start out as a Holocaust historian. His earlier research focused on the history of British Jewry.2 His move towards Holocaust Studies at 1 Dan Stone, “British Jewry, Antisemitism and the Holocaust: The Work and Legacy

of David Cesarani: An Introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice 53, no. 1 (2019): 2. 2 David Cesarani, “Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust and Hairdressing,” in Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, eds. Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus, and Milton Shain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 67–83. C. McDonald (B) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_20

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the turn of the millennium came at a fortuitous time, with issues of Holocaust remembrance garnering fresh relevance in schools, universities, cinemas, law courts and the UK parliament. Cesarani did not just ruminate on these developments as a passive observer. He was not just writing history but was— so to speak—living history as an active participant in ongoing debates and discussions. Cesarani’s contributions were informed by his academic research and his participation in Holocaust remembrance initiatives. His work as the historian for the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group in the 1980s spurred his turn towards Holocaust Studies. He would later provide advice to the group’s successor organisation, the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). Cesarani’s scholarly prowess was further strengthened through his work at the Wiener Library—the world’s oldest Holocaust archive—which he first joined in 1989. Cesarani combined his work as the Director of the Wiener Library with a professorship in the Parkes Centre at the University of Southampton: a dual role which connected him to two of the most significant Jewish research centres in Britain. Through these activities, Cesarani became ‘probably the best known media figure associated with modern scholarship of the Holocaust’ in Britain.3 In doing so, he can be seen as part of a wider trend since the late 1990s that has seen academic historians—most notably Simon Schama and David Starkey— becoming household names. De Groot suggests that Schama and Starkey have become ‘abstracted from their disciplinary and academic origins’.4 In other words, their public personas have overshadowed their roles in the academy. The distinction between public and scholarly roles is less clear-cut in Cesarani’s case; his involvement in public projects did not sever his connection to academic research. Cesarani’s ability to straddle public and scholarly identities is demonstrated through colourful reflections he made about the development of the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) permanent Holocaust Exhibition in June 1999. Summing up the exhibition in an email to Suzanne Bardgett—the exhibition’s project director—he argued that: It’s such a familiar story. Just like WWII. We’ll get there in the end, more by good luck and improvisation. The Yanks will beat us (have done), by throwing masses of money and intellectual firepower at the problem, producing a product that has got Made in the USA stamped all over it … We will create something that is marvellous and will last, but with a miraculous quality – like the Festival

3 Memo

from Suzanne Bardgett to Robert Crawford, 15 December 1995, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), Imperial War Museum’s Internal Archives, London (hereafter IWM IA).

4 Jerome

de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 18.

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Hall (‘Oh you mean it was only supposed to last for 2 years!!!’) And we will always wonder if it could have been better – well, I will.5

In many ways, Cesarani’s comments provide an effective precis for the scholarship that has been written about the exhibition since it opened in June 2000. In the considerable literature written about the exhibition, scholars have undertaken sustained analysis of what the IWM’s exhibition reveals about Holocaust remembrance in Britain at the turn of the millennium and its connection to memories of the Second World War.6 Tony Kushner argues that the exhibition adopts a familiar story by underscoring Britain’s ‘glorious role’ in the conflict.7 Tom Lawson agrees, emphasising that the exhibition paints Britain as a ‘liberal alternative to Nazism—as refuge, as liberator’.8 Additionally, scholars have regularly compared the exhibition to Holocaust museums—particularly in America and Israel—and noted how representational clichés have developed at such sites.9 It is important to note that these criticisms are only a small part of the response the exhibition received. Much of the commentary—from scholars and the wider public—has emphasised the pioneering nature of the exhibition and how it has supported a greater understanding of the Holocaust. This chapter should be read with this widespread praise in mind.10 The intense focus on the IWM’s exhibition as a microcosm of how Britain has sought to remember the Holocaust is unsurprising. The exhibition is situated in the nation’s capital. The IWM has been credited as being the unofficial ‘Museum of Britain’, having initially been founded to commemorate Britain’s role in the First World War.11 As such, much can be learnt from approaching the Holocaust Exhibition as a site of national Holocaust remembrance. However, focus on the exhibition in a national context has 5 Email

from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1999, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA.

6 As

a starting point, see Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 108–132.

7 Tony

Kushner, “The Holocaust and the Museum World in Britain: A Study of Ethnography,” in Representing the Holocaust: In Honour of Bryan Burns, ed. Sue Vice (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), p. 27.

8 Tom

Lawson, “The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum,” in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, eds. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 161.

9 See,

for example, Tom Lawson, “Ideology in a Museum of Memory: A Review of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, no. 2 (2003): 173–183; Tim Cole, “Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK,” Journal of Israeli History 23, no. 1 (2004): 130–145.

10 Caroline

Sharples and Olaf Jensen, “Introduction,” in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, eds. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 5.

11 Kushner,

“Holocaust and the Museum,” p. 16.

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eschewed what Cesarani referred to as the ‘good luck and improvisation’ needed to create it.12 This loss feeds into a wider issue with the way Holocaust remembrance has been debated in numerous narrative studies and explanatory paradigms over the last twenty years. Whilst providing valuable scholarly insights, Andy Pearce argues that such research has inadvertently ‘deagentified’ Holocaust remembrance. He suggests that ‘presumptions about how things happen in contemporary Holocaust culture’ would be nuanced by moving away from ‘non-human’ trends and trajectories that have dominated the scholarship.13 This chapter provides a ‘reagentified’ study of Holocaust remembrance in Britain by examining one individual’s involvement in a major Holocaust remembrance project. In exploring agency, this chapter questions ‘the capacity of people in the past to resist, manipulate or negotiate the powerful discourses that constitute their cultural and social worlds’.14 To do so, the chapter presents a microhistory focusing on Cesarani’s involvement in the creation of the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition. As such, this chapter is not considering Cesarani’s wider academic legacy, but rather focusing on his work at a specific intellectual moment during his lifetime. Through an examination of Cesarani’s role, this chapter considers how far the scholarly community was able to influence a major public exercise in memory-work. In particular, the chapter explores Cesarani’s concerns with the way Jewish victims were being represented to illuminate the competing tensions present within the IWM’s exhibition. Cesarani maintained a clear conceptualisation of Holocaust remembrance that foregrounded the Jewish victims. He believed that this particularity must sit alongside an emphasis on the universal lessons the Holocaust could teach all sections of British society. As the chapter will demonstrate, Cesarani was able to convince the museum to change aspects of their plans for representing the Holocaust. On the whole, however, there was a consistency in the institutional approach adopted by the museum towards the exhibition, meaning that many of Cesarani’s criticisms remained unresolved when the exhibition finally opened.

A Public Appeal: Bringing the Holocaust Home In the early 1990s, Cesarani publicly campaigned for a British Holocaust museum. Writing in the Guardian, he argued that such a museum would provide ‘an honest appraisal of Britain’s wartime record’ by nuancing the

12 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1999, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 13 Andy

Pearce, “In The Thick of It: ‘High Politics’ and the Holocaust in Millennial Britain,” Patterns of Prejudice 53, no. 1 (2019): 101.

14 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 8.

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dominant celebratory narrative of the ‘People’s War’.15 A year later, in 1995, Cesarani wrote and presented Bringing the Holocaust Home on BBC2. This programme was televised as part of the BBC’s ‘Remember Season’, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of AuschwitzBirkenau. In total, the season included 15 hours 15 minutes of content related to the Holocaust.16 Cesarani’s documentary stands alone as the only programme to challenge the ‘moral and exclusive underpinnings’ of Britain’s war memory.17 In his programme, Cesarani repeated the sentiments he had raised in his Guardian article, arguing that a museum was needed to counter ‘racism, intolerance and fascism’ in Britain.18 To support his argument, Cesarani drew comparisons between the status of Holocaust remembrance in Britain and the United States. He claimed that there were hundreds of institutions dedicated to remembering the Holocaust in America, while none existed in Britain.19 He singled out the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, as the type of institution Britain needed, suggesting that this museum provided a ‘powerful educational weapon’ against intolerance.20 The USHMM opened in April 1993 to critical acclaim. It was followed a few months later by Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust feature film, Schindler’s List. In drawing comparisons between the two countries, Cesarani emphasised that British attempts had failed to attract the level of funding and prestige that American projects had secured. He stressed how Holocaust remembrance had been deployed in the United States as an educational tool to guard against intolerance. He suggested this approach would be relevant for contemporary Britain. But Cesarani had a particular understanding of how the Holocaust should be used to warn against the dangers of prejudice, which would keep the focus on the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His views would necessitate a sharp departure from earlier approaches to Holocaust remembrance in Britain.

15 David

Cesarani, “Holocaust and Its Heritage,” Guardian, December 29, 1994, p. 18.

16 Judith

Petersen, “How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory in 1995,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21, no. 3 (2001): 264. 17 Ibid. 18 “Remember:

Open Space,” Radio Times, January 12, 1995, p. 61.

19 Cesarani’s

argument was overstated. In 1995, Beth Shalom (now The National Holocaust Centre and Museum) opened in Nottinghamshire. There were Jewish museums in London and Manchester, which both documented the history of their respective Jewish communities and the impact of the Holocaust. The Wiener Library in London was another important site documenting the Holocaust and its legacies. It should be borne in mind, however, that these sites did not have the wide-reaching appeal of national museums. The unfamiliarity of the Wiener Library, for instance, is shown in Bringing the Holocaust Home, where the institution is incorrectly called the ‘Weiner Library’ in the closing credits. 20 Bringing

the Holocaust Home (BBC, 1995).

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‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ Cesarani’s conviction that Britain needed a Holocaust museum meant that his interest was piqued when the IWM announced its own plans to develop such a site in 1994. Initially, the museum intended to create an exhibition focusing on ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’. This proposal would have incorporated the Holocaust alongside other acts of ‘inhumanity’. In responding to a consultation on the proposal, Cesarani outlined his serious objections. He lambasted the concept for emphasising universal human suffering rather than the specific Nazi policy towards the Jews.21 By doing so, Cesarani suggested the IWM risked ‘at best confusion’ and at worst the denial of the ‘historicity’ of the Holocaust.22 As he bluntly put it: the museum’s proposal failed to ‘meet the need for a national British memorial to the Jews who perished in the Holocaust’.23 Suzanne Bardgett, then the IWM’s co-ordinator for the ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ project, was not surprised that Cesarani had reservations about the idea. She suggested that Cesarani probably thought the museum lacked experience in organising the type of exhibition they were proposing.24 She questioned whether Cesarani’s research into war criminals living in Britain might have made him sceptical about whether a governmentsponsored organisation would ‘pursue the truth of certain aspects of the Holocaust’.25 Yet Cesarani was not the only historian to raise objections to the museum’s plans. Martin Gilbert wrote to Bardgett in May 1995. At this time, Gilbert had already developed a longstanding relationship with the IWM, having advised the museum about their exhibitions in the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall and through his patronage of the museum’s 1991 Belsen exhibition. As such, Gilbert did not have the potential anti-establishment twinge that Bardgett suggested may have coloured Cesarani’s opinions. Gilbert informed Bardgett that it was ‘specifically a Holocaust Exhibition which the Jewish community is hoping for’, and he encouraged the IWM to explicitly recognise this aim.26 The IWM’s then Director-General, Alan Borg, acknowledged Gilbert’s concerns, but noted that some of the IWM’s Trustees were opposed to an

21 David Cesarani’s Response to the IWM’s ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ Proposal, n.d., 3, 7, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. 22 Ibid.,

p. 9.

23 Ibid. 24 Memo from Suzanne Bardgett to Alan Borg, 9 May 1995, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. 25 Ibid. 26 Letter from Martin Gilbert to Suzanne Bardgett, 11 May 1995, IWM IA-32, Martin Gilbert’s personal archive.

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exhibition solely focusing on the Holocaust. The Trustees’ objections emphasised a desire to maintain a focus on Britain’s war effort within the museum.27 To avoid jeopardising the scheme altogether, Borg wished to avoid sustained discussion focusing on the difference between a specific Holocaust exhibition and the IWM’s ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal.28 Borg naïvely hoped the issue could be ducked, so that the museum could get on with the ‘real job’.29 This assumption showed a lack of understanding about how the Holocaust was increasingly being understood in Britain as an event that required separate and specific attention, as was demonstrated by the revised National Curriculum for schools released in 1995. The IWM would have to choose to either focus on ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ or develop a specific Holocaust exhibition. It could not please everyone. Borg equally failed to appreciate the changing landscape of Holocaust remembrance in Britain in the early 1990s. The media—or at least specialised subsections—have always provided some form of critique of how the Holocaust should be remembered in Britain. In the early 1990s, coverage of the Holocaust in the British media continued to increase, even if its appeal remained somewhat patchy and underdeveloped.30 Cesarani publicly attacked the IWM’s proposals in the Jewish Chronicle, branding the idea a ‘thoughtless mish-mash’.31 He was not the only individual to raise objections to the proposals in the press. Eric Moonman, one of the Board of Deputies’ (BoD) joint vice-presidents, voiced concerns that the ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal was not focusing enough on the Holocaust.32 The BoD’s communal influence had been in decline since the 1980s. The comments of one of the Board’s vice-presidents only had so much sway by themselves. Alongside them, however, it is important to note that a wide variety of organisations focusing on aspects of Holocaust remembrance had emerged by the mid-1990s. This environment meant that, if the IWM decided to continue with its focus on ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’, an alternative organisation may decide to develop a museum focused solely on the Holocaust. Indeed, an alternative proposal came from a group of Jewish businesspeople headed by Israel Weinstock. They expressed a desire to create a smaller version

27 Emily-Jayne Stiles, ‘Narratives, Object, Witness: The Story of the Holocaust as told by the Imperial War Museum, London’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Winchester, 2016), p. 47. 28 Letter from Alan Borg to Martin Gilbert, 24 May 1995, 1–2, IWM IA-32, Martin Gilbert’s personal archive. 29 Ibid.,

p. 2.

30 David

Cesarani, “Holocaust Controversies in the 1990s: The Revenge of History or the History of Revenge?,” Journal of Israeli History 23, no. 1 (2004): 83–84. 31 David Cesarani, “Historian Attacks ‘Inappropriate’ Plan for UK Holocaust Museum,” Jewish Chronicle, June 16, 1995, p. 8. 32 Simon Rocker, “Board Leader Voices Doubts Over Plans for Holocaust Museum,” Jewish Chronicle, April 21, 1995, p. 7.

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of the USHMM in Britain.33 Moonman gave this group’s proposal tacit support by suggesting that the Board was willing to ‘explore all avenues to ensure that the museum offered in London is both true to the memory of those who died and provides an educational tool for generations to come’.34 The IWM’s leadership was undoubtedly aware that having the BoD, highly respected historians and Jewish business leaders speaking out against their proposal would damage the museum’s fundraising drive. The museum’s efforts would have been weakened further if these groups backed Weinstock’s project. The negative public reaction to the IWM’s plans persuaded the museum to scrap their ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal, which had also received internal criticism from Bardgett and others, and pledge to create something similar to the USHMM.35 As has been common in the history of Holocaust remembrance in Britain, rising pressure could gain enough momentum to stop a project in its tracks. The IWM’s change of focus successfully silenced its critics. In July 1995, the BoD publicly welcomed the revised proposal.36 Endorsements came from important organisations including HET, the Spiro Institute and the Wiener Library. This widespread support for the IWM’s plans ‘dealt a fatal blow’ to Weinstock’s scheme.37 Cesarani and Gilbert were invited to become members of the exhibition’s Advisory Group, whose principal task was defined as ensuring the exhibition was ‘historically balanced’ and therefore help to avoid the return of public criticism.38 They were joined by Antony Lerman, then Director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, and Martin Smith, who had been the permanent exhibition director at USHMM. Two Holocaust survivors, Ben Helfgott and Rabbi Hugo Gryn, completed the group, although Gryn passed away in 1996. The relationship between the Advisory Group and the Holocaust Exhibition Project Office (HEPO) started on a positive note. Several members from both groups undertook a visit to Holocaust landscapes across Europe, organised by Martin Gilbert for his MA students, in the summer of 1996.39 At a conference focusing on the Holocaust and British museums in 1996, 33 Stiles,

“Narrative, Object, Witness,” pp. 46–49.

34 Rocker,

“Board Leader,” p. 7.

35 Stiles,

“Narrative, Object, Witness,” 48–49. For Bardgett’s own reflections on the development of the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, see Suzanne Bardgett, “David Cesarani and the Creation of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition,” in The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public: The Legacies of David Cesarani, eds. Larissa Allwork and Rachel Pistol (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 297–305. 36 Stiles,

“Narrative, Object, Witness,” p. 49.

37 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness, p. 116.

38 Letter

from Suzanne Bardgett to David Cesarani, 20 October 1995, 2, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. 39 The

diary Martin Gilbert wrote during the trip formed the basis for what became Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), xiii.

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co-organised by the Parkes Centre and Wiener Library, Cesarani defended the museum’s revised plans against critics. During the conference, historian Mark Mazower argued that the IWM—and, indeed, Britain more broadly— did not need a discrete Holocaust exhibition. Instead, he suggested the IWM should focus on genocide more broadly or develop an exhibition examining the country’s involvement in the slave trade. Cesarani countered that a distinct Holocaust exhibition was needed because it would teach ‘children basic moral values, what it was to be a responsible citizen and that democratic values are not automatically sustained but need to be nurtured and protected’.40 In doing so, Cesarani was suggesting that the specific events of the Holocaust could be utilised to teach universally applicable lessons. It is striking that Cesarani’s defence of the exhibition sounded very similar to the criticisms he had levelled against the ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal. There was a tangible risk that the exhibition’s visitors—many of whom would have no Jewish connections—would focus on universal lessons rather than the particularity of the Jewish experience. The potential consequence of this unintended focus was the removal of Jewish victims from their historical circumstances, thus providing a tabula rasa onto which ‘the visitor can inscribe their own circumstances and hopes’.41 The tensions surrounding the purpose of a Holocaust exhibition in Britain, and particularly the specificity of the Jewish experience, persisted throughout the development of the IWM’s exhibition. Cesarani was vexed by the representation of Jewish victims throughout his time on the exhibition’s Advisory Group—a period of more than four years. It is evident from Cesarani’s own notes from the time that he was very much influenced by wider academic discussions then taking place. He repeatedly told the HEPO’s staff to read Kushner’s The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination to ensure the exhibition avoided recycling deep-rooted misunderstandings about the Holocaust that were present in Britain, particularly surrounding Belsen.42 He suggested that the alternative would be to engage in ‘universalistic babble’—a phrase he borrowed from the Israeli historian, Yehuda Bauer.43

40 Simon Rocker and Susannah Cusworth, “Historian Slams Holocaust Museum Plan as ‘Wasteful’,” Jewish Chronicle, July 5, 1996, p. 10. 41 K.

Hannah Holtschneider, “Are Holocaust Victims Jewish? Looking at Photographs in the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition,” Melilah 1 (2012): 103. 42 See, for example, David Cesarani’s response to the IWM’s ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal, n.d., 2, 7, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA; David Cesarani’s comments on Holocaust Exhibition texts, 22 March 1999, 2, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA; News reaches the outside world (window 4), n.d., 1, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. 43 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 15 October 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. The reference is from Yehuda Bauer, “A Past That Will Not Go Away,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 12.

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Cesarani’s desire to teach universal lessons and concern that Jewish victims must be appropriately foregrounded were aims that proved to be difficult, and often impossible, to square. His concerns are perhaps best illustrated in the debates surrounding the exhibition’s overarching narrative. The narrative was of critical importance, underpinning all the decisions that were made about the exhibition.44 When key flashpoints within the exhibition’s narrative are interrogated, points of dispute and disagreement between those involved in its creation come to the fore. In the process, the issues Cesarani himself was wrestling with can be identified. These tensions are well illustrated in the following three examples.

The Exhibition’s Opening Foyer: Defining the Holocaust Hannah Holtschneider suggests that the exhibition’s foyer provides the visitor with an opportunity to prepare themselves for what is to follow. The foyer signals a departure from the machinery of war prominently displayed in the rest of the museum—aptly dubbed the ‘biggest boys’ bedroom’—and allows for ‘a moment of collection and orientation’ before the exhibition truly begins.45 Whilst the foyer appears understated, it frames the entire exhibition and the IWM’s narrative of the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, it duly became one of the most controversial areas of the exhibition and was the focus of heated discussion between the Advisory Group and the HEPO. On the left-hand side of the exhibition’s entrance, the visitor is greeted by rolling footage of German militarism encased in a steel wall. Accompanying these images is the declaration that: Under the cover of the Second World War, for the sake of their ‘new order’, the Nazis sought to destroy all the Jews of Europe. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people. Six million were murdered, including 1,500,000 children. This event is called the Holocaust.

In a subsequent paragraph, the text describes how the ‘Nazis enslaved and murdered millions of others as well’. The paragraph break provides a caesura. The events in the first paragraph are the Holocaust, but those in the second are not. These two paragraphs represent a fundamental shift in Holocaust remembrance in Britain. As Pearce has noted, this explanation was the first attempt to provide a ‘clear and concise definition’ of the Holocaust in Britain. 44 Stiles, “Narrative, Object, Witness,” 20–21; Holtschneider, “Holocaust Victims,” 91– 106. 45 For

reference to the IWM as the ‘biggest boys’ bedroom,’ see Anne Karpf, “Bearing Witness,” Guardian, June 2, 2000. Holtschneider, “Holocaust Victims,” 98, discusses how the foyer prepares visitors for the subsequent exhibition.

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The definition’s placement in the IWM gave it ‘institutional authority and cultural weight’, marking a departure from the ‘uncertainty and confusion’ that had surrounded understanding of the Holocaust in this country for decades.46 In this definition, the Holocaust is defined as the culmination of a specific Nazi policy towards the Jews. Other victim groups are—rather ambiguously—separated from the distinct events of the Holocaust. What is striking about this definition, however, is that it was not the museum’s first choice. In a late draft of the exhibition’s text, a different definition of the Holocaust was proposed. In full it stated that: Under the cover of the Second World War, the Nazis systematically murdered more than 14 million people. The exact figure will never be known. For the sake of their New Order, they aimed to annihilate all the Jews of Europe. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for mass extermination. The Nazis enslaved or suppressed other groups as well. People with physical and mental disabilities, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, prisoners of conscience, and homosexuals were killed in vast numbers. These events, called the Holocaust, took place in a modern, civilised society, with the help of people from many countries. This exhibition looks at how and why the Holocaust happened.47

Unlike the final definition used by the museum, the earlier version provided an overtly inclusive definition, which conflated the reasons why different victim groups were targeted by the Nazis. The specificity of the Jewish experience was striking in its absence. The earlier definition was present in the exhibition script in March 1999, but it was replaced by the end of April 1999. What caused the museum to completely recast the definition they were using? Steve Paulsson, the IWM’s project historian, told Cesarani that the earlier definition reflected the ‘party line at the museum’ and that the IWM intended to ‘treat all victim groups equally’. Paulsson concluded that it would be difficult to shift this attitude, but he suggested that a strong statement from the Advisory Group might help.48 Cesarani was happy to provide such a clear rebuke. In a formal response to the museum, he warned that ‘I cannot possibly approve the entire text’ 46 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness, p. 121.

47 Holocaust

Exhibition: Mainline text and subtexts: Level E: Upper Floor, Version 3a, n.d., 2, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. This version of the script was sent to Advisory Group members on 16 March 1999. 48 Email from Steve Paulsson to David Cesarani, 28 March 1999, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive.

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unless the problems with the definition were ‘dealt with in a satisfactory way’.49 Cesarani did not just communicate his disquiet to the HEPO, rather he worked with members of the Advisory Group to force the museum to abandon their preferred definition. Cesarani wrote to Gilbert, complaining that the ‘opening is appalling’ and must be changed.50 Cesarani was also in contact with Lerman and Helfgott about the definition. Cesarani, Lerman and Helfgott met with the museum in a ‘special meeting’, which helped to ensure the definition was amended.51 Alongside the cumulative pressure from the Advisory Group as a whole, the reaction of individual members of the group played a part in ensuring that the original definition would be scrapped. In terms of Cesarani’s role, two key points should be emphasised. Firstly, Cesarani was a high-profile figure in the media with a growing international reputation. He had written in the press about his disdain for the ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ concept. If the museum did not change their approach, it was possible he would publicly speak out against the Holocaust Exhibition. Secondly, an alternative scenario was that Cesarani may have chosen to resign. Such a response would have concerned the museum because there was already speculation that Gilbert might have resigned from the Advisory Group. This rumour was ultimately unfounded, although Gilbert’s continued involvement was not confirmed for several months.52 Nevertheless, set against heated disagreement about the definition, there was real concern that members of the Advisory Group might vote with their feet. One resignation would have prompted questions; two would have raised serious concerns. The debate over the definition demonstrated a concern about the way Jews were represented in the exhibition. The final definition only met Cesarani’s approval with ‘reservations’.53 He still disliked the opening phrase—‘Under the cover of the Second World War’—arguing that it suggested that the war was driving the exhibition’s chronology rather than the Nazi’s Jewish policy. For Cesarani, the way the war acted as a proscenium arch in which to frame the exhibition was problematic, and he continued to express doubts about the exhibition’s foyer. Initially, this area was meant to contain four video displays. The fourth installation was to showcase the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, 49 Letter from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 22 March 1999, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 50 Letter from David Cesarani to Martin Gilbert, 25 March 1999, IWM IA-34, Martin Gilbert’s personal archive. 51 Memo from Antony Lerman to David Cesarani and Ben Helfgott, 9 April 1999, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. 52 Ibid. In the memo to Cesarani and Helfgott, Lerman discussed speculation that Gilbert had resigned from the Advisory Group. Bardgett had told Lerman that Gilbert had not communicated such a decision to the museum. 53 David Cesarani’s handwritten notes on Advisory Group meeting, 23 April 1999, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive.

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focusing on the British liberation of Belsen. This video would have been accompanied by a comment made by a British newsreel commentator in April 1945, which announced: THIS IS BELSEN, TO WHICH PEOPLE FROM ALL PARTS OF EUROPE WERE HERDED … THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS PERISHED … AND YET SHALL WE REMEMBER THESE THINGS IN TEN, FIFTEEN, TWENTY YEARS’ TIME?54

The video and accompanying quotation emphasised the scenes discovered by the liberators in 1945—placing the focus on the British soldiers—rather than the specific experiences of the Jewish victims. Cesarani found this emphasis unacceptable, condemning the museum for perpetrating ‘a form of denial practiced [since] 1945’.55 Yet, whilst Cesarani’s objections to the opening definition had found traction, the museum was less willing to scrap the references to Belsen. Featuring Belsen was seen as important because of the camp’s prominence within British collective memory. Indeed, according to Bardgett, the focus on the camp ‘reassures visitors that they are doing the right thing by visiting’ the exhibition.56 Eventually, the Belsen installation was removed from the exhibition’s foyer, but it is difficult to ascertain how influential Cesarani’s objections were here. In a meeting with colleagues in the Parkes Centre, Cesarani was asked by Kushner why the Belsen footage was removed. Whilst Cesarani wrote notes for his answers in which he explained the museum’s rationale for certain decisions, he did not record a response to Kushner’s question.57 It is possible, therefore, that Cesarani had not played a significant part in the removal of the footage, even though he had continually voiced serious objections about its inclusion. Instead, it appears that the decision to remove the references from the introduction was taken by the museum in collaboration with the exhibition’s designers. Writing in 2005, Bardgett stated that ‘during a final walk around with our designers we decided that the Entrance Space was too busy, with too many competing elements’.58 The Belsen footage was thus moved to

54 Holocaust Exhibition: Mainline text and subtexts: Level E: Upper Floor, Version 3a, n.d., 4, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. 55 David Cesarani’s handwritten comments on Holocaust Exhibition: Mainline text and subtexts: Level E: Upper Floor, Version 3a, n.d., 4, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive [emphasis in original]. 56 Letter from Suzanne Bardgett to David Cesarani, 17 September 1999, 2–3, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. 57 Comments on IWM exhibition, n.d., 2, IWM Holocaust Project (1998–2000), David Cesarani’s personal archive. 58 Suzanne

Bardgett, “Film and the Making of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition,” in Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, eds. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: Wallflower, 2005), p. 23.

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the end of the exhibition, as part of a package of last-minute changes to make the foyer look less cluttered.59 The movement of the footage underscores the competing aims of different groups involved in the creation of the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition. Importantly, the concerns of the Advisory Group were not always the most pressing. Indeed, whilst the Belsen material was taken out of the introduction, the focus on the British liberators still appears in the exhibition in a significant location. Placing the footage at the end underscores the superiority of the British wartime record in contrast to the horrors the visitors have experienced throughout the exhibition. Examining the exhibition’s opening section has therefore shown that Cesarani’s interventions had differing levels of success.

The Upper Floor: Tinkering at the Edges Beyond the entrance space, Cesarani had an ongoing concern that the exhibition’s upper floor was ‘overly devoted to the Third Reich. It becomes an exhibition about Nazis and Nazism’.60 Due to this focus, Cesarani was concerned that the experiences of European Jewry before and during the early years of the Nazi regime risked being inappropriately neglected. As the floor developed from conception to reality, Cesarani’s objections included concerns about aesthetical choices, which he suggested emphasised the perpetrators’ experiences. He argued that the exhibition’s designers had adopted a Nazi colour scheme and that an audio recording of Josef Goebbels was overpowering the upper floor.61 The museum conceded to several of these criticisms and made alterations. Bardgett, for example, stated that the volume of Goebbels’ speech had to be turned ‘right down’.62 By themselves, these design changes only amounted to tinkering at the edges. Cesarani failed to persuade the museum to alter the substantive contents of the upper floor and therefore the exhibition’s prepetrator-driven narrative. His limited success is clearly demonstrated when examining how artefacts were displayed on this floor. Cesarani, for example, questioned the inclusion of a ‘spotless’ SS uniform within the exhibition.63 A quotation was added to the 59 Ibid. 60 Letter from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1997, 3, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. 61 On the colour scheme, see letter from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1997, 3, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. For examples of Cesarani’s concern about the sound leakage, see email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 15 May 2000, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA; Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 19 May 2000, 1, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA. 62 Handwritten note from Suzanne Bardgett on an email from David Cesarani to Bardgett, 15 May 2000, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA. 63 See, for example, email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 15 May 2000, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA; Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 19

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display case, designed to explain the purpose of the SS and thus temper the glamorous image the uniform could present.64 This textual addition, however, did not address Cesarani’s overarching concern about the floor’s focus on the perpetrators. Indeed, the space provided to the uniform can be contrasted to the lack of space provided to the display of Judaica and antisemitica, which meant these objects were placed in the same display case. Cesarani remarked that this decision was a ‘fatal error’, but the museum could not find an easy solution and the objects remained together when the exhibition opened.65 The SS uniform, Judaica and antisemitica are all relatively small objects. But whilst the IWM had access to ample ‘flat evidence’—documents, film, and photographs—it had a limited supply of artefacts within its own collection at the start of the Holocaust Exhibition project.66 Securing three-dimensional artefacts for the exhibition was a priority for the HEPO and collecting such objects ‘dominated the first two years of the four-year project’.67 A dissecting table from Kaufbeuren-Irsee psychiatric hospital, near Munich, epitomises the type of artefact that the HEPO was looking to acquire. The museum worked hard to secure the table, with the Director-General, Robert Crawford, suggesting it provided ‘an indication of the barbaric route which events will take on the Lower Floor’.68 Elaborating further, he argued that the object would play ‘a particularly important role’ in signalling ‘a literal descent into the war years’.69 Cesarani was less convinced. He had long argued that the upper floor should not ‘hinge on September 1939’ because the outbreak of the war did not seal the fate of European Jewry.70 In terms of the dissecting table itself, Cesarani equally felt the HEPO was conflating issues. He argued that prominent display of the table ‘turns a minor, if bizarre, feature of Nazi activity, into a focal point’ by implying the Nazis were interested in studying anatomy, rather than simply murdering May 2000, 1, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA. Cesarani also raised concerns about how the perpetrators were represented on the lower floor of the exhibition. See, for example, email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 15 May 2000, David Cesarani (1999–onwards), IWM IA. 64 Email from Suzanne Bardgett to David Cesarani, 16 May 2000, David Cesarani (December 1999–onwards), IWM IA. 65 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 15 May 2000, David Cesarani (December 1999–onwards), IWM IA. 66 Suzanne Bardgett, “The Material Culture of Persecution: Collecting for the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,” in Extreme Collecting: Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums, eds. Graeme Were and J. C. H. King (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), p. 23. 67 Ibid.,

p. 22.

68 Letter

from Robert Crawford to Gebhardt von Moltke, 29 October 1998, Section Files: Dissection Table, IWM IA. 69 Translation of a letter from Robert Crawford to Dr Simnacher, 12 February 1999, Section Files: Dissection Table, IWM IA. 70 Letter from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1997, 3, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA.

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racially undesirable people.71 Cesarani suggested that the table was only being included ‘because it is all the museum could get’, which meant that the object’s relevance to the exhibition was not as obvious as other artefacts would have been.72 Emily-Jayne Stiles has since provided a nuanced reading of the dissecting table. She argues that the exhibit could have been linked to the IWM building’s former use as a psychiatric hospital ‘to engage on a deeper level with how we understand objects and environments to challenge the broader context of Holocaust history and British connections’.73 Yet prioritising Stiles’ innovative reading of the dissecting table would have moved away from what Cesarani saw as the central purpose of the exhibition. For Cesarani, the exhibition was about Jews, not psychiatric hospitals. Two years after it opened, Kushner provided an assessment of the exhibition that paralleled Cesarani’s own views during his time on the Advisory Group. Kushner argued that the exhibition amounted to a ‘fetishisation of Nazi memorabilia’.74 Mirroring Cesarani’s concerns, Kushner questioned why the exhibition included: a ‘pristine SS uniform’; a jumbled assortment of Judaica and antisemitic objects in a single display case; and the purpose of the dissection table.75 Taken together, Kushner argued that such objects made the museum an alienating experience because visitors were unable to identify with the Jewish victims, who were presented as ‘strange exotic creatures’.76 Kushner suggested that the representation of Jews within the exhibition is not unique, but rather typifies the way Jews are presented in British museums. The representational methods deployed in the IWM did not simply echo the museum’s focus on modern conflict, but rather reflected the wider stigmatisation of the ‘other’ in British museums.77

The Lower Floor: The War Versus the Holocaust Whilst Kushner shows how the representation of Jews in the exhibition reflects wider issues concerning British museology, it was the IWM’s focus on modern conflict that would engulf discussions of the lower floor. Cesarani suggested that the order of events on this floor was ‘tailored to the needs of design’, rather than historical events and should be adjusted.78 In essence, this view 71 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 8 December 1998, 2, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 72 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 10 December 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 73 Stiles,

“Narrative, Object, Witness,” p. 115.

74 Kushner,

“Holocaust and the Museum,” p. 24.

75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 78 Email

pp. 24–25.

from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 8 December 1998, 1, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA.

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was in keeping with his discomfort about how the war was driving the exhibition’s narrative. This concern can be seen in discussions about the place of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, within the context of the exhibition. Cesarani suggested that the museum’s intention to increase the exhibition’s references to Barbarossa ‘betray[ed] a confusion between the war against the Jews and the German war against Britain and Russia’.79 Cesarani felt the museum was prioritising the Second World War, which caused ‘important twists and turns of Nazi policy in Poland’ against the Jews to be placed in the wrong order, with the importance of ghettoisation not being adequately addressed.80 The museum did not change the layout. Instead, they provided a detailed justification for the use of flashforwards and flashbacks to rationalise the lower floor’s design and stated that clearer signposting would be provided to help visitors.81 Cesarani was not entirely convinced. He complained that the museum was ‘making the best of a bad job’ and lamented that he should have done more ‘to help forestall this chaos’.82 Cesarani’s criticisms of the lower floor—and self-proclaimed lack of involvement—have to be contrasted with the museum’s interpretation of these events. Whilst he claimed to have been negligent of the lower floor’s layout, the museum’s internal correspondence suggested Cesarani was well aware of the plans. On a memo sent to him by Bardgett, Crawford responded that Cesarani’s influence in planning the lower floor’s layout had been ‘a major one!’83 Had Cesarani argued for and against the layout of the lower floor? It is not unreasonable to assume that he had; indeed, colleagues attested to his ability to ‘argue passionately for a case one week and against it the next’.84 Later in his career, Cesarani produced a tome that challenged his earlier insistence on the paramount importance of isolating the Holocaust from the Second World War. In his book the Final Solution, he emphatically argued for the need to integrate the history of the war and the genocide. As he set out in the book’s introduction, scholarship has changed tremendously since the 1990s.85 Cesarani did not, however, alter his argument about who the victims of the Holocaust were. He stressed that the Final Solution was ‘primarily and 79 Ibid.,

[emphasis in original].

80 Email

from David Cesarani to Steve Paulsson, 10 December 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 81 Email

from Steve Paulsson to David Cesarani, 9 December 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 82 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 10 December 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 83 Robert Crawford’s handwritten note on a memo sent to him by Suzanne Bardgett, 15 December 1998, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 84 Tony Kushner, “Professor David Cesarani OBE 1956–2015,” Holocaust Studies 21, no. 4 (2015): 208. 85 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (London: Macmillan, 2016), pp. xxv–xl.

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unapologetically [about] the Jews’.86 The emphasis on this particularity acts as a constant. In the 1990s, Cesarani’s concern with ensuring the Second World War did not determine the chronology of the Holocaust Exhibition stemmed from his wider view of what Holocaust museums were intended to do. He felt that Holocaust museums ‘should have an explicit memorial function’.87 The IWM, however, had decided that learning—not memorialisation—would be at the crux of the exhibition. Whilst education was the museum’s stated aim, Cesarani suggested that the exhibition would implicitly be the ‘best memorial’ by ‘commemorat[ing] the lives and the civilization that was lost’.88 Given this view, it is unsurprising that Cesarani forcefully questioned the inclusion of Nazi memorabilia and items—such as the intention to include a bone grinder and whipping block—that gave a ‘chamber of horrors’ vibe to the exhibition.89 Cesarani acknowledged that in a ‘museum of conflict it is natural to focus on soldiers, policemen and even killers, but this exhibition is not about a war’.90 Instead, it is an exhibition about genocide and so there is an obligation to go into depth about the target of the genocide, as a response to the attempt to wipe out a people, to help to explain why that onslaught occurred, and to correct the distortions that will appear if the ‘victims’ are only seen as such and in representations determined by the perpetrators.91

Holtschneider’s nuanced study of the exhibition questions how far this vision was achieved. She argues that the Jewish victims are represented as mere window dressing in a perpetrator-led narrative. The victims’ religious, cultural and ethnic identifications are neglected, meaning that ‘the Jews’ appear as nothing more than a ‘homogeneous mass of people’.92 Prior to Holtschneider’s assessment, Kushner had previously suggested that the focus on the victims could have been enhanced by embracing the audio-visual testimony used throughout the exhibition to highlight the ‘diversity, fullness and contested nature of the Jewish experience’ before, during and after the Holocaust.93 In the exhibition itself, however, Holtschneider contends that these materials are not allowed to add complexity to the exhibition or disrupt the 86 Ibid.,

xxix.

87 Letter

from David Cesarani to Mr. Barak-Kaye, 14 May 1999, David Cesarani (February 1998–December 1999), IWM IA. 88 Ibid. 89 Letter from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 27 June 1997, 4, David Cesarani (January 1995–February 1998), IWM IA. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 K. Hannah Holtschneider, The Holocaust and Representations of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 41. 93 Kushner,

“Holocaust and the Museum,” p. 35.

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museum’s master narrative.94 Holtschneider’s finding that the ‘logical and easily accessible’ narrative propels the exhibition forward is supported by Stiles, who equally suggests that the exhibition prioritises a comprehensible narrative rather than a nuanced account.95 Holtschneider, Kushner and Stiles provide a constructive critique of the exhibition. They suggest that Cesarani’s involvement hardly shifted the exhibition away from a vague sense of the victim that he had criticised in the IWM’s ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ proposal. Cesarani’s input may have ensured that the Jews were foregrounded in the exhibition’s opening definition, but the subsequent contents continued to generalise who the victims actually were. A more positive reading of the exhibition’s final effect is offered by Pearce. He suggests that the exhibition provides ‘a detailed yet accessible history of the Holocaust’.96 Lay visitors would certainly come away with improvements in their basic knowledge and understanding, which was important as most people were only likely to visit once. That three million people had visited after a decade was certainly an impressive feat.97 The public’s engagement convinced Cesarani of the effectiveness of the finished exhibition. Following his first visit after the exhibition opened, he wrote that the place was heaving. It was the first time I had been there when the public was going through. A revelation. I saw them rapt, being moved – learning. By the end I felt better about the exhibition than ever before: it really works.98

But in what ways did the exhibition ‘really work’? Does footfall alone mean that the public were learning about the Holocaust, even when the exhibition is unclear about the nature of the genocide? These are hardly moot questions. It is certainly fruitful to consider how Holocaust exhibitions, such as the IWM’s, are engaged with by their intended audience. Yet these questions lie beyond this chapter’s scope.

Towards a Conclusion This chapter has considered how Cesarani influenced the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition and how the museum responded to his views about the particularity of the Holocaust. Whilst the museum did not always follow his advice, Cesarani was praised by staff at the IWM for his ‘massive personal

94 Holtschneider, 95 Ibid.,

Holocaust and Representations, p. 41.

p. 44.

96 Pearce,

Holocaust Consciousness, p. 129.

97 Suzanne

Bardgett, The Holocaust Exhibition: Ten Years On (London: Imperial War Museum, 2010), p. 4. 98 Email from David Cesarani to Suzanne Bardgett, 24 July 2000, David Cesarani (1999– onwards), IWM IA.

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contribution’ to the exhibition.99 The creation of a Holocaust exhibition at the heart of the unofficial ‘museum of the nation’—without attracting major public concern—was certainly an impressive achievement. Looking back two decades later, Cesarani’s positivity towards the exhibition might raise eyebrows, but perhaps at the turn of the millennium his optimism seemed perfectly reasonable. Cesarani’s involvement with the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition became only one part of his wider engagement with Holocaust remembrance initiatives in Britain. As the exhibition was finalised, Cesarani became an advisor for the government’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). The first HMD was held within a year of the exhibition’s opening. In 2002, Cesarani predicted that professional historians will have a greater role than ever to play as experts, counsellors, arbiters, and advocates. This, surely, is what all historians aspire to and what should characterise the formation of public memory.100

In arguing for historians to play an increasingly active role, Cesarani was placing a large burden on the importance of individual agency in shaping Holocaust remembrance in early millennial Britain. At the turn of the millennium, this demand perhaps seemed a reasonable one to make. Deborah Lipstadt’s courtroom experience had shown that individuals—backed by appropriate legal and financial clout—could successfully challenge the insidious nature of Holocaust denial. Cesarani’s work for the inaugural HMD equally suggested reasons to be positive. Whilst the first HMD suffered from controversies, those questioning it did not challenge the need to remember the Holocaust in Britain, but rather what else should be remembered alongside the genocide. The political endorsements, financial clout and access to large, national audiences marked clear departures from earlier attempts to remember the Holocaust in Britain. But there was, equally, a continuity between the millennium projects and earlier attempts to remember the Holocaust, demonstrated through a continuing confusion about the relevance of the Holocaust to life in Britain. Cesarani had provided, from the outset, a clear conceptualisation of who the victims of the Holocaust were. He insisted that the IWM’s exhibition needed to focus specifically on the Jewish victims and that any deviation from this approach would betray the memory of the Holocaust. His certainty was clearly communicated throughout his involvement with the IWM and he often lambasted the museum for adopting a perpetrator-driven narrative. Cesarani occasionally managed to get the museum to adapt to his way of thinking, as

99 Letter from Robert Crawford to David Cesarani, 9 June 2000, David Cesarani (December 1999–onwards), IWM IA. 100 David

Cesarani, “Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain,” History Today 52, no. 2 (2002), https://www.historytoday.com/archive/holocaust-memorial-day-britain.

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seen most explicitly through the revised definition at the start of the exhibition. The final product, however, did not place the Jewish victims at its core in the way he had demanded. Yet, when he visited the exhibition after it opened, Cesarani praised the response it was eliciting from the public. The exhibition seemed to have achieved its goal. Cesarani’s contradictory reaction to the exhibition seems to arise from two concurrent beliefs he held about Holocaust remembrance. Firstly, he undoubtedly felt the Jewish victims needed to be at the heart of any memorial project. His second conviction was his strong sense that the Holocaust could be used to support the teaching of universal lessons about the dangers of prejudice and discrimination. These views seemed to have been successfully realised during the planning for the inaugural HMD, which placed the Holocaust at its core. The controversies surrounding HMD did not hinge on whether the Holocaust should be remembered in Britain, but rather focused on which genocides and atrocities should feature alongside it. Holocaust remembrance in Britain seemed, finally, assured. But this assurance was built on an unstable foundation. The confusions surrounding Holocaust remembrance lingered, thus creating the conditions for ‘a yawning gulf’ between popular understanding and academic scholarship to continue to expand in the decades after the exhibition’s opening.101 Over time, Cesarani’s optimism surrounding Holocaust remembrance receded. He was left questioning ‘whether it is not better to let history remain in the past, whether the utilization of history for whatever purpose inexorably degrades it’?102 This chapter has not sought to explain the causes of Cesarani’s growing unease with Holocaust remembrance towards the end of his life. But it has suggested that to do so will require turning away from structures to consider the role of individuals in shaping Holocaust remembrance. In understanding the shape of Holocaust remembrance in Britain, there remains much unfinished business.

101 Cesarani,

Final Solution, p. xxv.

102 Cesarani,

“Autobiographical Reflections,” p. 83.

Part VIII

Institutional Memory

CHAPTER 21

From Celebrating Diversity to British Values: The Changing Face of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain Kara Critchell

2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in Britain. In the two decades since the inaugural ceremony took place successive British governments have sought to position themselves at the very forefront of Holocaust remembrance and education on a national, international and supranational level. As such, the Holocaust has emerged as a dominant sociopolitical symbol in twenty-first century Britain even though the event intersects with the British experience in few ways, in part, due to the lack of connections the country has to the sites of deportation or extermination. Held at Westminster Central Hall in 2001 the first national ceremony was, Andy Pearce describes, a ‘holistic commemoration’ that displayed a ‘fusion of educational, symbolic and interactional communicative forms’ as a means by which to stress the diversity of British society and the inclusivity that the government hoped to promote through the day itself.1 With a keynote address given by Prime Minister Tony Blair, attended by 1900 invited guests including the Prince of Wales, leaders of the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats, Holocaust

1 Andy Pearce, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: Inculcating “British” or “Euro-

pean” Holocaust Consciousness?’ in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds.), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 199. K. Critchell (B) University of Chester, Chester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_21

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survivors, faith leaders and notable figures from stage and screen and broadcast to 1.5 million people across the country, the first Holocaust Memorial Day was a significant event in the British memorial calendar. Whilst the national ceremony has continued to evolve into an ever more ‘multimedia and multimodal epideictic event’ so too has the ethos of the day been increasingly disseminated across the country.2 As we approach the twentieth year of HMD it is clear that the day now extends far beyond the merely official commemorative action towards more localised engagement, with many schools, universities and local councils organising memorial services, public lectures and educational initiatives. The increase in such public events should not be underestimated: approximately 11,000 events took place across in 2018 compared to 7700 in 2017 and 266 in 2006, the first year that the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) organised the day.3 Though the increase in activities suggests a growing engagement with the Holocaust in British society this obscures the complex discourses surrounding the day, and inherent tensions that have existed within it since its inception in 1999. This chapter explores some of these by tracing the shift in Holocaust remembrance in Britain since the establishment of HMD in 2001, considering the political tensions surrounding it and the changing politicised messages being promoted by it. It is the position of this chapter that, evermore, HMD is being utilised as a means by which to evoke specific values for the furthering of very particular political agendas.

Establishment and Early Years With the establishment of HMD Britain entered a new phase in the development of its Holocaust consciousness. How and why this occurred has been discussed extensively elsewhere; here we can say that this shift did not represent a sudden break with past trends in Holocaust consciousness nor was it wholly unanticipated. In short, it can be said that ‘awareness of and interest in the Holocaust was generally confused and contradictory, fluctuant and turbid’ in the decades following 1945.4 That being said the early years of the 1990s were marked by an increasing engagement with the Holocaust beyond Anglo-Jewish communities and the decade bore witness to an evolution in the development of British Holocaust consciousness. The culmination of a variety of factors including the success of Schindler’s List and the multitude of public acts of remembrance which had taken place across the country in 1995 2 John

E. Richardson, ‘Evoking Values or Doing Politics? British Politicians’ Speeches at the National Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration’, Journal of Language and Politics 17 (3, 2018): 344.

3 Holocaust

Memorial Day Trust, Holocaust Memorial Day 2018 in Review (2018), pp. 2–

3. 4 Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Britain (Paper Presented at the University of Winchester 12 February 2015).

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to mark the fiftieth anniversaries of the liberation of the camps of AuschwitzBirkenau and Bergen-Belsen all encouraged greater awareness of the genocide. Nonetheless, as Mark Donnelly observes, ‘these anniversaries themselves were part of a wider programme of war-related commemorations that year’.5 The Holocaust was thus being commemorated as part of a more holistic response to the memory of the events of the Second World War in British culture, often projected through the lens of British moral superiority and accompanied by allusions to the myth of societal cohesion and accolades to British heroism in the face of the tyranny of Fascism. It was not that the British people were unaware of the Holocaust or its significance in the mid-1990s, nor was it the case that they were somehow cruelly indifferent. It was more that despite a growing engagement with the genocide in some areas the historical event itself remained on the margins of mainstream society. Institutional interest reflected and fuelled this somewhat inconsistent public engagement with the Holocaust, and can be described as being somewhat fragmentary. This was, however, soon to change when the inaugural day of Holocaust remembrance, now referred to as Holocaust Memorial Day, took place. The establishment of the day marked the biggest shift towards a sustained institutional engagement with the Holocaust since the subject became a mandatory part of the National Curriculum for English Secondary Schools in 1991. The institutionalisation of the Holocaust was, in many ways, the institutionalisation of a cosmopolitan morality that reflected wider trends across Europe at this time.6 Britain did not, however, simply import transnational trends in Holocaust education and commemoration. Such ‘reductionist interpretations’ are, as Pearce rightly states, ‘fundamentally flawed’ and imply indifference or apathy in Britain towards developing its own institutionalised Holocaust consciousness.7 Contrary to such interpretations the day emerged as a result of interweaving international and domestic influences, including lobbying by interested parties (particularly by the Holocaust Educational Trust [HET] founded by Greville Janner in 1989), burgeoning political interest within the Labour Party (which had recently assumed control of the Government following a landslide election win in 1997), and the domestic turn towards a more active civic morality and celebration of multicultural ideals. As Lothar Probst suggests the Holocaust ‘is necessarily differently embedded in the political culture’ of each nation and, as such, is still in essence continually 5 Mark

Donnelly, ‘We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, in Britain and the Holocaust, 172.

6 Larissa Allwork, Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational: The Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the International Task Force (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory 5/1 (2002): 87–106. 7 Andy

Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14 (2, 2008): 71–94, 72.

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being shaped by national considerations and interpretations of identity.8 These interpretations are of course influenced by transnational events, concerns and meanings but they are also based on the sense of entitlement borne out of a belief in some kind of belonging to the national group. Within the academy reactions to the proposal of a day of Holocaust remembrance varied. David Cesarani, who was later to become a founding trustee of the HMDT, emphasised the inherent value in having a day in the national calendar that could act as ‘contested terrain for interpretations of the Holocaust and genocide’.9 Others appeared far more wary about the apparent lack of confrontation with some of the more difficult questions associated with such a day, including the failure to address the issue of Britain’s own colonial past. In its formative years, responsibility for the day lay under the auspices of the Home Office and the Department for Education and Skills and it was this state-sponsored control of the day which some found troubling. Donald Bloxham saw inherent limitations posed by this relationship and he questioned the extent to which the state would be ‘capable of promoting or at least allowing a self-critical civic culture’ in which acts of historic (and indeed contemporary) violence committed by British subjects on behalf of the British state could be considered through a critical lens.10 For whilst it is not the case that states are incapable of self-reflection it is usually not politically expedient for them to do so. Dan Stone raised similar concerns about the tension between the proposed aims of the day and contemporary realities asking whether government officials would ‘appear on podia to remember the Jews of Europe, and then carry on supplying weapons to dubious regimes?’11 Responding to such criticisms Cesarani accused those articulating these views of ‘offering a counsel of despair’ to the debate. Instead, he argued, ‘whatever way that this or other governments try to mould it, the day will act inexorably as a lightening conductor for criticism of many aspects of government policy’.12 Similar tensions were discernible in the public sphere. Some believed that a day was needed in the national calendar as a sign of ‘respect to those who died and suffered at the hands of those madmen who wanted to control man’s destiny, and to be there as a stark reminder that if we forget history, it will surely visit us again’.13 Others were rather more reticent. Responding to the 8 Lothar Probst, ‘Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust’, New German Critique 90 (Autumn, 2003): 55. 9 David

Cesarani, ‘Seizing the Day: Why Britain Will Benefit from Holocaust Memorial Day’, Patterns of Prejudice 34 (4, 2000): 66.

10 Donald

Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Reshaping the Past in the Service of the Present’, Immigrants & Minorities 21 (1–2, 2002): 51. 11 Dan Stone, ‘Day of Remembrance or Day of Forgetting? or, Why Britain Does Not Need a Holocaust Memorial Day’, Patterns of Prejudice 34 (4, 2000): 57. 12 Cesarani, 13 Jim

‘Seizing the Day’, pp. 63–66.

Bogusz. J, 30 January 2002, comment on ‘Talking Point: Do We Need a Holocaust Memorial Day?’ (2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1774160.stm.

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announcement in a letter to the Independent, one individual raised their opposition to the day on the basis that ‘Britain is not a Jewish nation […] we should not allow our grief for those atrocities to confuse the issue of what is a suitable cause for any British national remembrance ceremony’.14 So whilst Carly Whyborn, former Chief Executive Officer of the HMDT, claimed that ‘Holocaust Memorial Day has been really embraced by the UK community’ the reality is that the entire concept of establishing a day devoted to Holocaust remembrance was beset with disagreement from the start.15 Perhaps the most prominent, and well publicised, tension was the dispute that emerged over the exclusion of victims of the Armenian genocide from the commemorative programme.16 Reflecting growing public interest in this decision, representatives from the Home Office were asked in November 2000 whether the Government would include any reference to the massacre of Armenians during the commemoration. The Minister of State for Immigration, Mike O’Brien, provided a response which did little to allay or address these concerns and, instead, simply reiterated the government’s line that: We took a conscious decision to focus on events around the Holocaust and thereafter, although we did examine requests to consider the atrocities and other events that preceded the Holocaust….It is always difficult to draw a line and wherever it is drawn it runs the risk of being misinterpreted.17

Whilst it may have seemed reasonable to the British establishment that commemoration only focus on those acts of genocide which had taken place since 1945, for many others the marginalisation of the Armenian genocide on account of it not fitting within a particular timescale undermined the entire ethos of the day. Mark Levene attributed this lack of inclusion to ‘the government’s current political sensitivities, not only with regard to any direct relationship with Turkey but, much more profoundly, as a result of the complex set of interconnections enmeshing Britain within the Atlantic alliance’.18 In an attempt to deflect growing anger from interested parties a small number of representatives from the Armenian community were eventually invited to attend the inaugural ceremony. It was also agreed that the

14 P.

Larg, ‘Letter: In Brief’, The Independent, 7 July 1999.

15 Carley

Whyborn, ‘About Holocaust Memorial Day Podcast’, cited in Kara Critchell, Holocaust Education in British Society and Culture (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2014), p. 16. 16 Yair Auron, The Pain of Knowledge: Holocaust and Genocide Issues in Education (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), p. 100. 17 Mike O’Brien, ‘House of Commons Debates Written Answers: Holocaust Memorial Day’, Hansard, Col. 917, 30 November 2000. 18 Mark Levene, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: A Case of Post-Cold War WishFulfilment, or Brazen Hypocrisy?’ Human Rights Review (April–June, 2006): 28.

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‘massacre of Armenians’ could be referred to by broadcasters.19 Despite the fact that no explicit reference to the genocide of the Armenians was to be permitted, not least due to the fact that the United Kingdom does not officially recognise the genocide, even this minor reference was seen as a capitulation by the Turkish government who vehemently opposed its inclusion.

HMD and Other Genocides The Armenian controversy, reignited during the centenary of the atrocities in 2015, not only exposed the sensitivities surrounding the creation of a nationwide day of Holocaust remembrance, but also highlighted the complexities of attempting to negotiate the relationship between the Holocaust and other genocides in British memorial culture. Although the Holocaust was the principal hub around which the day had been created, incorporating other genocides appeared to be one of the main objectives of the day. In the programme created to accompany the inaugural memorial service at Westminster Abbey, the Home Secretary Jack Straw noted that ‘Holocaust Memorial Day is about learning the lessons of the Holocaust and other more recent atrocities that raise similar issues’ going on to stress the significance of exploring ‘its contemporary relevance in light of continuing instances of genocide and other appalling atrocities around the world’.20 The broader inclusivity of the day, which also commemorates non-Jewish victims of Nazi Persecution has become one of the defining features of the day in Britain. As part of the 2019 national ceremony a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Marie Chantal Uwamahoro, addressed the assembled audience by testifying to her experiences before music by an LGBT choir led by singer-songwriter, and Rwandan genocide survivor, Jean Paul Samputu provided a musical dimension to the event. Despite this, the position of the Holocaust as the central genocide of the day, and the subsequent hierarchy of significance this implies, has been evident since the opening ceremony. The official programme for the ceremony in 2001 asserted that ‘over 169,000,000 people died during the 20th century as a result of state sponsored mass murder’ before going on to clarify the government’s position that, ‘among them all, the Holocaust stands out as an example at the extreme’.21 Sentiments such as these articulated the extent to which the Holocaust was designed to be the main focus of the day. The strapline ‘Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future’ was, Cesarani noted, only

19 Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Genocide: Lessons for the Future Commemorative Programme (London: HMSO, 2001). 20 Jack

Straw, cited in Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Genocide Commemorative Programme.

21 Ibid.

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included due to criticism of the apparent focus on the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.22 The decision to name the day HMD has continued to raise concerns. In 2018 amidst the articulation of far broader fears about the British Labour Party’s stance on antisemitism it was revealed that the then leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn, had previously sponsored an Early Day Motion to rename HMD as Genocide Memorial Day—Never Again for Anyone.23 In response to the news the Chief Executive of the HMDT issued a firmly worded statement to reiterate the fact that ‘Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the Holocaust, all victims of Nazi Persecution, and the subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur’.24 Yet the next comments made by Olivia Marks-Woldman reflect the inherent tensions within the day itself: she continued, ‘The Holocaust rightly holds the central place in HMD, marking not only the extremity of centuries of antisemitism but also the trauma which compelled the formulation of the international crime of genocide’.25 The Holocaust is thus positioned as the central act of genocide to be commemorated as part of this day which, in turn, reveals much the priorities of those who established and promote it and how the Holocaust was thought about, and thought with, in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Concern about the perceived prominence of the Holocaust during this day of remembrance has, however, also led to shifts in the broader landscape of British genocide consciousness. Those activists involved with the promotion of non-Holocaust memory have taken the opportunity to promote awareness of other genocides; in 2013, for example, the inaugural Srebrenica Memorial Day took place. Meanwhile, British based academic research on genocide beyond the Holocaust has also flourished. Whilst Cesarani’s prediction that HMD would be a provide a platform for debate was not realised in the way he anticipated, therefore, it did become a space for debate and a platform for controversy be that in relation to further discussion of other genocides or in relation to domestic tensions, as was evidenced in discourse following the decision by the Muslim Council of Britain to boycott the HMD ceremony until 2007 because of concerns about human rights violations in the Palestinian Territories.

22 David Cesarani, ‘Does the Singularity of the Holocaust Make It Incomparable and Inoperative for Commemorating, Studying and Preventing Genocide? Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day as a Case Study’, The Journal of Holocaust Education 10 (2): 41. 23 EDM

1360, Never Again for Anyone Initiative, 27 January 2011, https://edm.parlia ment.uk/early-day-motion/42381/never-again-for-anyone-initiative.

24 Olivia Marks-Woldman, ‘Response to News About a Motion to Rename Holocaust Memorial Day’, 2 August 2018, https://www.hmd.org.uk/news/in-response-to-newsabout-a-motion-to-rename-hmd-in-2011. 25 Ibid.

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Changing the Agenda? Despite these tensions by the time of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005, HMD appeared to have firmly rooted itself in the British commemorative landscape. This was, however, to be the last ceremony to be run by the Home Office. In May 2005 the HMDT was established and responsibility for the running of the day and shaping the strategic vision of the annual day of remembrance was transferred to this charitable organisation under the guidance of its trustees. Bloxham, who had already questioned the extent to which the state would encourage or even permit a reflective selfcritical culture, tentatively raised the possibility that the decentralisation of the day and its ultimate removal from state administration to a non-governmental organisation offered the potential for a reorientation of the day, although he remained duly cautious as to the extent to which this could or would be achieved.26 The creation of this charitable body was certainly to have considerable implications for the way in which the Memorial Day would be positioned over the following years, although perhaps not in the way that earlier critics of the day may have hoped. Rather than reorientation, the creation of HMDT instead appeared to mark the transition towards an ever-greater abstraction of the Holocaust from its historical underpinnings. Instead of encouraging critical engagement with the past, the day became increasingly positioned towards more abstract themes promoting civil morality and values that were ostensibly democratic. Every year HMD is based around a specific topic which provides a focus for the ceremonial events and educational initiatives on both a national and local level. As a means by which to unify events around the country the thematic approach has been a relative success spawning a plethora of instructional materials produced for educators and community groups by those organisations established to further Holocaust memory. The theme for the first ceremony, ‘Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future’, was followed by ‘Britain and the Holocaust’ (2002) and ‘Children and the Holocaust’ (2003). Although these early themes aroused debate, they also contained the opportunity for historical rootedness and the possibility of contextual discussion and critical self-reflection. The potential for confrontation with official narratives of the past was particularly offered by the 2002 theme of ‘Britain and the Holocaust’. Nonetheless, whilst guidance produced for the day by the HMDT referred to the fact that the ‘ambiguity of Britain’s response to Nazi tyranny and racism is lodged in our heritage’, this ambiguity was presented as ‘an inspiration, a warning and a guide’ rather than as an opportunity for critical self-reflection and historical analysis whilst the day,

26 Bloxham,

‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days’, p. 51.

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and the associated events connected to it, failed to stimulate a considered response to British actions either in the past or in the present.27 Since the establishment of HMDT the themes promoted by the organisation appear to have been re-framed towards more active memorialisation. In 2006 the theme chosen, ‘One Person Can Make a Difference’, spoke acutely to the aims of the day as people were encouraged ‘to use one’s voice to enhance positive human values’.28 Even more explicit in terms of framing the day as a one of contemporary action was the 2016 theme ‘Don’t Stand By’ which specifically positioned itself as being a ‘forward-looking with a clear call to action in the present’.29 Not just learning about the Holocaust but, more specifically, learning from the Holocaust. This emphasis on moral instruction as opposed to encouraging historical reflection has been termed the ‘pathos approach’ to Holocaust commemoration and education, privileging moral judgement and ceremonial processes of remembrance at the expense of tackling more complex historical questions regarding how people came to commit such crimes and why they were able to do so.30 From the outset the British government had envisaged the day as being primarily an educational event, albeit with a strong commemorative dimension. Not simply a means by which memorialise but also as a pillar around which it could instruct. For those of school age it was anticipated that the day would move the Holocaust beyond “a mere academic subject” to one that would impart messages regarding tolerance and respect through enhancing an understanding of the different groups that form British society.31 It was, Cesarani noted, a ‘weighty educational burden’32 that the day carried and this burden was met by the idea of the Holocaust holding ‘lessons’ for contemporary society. The question as to whether ‘lessons’ for contemporary society can be derived from the Holocaust has been a defining feature of the debates surrounding HMD and Holocaust education more broadly. Yet despite the fact that an event as historically and contextually complex as the Holocaust cannot, and arguably should not, be easily be distilled to provide messages for common humanity, the concept of ‘lessons’ has emerged as a dominant aspect of the way in which the Holocaust has continued to be both taught

27 David

Cesarani, Holocaust Memorial Day Theme Paper: Britain and the Holocaust

(2002). 28 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Theme Paper: One Person Can Make a Difference 2006 (2005). 29 Holocaust 30 Bloxham,

Memorial Day Trust, Theme Paper: Don’t Stand By 2016 (2015). ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days’, p. 47.

31 Andrew Dismore, ‘House of Commons Debate: Holocaust Remembrance Day,’ Hansard 334, Col. 363, 30 June 1999. 32 Cesarani,

‘Does the Singularity of the Holocaust’, p. 42.

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and conceptualised.33 Whilst this approach is reflected in the way in which other countries have sought to engage with the Holocaust on educational and commemorative platforms, within Britain the approach to Holocaust teaching transmitted through ‘lessons’ for the future has achieved a particular pertinence and provides the moral justification for the continued inclusion of the Holocaust on the National Curriculum. As the United Kingdom’s first Envoy for post-Holocaust issues, Andrew Burns, observed, it is hoped that the ‘lessons from that disastrous period of history guide us in the future’.34 Such sentiments are frequently evoked in both the classroom and in wider culture and reflect a distinctive trend in British consciousness in this period whereby the events of the Holocaust are utilised as a means by which to either reflect the righteousness of Britain’s moral commitment to multiculturalism or as a means of emphasising the benefits of living in a tolerant liberal democracy. With the establishment of HMDT the emphasis on the supposed ‘lessons’ that contemporary society could draw from the Holocaust became increasingly more central to the day than any real engagement with the historical event itself. Learning about the Holocaust was not, however, to be enough. It was anticipated that these ‘lessons’ and the sentiments expressed during the service of remembrance would be mediated to more localised initiatives and would, in turn, be translated into some form of positive action.35 This promotion of active participation in society reflects the wider context in which this increased engagement with the Holocaust was emerging. For at the same time as the Labour government was implementing plans for HMD it was also making Citizenship a mandatory part of the National Curriculum which came into effect in 2002 at both Key Stage 3 and 4. Citizenship education was intended to further knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens, developing skills of enquiry and communication and developing skills of participation and responsible action. The Crick report published in 1998, highlighted the importance the new government was placing on education at this time and was bold in its aim which was ‘no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens’.36 For the Labour leadership at this time it was clear that education through the lens of the Holocaust could be transformative. As Dave Landrum suggests it was a central concern of the newly incumbent Labour government that

33 Andy

Pearce, ‘The Holocaust in the National Curriculum after 25 years’, Holocaust Studies 23 (3): 246. 34 Andrew Burns, ‘Holocaust Memorial Day: Lessons for the Future’, 24 January 2013, www.het.org.uk/index.php/blog/entry/holocaust-memorial-day-lessons-for-the-future. 35 Dismore, 36 Advisory

‘House of Commons Debate’.

Group on Citizenship, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (London: Department for Education, 1998), p. 7.

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active citizenship was needed to counter the effect of globalisation by ‘concentrating identity at an increasingly local and regional level, and the need cultivate a common or national identity to maintain the base elements of the nation-state itself’.37 The Holocaust provided the means through which this identity could be cultivated through recourse to active citizenship. As a historical event that could be disseminated from a national to a local level and could help forge and sustain a common identity based on a celebration of British traditions of liberal tolerance and multiculturalism. That it was the Holocaust that was seen to have the potential to fulfil this role was, on the one hand, unsurprising. The Labour commitment to addressing issues relating to the Holocaust was shown even before they assumed office. Speaking in January 1997 the former leader of the party, Tony Blair, said that he was giving ‘active consideration’ to making denial of the Holocaust illegal should the party gain control of Parliament later that year.38 In December of the same year the new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, on behalf of the incoming government, arranged the London Conference on Nazi Gold which invited representatives from 41 countries to discuss the plunder of Jewish assets during the Holocaust and the issue of restitution to survivors of the genocide. Yet whilst the Labour commitment to furthering awareness of the Holocaust was clear, the use of the Holocaust as a tool to sculpt British identity was also surprising given nations commonly commemorate events committed by or against itself. The geographical distance from the crimes of Nazism means that there is actually very little intersection between Britain and the Holocaust particularly in terms of Britain assuming a status of victimhood.

Conflict, Genocide and British Identity To understand this association between the Holocaust and the conceptualisation of British identity we have to consider the dominant narratives surrounding the Second World War which celebrate British heroism in the conflict. It is certainly difficult to separate the memory of the Holocaust, and the perils of Fascism, from the memory of the British defeat of Nazism and the prevailing of democratic ideals. Since the establishment of HMD, however, the Holocaust has become increasingly central to popular understandings of this period by reinforcing the memory of the war as opposed to the war simply facilitating engagement with the Holocaust. As Andrew Dismore MP noted, ‘the need to commemorate the Holocaust applies in Britain as much as anywhere. Our country made terrible sacrifices to defeat Hitler. The period of Nazism and the Second World War remain a defining episode in our national psyche’.39 The indelible association between Britain, the Second World War 37 Dave

Landrum, ‘New Labour New Citizenship?’ Children’s Social and Economic Education 4 (1, 2000): 23.

38 ‘Blair

May Outlaw Denial of Holocaust’, The Independent, 30 January 1997.

39 Dismore,

‘House of Commons Debate’.

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and the Holocaust in cultural imagination contributes to a sense of identity built on pride in British heroism during this time not only in resisting Fascism but also for liberating the rest of Europe from the yolk of Nazism. National ‘myths’, and the subsequent interpretations of identity they inspire, tend not to develop around negative actions of the state. Instead, they are shaped around the affirmation of a positive self-identity through the assertion of supposed national values such as heroism, liberal democracy or tolerance. This is also achieved by positioning the perceived characteristics of the nation against the actions and characteristics of an identified ‘Other’. In the British case, this self-image, drawn from the domesticated narrative of the past, encourages a sense of entitlement to international leadership, particularly with regard to issues with humanitarian implications. When asked about the importance of HMD Andrew Burns observed that, ‘we were the country that stood up to Nazism, and in the early days of the war… And I think we have a lot of good things to, not to preach to other people, but there’s good practice in the UK and so if we’re active we can spread that good practice around Europe’.40 This evocation of British actions during the Second World War and British actions in ‘liberating’ survivors of the Holocaust thus allows politicians and the British public to maintain a position of moral superiority within the global arena whilst encouraging the view that other countries should be grateful for British heroism and disinterested benevolence. Seen in this light HMD has facilitated the articulation of a somewhat ‘reconfigured vision of national identity, legitimated through reference to the past and the iconic evil of modern times’.41 The danger of connecting the Holocaust with overt expressions of British identity is that it allows the perpetuation, and evolution, of a post-imperial identity based on positive notions of tolerance. Necessarily this ignores or omits critical evaluation of Britain’s own past actions of atrocity and state crimes whilst also helping to defend limited responses to contemporary humanitarian crises. As Levene observed in 2006, ‘the underlying spuriousness, indeed mendacity of Britain’s recent foreign policy record destroys any moral basis upon which it can make claim, let alone offer leadership on the basis of any Holocaust association’.42 Considering the conflicts which Britain has participated since this observation, and the apathetic if not outright callous treatment of refugees fleeing Iran and Syria in more recent years, one is entitled to question the truthfulness of British claims to moral distinction and the extent to which Holocaust ‘lessons’ can really be said to be learnt. Equally, ‘the refusal to think of the totalitarian temptation as something which is emerging 40 Andrew Burns, ‘Podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’, Retrieved on 13 February 2016, from www.hmd.org.uk/resources/podcast/sir-andrew-burns. 41 Sharon Macdonald, ‘Commemorating the Holocaust: Reconfiguring National Identity in the Twenty-first Century’, in Jo Littler and Roshi Naidoo (eds.), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 44. 42 Levene,

‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, p. 27.

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from inside of democratic societies and not from the outside’ is something that perhaps is more perilous as global tensions rise.43 If one of the central objectives behind the establishment of HMD was to ‘provide an opportunity to examine our nation’s past and learn for the future’ it is clear that, to date, there has been a relative absence of opportunity for this introspection to take place beyond superficial engagement.44 Such a trend towards ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust and abstract identification in the service of moral civic instruction at the expense of historical understanding forces us to reconsider the reasons behind the framing of HMD, especially following the removal of the day from direct state administration in 2005. Importantly, although the day is now ostensibly run independently from the state, the HMDT continues to be funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and, as such, cannot be completely removed from the influence of official policy. It is not that the government invented the lessons-based approach to the Holocaust that emerged in this period but it certainly gave it political authority and encouraged its continuation. This, in part, explains why this ‘lessons-based’ approach with its deeply civic objectives was adopted not only by HMDT but by other organisations such as the HET which have their own educational and commemorative, but also political, agendas and influence. The role of these organisations in the advancement of HMD in this period should also not be understated. For whilst politicians have been instrumental in the establishment of a ‘lessons’ based approach to Holocaust education and remembrance under the umbrella of HMD, what is apparent is that increasingly it is those organisations ostensibly removed from the government but often funded by them, at least in part, who are becoming the arbiters of what this day means, how people should engage with it and who shape its relevance to present day concerns. Each year politicians are invited by the HET to sign a Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Commitment designed to illustrate each politician’s commitment to the day of remembrance and their pledge to remember those who perished. The carefully sculpted entries of the Prime Minister of the time are not only concerned with remembering the past but also contain messages for common humanity. MPs are said to be speaking out against intolerance by signing these books of remembrance, yet whilst what they compose appears to be an organic act reflection of the sentiments of the individual this is also a managed mode of remembrance which raises questions about who and what is shaping the face of HMDT. For the Prime Minister of the day receives a briefing pack from the Trust which offers carefully constructed suggestions about what the politician could choose to write in the book when they sign it.45

43 Probst,

‘Founding Myths’, p. 58.

44 Holocaust 45 Critchell,

Memorial Day Trust, Strategic Plan 2014–2020 (2013).

Holocaust Education, pp. 78–79.

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Those members of Parliament who do not receive advice about what to include when signing the book of commitment often choose to express sentiments which sound assertive and emotive, but which never seek to explain or to justify a reason as to why ‘We must always remember what happened’ nor which define exactly why ‘Each new generation needs to know what happened’.46 Simply stating these sentiments is deemed to be enough to show a commitment to this day of remembrance. The political value inherent in these actions, however, can be seen by the way in which photographs are taken of those members of Parliament signing the book which are then placed on each individual MPs constituency website as demonstrable evidence of their actions. Speaking about the purpose of the Book following HMD 2019, in part prompted by continuing allegations of antisemitism within the Labour party, the Chief Executive of the HET stated passionately that ‘This is not a photo opportunity, but a way to commit to remembering the Holocaust – one of the darkest and most defining moments of human history’.47 Unfortunately how politicians themselves use their sign of commitment to this day of remembrance is beyond the control of organisations like the Trust. Despite the laudable hopes of those like Pollock it is apparent that for many who sign the book there is an assumption that by illustrating their commitment to ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten they have demonstrated their willingness to be a part of the moral imperative to remember and demonstrate their own position as good citizens whilst using the memory of the Holocaust to encourage others to act likewise. Whilst this is not to suggest that the commitment of some is not sincere it is to highlight the political value inherent within the act of commemorating this event and the other agendas that it can serve. Despite hopeful expectations to the contrary the political value of HMD has perhaps increased, rather than decreased, in the time since the day was ostensibly removed from direct state control.

From Active Citizenship to British Values 2010-Present Whilst universalised lessons for common humanity, the celebration of multiculturalism and the establishment of the national and global citizen were the emphasis of the early years of the twenty-first century, there has been another marked shift in how HMD, and in turn the Holocaust, have been framed in contemporary British society. Again, there is a need to consider the context

46 Annette

Brooke, HMD Book of Remembrance 2010 (Unpublished, January 2010); Robert Goodwill, Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Remembrance 2007 (Unpublished, January 2007). 47 Karen

Pollock, ‘Comment on the Trust’s Book of Commitment’ (2019), https:// www.het.org.uk/news-and-events/764-karen-pollock-mbe-comment-on-the-trust-s-bookof-commitment.

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in which this second shift took place. For the period after the General Election of 2010 can be defined by a newly invigorated political impetus towards a domestic commitment to ensuring the future of Holocaust remembrance, education and commemoration in British society and culture. This renewed sense of commitment to Holocaust remembrance was not necessarily anticipated. Although the establishment of HMD had achieved cross-party support, the decisive shift towards the greater institutionalisation of Holocaust memorialisation and education in the first decade of the twenty-first century had overwhelmingly been instigated and championed by the Labour Party. Following the General Election of May 2010 a coalition government led by the Conservative Party alongside the Liberal Democrats came to power. Like the rest of the country, those invested in Holocaust commemoration and education faced a period of considerable uncertainty about what the future would hold. Contrary to expectations, however, the new government instigated a series of initiatives which implied a newly invigorated engagement with the Holocaust and a determination to augment the place of the Holocaust further within British consciousness. Reflecting an apparent desire to take a more active role in the promotion of Holocaust teaching and commemoration was the announcement of an Envoy for post-Holocaust issues in June 2010. The fact that this appointment was announced just one month after a deeply contested election which resulted in a hung parliament reflects the significance attached to the Holocaust in British political imagination and the emphasis now being placed on this ‘revival’ of domestic engagement with it. The statements which accompanied the announcement of this role revealed how Britain was choosing to situate itself in regard to the wider European context of Holocaust memorialisation. Following his appointment, the new Envoy, Andrew Burns, stated that ‘the UK already plays a leading and active role in promoting Holocaust education, remembrance and research, in tackling and resolving outstanding issues and claims and in raising public awareness of the continuing relevance of the lessons and legacy of that terrible moment in European history’.48 The explicit reference to the UK as being a leading figure in the sphere of Holocaust education and remembrance was reiterated by Burns’ successor, Sir Eric Pickles, who used his opening statement as an opportunity to praise the fact that ‘The UK is a leader internationally in ensuring the Holocaust is properly commemorated and the lessons learnt’ and to pledge his commitment to ensuring this position was developed further.49 The expression of such sentiments not only implies the need for Britain to show greater initiative in international discussions about the Holocaust but also suggests that the UK can, and should, be taking a leading role within 48 Andrew Burns cited in FCO Press Release, UK appoints post-Holocaust Issues Envoy (9 June 2010). 49 Eric Pickles cited in FCO Press Release, ‘Sir Eric Pickles announced as UK Envoy on Post-Holocaust Issues’ (10 September 2015).

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the international community. The sense of British exceptionalism encountered within historical conceptualisations of the Second World War appears to be situated alongside an on-going quest and ‘deep craving’ for leadership which, Anne Deighton suggests is, ‘one facet of what has remained of Britain’s postimperial political culture’.50 The renewed frenzy towards Holocaust remembrance and education appeared to reach its zenith in the establishment of a cross-party Holocaust Commission in 2014 and its announcement of the creation of a new Holocaust memorial and learning centre the following year. The location of the memorial, directly alongside the Houses of Parliament, was to physically demonstrate the centrality of the Holocaust in the British imagination and the importance to remembering the event to the British people. But what then of HMD? How has the content and objectives of this day come to be shaped in this new context? When Dismore originally put forward the bill to introduce a national day to commemorate the Holocaust he expressed a desire that the day would further ‘understanding’ of ‘the values and customs of different groups in our society’.51 This objective was also articulated in the official Government proposal for HMD produced in 1999 which stated on its opening page; The Government has a clear vision of a multicultural Britain—one which values the contribution made by each of our many ethnic, cultural and faith communities. We are determined to see a truly dynamic society, in which people from different backgrounds can live and work together, whilst retaining their distinctive identities, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding.52

As proposed in 1999, HMD clearly reflected positive commitments to reinforcing multiculturalism, celebrating distinctive identities and encouraging respect for, and understanding of, difference. The abstract universalised lessons for common humanity emphasised during the opening years of the twenty-first century appeared to follow the founding principles of HMD. In the post-2010 era of renewed commitment to Holocaust memory, however, there appears to have been a shift in the rhetoric surrounding the day and, in turn, the role it seems to be playing in contemporary British society. For whilst messages of openness, inclusivity and acceptance were generally well received in 2001, as the years passed the British people, and the British government, appeared to become increasingly hostile to the idea of Britishness based on inclusivity and plurality. In part, this hostility emerged as a result of tensions surrounding

50 Anne Deighton, ‘The Past in the Present: British Imperial Memories and the European Question’, in Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-war Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 100. 51 Dismore, 52 HO,

‘House of Commons Debate’.

Government Proposal for a Holocaust Remembrance Day, p. 1.

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increased migration to the country from both within and outside the European Union and as a result of an increase of terror attacks committed across the country. As a result of these tensions, since 2010, both the Holocaust and HMD, have been increasingly harnessed as a means by which to promote so-called ‘fundamental British values’. What these particular values are, and what characterises these values as British, has never really been identified, however, the phrase builds on the entrenched idea of Britain as a tolerant and liberal democratic country that has been constantly reiterated in public and political discourse over the preceding decades. When reporting back on the findings of the Holocaust Commission the phrase ‘British values’ was drawn on repeatedly both as a means by which to justify the establishment of a new memorial and to instil pride in a sense of Britishness both past and present. The report even retrospectively ascribed an adherence to, and belief in, these so-called values to explain why individuals such as Frank Foley and Nicholas Winton attempted to rescue Jews from Nazi occupied Europe before and during the war.53 With the move towards the promotion of these sentiments in wider society it is apparent that learning about and commemorating the Holocaust as a means by which to learn the ‘lessons’ of liberal democracy has instead been re-orientated so as to reinforce values which are deemed as being fundamentally British. This is not to suggest that the official narrative put forward by HMDT has of yet altered to any significant degree. As the strategic plan for the organisation makes clear the Trust is still focused on commemorating the Holocaust and reiterating the value of a free, respectful and democratic society as per the statement of commitment created after the Stockholm Declaration in 2000. Central to discourse surrounding the day is still the celebration of democracy, pride in the defeat of tyranny and a need to remember the events of the past to ensure events like it can never happen again (notwithstanding the fact that they continue to do so). In the speech delivered at the national ceremony in 2019 the phrase ‘British values’ was not even utilised by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Despite not having an overt presence within the national ceremony this should not imply that the rhetoric has not come to form a significant dimension of British Holocaust commemoration and how it is currently being framed. In the final year of the Coalition government the promotion of socalled ‘British values’ rose considerably. This was a trend felt across all aspects of society but there was particular emphasis on this in the educational sphere. The securitisation of education in the fight against Islamic extremism was not born with the Coalition but it did see an exponential growth during its parliamentary term and under the successive Conservative governments

53 Holocaust

Commission, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (January, 2015), p. 22.

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that followed.54 The introduction of the Preventing Violent Extremism (more commonly referred to as the ‘Prevent’) Programme in the wake of the terror attacks of 2001 and the London bombings of 2005 to promote ‘mainstream British values: democracy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights of all men and women to live free from persecution of any kind’55 is just one early example of how the field of education has been recruited in the ‘fight’ to defend the British way of life. This was taken even further in the summer of 2015 when the Government made adherence to the programme a statutory duty to respond to the ideological threat of terrorism by encouraging ‘fundamental British values’ and to establish safeguards to support those who are at risk of radicalisation.56 Such political shifts have meant that the HMDT has had to evolve to respond to the challenges this political change has had on educators across the country and incorporate the essence of supposed ‘British values’ into the literature they produce for public consumption. The necessity of this comes in part as a direct result of the symbiotic relationship between commemoration and education which is inherently manifested within the foundation blocks of HMD. Whilst once Holocaust education and commemoration was utilised as a means by which to promote citizenship and inclusivity now the HMDT provides guidance for educators on how to use the Holocaust as a means by which to meet the obligations placed on them by statutory requirements. Reporting on social media HMDT noted that, ‘Many teachers tell us that marking HMD with students is helpful for British values and SMSC learning about the history of these events has clear relevance today in terms of discrimination and social responsibility’ (@HMD_UK 15 January 2019). Similarly for HMD 2019, activities and materials which were created around the theme of ‘Torn from Home’, were suggested to be suitable not only for subjects such as History and English but also for use in spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSC) or British values education.57 That teachers view learning about the Holocaust as a means through which to impart British values to their students, and thus fulfil their statutory obligation to do so, is clear from the way in which schools across the country explicitly promote their annual HMD initiatives as a vehicle to celebrate tolerance and mutual respect as well as democracy and the rule of law.

54 Kara Critchell, ‘“Proud to Be British; and Proud to be Jewish’: The Holocaust and British Values in the Twenty-First Century’, Holocaust Studies (2018), 10.1080/175 04902.2018.1528414_7-14. 55 HM

Government, Prevent Strategy (June 2011), p. 34.

56 HM

Government, Protecting Vulnerable People from Being Drawn into Terrorism: Statutory Guidance for Channel Panel Members and Partners of Local Panels (April 2015), p. 3.

57 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, HMD 2019: Postcard Project (2019), https://www. hmd.org.uk/resource/hmd-2019-postcard-project-secondary-schools/.

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Far from celebrating distinctive identities in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding HMD has, in an increasingly hostile domestic environment fuelled by fear of terrorism and post-imperial decline, emerged as a vehicle through which a different sense of Britishness can be expressed and celebrated. Rather than fostering a strong sense of inclusive national identity the idea of shared values can actually be interpreted as being overtly exclusionary; reaffirming differences with foreign powers and former fascist states, as was the institutionalised trend in the early 2000s, but also establishing domestic differences through the reinforcing of a particular British identity defined through particularity and difference as opposed to unity and cohesion. The respect and understanding now being promoted within political discourse appears evermore to be about those deemed as being the ‘other’ in society respecting the British state, the British people and supposed ‘British values’.

Conclusion As we approach the twentieth anniversary of HMD it is apparent that the politicisation that was visible at the time of its inception has not abated. As has been shown, however, this political discourse and the way in which it has been utilised to respond to shifting domestic tensions has changed shape, moving from the rhetoric of an inclusive form of active citizenship that celebrates multiculturalism to one which uses the Holocaust to laud ‘British values’ in a clear response to internal domestic fracturing under the strains of austerity, a heightened fear of terrorism and the continuing legacy of post-imperial decline. Whilst the influence of European turns of remembrance could be discerned in the framing of the ceremony in the early years of the Memorial Day this has, increasingly, come to be replaced by a more domesticated narrative reflecting Britain’s increasing retreat from the world stage. The political value perceived to be inherent in the day has continued even though the particular shape of that value has altered. Other fundamental continuities are also discernible. The role of victim testimony and the presence of survivors in the commemorative ceremony and educational literature created for the day have also endured. Perhaps more unexpected, however, is the fact that despite a steady rise in public and political engagement with HMD and the themes it promotes, there continues to remain a degree of controversy and debate surrounding the nature and purpose of the day. Cesarani had been right to claim that a day of Holocaust remembrance could become a space for contestation and debate although what exactly has been contested, where this has been fought and how it has been articulated could not perhaps have been predicted in 2001. These debates are, however, usually politically fuelled and have done little to really inform the public about the historical event that was the Holocaust or with more recent genocides beyond relatively superficial engagement. As we look forward to the future it is perhaps time for educational organisations, politicians and academics to take stock and to actively work together to consider what the

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next twenty years of HMD can, or should, look like rather than letting the day become ever more harnessed to evoke very specific values as a means of furthering very particular, if fluctuating, political agendas.

CHAPTER 22

Visions of Permanence, Realities of Instability: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission and the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation David Tollerton Assuming it passes unhindered through planning processes or does not collapse under a weight of ideological tensions, in the 2020s Britain will have a major new site of Holocaust remembrance next to the Houses of Parliament in London. At the time of writing (December 2018) its exact final form and date of unveiling are unfinalised, but it is already a project with a rich history that echoes some of the recurring characteristics and conflicts of Holocaust representation in British public life. When the location of the memorial and learning centre was revealed in January 2016, the government press release included an array of affirmations of the site as a ‘permanent statement’ for ‘generations to come’, suggesting that its purpose could be uncomplicatedly eternalised.1 But in reality the project’s development has been heavily contingent on the particularities and fault lines of present-day concerns. My purpose in this chapter is to present a brief overview of the project’s development since 2013 and explore a selection of tensions apparent in its progress to date. The new memorial and learning centre is, in sum, an unstable enterprise with an uncertain future. 1 UK Government, ‘PM: Holocaust Memorial Will Stand Beside Parliament as

Permanent Statement of Our British Values’, 27 January 2016, https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/pm-holocaust-memorial-will-stand-beside-parliament-as-perman ent-statement-of-our-british-values. D. Tollerton (B) Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_22

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A Brief History of the Project to Date On 16 September 2013 Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech at a dinner marking the 25th anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). He listed some of the achievements in British Holocaust remembrance thus far: developments in history curricula, the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), Lessons from Auschwitz school visits, and the work of the Wiener Library, Imperial War Museum, and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. But there was a sense of restlessness with regard to the future: ‘I want my children, my grandchildren and their children to learn about the Holocaust too […] we need to work harder than ever to preserve the memory of the Holocaust from generation to generation’. With this in mind he announced that a new commission would be established ‘to ensure Britain has a permanent and fitting memorial and educational resource for generations to come’. The reference to a ‘fitting memorial’ closely followed mention of the Hyde Park Holocaust memorial, implying that the latter was unsatisfactory.2 A few months later the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission (PMHC) was launched at 10 Downing Street amidst similar language of posterity and gravitas. ‘I’ve had some extraordinary gatherings of people in this room’, Cameron reflected, ‘but I don’t think there’s been a more extraordinary gathering or a gathering I’ve been prouder to have’. He announced that the commission’s responsibility to future generations was no less than a ‘sacred task’.3 Over the following twelve months the commissioners visited international remembrance sites and took evidence from a range of academics and organisations, before in January 2015 making their recommendations in the Britain’s Promise to Remember (BPR) report. Most prominently, these included the construction of a new memorial and learning centre, essentially mirroring Cameron’s comments in 2013.4 But if this is suggestive of a preordained outcome, a more ambiguous issue was the location. BPR proposed three sites—the Imperial War Museum, a site near Tower Bridge, and one near Millbank Tower—but in January 2016 it was announced that the memorial and learning centre would be located in Victoria Tower Gardens, immediately adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. By this point the project had moved from the PMHC to a new United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation (UKHMF), which in January

2 UK

Government, ‘25th Anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Trust: Prime Minister’s Speech’, 16 September 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/25th-ann iversary-of-the-holocaust-educational-trust-prime-ministers-speech.

3 UK

Government, ‘David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission Speech’, 27 January 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/david-camerons-holocaust-commis sion-speech.

4 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report, 27 January 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prime-minist ers-holocaust-commission-report, pp. 41–49.

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2017 launched a public design competition with ten shortlisted entries.5 Over the following months an exhibition of the designs toured a variety of national locations, and in September 2017 a day of public presentations from each of the teams was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).6 But while the UKHMF certainly made efforts to draw in public interest there remained a nagging sense of this being a top-down political initiative. The public responses were never released, and at the V&A presentations questions from the audience were not included in the proceedings. In October 2017 it was announced that the design competition had been won by David Adjaye and Ron Arad, with follow up exhibitions on the project’s progress held in September and December 2018 as part of the consultations required for planning permission.7 In the Autumn of 2018 the former government ministers Eric Pickles and Ed Balls, now co-chairs of the UKHMF Advisory Board, articulated their rationale for the project in The Evening Standard and the BBC’s Today programme.8 That these interventions were deemed necessary reflected the growth of opposition to the memorial and learning centre, exemplified by a letter published in The Times by four Jewish members of the House of Lords.9 Contained in the letter were varied complaints, covering local objections to the use of Victoria Tower Gardens, a perception of disconnect with Jewish history, and a sense that the socio-ethical impact of memorials (or lack thereof) had not been given critical consideration. At the time of writing, it is not completely certain that the project will go ahead, though my own reading of the situation is that the political fallout of cancelling it would at this point be deemed far too great. With this very brief summary in mind the rest of the chapter will focus in more detail on a selection of tensions present in the development of the new memorial and learning centre. As I have noted, Cameron’s original vision was 5 UKHMF,

‘UK Holocaust Memorial Design Competition: Tell Us What You Think’, 26 January 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-holocaust-memorial-designcompetition-tell-us-what-you-think.

6 UKHMF,

‘Holocaust Memorial Designs Exhibition in the Scottish Parliament’, 27 March 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/holocaust-memorial-designs-exhibition-inthe-scottish-parliament; UKHMF, ‘Holocaust Memorial Designs Exhibition in Wales’, 13 April 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/holocaust-memorial-designs-exh ibition-in-wales.

7 UKHMF,

‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects Win UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition’, 24 October 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/ news/adjaye-associates-and-ron-arad-architexts-win-uk-holocaust-memorial-internationaldesign-competition; UKHMF, ‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’, 4 December 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-holocaust-memorialpublic-exhibition-boards.

8 Eric

Pickles and Ed Balls, ‘Why a New Memorial to the Holocaust Is Essential’, The Evening Standard, 3 September 2018; BBC Radio 4, Today, 4 December 2018.

9 Jeffrey

Sterling, Alexander Carlile, Ruth Deech, and Simon Haskel, ‘“Poor Design” of Holocaust Project’, The Times, 2 October 2018.

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wrapped up in language of grand social legacy, and perhaps nowhere better is such rhetoric encapsulated than in BPR’s sweeping conviction that it would convey ‘a bold vision that will enable Britain and the wider world to draw from this unparalleled horror and tragedy lessons that will resonate with people of all faiths, from all lands, for all times’.10 Yet, beneath such universalising hyperbole, the plan to build a major new site of Holocaust remembrance next to the Houses of Parliament has nonetheless featured an array of tensions. Four of these will be addressed here.

One: Between the International and National The development of Holocaust consciousness in Britain has long featured a mixture of international influence and national particularities. In the mid1990s, for example, growing public awareness of the event was fuelled by the attention given to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List , but also by the weaving of Holocaust references into national coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end.11 But the PMHC and UKHMF initiatives come at a time in which Britain’s identity and relationship with the international community are in a state of heightened flux. Within their plans it is possible to both discern a new emphasis on British exceptionalism though, behind this, also the continuing influences of a transnational memory culture. Much commentary has been given to the extent to which Holocaust remembrance in the 1990s and early 2000s was shaped by the desire to provide a foundation myth for European integration, but in subsequent years it is a desire that in Britain has fractured significantly.12 Euroscepticism has been a growing feature of the Conservative Party for several decades, and in the period since Labour’s loss of power in 2010 there has been a marked shift in the framing of the Holocaust’s meaning. BPR makes no mention of the European Union whatsoever, with emphasis instead placed upon how, ‘[i]n commemorating the Holocaust, Britain remembers the way it proudly stood up to Hitler and provided a home to tens of thousands of survivors and refugees’.13 The commission report refers repeatedly to national ‘values’, 10 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, 10.

11 Andy

Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979–2001’, Holocaust Studies, 14, 2 (2008): 83; Judith Petersen, ‘How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory in 1995’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21, 3 (2001): 255–272; Mark Donnelly, ‘“We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth”: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, ed. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171–189. 12 Dan

Diner, ‘Restitution and Memory—The Holocaust in European Political Cultures’, New German Critique, 90 (2003): 36–44; Andy Pearce, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: Inculcating “British” or “European” Holocaust Consciousness?’ in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, ed. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 190–211. 13 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, 9.

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and when the Victoria Tower Garden’s location was announced in 2016, the site was proclaimed, in the press release headline, as a ‘Permanent Statement of Our British Values’.14 Such ‘values’ were again cited in Pickles and Ball’s Evening Standard article in September 2018, and speaking in the House of Lords a few weeks later the former commented on how plans for the site reflected a uniquely British endeavour: At a time when parts of Europe are seeking to rewrite history, it is important for us to set a clear example that we will look at our history with an unblinking eye. The real reason it will go there is because it will stand right next to Parliament and remind people, as they leave the monument and look towards Victoria Tower, that this place is a bastion against tyranny. As we look out at the memorial, it will remind both Houses of Parliament that the legislature has a power to protect or to oppress. We will remember that a compliant legislature introduced the Nuremberg laws. It is my sincere hope that we will build a monument of which we will all be proud; we will build a learning centre that will be a beacon to the world.15

Despite the warning of parliament’s potential to oppress, there is a language of British exceptionalism weaved through the passage. The past and present failures he alludes to are specifically continental European ones, and the memorial, learning centre, and Houses of Parliament should, according to Pickles’ vision, stand together as a mutually reinforcing moral example to the outside world. Against the backdrop of Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union, it is hard not to see developments in Victoria Tower Garden as a physical embodiment of the nation taking leave of older, transnational (especially European) models of Holocaust memory. But when you look beyond these elements of ideological context into the practicalities of the PMHC and UKHMF’s activities, it becomes readily apparent how influential international perspectives have been. Alongside signing partnership agreements with Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, BPR records that the PMHC examined some seventy international memorials, singling out New England Holocaust Memorial (NEHM) in Boston for special praise.16 By way of aside, we might note a particular irony in this choice given that the memorial in Boston was purposefully positioned midway along the ‘Freedom Trail’ taking visitors around sites of the American Revolution against British rule. As one of the engravings at the NEHM clarifies, it was positioned near such ‘symbols of American history’ so that they may together ‘be used by generations to witness history and reaffirm the basic rights of all people’. When the PMHC was planning its own memorial for future generations we might wonder whether they failed to notice the NEHM’s narrative paralleling of 14 UK

Government, ‘PM: Holocaust Memorial Will Stand Beside Parliament’.

15 House

of Lords Hansard, 17 October 2018, columns pp. 527–528.

16 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 31, p. 49.

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Nazism and British rule (notably, the NEHM stands not far from the site of the 1770 Boston Massacre). But the NEHM is not the only North American memorial site that disrupts a notion that the new London memorial and learning centre is an endeavour sealed into a British context. As Isabelle Mutton has noted, Adjaye and Arad’s chosen design for London is strikingly similar to their unsuccessful submission for the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, leading to the curious conclusion that, architecturally speaking, the UKHMF’s ‘Permanent Statement of Our British Values’ will be the recycled product of a failed bid to articulate Canadian values.17 In truth, the UKHMF design competition was as a whole a distinctly cosmopolitan affair, with Daniel Libeskind, for example, the veteran of numerous international sites of Holocaust remembrance. The multi-layered relationship between British exceptionalism and transnationalism is itself summed up by the following description of a visitor’s journey in the promotional video provided by the Studio Libeskind and Haptic Architects submission: In the underground, we are suddenly shifted to another direction, another dimension. We are in the darkness and the luminosity of the exhibits. With the ramps and intertwining spaces, very clearly you see that most of them end in a dead end. But one of them, the path of hope, rises, and it is of course the kindertransport, 10,000 children saved by the UK, a trace of hope in a dark world. We ascend, we are in the park, we pass the Buxton memorial, and we’ve wound up at its destiny, destination, the river Thames, the terrace on the river Thames, looking at the beauty of London, the beauty of the river of life, and at the fact that the island character of the UK was victorious against Nazism and fascism.18

With an eye to British narration of the Holocaust, this passage reads like a strikingly self-congratulatory and historically selective reverie. But, heard spoken aloud in Libeskind’s distinct Polish-American accent in the promotional video itself, the effect is somewhat different. Are the words a heartfelt paean to British exceptionalism? Or simply a commercially minded appeal to a client’s ideology? Given that Libeskind only recently designed the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa or the Memorial of Names in Amsterdam, there is a nagging suspicion that the UKHMF are simply receiving their own recycled rhetoric echoed back to them. Dan Stone reflects that ‘Britain came relatively late to Holocaust consciousness’, and, to draw this section to a close, with the new memorial and

17 Isabelle

Mutton, ‘The Sacred Lineage of the UK’s New Holocaust Memorial’, Material Religion, 15, 2 (2019): 266–268.

18 Malcolm

Reading Consultants, ‘Studio Libeskind and Haptic Architects’, 26 January 2017, https://competitions.malcolmreading.co.uk/holocaustmemorial/shortlist/ studio-libeskind.

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learning centre plans we consequently find a dual nature.19 The project is both forthrightly ‘British’ for an era of resurgent political appeals to national values, but also heavily immersed in pre-existing patterns of international memorialisation. Which is the more superficial of the two is not neatly identifiable, with assertive language of British exceptionalism often intermingled with the utilisation of transnational precedents.

Two: Between the Unique and the Permeable When the PMHC published its terms of reference in January 2014, it included the following declaration as its opening sentence: ‘The Holocaust is unique in man’s inhumanity to man and it stands alone as the darkest hour of human history’.20 The document does not provide a justification for this judgement or explain where it originated from; the uniqueness of the Holocaust as ‘the darkest hour’ is taken as simply self-evident. The type of queries raised by British historians such as Stone and Tom Lawson, for example, appear well outside the PMHC’s foundational thought processes.21 Language of uniqueness unsurprisingly transferred into later project documents. BPR remarked that ‘the Holocaust was unprecedented and should never be seen as equivalent to other genocides’ and the UKHMF spoke of the need ‘to create an outstanding and sensitively-designed Memorial and Learning Centre that is emotionally powerful while offering visitors an opportunity to deepen their understanding of humanity’s darkest hour’.22 Leaving aside the debates on whether the Holocaust was unique (and how those debates are even framed), we might note that emphasising such uniqueness does serve a couple of useful purposes. It addresses the obvious question of why, so many decades later, the British government has now chosen to memorialise this historic event so prominently. And with regard to the discussions of British exceptionalism above, there is also a reciprocal relationship between the Holocaust as ‘darkest hour’ and Britain’s moral status as an opponent of Nazism. But if these articulations of radical uniqueness present the Holocaust as a sealed, firmly distinct event in history, there have nonetheless been aspects of the project where more 19 Dan Stones, ‘From Stockholm to Stockton: The Holocaust and/as Heritage in Britain’, in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide, ed. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 212. 20 PMHC, ‘The Holocaust Commission: Keeping the Memory Alive’, 27 January 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-holocaust-commission-keeping-thememory-alive. 21 Dan Stone, ‘The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond “Uniqueness” and Ethnic Competition’, Rethinking History, 8, 1 (2004): 127–142; Tom Lawson, ‘Britain’s Promise to Forget: Some Historiographical Reflections on What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust?’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 23, 3 (2017): 356–357. 22 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, 9; Malcolm Reading Consultants, ‘United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition’, 26 January 2017, https://competitions.malcolmreading.co.uk/holocaustmemorial/.

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unstable aspects of permeability have been apparent. Three variations of this will be considered here. The first concerns the very boundaries of what we refer to as ‘the Holocaust’. A notable feature of the story of the Hyde Park memorial is the extent to which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British government understood the name as referring to the persecution of both Jews and non-Jews.23 Speaking at the memorial’s dedication ceremony on 27 June 1983, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Patrick Jenkin, remarked that ‘[i]t is fitting that the Board [of Deputies] should take the lead in this memorial but there were, of course, others who died in the Holocaust, and it is, therefore, appropriate that the garden should commemorate the victims of all faiths’.24 In the development of the new Victoria Tower Gardens site the organisers have been much more precise, stating that ‘[t]he Holocaust was the planned, systematic, industrialised murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children’.25 There are nonetheless plans for the memorial and learning centre to incorporate remembrance of the murder of Roma and Jehovah’s Witness communities, political dissidents, homosexuals, and the disabled. BPR states that ‘it is essential that the new Memorial recognises the persecution of non-Jewish victims, whilst maintaining the centrality of the six million murdered Jews’.26 Facilitating this fragile balancing act will of course require careful articulation. Given that the UKHMF has recently suggested that ‘[t]he majority of visitors to the Memorial are expected to be tourists already in the local area’, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that some casual visitors may not easily navigate the concept that part of a Holocaust remembrance site refers to events understood by its organisers as firmly distinct from the Holocaust.27 A curiosity of the 2017 design competition is that one of the ten shortlisted designs itself appeared to blur this issue. The Lahdelma, Mahlamäki Architects, and David Morley Architects design summary stated that ‘[t]he UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre summarises the Holocaust, the persecution and systematic mass murder against not only the Jews, but also against other minorities, that took place during the Second World War’.28 There is a slight grammatical ambiguity in this sentence, but the most obvious reading is that ‘the Holocaust’ here encompasses both Jews and other minorities. A second element of permeability concerns the relationship between the Holocaust and experiences of mass suffering in other time periods. As noted 23 Steven Cooke, ‘Negotiating Memory and Identity: The Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial, London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 26, 3 (2000): 449–465. 24 Cited

in Jenni Frazer, ‘Holocaust Garden Dedicated’, Jewish Chronicle, 1 July 1983.

25 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 5.

26 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 41.

27 UKHMF, 28 Malcolm

‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’.

Reading Consultants, ‘Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects and David Morley Architects’, 26 January 2017, https://competitions.malcolmreading.co.uk/holocaustmem orial/shortlist/lahdelma-mahlam%C3%A4ki-architects-and-david-morley-architects.

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above, BPR asserted that it ‘should never be seen as equivalent to other genocides’, but this was held alongside a view that one of the project objectives ‘would also be to help people understand the way the lessons of the Holocaust apply more widely, including to other genocides’.29 ‘Equivalence’ and ‘applicability’ are of course not the same thing, and as plans have developed the project has adopted a pattern (akin to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust) of referring only to the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.30 Doing so avoids both accusations that genocides other than the Holocaust are being ignored, but also implicitly maintains the status of the Holocaust as a radically unprecedented, transformative event in history. From a British perspective, it also effectively side-lines the challenging and divisive issue of addressing earlier colonial genocides.31 But the project has not been able to completely avoid linkages between the Holocaust and racial persecution enacted by the British. In October 2017 James Smith, co-founder of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire, publically called for the new memorial and learning centre to address links between Nazi ideology and British slavery and colonialism.32 The UKHMF appears to have largely ignored Smith’s suggestion. One recent exception to this has, however, emerged from the necessity of placing the memorial and learning centre in close proximity to the Buxton Memorial. Built on Parliament Square in 1865, and later moved to Victoria Tower Gardens in the 1950s, it memorialises the end of the British slave trade. UKHMF literature has generally given little attention to the Buxton Memorial, with the announcement of the design competition winner simply listing it as another memorial in the park, and the initial announcement of the Victoria Tower Gardens site omitting mention of it entirely.33 During the competition itself, the entry from Caruso St John Architects, Marcus Taylor and Rachel Whiteread did explicitly reference the physical shape of the Buxton Memorial yet offered no explanation of the meaning of doing so. But at the December 2018 UKHMF public exhibition, a notable (though easily missed) development was the inclusion of the following quotation from David Adjaye, co-designer of the winning entry: The Buxton and the Holocaust memorials reflect on the worst atrocities against human lives, freedom and dignity. They are a reminder of the fragility of our democratic values and history’s darkest hours that we should never forget. At 29 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 9, 43.

30 Holocaust

Memorial Day Trust, ‘Strategic Plan 2014–2020’, https://www.hmd. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Strategic-plan-2014-2020-External.pdf; UKHMF, ‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’.

31 See,

for example, Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

32 James Smith, ‘London’s New Holocaust Memorial Should Not Ignore the Roots of Racism Shared with Slave Trade’, New Statesman, 24 October 2017. 33 UKHMF, ‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects Win’; UK Government, ‘PM: Holocaust Memorial Will Stand Beside Parliament’.

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the same time they tell a powerful story about human resilience and courage in standing up to hate, oppression and injustice. The two monuments will create a very powerful agency together. They will stand stronger side by side at the heart of democracy to speak truth to power.34

In his professional life Adjaye is certainly sensitive to the history of slavery, having himself recently designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC (opened 2016). What is notable about this quotation is the extent to which the Holocaust and the British slave trade are apparently equalised. Where the PMHC stated in 2014 that ‘[t]he Holocaust is unique in man’s inhumanity to man and it stands alone as the darkest hour of human history’, Adjaye refers in plural to ‘the worst atrocities against human lives’ and ‘history’s darkest hours ’. It is yet to be seen whether (as I suspect is more likely) Adjaye’s quotation remains an outlier, with the final memorial and learning centre studiously avoiding overt connections between racial ideologies in the British Empire and Nazi-occupied Europe, or whether a turn towards this more challenging confrontation with national pasts is in fact enacted. A third way in which rhetoric of the Holocaust’s uniqueness has at times appeared unstable is with regard to ideas of relevance for contemporary concerns. Unsurprisingly, given that these are publically funded endeavours, language of uniqueness has not been so overpowering as to suppress appeals to current social relevance. BPR cites resonances between the Holocaust and ‘the ideology of extremism [...and] hatred that underpins antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and homophobia today’, and it has been clear throughout subsequent publications and exhibitions that visiting the site is intended as an act that will encourage better citizenry.35 Leaving aside questions of whether this is plausible or how it could even be measured, I wish to briefly address this relationship between uniqueness and the malleability of relevance. One notable example concerns the reference to ‘the ideology of extremism’ in the BPR passage immediately above. In his 2013 speech at the HET dinner Cameron explicitly linked the Holocaust with contemporary Islamist extremism, and as Kara Critchell has recently examined, state-led Holocaust memorialisation has become increasingly associated with securitization initiatives.36 Earlier in this chapter I noted the links between the language of ‘British values’ and the Holocaust (including the announcement of the new memorial and learning centre as ‘Permanent Statement of Our British Values’) and it is important when encountering such terminology to appreciate its links to anti-terror policy. Especially important is the Prevent Strategy 2011, 34 UKHMF, 35 PMHC, 36 UK

‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’.

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 9.

Government, ‘25th Anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Trust’; Kara Critchell, ‘“Proud to be British; and Proud to be Jewish”: The Holocaust and British Values in the Twenty-First Century’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 2018.

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which defined extremism as ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values’, and subsequent (controversial) demands for alignment with ‘British values’ amidst an increasingly securitised education environment.37 We might consider whether drawing Holocaust memory into contemporary British state endeavours to counter Islamist extremism represents an excess of comparison. The situation of British society facing a tiny and disparate group of terrorists bears quite limited comparison to the situation of Jews facing persecution and murder in Nazi-occupied Europe. Contemporary Islamists and historic Nazis both articulate(d) ‘extreme’ views, but using an atrocity enacted by the latter to counter the ideology of the former risks unhelpfully decontextualising both. My broader point here is that in the PMHC and UKHMF documents there is a combined commitment to both the radical uniqueness of the Holocaust and its malleable relevance that intersect awkwardly with one another. But what all three of these issues perhaps demonstrate is the extent to which the rhetoric of uniqueness was never very theoretically fleshed out. Boldly proclaimed in the PMHC’s original terms of reference document in 2014, there has been a conspicuous lack of explanation regarding what this uniqueness specifically and tangibly demands of the memorial and learning centre project.

Three: Between Jewish and Non-Jewish Meaning On 17 September 2017, when the ten shortlisted architectural teams publically presented their designs at the V&A, Peter Bazalgette (then chair of the UKHMF) began each of the four sessions by quoting from Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis: ‘this is for the Jews, but not just for the Jews. This is for everybody. This is for the whole country’. The repetition of this formulation reflected a desire to convey that the plan for a new memorial and learning centre both is and is not associated with Britain’s Jewish communities. I will argue in this section that output from the PMHC and UKHMF has at various points pushed in both directions, and alongside this tension the project also relates uneasily to the diversity of Anglo-Jewry. The PMHC and UKHMF have been keen to flag up the involvement of the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies, and the Jewish Leadership Council. In photographs from the 2014 launch of the PMHC and in BPR the symbolism of Mirvis sat prominently listening to Cameron is hard to avoid.38 Several shortlisted designs for the site included overt references to Jewish religious tradition, perhaps most conspicuously the appearance of a large tallit (prayer

37 UK

Government, ‘Prevent 2011’, 7 June 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/pub lications/prevent-strategy-2011; for one selection of articles on Prevent and the education environment see Journal of Education for Teaching, 42, 3 (2016).

38 UK

Government, ‘Prime Minister Launches Holocaust Commission’; PHMC, Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 6.

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shawl) at the entrance of the Allied Works proposal.39 And the ‘concept sketches’ for Adjaye and Arad’s winning design included references to the Book of Genesis, a menorah, and the Jerusalem Temple Mount. But alongside such involvement of Jewish participants and referencing of Jewish culture, there have also been overt gestures to non-Jewish relevance. Both BPR and the September 2018 UKHMF exhibition included, for example, the following declaration: ‘The story of the destruction of European Jewry is not purely a Jewish tragedy: the Holocaust is a lesson and warning to all people of all faiths and lands for all times’.40 It is difficult to conjure a more comprehensive statement of universality. Although these two emphases are not necessarily contradictory, it should be borne in mind just how different the origins of the Victoria Tower Gardens project are to those of the previous national Holocaust memorial in Hyde Park. Steven Cooke has examined the extent to which the British government of the late 1970s and 1980s was decidedly lukewarm in response to the Board of Deputies’ initiative. Quashing the possibility of financial support from the government, Michael Heseltine is reported to have commented that ‘[i]f a memorial like this cannot attract enough private support it is not worth erecting in the first place’.41 Ultimately, the level of state indifference was reflected in the small size and relatively obscurity of the site in Hyde Park. The project in Victoria Tower Gardens is quite different, enthusiastically driven forward by the state and supported by substantial sums of public money.42 It is perhaps revealing that in the quotation from Mirvis that Bazalgette kept repeating, the site was described as ‘for the Jews’ rather than ‘by the Jews’, indicating the extent to which Jewish communities are reacting to government agency rather than vice versa. And responses have at times been decidedly mixed. As noted above, in October 2018 four Jewish peers wrote to The Times to voice their unease with the project, with one complaint being that the design did not adequately evoke connections with Jewish history.43 One of the authors, Baroness Ruth Deech, has been an especially vocal critic, telling BBC radio that I don’t know that the grassroots Jewish community has been consulted about this. The people I talk to say – very quietly because they’re rather scared to speak out, unlike me – they all say ‘I don’t like this, it’s not the right thing’.44

39 Malcolm

Reading Consultants, ‘Allied Works’, 26 January 2017, https://competitions. malcolmreading.co.uk/holocaustmemorial/shortlist/allied-works.

40 UKHMF,

‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’; PMHC, Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 21.

41 Cited

in Cooke, ‘Negotiating Memory’, p. 454.

42 UKHMF, 43 Sterling, 44 BBC

‘UK Holocaust Memorial Public Exhibition Boards’.

Carlile, Deech, and Haskel, ‘“Poor Design” of Holocaust Project’.

Radio 4, The Westminster Hour, 18 November 2018.

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Deech’s comments are anecdotal, but the situation has parallels with reactions to the establishment of HMD at the turn of the century. Led by the British government, the initiative had fulsome support from then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and an array of Jewish commentators, but strongly critical Jewish voices could also be found in articles published in The Jewish Chronicle, The Observer, and The Times.45 ‘[S]how me the British Jew who thinks this is a good idea’, the historian Geoffrey Alderman wrote acerbically, ‘and I will show you a fool’.46 More recently, Alderman has also been critical of the PMHC, complaining that ‘the commission membership seems to reflect not so much the wealth of expertise that Anglo-Jewry has to offer on Holocaust education as a roll-call of establishment names co-opted primarily for publicrelations purposes’.47 What the variations of Jewish response to both HMD and plans for the new memorial and learning centre reflect, though, is the highly diverse nature of Britain’s Jewish communities. In his history of AngloJewry Alderman himself notes the need to ‘talk of “a series of communities,” “a community of communities”, and “a loosely knit complex of communities”’ rather than a uniform demographic.48 PMHC and UKHMF publications may draw attention to the involvement of Jewish organisations, but in reality the representative status of such bodies has long been queried.49 So we might view some of the diversity of Jewish relationships with the PMHC and UKHMF’s project as an inevitable reflection of Anglo-Jewish diversity itself. But this is not the only characteristic of Anglo-Jewry that is significant to this discussion. It should also be remembered that while the new Victoria Tower Gardens site has been announced as a statement of ‘British Values’, the Jewish population is, to state an obvious point, a proportionately extremely small component of the nation the values of which are being proclaimed (at around 0.5%, using the 2011 England and Wales census as an indication).50 Thus, while some Jewish organisations and commentators have been clearly supportive of the project, it is hard to entirely avoid a sense that 45 Jonathan

Sacks, ‘Why Have a National Holocaust Day?’, BBC, 25 January 2000, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/618352.stm; Norman Lebrecht, ‘Don’t Consign the Dead to an Empty Day’, The Jewish Chronicle, 25 December 1998; Yitzchak Y. Schochet, ‘Our Suffering Has Become Too Much of a Fixation’, The Times, 19 October 1999; Nick Cohen, ‘This Holocaust Day Is Voyeuristic Hypocrisy’, The Observer, 30 January 2000. 46 Geoffrey

Alderman, ‘Disband this Body of (Un)representatives’, The Jewish Chronicle, 1 March 2002.

47 Geoffrey Alderman, ‘Why I’m Out of Commission’, The Jewish Chronicle, 7 February 2014. 48 Geoffrey Alderman, Controversy and Crisis: Studies in the History of the Jews in Modern Britain (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), p. 306. 49 David J. Graham, ‘Judaism’, in Religion and Change in Modern Britain, ed. Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 93. 50 Office

for National Statistics, ‘Religion in England and Wales 2011’, 11 December 2012, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturaliden tity/religion/articles/religioninenglandandwales2011/2012-12-11.

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the mass-murder of European Jews has been appropriated for national valueconstruction (and, at times, outright virtue-signalling) for overwhelmingly non-Jewish participants.

Four: Between the Memorial/Learning Centre and Its Surroundings One irony of the Board of Deputies’ role as prime movers in the construction of the Hyde Park memorial is that, when BPR was published just over thirty years later, it was their own complaints about it that featured prominently in justifications for a new memorial. Taken from the Board’s submission to the PMHC, BPR includes the following text in a highlighted block quotation: There is a strong consensus that there remains no memorial in London that is fitting to the enormity of the catastrophe. The monument in the Dell in Hyde Park is insufficient in both its impact and location. When compared with the Animals in War monument in Park Lane, many feel its inadequacy is bordering on offensive. We recognise the need for a new memorial.51

As the last sentence reflects, (‘we recognise the need’) the idea of a new memorial pre-existed BPR. The commission’s response to the perceived insufficiency of the Hyde Park memorial was BPR’s assertive view that there should be a striking new Memorial to serve as the focal point for national commemoration of the Holocaust. It should be prominently located in Central London to attract the largest possible number of visitors and to make a bold statement about the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust.52

The vocabulary is forceful (‘striking’, ‘prominent’, ‘bold’) and, in retrospect, represents the high point of the project’s ambition in terms of impact. Unencumbered by the specifics of fitting into a particular location, the imagined site’s prominence could be declared without constraint. It is noticeable that, following the announcement of the Victoria Tower Gardens site in 2016, concern shifted towards how the memorial and learning centre would fit cohesively with what is already present at the location. The tender brief for designers stated that they ‘should respect and connect with the themes of the other memorials in Victoria Tower Gardens (without diluting its own identity) and ensure that the Gardens maintain their historic

51 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 33.

52 PMHC,

Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 41.

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setting and ambience as a public park’.53 Numerous shortlisted designs consequently spoke of respectfully enhancing the park, and since the announcement of Adjaye and Arad’s success in the design competition there have been recurring references to creating an overarching ‘park of Britain’s conscience’ incorporating the Buxton Memorial, the Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst Memorial, and Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais sculpture.54 But, as suggested by both the bracketed caveat in the tender brief passage quoted above (‘without diluting its own identity’) and the very fact that the ‘park of Britain’s conscience’ concept is evidently an afterthought, it is not clear how cohesive the park really will be. The Holocaust memorial and learning centre will be physically vast in size compared to the other monuments and, as already discussed, the emphasis upon the Holocaust’s uniqueness as history’s ‘darkest hour’ does not fit easily with sharing equal attention on the site. The proximity to the Houses of Parliament has also received considerable attention since the Victoria Tower Gardens site was announced, though this has again become a conflicted relationship. On the one hand, the project has at times constructed the relationship as one of contrast, framing British governance as the antithesis of Nazi tyranny. During the September 2017 V&A design presentations several teams expressed this sentiment in fulsome terms, with the following reflections just two examples of what was a recurring theme: The selection of Victoria Tower Gardens as the context for the Holocaust memorial is itself an extremely meaningful statement. The park is surrounded by the Houses of Parliament which represents the political stability for this national democracy and freedom to exercise one’s conscience. [From the Diamond Schmitt Architects presentation] After visiting the memorial you come back out in the city, into light, into sky, and into this reassuring democracy and openness. This openness is an expression of tolerance and diversity. It is the essence of what is our society. The UK is a society that is recognised as an example, a desirable model of democracy worldwide. [From the Heneghan Peng Architects and Sven Anderson presentation]

In the official announcement that Adjaye and Arad had won the competition, the design summary similarly remarked that ‘[o]n leaving the memorial, the circulation route ensures visitors will emerge to see the classic uninterrupted view of Parliament – and the reality of democracy’.55 These statements collectively reflect what Avril Alba, writing on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has referred to as a ‘negative epiphany’, that is, the 53 Malcom

Reading Consultants, ‘Tender Brief’, 7 November 2016, https://competitions. malcolmreading.co.uk/holocaustmemorial/assets/downloads/UK-Holocaust-MemorialTender-Brief_161107.pdf.

54 UKHMF,

‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects Win’.

55 UKHMF,

‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects Win’.

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idea that encountering the Holocaust in museum and memorial sites may encourage visitors to leave with a renewed sense of appreciation for their national surroundings.56 In Victoria Tower Gardens there is an obvious narrative of descent into the learning centre and its descriptions of historic atrocity, before arising, re-baptised, as renewed and appreciative British citizens. There is good reason to be uncomfortable with this dynamic, with public Holocaust memory being effectively sited in Victoria Tower Gardens as a means of governmental self-congratulation. But, on the other hand, as the project has moved forward a counter-voice has become gradually more apparent. When Pickles and Balls wrote in defence of the project in September 2018, their rationale for the location was rather differently framed: There is no better place than Victoria Tower Gardens, in the shadow of Parliament, to build the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre […] It will allow us to achieve our aim of holding Parliament to account. We all need to speak up to Parliament, to remind our elected representatives of their basic responsibility to protect British people of all faiths and backgrounds.57

When speaking on the Today programme a couple of months later, Balls was also critical of the British government’s behaviour during the Nazi period. ‘The fact was’, he remarked, ‘our parliament did not do as good a job as it could have done’.58 Understanding why there has been this shift of emphasis cannot be pinned down precisely, but there is a distinct possibility that it is linked to controversies regarding antisemitism and the Labour Party leadership, which became especially prominent in the summer and autumn of 2018. Certainly this issue came to the fore at the launch of the September 2018 UKHMF planning exhibition, when survivor Agnes Grunwald-Spier specifically spoke out against Jeremy Corbyn.59 How the relationship between the site and the Houses of Parliament will play out after its opening in the 2020s is yet to be seen. Will it become an instrument to effectively venerate British governance, both past and present? Or will it act as a rallying point for countering injustices perpetrated by those in the Houses of Parliament? It is to be suspected that this will oscillate, depending on the political climate and the concerns of those narrating the site’s meaning. And of course this is not a simple binary—it will doubtless prove quite feasible to use the site to highlight some contemporary or historic concerns while simultaneously side-lining others. 56 Avril Alba, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 40–88. 57 Pickles 58 Ed

and Balls, ‘Why a New Memorial to the Holocaust Is Essential’.

Balls, speaking on BBC Radio 4, Today, 4 December 2018.

59 Daniel Sugarman, ‘Labour Condemned by Holocaust Survivor at Launch of Memorial Design Exhibition’, The Jewish Chronicle, 4 September 2018.

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Conclusion The four tensions highlighted here are not the only ones that could be considered. Elsewhere I have written, for instance, on the memorial and learning centre as a both sacred and profane space, and on its tangled relationships with British multiculturalism.60 But from this short and selective survey we can see that, despite the appeals to permanence and generational legacies, the project is a conflicted endeavour with an unpredictable future. At the launch of the PMHC in January 2014 Cameron spoke of laying the foundations for half a century of Holocaust remembrance, remarking that ‘the sacred task is to think, how are we best going to remember, to commemorate and to educate future generations of children? […] How can we make sure in 2064 that it is as vibrant and strong a memory as it is today?’.61 This may make for stirring rhetoric, but we should remember that public discourse on the Holocaust has radically altered since the 1990s, and there is no particular reason to imagine that conditions will not remain in flux. By 2064, what social and political developments will the site have been necessarily forced to dialogue with? By that point will its resonance have dissipated, leaving it little more than a semi-meaningful physical artefact attesting to early twenty-first-century preoccupations? And perhaps, of course, it will never be built (the reader may have more insight than was available at the time of writing), making it less a ‘striking’ and ‘bold’ statement than a peculiarity to be occasionally included in the footnotes of future cultural histories. Whatever the case, I aim to have shown in this chapter that there is already enough instability contained in the story of the site’s origins to make us doubt anyone claiming to answer Cameron’s questions with confidence.

60 David

Tollerton, ‘“A New Sacred Space in the Centre of London” The Victoria Tower Gardens Holocaust Memorial and the Religious-Secular Landscape of Contemporary Britain’, Journal of Religion and Society, 19 (2017): 1–22; David Tollerton, Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape: Politics, Sacrality, and Diversity (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 61 UK

Government, ‘David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission Speech’.

Part IX

Postscript

CHAPTER 23

Britishness, Brexit, and the Holocaust Andy Pearce

The physical decay of the Palace of Westminster is more than a metaphor. Like the culture and conventions inside, the building’s failings contribute to the problems of running a respected 21st century democracy. Scaffolding obscures the view of Big Ben, the world’s most famous clock, its bongs silenced to allow repair.1

Our country stands together against the hatred, ignorance and bigotry that led to the Holocaust and other genocides. By placing the greatest example of where democratic institutions elsewhere failed to protect its citizens next to our own Parliament, we are making a strong commitment to stand up whenever our shared values are threatened.2

1 Bronwen Maddox, ‘House of Commons crumbles amid a culture of decay’,

Financial Times, 4 November 2017. 2 James Brokenshire, cited, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, ‘Press Release: UK Holocaust Memorial to reaffirm Britain’s commitment to stand up against antisemitism, prejudice and hatred’, 5 December 2018. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-holocaust-memorial-to-reaffirmbritains-commitment-to-stand-up-against-antisemitism-prejudice-and-hatred. A. Pearce (B) UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_23

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The constitution is crumbling before our eyes, its frailties brutally exposed by the Brexit storm. But something even more fundamental has been shattered, and that is the country’s national identity. The English no longer know who they are, or what they are for.3

The Palace of Westminster is a national landmark familiar the world over. Home to the Houses of Commons and Lords and colloquially—if incorrectly—known as the ‘mother of parliaments’, the Palace is also a site in a state of total disrepair. A building ‘heading for a catastrophic collapse’,4 such is the extent of decay that in February 2018 MPs approved proposals to move out of the Palace completely so that the necessary repairs can be completed. The relocation date of Parliament is still to be decided, but it is anticipated that once they have left the Palace, politicians will not return for around 6 years. The cost of the project—including expenses involved in refurbishing the buildings Parliament will temporarily use—is in the region of £5,000,000,000.5 As plans for the decanting of Parliament move forward, a separate initiative is already underway. This is the renovation of the Palace’s iconic eastern Elizabeth Tower—or, ‘Big Ben’. Costing in the region of £61,000,000, refurbishment of the Tower began in 2017 and is due for completion in 2021. As well as updating the structure with, among other things, a lift and a kitchen, the most eye-catching work is being done to the famous clock-face. In the summer of 2018, it was revealed this would include returning the clock to its original Victorian design. In addition to recolouring the dials and the clock hands back to Prussian Blue (the colour so named after the dye used in the eighteenth century to colour the coats of the Prussian army), it was announced that the restoration would see the black and white shields above each clock face repainted in the original red and white of the St. George’s Cross. On being announced, a group of Scottish, Welsh and Irish politicians forcefully objected to the absence of flags representing the other nations of the United Kingdom. The task of pouring oil on these troubled waters fell to Tom Brake MP, then spokesman for the House of Commons Commission in charge of the restoration. Brake’s response was to offer the emollient explanation that the Cross ‘represents what is best about England and the English nature. Obviously the Scots, the Welsh and Northern Irish are represented on the tower with different rosettes that are there representing those countries.

3 Nicholas

Boyle, ‘The end of England: How the Brexit storm shattered national identity’, The Tablet, 12 September 2019. Available via: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/ 16688/the-end-of-england-how-the-brexit-storm-shattered-national-identity. 4 Peter

Bottomley, cited, Jonathan Morrison, ‘Renovating the Palace of Westminster—a gothic horror story’, The Times, 14 August 2019.

5 Jonathan Morrison, ‘Renovating the Palace of Westminster—a gothic horror story’, The Times, 14 August 2019.

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So I’m sure they won’t object to that’.6 Brake was correct to point to the presence of other emblems, but his comments—like the restoration project more generally—could not be divorced from the incendiary cultural and political backcloth against which they appeared. This backdrop was that of ‘Brexit’: the process of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union (EU) following the result of the advisory referendum held in 2016. The outcome of that referendum, with 52% of the electorate voting to leave the EU, was—in sheer numerical terms—driven by English voters, with the majority of Scotland and Northern Ireland indicating a preference to remain.7 With Brexit therefore very much ‘made in England’,8 Brake’s remarks, like the returning of Big Ben to how it looked when it was constructed at the height of Victorian imperialism, refracted both the uneven configuration of power in the ‘British’ Empire and the volatility of identity politics in early twenty-first-century Britain. Given the regional breakdown of the EU referendum result, it is highly likely that the coming years will see the constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom under continued stress and strain.9 Just as the restoration of Big Ben has become emblematic of the heritage politics of Brexit Britain, so the same is true of a second building project currently in train on the other side of the dilapidated Palace. This is the prospective construction of a new national memorial and learning centre by the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation (UKHMF)—a project first advanced in 2015 by the then Prime Minister David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission, and subsequently endorsed by the government with cross-party support. In 2016, a few months before responding to his defeat in the UK referendum by resigning his premiership and retreating to a luxury shepherd’s hut to pen his memoirs,10 Cameron announced that this ‘striking national memorial’ was going to ‘show the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust’ and ‘stand beside Parliament as a permanent statement of our values as a nation’.11 6 ‘St

George’s Cross coming home to Big Ben’, Sky News, 11 July 2018; James Tapsfield and Kate Ferguson, ‘Scottish and Welsh MPs erupt in fury’, MailOnline, 11 July 2018.

7 Michael

Kenny, ‘The English Question—From the margins to the mainstream?’ Blog, Centre on Constitutional Change. Available via: https://www.centreonconstitutionalch ange.ac.uk/news-and-opinion/english-question-margins-mainstream.

8 Alisa

Henderson, Charlie Jeffrey, Dan Wincott, and Richard Wyn Jones, ‘How Brexit was made in England’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19:4 (2017), 631–646.

9 Steven

Morris, ‘Cataclysm of Brexit “could lead to Welsh independence”’, The Guardian, 5 October 2018; Benjamin Kentish, ‘Brexit and May’s “disgraceful failure of leadership” pave way for second Scottish independence referendum’, The Independent, 9 October 2018.

10 ‘Downing Street to garden retreat: David Cameron spends £25,000 on luxury hut’, The Guardian, 30 April 2017. 11 House

of Commons Hansard, ‘Engagements’, 27 January 2016, Volume 605.

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Cameron’s accent on nationhood was noteworthy. While they pre-dated Brexit, his remarks appeared in a context where conceptions of Britishness had become ever-more vexed over the preceding decade, with national fervour experiencing an upturn in each of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. Indeed, just two years previously the Scottish independence referendum came close to constitutionally breaking-up Britain. Cameron’s response to defeating the independence campaign was to call for ‘English votes for English laws’12 : a strategy that did not sound as if it was in tune with how the ties of the Union were becoming increasingly frayed. In such an environment, the decision to tie a new major public project on Holocaust memory and education with imaginings of Britain and national identity ensured that the UKHMF would be open to contestation and complication. Since 2016 this has very much come to pass, with the project attracting controversy and opposition. Opponents of the scheme—which, in addition to local residents and politicians, include Historic England and the Royal Parks—are clear that their objection lies not with the principle of a Holocaust memorial, but how its construction will fundamentally alter the complexion of a historic park. Recent developments in the project’s process through planning procedures have only added new dimensions to the affair, creating further grievance with the project’s opponents. The UKHMF project was born in a time before Brexit. However, since its inception, it has followed a course that has become entwined with broader conflicts around nationhood and identity in twenty-first-century Britain. In this chapter I will explore this argument by tracking how Holocaust memory has been used at a state level in recent years. I will show how during the first decade of the twenty-first century the Holocaust was increasingly used in connection with ideas of ‘Britishness’ before Holocaust memory and education then became an expression of and buttress to notions of ‘British values’. I will also demonstrate how this discourse shifted again in the years since 2016, with analysis of the UKHMF’s evolving accent on an imagined relationship between Holocaust memorialisation and ‘British’ democracy. Finally, I will conclude will some cautious reflections on what potential developments may lie ahead in the coming years.

‘New’ Labour, ‘New Britishness’13 Understanding how and why national identity has become interconnected with memory of the Holocaust requires an appreciation of the ways in which nationhood was configured during the years of Labour government from 1997 to 2010. For Ben Pitcher, from the moment it assumed power in 1997 ‘New’ Labour embarked upon ‘the Britishness project’: ‘a nationalist venture’ that 12 Patrick Wintour, ‘David Cameron raises West Lothian question after Scotland vote’, The Guardian, 19 September 2014. 13 Paul

Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), p.110.

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sought ‘to redefine Britain’s national identity’, but which ultimately became ‘a new means of deciding who does and does not belong to the nation-state’.14 As much as being in keeping with Labour’s penchant for repackaging and rebranding, redefining Britishness also became a necessity. This was for three particular reasons. The first was devolution. Labour entered power in 1997 committed to devolving power from Westminster to new assemblies in Scotland and Wales. Devolution was also a component of the peace process in Northern Ireland, meaning that by the late 1990s referenda had facilitated the creation of three new legislatures in the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. The establishment of these bodies were the tangible expressions of devolution, but they did not bring about an end to either the devolutionary process or the debates opened up by it. If anything, the reverse was true. For some, the cumulative effect of devolution was something akin to existential crisis. Devolution had occasioned fundamental constitutional change, and pushed open the door for prospective future moves towards full Celtic independence from the Union. Moreover, symbolically and practically, devolution gave both legitimacy and urgency to nationalist sentiments and sentimentalities. Accordingly, in the wake of devolution, there emerged in all four nations debate about the means, modes and measures of self-identification, amounting to what Kathleen Paul calls a ‘search for a new British identity’.15 Fundamentally, ‘the political shape of the nation was being redefined’, to quote Alwyn Turner, ‘and with that came a need to redefine what constituted Britishness’.16 These processes were augmented and amplified by a second development: immigration. Erica Consterdine has suggested that the years of Labour rule amounted to the ‘making of a migration state’.17 With ‘migration at the centre of its legislative programme’,18 the Labour governments dramatically transformed levels of net migration, principally through their approach to economic immigration. Understood as a crucial mechanism for making the British economy competitive in the global marketplace, Labour both opened up existing opportunities and created new ones for both low- and high-skilled migrants. However, if this represented ‘a concerted, thought-out policy designed to maximise the potential economic gains of immigration’, it

14 Ben

Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8, 51.

15 Kathleen Paul, ‘Communities of Britishness: Migration in the last gasp of empire’ in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 180. 16 Alwyn

W. Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London: Aurum Press, 2013),

p. 8. 17 Erica Consterdine, Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of a Migration State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 18 Will

Somerville, Immigration under New Labour (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2007), p. 1.

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also ‘went against public opinion’.19 This was particularly true after Labour decided in 2004 to allow citizens from central and eastern European countries newly acceded to the EU immediate access to the British labour market. The unexpected arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants not only ‘ignited the debate on whether freedom of movement was a wholly positive thing’20 ; it had the palpable effect of giving the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) its ‘first major success’ at the ballot box.21 Though this electoral breakthrough in the European Parliament election was never to translate into success at domestic elections, UKIP’s popularity spoke of a backlash against Labour immigration policy which was inseparable from issues of national identity. Thirdly, Labour’s refashioning of Britishness was bound up with its proEuropeanism. This attitude had been made clear even before its entrance to power: in 1997, Labour had campaigned on a manifesto which promised reform of the EU and a referendum on joining the single currency. Over the course of its first term Labour pursued what Julie Smith calls a ‘proactive European policy’22 —the underlying tenets of which were intricately related to its imaginings of nationhood. Speaking in 2000 on the subject of Britishness, then Prime Minister Tony Blair took on criticism of devolution and Labour’s warmth towards the EU explaining that both were part and parcel of necessary ‘modernisation’, but ‘modernisation based on values’. These ‘core British values’ consisted of ‘fair play, creativity, tolerance, and an outward-looking approach to the world’. This approach was borne of ‘our unique island geography and history’ and meant that as well as being European, Britain was more than this: ‘a “pivotal” nation’, as Blair put it, ‘a bridge between East and West between the United States and the EU’. All in all, this ‘new world’ demanded ‘a new modern patriotism’ which was future-orientated, and European in tenor.23 Such rhetoric was all well and good, of course, and was part of a ‘policy approach’ aimed at ‘slowly building up a new consensus on European issues’.24 But Labour’s pro-European sentiments remained very much at odds with an ‘increasingly anti-European public’ and ‘Eurosceptic media’.25 In the above ways it can be seen how Labour’s conceptions of Britishness fed off and fed into an ideological world-view that, in character and content, 19 Ibid.

37; Consterdine, Labour’s Immigration Policy, 3. See also Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour, ‘How immigration came to haunt Labour: The inside story’, The Guardian, 24 March 2015. 20 Erica Consterdine, ‘The huge political cost of Blair’s decision to allow Eastern European migrants unfettered access to Britain’, The Conversation, 16 November 2016. 21 Roger

Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy (London: Pelican Books, 2018), p. 8.

22 Julie Smith, ‘A missed opportunity? New Labour’s European policy, 1997–2005’, International Affairs, 81:4 (2005), 703–721. 704. 23 Tony

Blair, ‘Tony Blair’s Britain speech’, The Guardian, 28 March 2000.

24 Kirsty

Hughes and Edward Smith, ‘New Labour—New Europe?’ in The New Labour Reader, eds. Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffer (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 235. 25 Smith,

‘A missed opportunity?’ p. 713.

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was globalist, cosmopolitan, and multicultural. For Tariq Modood, because a ‘remaking of national identity was central to the idea of multiculturalism’, Labour—especially during its first term in office (1997–2001)—embarked upon a ‘multiculturalising of the national identity’. According to Modood, policies such as the Race Relations (Amendment) Act of 2000, the funding of Faith Schools, and the creation of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) were all proof of both Labour’s commitment to multiculturalism and material expressions of how national identity was being remade along multicultural lines.26 The early post-millennial years would see significant changes in attitude and approach towards these ideals, though some have questioned whether New Labour was from the outset as multicultural as is often presumed. Catherine Curran-Vigier, for instance, argues that an ‘insistence on integration and social cohesion, and an implicit rejection of multiculturalism’ was, in fact, ‘an integral part of New Labour’s political agenda, embodied in the Third Way and its policies’ from the beginning. Curran-Vigier draws particular attention to New Labour’s promotion of ‘commonality’—which, she maintains, essentially ‘suggests that various communities are fundamentally different’.27 The place of community, communitarianism, and citizenship within New Labour ideology was picked up on by Stephen Driver and Luke Mantell in 1999, when they argued that Labour had ‘set out a communitarian moral agenda about duties in the community and the rights and responsibilities of individuals’.28 This framework had direct consequences for understandings of multiculturalism and its pursuit in practice. As Derek Mcghee would observe in 2005, ‘the multicultural rainbow is to be shaken up, the multicultural mosaic is to be disturbed, and no group is to be allowed to demand anything from their fixed position’. This was because in the ‘new Britain’ envisaged by Labour, ‘unity out of diversity’ was to be created ‘through the isolation of core principles and establishing core values shared by all’. Crucially, contended Mcghee, ‘the dream of creating a common culture of core values’ was ‘to be found in the process of all social groups undergoing transformation’.29 Values, as we’ve seen, were central to Labour’s imaginings of Britishness. Imaginings of the Holocaust, meanwhile, were both an expression of these 26 Tariq Modood, ‘What is multiculturalism and what can it learn from interculturalism?’ Ethnicities (2015), 11–24. 15–17. 27 Catherine Curran-Vigier, ‘From multiculturalism to global values: How New Labour set the agenda’, Le New Labour et l’identité britannique, ed. Timothy Whitton (Clermont Ferrand: Observatoire de la Société Britannique, 2008). Available via: https://journals. openedition.org/osb/624?lang=en#text. 28 Stephen

Driver and Luke Mantell, ‘New Labour: Culture and Economy’ in Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn, eds. Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer (London: Sage, 1999): 1. See also Gavin Parker, Citizenships, Contingency and the Countryside: Rights, Culture, Land and the Environment (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 53.

29 Derek Mcghee, Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2005), p. 167.

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values and a means of validating them. In his HMD address of 2001, Blair remarked how the Holocaust occasioned ‘a profound crisis in human civilisation’ but ‘also marked a turning point in European and human history’, for it ‘served as a catalyst for the reconstruction of our continent founded on the values of democracy, liberty, equality, opportunity’. Accordingly, Blair claimed, ‘in remembering the Holocaust and its victims, we reaffirm the kind of society that we all believe in. A democratic, just and tolerant society’.30 The implication was clear: that remembering the Holocaust and learning its supposed ‘lessons’ were regarded by Labour as composite parts of ‘being British’.

The Holocaust and Britishness in Labour’s Second and Third Terms Like much which concerns New Labour, its second and third terms in government (2001–2005 and 2005–2010) saw increasing change and departure from its first years in power. The principal drivers were escalating concerns over and around immigration, backlash towards the invasion of Iraq (2003) and its after effects, and increasingly fractured ethnic tensions following a summer of riots (2001) and the London bombings (2005). Importantly, these trends and occurrences interfaced with each other to magnify their effects. However, this did not bring about an abandonment of what Simon Clarke and Steve Garner pithily call ‘the new “Britishness” project’ pursued under Labour.31 Instead, for its proponents, they combined to give this enterprise a new urgency and edge—primarily because they ‘shifted perspectives on multiculturalism’.32 Romain Garbaye and Pauline Schnapper have suggested that Labour’s time in office can be described as one of transition. Having been ‘arguably the most multiculturalist government in British history’ during its first term, Labour ‘spectacularly changed track’ in the years after 2001. For evidence of this, they point to how post-9/11 Labour introduced ‘citizenship ceremonies, criticised multiculturalism for encouraging segregation, and developed…a new discourse on cohesion and shared values’.33 These measures were, of course, influenced by a broader cultural milieu—one where even those on the left of the political spectrum were ruminating on life ‘after multiculturalism’34 and those on the right sought to cultivate, in the early millennial years, a sense of 30 Tony

Blair, ‘Full text of the Prime Minister’s speech’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 January

2001. 31 Simon Clarke and Steve Garner, White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach (London: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 63. 32 Ryan

Trimm, Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 260.

33 Romain Garbaye and Pauline Schnapper, ‘Introduction’ in The Politics of Ethnic Diversity in the British Isles, eds. Romain Garbaye and Pauline Schnapper (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 7. 34 Yasmin

56.

Alibhai-Brown, ‘After multiculturalism’, The Political Quarterly (2001), pp. 47–

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‘moral panic’ around issues of immigration and asylum.35 The dramatic surge in migration in the middle years of the 2000s together with growing Islamophobia in the wake of the 7/7 terror attacks thus saw fears and concerns over security grafted on to pre-existing debate on the societal effects of sharp changes in the demographic, political, and cultural fabric of Britain. Within these contexts of rising ‘“security and identity” issues’,36 notions of ‘Britishness’ became an instrument for fostering ‘community cohesion’,37 promoting integration, and servicing national security agendas. To quote David Goodhart, the mechanism to capture ‘the felt reality of British life, [its] norms and institutions’ was ‘British values ’. Notably, in Goodhart’s estimation, this ‘thinking about integration in terms of values’ was ‘not being built out of thin air’ since ‘most of the raw material for its construction’ came ‘from Britain’s history and its way of life’.38 Yet if this underlines how perceptions of and claims to British values saw themselves as being historically rooted (and, therefore, legitimated), such approaches were, nevertheless, inherently selective—both in terms of the stories of the past they invoked, and the ways these narratives were duly told. Inevitably, and unavoidably, this created exclusionary discourses, for embedded within these invocations of an imagined Britain was ‘a racialized narrative of national belonging’.39 An illustration of this, and of how Holocaust remembrance was being refitted in a domestic framework where the principles of multiculturalism were being recast, came in 2006. That summer, the Secretary of State for Communities, Ruth Kelly, used the occasion of launching a new Commission on Integration and Cohesion to publicly question whether multiculturalism was ‘encouraging separateness’. Furthermore, she speculated if ‘in our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, we have ended up with some communities living in isolation from each other, with no common bonds between them’.40 Kelly’s remarks were noteworthy as the first public expression of a growing mood in Westminster. But the salience of these concerns around multiculturalism, cohesion, and identity, and the way these were being viewed through a prism of combating Muslim extremism, were accented further in a speech Kelly delivered that October. Addressing an audience of representatives from different Muslim groups, Kelly took a thinly veiled swipe at the Muslim 35 “‘Moral

panic” driving asylum policy’, BBC News, 30 July 2003.

36 David

Goodhart, ‘Progressive nationalism isn’t an oxymoron, it’s a necessity’, The Guardian, 29 May 2006. 37 Garbaye

and Schnapper, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

38 David

Goodhart, Progressive Nationalism: Citizenship and the Left (London: Demos, 2006), p. 26.

39 Ben

Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8.

40 ‘In

full: Ruth Kelly speech’, BBC News, 24 August 2006. Available via: http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5281572.stm.

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Council of Britain (MCB) who, since 2003, had boycotted HMD on account of what they saw as its exclusivity.41 In the course of her speech, Kelly expressed her dismay at how ‘those in leadership positions’ who professed a desire for ‘religious tolerance’ and social cohesion, snubbed ‘an event which marks, above all, our common humanity and respect for each other’.42 Going further, she suggested that ‘in future our strategy on funding and engagement [with the Muslim community] must shift significantly to organisations taking a pro-active leadership role in tackling extremism and defending our shared values’.43 Kelly’s comments were revealing on three counts. First, they showed how the government believed Holocaust memory had a critical role to play in fostering the societal cohesion it felt had been compromised by multiculturalism. Second, her barbed remarks about the future provision of state funding made clear that ‘signing up to a shared set of British values’44 was no mere semiotic exercise, but one tied—in effect—to financial reward. And third, her inference that Holocaust remembrance was bound up with these indicated that it was no optional endeavour; rather it was the benchmark against which conformity was measured. Kelly’s positioning was not an isolated occurrence but part of an emerging pattern which bore two distinctive features. The first of these was an elevation in the status of Holocaust remembrance and education to a point whereby they were matters beyond dispute or debate. The second, was an entwining of Holocaust remembrance and education with issues concerning Islamic extremism and the Muslim community in Britain more broadly. Each of these features—and, on occasions, both at the same time—were illustrated throughout Labour’s final term in government (2005–2010). In addition to the episode outlined above, for example, in early 2007 the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was reported by the Jewish Chronicle as telling the MCB ‘don’t boycott HMD’. On this ‘very important national day both of education and remembrance’, Brown was quoted as saying, ‘everybody should accept their responsibilities for playing a part in reminding whole communities of what happened’.45 At the time Brown was also making an increasing number of interventions into public discussion of ‘Britishness’, advocating ‘a distinctive set of British values which influences British institutions’ such as ‘British tolerance, the British belief in liberty and the British 41 For the MCB’s response, see Muslim Council of Britain, ‘MCB responds to Ruth Kelly’s speech’, 15 October 2006. Available via: https://www.mcb.org.uk/mcb-responds-to-ruthkellys-speech/. 42 Toby

Helm, ‘Back British values or lose grants’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2006.

43 Ruth

Kelly, cited, Tania Branigan, ‘Muslim groups must tackle extremism to gain funding, says Kelly’, The Guardian, 11 October 2006. 44 Martin

Bright, ‘Radical Islam: Ministers get the message’, New Statesman, 9 April 2007.

45 Rachel

Fletcher, ‘Brown: “Don’t Boycott HMD”’, The Jewish Chronicle, 26 January

2007.

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sense of fair play’.46 Once he finally took over as Prime Minister in the summer of 2007, Brown sought to translate this rhetoric into policy, calling on Westminster to ‘agree and set down the values, founded in liberty, which define our citizenship and help to define our country’.47 Increasingly beleaguered once in the position of Prime Minister, Brown would abandon these plans but Britishness and the Holocaust remained key interests of his and his administration. In early 2007 for example, the then Secretary of State for Education, Alan Johnson explained ahead of publishing plans to revise the National Curriculum for state-funded schools that ‘there are certain untouchable elements of the secondary curriculum that all teenagers should learn for a classic, well-rounded British education’. One such element was the Holocaust—which, alongside the world wars, was an ‘important’ part of history that was ‘essential’ for students to learn.48 Shortly after Johnson’s announcement, controversy broke around erroneous claims that teachers were deciding to not teach the Holocaust for fear of upsetting Muslim students.49 A hoax email gave these claims further currency, even prompting the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to write directly to Johnson to express their concern.50 Despite assurances from government, the rumours persisted well into the following year and only finally began to subside after the new Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls, issued a statement to international media outlets and embassies where he described the Holocaust as a ‘non-negotiable’ subject that was ‘protected in schools’.51 In several important respects, during its last years in power Labour was true to the spirit of these words. The years 2007–2010 saw considerable financial support provided to various organisations engaged in Holocaust education: as well as continuing to fund HMD, in 2008 the government extended and substantially increased its financial provisions for the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) flagship Lessons from Auschwitz (LFA) project.52 A memorandum submitted by the HET to a Parliamentary Committee in 2006 provides insight into why this project was attractive for the government. Describing LFA as having ‘a strong citizenship dimension’, HET indicated ‘the effect of the Holocaust on British society and therefore its contribution 46 ‘Full

text of Gordon Brown’s speech’, The Guardian, 27 February 2007.

47 Hansard,

Commons Debates, 3 July 2007, Column 819.

48 Tania

Branigan, ‘Shakespeare and algebra are a must for pupils, schools told’, The Guardian, 5 February 2007.

49 Laura Clark, ‘Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims’, Daily Mail, 2 April 2007; Jeevan Vasagar, ‘Schools drop Holocaust lessons’, The Guardian, 2 April 2007. 50 ‘Britain

to still teach the Holocaust’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 20 April 2007.

51 ‘UK

government acts on hoax e-mail’, BBC News, 4 February 2008. Available via: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7226778.stm. 52 For information on this programme, see Holocaust Educational Trust, ‘About LFA’. Available via: https://www.het.org.uk/lessons-from-auschwitz-programme.

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to the formation of Britain’s identity is relevant to the citizenship curriculum’, and suggested ‘fundamental to understanding the Holocaust and its relevance today, are issues of social justice, political literacy and identity’.53 This approach to teaching and learning about the Holocaust—one where primacy is placed on its ‘lessons and ‘contemporary relevance’ had long held attraction for Labour and helps to account for its policy around Holocaust politics during its first two terms in government.54 By the mid-2000s, it was a stratagem that dovetailed with concerns around integration, community cohesion, and constructions of Britishness in a context of growing security concerns and rising Islamophobia. Significantly, it was not only those in government who saw Holocaust education in this way. In 2009, research into teaching practices in England—as detailed by Stuart Foster in this volume—revealed uncomfortable findings for a country which, by then, had seen mandatory Holocaust education in place for a generation. Teachers were found to be unsure about what content to cover in the limited time available; curricula appeared skewed towards ‘perpetrator-orientated narratives’; many practitioners exhibited significant gaps in subject knowledge and a predilection to draw on ‘popular rather than academic discourse’; and the majority of teachers held inclusive understandings of victimhood, allowing them—it seemed—to pursue abstract, civic-centred, ‘lessons’-laden, teaching aims.55 These findings suggested that a particular narrative of the Holocaust was dominant in English schools—one that framed the Holocaust in a universalised way, and determined its meaning to be its capacity to combat social ills and provide contemporary lessons. Notably, this did not yet involve explicitly tying the Holocaust to conceptions Britishness (that was to come later) but nor did it mean teaching was geared towards encouraging critical reflection on Britain’s connections with the events of the Holocaust. Instead, when and where Britain did enter into teaching practices, this tended to be telescoped through particular themes or occurrences: principally, the Kindertransport and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen—events of importance, no doubt, but ones counterposed by equally important yet absent issues like the occupation of the Channel Islands or domestic antisemitism during the Nazi period. These pedagogical approaches and the government’s growing interest in Britishness and the Holocaust was further exemplified in the final years of Labour administration. In 2008 the HET launched a campaign for public 53 ‘Memorandum submitted by the Holocaust Educational Trust’, Select Committee on Education and Skills Written Evidence, March 2006. Available via: https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmeduski/147/147we30.htm. 54 The notion of their being “lessons” of the Holocaust is one which has come under increasing dispute and critique over the recent decade. See, for instance, Michael Marrus, Lessons of the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2016). 55 Alice Pettigrew, Stuart Foster, Jonathan Howson, Paul Salmons, Ruth-Anne Lenga, and Kay Andrews, Teaching about the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practice (London: Institute of Education, 2009), pp. 7–9.

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recognition and award of Britons who helped Jews during the Holocaust. The proposals required changes to be made to the existing honours system which would enable posthumous awards to be made, and was duly ‘seized on’ by allies close to then Prime Minister Brown.56 Having encountered obstacles to such reforms, it was announced in April 2009 that the government would find other ways to ‘recognise the contribution of Holocaust heroes’; partly because ‘honouring those people will help us to teach the lessons of the Holocaust when, during the next 20 years, it goes from living history to just history’ but also so as to ‘celebrate the outstanding contributions that they made for humanity and the finest traditions of this country’.57 In March 2010, The British Heroes of the Holocaust award, consisting of a silver medal inscribed with ‘In the Service of Humanity’, was bestowed by Brown on 27 individuals. At an event held in Downing Street to present the award to the two recipients who were still alive, Brown explained ‘these individuals are true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us. They were shining beacons of hope in the midst of terrible evil because they were prepared to take a stand against prejudice, hatred and intolerance’.58 Somewhat uncomfortably, the moral probity of one of these heroes was called into question a year later when the claims of Denis Avey to have ‘broken into Auschwitz’ to save Jewish inmates were attacked and debunked as a likely fabrication.59 After briefly sallying forth to defend his name, Avey soon retreated from the public eye and was no longer promoted by his former champions. The wish to promote heroic narratives of Britain and the Holocaust had been nevertheless been established. The Heroes of the Holocaust initiative, later resurrected in 2013, 2015, and 2018 was one way of doing this. It would soon be trumped by other, more grandiose plans.

Institutionalising British Values and Commissioning Holocaust Memory Holocaust remembrance and education had been tied by Labour to cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, yet the first decade of the new millennium saw growing attempts to give form to ‘Britishness’ through the notion of supposedly national, historic values. In theory, this latter trend risked undermining the foundations of ‘official’ Holocaust consciousness. In reality, the pursuit of a ‘British’ narrative by successive governments did not stall 56 Damian McBride, ‘Jimmy Saville’s Knighthood: The Civil Service Rearguard’. Available via: http://damianpmcbride.tumblr.com/post/33230968057/jimmy-savilles-knighthoodthe-civil-service. 57 Hansard,

Commons Debates, Columns 304-305WH, 24 April 2009.

58 Gordon

Brown, cited, Heidi Blake, ‘Unsung British heroes of the Holocaust awarded medals’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2010. 59 Guy

Walters, ‘Did this British PoW really smuggle himself into Auschwitz’, The Daily Mail, 9 April 2011; Idem, ‘The curious case of the “break into Auschwitz”’, New Statesman, 17 November 2011.

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or reverse statist approaches to the Holocaust so much as give them new dimensions and dynamics. The reframing of Holocaust consciousness after 2005 occurred at a time when culture became a battleground for national identity in an age of renewed fears of domestic terrorism. The Prevent programme—a counter-terrorism initiative established by Labour in 2003—was the clearest example of this development. Originally part of Labour’s response to the events of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘War on Terror’, the programme was expanded following the London bombings of 2005. Aiming to ‘stop radicalisation, reduce support for terrorism and violent extremism and discourage people from becoming terrorists’,60 Prevent pivoted on the notion that ‘the drive for equality, social inclusion, community cohesion and active citizenship in Britain strengthens society and its resistance to terrorism here in the UK’.61 Accordingly, significant public funds were made available for community-based projects and educational initiatives—many of which were directed at targeting radicalisation within the Muslim community. Unsurprisingly, it quickly garnered criticism and controversy. Concerns were expressed around its potential to stigmatise Muslims, inadvertently inculcate Islamophobia, and alienate the very people it was trying to prevent being radicalised. The ways in which government policy towards Islamic extremism, Britishness, and the Holocaust enmeshed increased after the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. The penchant of this new administration for Holocaust politics has been documented elsewhere62 ; of note here is its decision to comprehensively review the Prevent strategy on coming to power. Among the coalition’s many conclusions was the need to be more ‘confident in our own values’, to eschew organisations who do not ‘accept’ ‘fundamental values’, and to realise that ‘work to deal with radicalisation will depend on developing a sense of belonging to this country and support for our core values’.63 These ‘fundamental British values’ were spelt out as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’.64

60 Communities

and Local Government Committee, Preventing Violent Extremism: Sixth Report, 2010. Available via: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/ cmcomloc/65/6504.htm.

61 HM

Government, Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom’s Strategy (HMSO, 2006), p. 9.

62 Andy Pearce, ‘The Holocaust in the National Curriculum after 25 Years’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 23:3 (2017), 231–262. 249–252; Idem., ‘In The Thick of It: “High politics” and the Holocaust in millennial Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice, 53:1 (2019), pp. 98–110, pp. 104–105. 63 HM

Government, Prevent Strategy (London: HMSO, 2011), p. 1, 13, 45.

64 Ibid.,

p. 107.

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There was, of course, little that was self-evidently ‘British’ about these values. They had been enshrined in most Western nation-states since 1945,65 and in the words of the author Michael Rosen, describing them as inherently ‘British’ was ‘parochial, patronising and arrogant’.66 It also left, in Vini Lander’s words, ‘very little space to discuss more important issues around the utility and adequacy of the proposed values themselves’.67 Still, the appeal of the coalition government to British values reflected its understanding of national identity politics. Moreover, this was a conception which had itself shifted, with previous ‘concern about a lack of a shared British identity across the four nations’ becoming ‘replaced by concern about minority ethnic communities purportedly not integrating and having a sense of belonging to British society’.68 For our concerns, the coalition’s recalibration of the Prevent strategy in 2011 was notable on three counts. First, it expanded the understanding of present terrorist threats beyond Islamic fundamentalism to include far-right extremism; second, it reinforced what had become a nexus between conceptualisations of Britishness, counter-terrorism, and community cohesion through the normative framing of ‘fundamental British values’; and third, it established education as key priority area. The latter of these had particular consequences for Holocaust consciousness. In 2012, the Teachers’ Standards for newly qualified teachers were revised to require that teachers did not undermine ‘fundamental British values’.69 Two years later in 2014, the government mandated that all schools implement ‘a clear strategy for embedding’ British values, so as ‘to ensure young people leave school prepared for life in modern Britain’.70 The catalyst for this particular hardening of approach was the so-called Trojan Horse affair: a scandal that developed following unfounded claims that a group of Muslims were conspiring to infiltrate a number of schools in Birmingham and turn

65 Andrew

Gamble and Tony Wright, ‘Introduction: The Britishness question’, in Britishness: Perspectives on the British Question, eds. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 4–5.

66 Michael

Rosen, ‘Dear Mr Gove: What’s so “British” about your “British values”?’ The Guardian, 1 July 2014. 67 Vini Lander, Fundamental British Values (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 58. 68 Uvanney Maylor, ‘“I’d worry about how to teach it”: British values in English classrooms’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 42:3 (2016), 314–328. 316. 69 Department for Education, Teachers’ Standards: Guidance for School Leaders, School Staff and Governing Bodies (London: HMSO, 2011), p. 14. 70 Press Release, ‘Guidance on promoting British values in schools published’, 27 November 2014. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guidance-on-pro moting-british-values-in-schools-published. See also Samira Shackle, ‘Trojan horse: The real story behind the fake “Islamic plot” to take over schools’, The Guardian, 1 September 2017.

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them into hotbeds of Islamic extremism.71 Elizabeth Poole astutely suggests that within an already febrile atmosphere, this ‘Islamist scare story’ enabled the government and its supporters in the media to construct a ‘radicalisation narrative’ which legitimated its calls for a ‘muscular liberalism’ that would rectify the ills of multiculturalism and ‘proscribe[d] a common identity…with a concept so open—Fundamental British Values—this can be redefined as and when needed’.72 By 2015, schools were obliged to fulfil their ‘Prevent Duty’: that being, identifying and protecting those at risk of radicalisation and building ‘resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values’.73 Significantly, what soon emerged as one of the most popular ways of fulfilling this obligation was for schools to increase Holocaust-related activities. As Kara Critchell notes, this translated into schools publicly committing themselves to Holocaust memorialisation, and inviting Holocaust survivors to talk to students.74 In this way, making British values education compulsory worked in some respects to reinforce the position of Holocaust consciousness within educational establishments.75 Yet crucially the use of the Holocaust to meet these requirements was not imposed by the government, but instead adopted by schools and teachers themselves. Further research is required to determine why this choice was made, but three contributing factors can be identified. The first, as noted by Critchell, is that there was ‘already a precedent for using the Holocaust as a means by which to promote a politicized domestic narrative of the Holocaust with supposed lessons of tolerance for contemporary society’.76 As such, teachers were already predisposed to drawing on the Holocaust to serve particular ends. Second, for some non-governmental organisations working in Holocaust education, the institutionalisation of British values in schools opened up new

71 For summary, see Samira Shackle, ‘Trojan horse: The real story behind the fake “Islamic plot” to take over schools’, The Guardian, 1 September 2017. 72 Elizabeth

Poole, ‘Constructing “British values” within a radicalisation narrative: The reporting of the Trojan Horse affair’, Journalism Studies, 19:3 (2018), 376–391. 377, 387. 73 Department

for Education, The Prevent Duty: Departmental Advice for Schools and Childcare Providers (London: HMSO, 2015), pp. 4–5.

74 Kara Critchell, ‘“Proud to be British; and proud to be Jewish”: The Holocaust and British values in the twenty-first century’, Holocaust Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17504902.2018.1528414. 75 By contrast, the government’s academisation policy undermined the position of the Holocaust in the National Curriculum. See Andy Pearce, ‘The Holocaust in the National Curriculum after 25 Years’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 23:3 (2017), 231–262. 232. 76 Critchell,

‘“Proud to be British’”.

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opportunities for educational initiatives.77 In a field where non-governmental organisations have long influenced teaching practices, such moves functioned to promote and endorse the notion that the Holocaust could be linked to British values. And third, connections between the Holocaust with British values—both explicit and implicit—became far more pronounced and prevalent in political circles during the term of the coalition government (2010–2015). In one direction, for example, in a speech on the ‘necessity of memory’ delivered at the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) annual dinner in 2014, the then Chief Whip, Michael Gove positioned antisemitism as ‘an obvious early manifestation of the growing threat’ posed by ‘those who care nothing for peace, democracy or British values’.78 In the other, following the launch of the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission in 2014, the Holocaust itself was increasingly directly tied to value-laden imaginings of Britishness. The trumpeting of Holocaust remembrance and education by the coalition government took place in an increasingly inauspicious and ill-fitting environment. In the summer of 2013, for example, the Home Office decided to pilot an advertising campaign designed to encourage illegal immigrations to return to their country of origin. This initiative saw a fleet of vans drive around six London boroughs carrying billboards emblazoned with ‘Go home or face arrest’. Although the pilot was deemed a failure and abandoned, partly due to cross-party criticism, research into public opinion gestured to a wider climate of hostility: some 47% of respondents had ‘approved of the scheme’.79 This controversial initiative was part of the coalition’s broader attempt to respond to immigration concerns by reducing net migration from hundreds to ‘tens of thousands’.80 That objective itself fed off and into ‘feverish discussions of immigration’ taking place British culture and society; discussions that were increasingly being driven by UKIP.81 By 2013, UKIP’s populism, antiimmigration and anti-EU stance had enabled it to become a significant thorn in the side of the coalition government. That May the party secured 139 seats in local elections, and enjoyed a sharp upswing in their percentage of the vote

77 See,

for instance, references made to British values in the following: Stories from Willesden Lane N.W 6, Home page. Available via: http://willesdenlane.org.uk/; Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, ‘2019 Postcard Project: Secondary Lesson Plan’, available via: https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Secondary-lesson-plan.pdf. 78 Michael Gove, ‘“The necessity of memory”: The full text of Michael Gove’s speech to the Holocaust Educational Trust’, Conservative Home, 10 September 2014. Available via: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2014/09/the-necessity-of-mem ory-the-full-text-of-michael-goves-speech-to-the-holocaust-educational-trust.html. 79 James Legge, ‘Government’s “Go home” vans backed by Immigration Minister Mark Harper’, The Independent, 18 October 2013. 80 BBC 81 Paul

News, ‘UK government agrees on skilled migration cap’, 23 November 2010.

Stocker, English Uprising: Brexit and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right (London: Melville House, 2017), p. 124.

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in parliamentary by-elections.82 Such electoral advances positioned UKIP as a tangible threat to the Conservative Party in its traditional heartlands. In an attempt to stave off this danger and satisfy the increasingly vociferous Eurosceptic wing of his own party, then Prime Minister David Cameron pledged in 2013 that a referendum on British membership of the EU would be held if the Conservatives secured a majority at the next General Election.83 Believing such an outcome to be remote, and confident that he would, in any case, be able to ‘sell a “reformed EU” to the British people’,84 Cameron calculated the promise was a risk worth taking. After winning a small majority in the 2015 General Election, Cameron found his hand unexpectedly forced. Before leading Britain into the 2016 referendum, Cameron made another intervention with profound significance for our investigation. Some eight weeks after the Home Office’s ‘Go home’ vans turned off their engines, Cameron was the keynote speaker at the HET’s 25th anniversary dinner. In an address which soldered Holocaust politics with his thwarted ambitions for military intervention in Syria and foreign policy towards Israel, Cameron announced he would create a Holocaust Commission. This body would ‘investigate whether further measures should be taken to ensure Britain has a permanent and fitting memorial and educational resource for generations to come’.85 The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission was formally launched in January 2014. Framed as being necessary primarily because of the passing of survivors and general passage of time, the Commission’s primary task was to produce ‘a set of concrete, deliverable recommendations which will ensure the Holocaust and its lessons remain relevant for future generations’. These would, according to the Commission’s Terms of Reference, ‘focus on the role Britain played through, for example, the Kindertransport, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the experiences of survivors now living in Britain’.86 This specific ambition was emblematic of ‘a new, emerging discourse about Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust as history and memory’87 which was initially articulated in the Commission’s final report, Britain’s Promise to Remember, published twelve months later. 82 George Parker, ‘Votes for Ukip in council elections rock political establishment’, Financial Times, 3 May 2013. 83 ‘David

Cameron promises in/out referendum on EU’, BBC News, 23 January 2013.

84 George

Parker and Alex Barker, ‘How Brexit spelled the end to Cameron’s career’, Financial Times, 24 June 2016. 85 David Cameron, ‘25th anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Trust: Prime Minister’s speech’, 16 September 2013. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ 25th-anniversary-of-the-holocaust-educational-trust-prime-ministers-speech. 86 The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission, ‘Terms of Reference’. Available via: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/275198/Terms-of-Reference-PM-Holocaust-Commission.pdf. 87 Andy Pearce, ‘An Emerging “Holocaust Memorial Problem”? The Condition of Holocaust Culture in Britain’, Journal of Holocaust Research, 32:2 (2019), 117–137. 131.

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The Commission’s report came on the back of a year of gathering evidence. During this time, it staged a number of public and publicised consultations: some of which became mass media events in and of themselves. These included meetings with President Jimmy Carter, visits undertaken to sites like Bergen-Belsen and Yad Vashem, and the gathering of 250 survivors for discussion at Wembley stadium.88 Additionally, there was a considerable number of responses to the Commission’s Call for Evidence—nearly 2500, including some 700 essays written by ‘young people’89 —and representatives from various sectors (including the editors of this volume, as noted in the Introduction), were formally consulted. It would be fair to say therefore that the Commission catalysed and stimulated public engagement with questions related to the nature and purpose of Holocaust memory-work and education. What was telling, was how the Commission ultimately came to understand these enterprises and how their recommendations were subsequently taken forward over the proceeding years. Britain’s Promise to Remember was an article of faith in keeping with the sacral, nationalised discourse that accompanied the creation of the Holocaust Commission in the first place.90 Conjoining the Holocaust with Britishness was a central trope of this narrative, with the Executive Summary making clear the Commission’s conviction that ‘ensuring that the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten lies at the heart of Britain’s values as a nation’. While recognising that there are ‘more challenging elements of Britain’s history—such as the refusal to accept more refugees or the questions over whether more could have been done to disrupt the Final Solution’,91 this amounted overall to little more than occasional nods in the direction of self-conscious reflection. Predominantly, the tone of the report oscillated between two interpretative poles. In one direction, A.J. Sherman’s infamous ‘balance sheet’ approach of

88 Cabinet Office, ‘PM’s Holocaust Commission meets President Jimmy Carter’, 30 May 2014. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pms-holocaust-commissionmeets-president-jimmy-carter; Adam Sherwin, ‘Steven Spielberg help sought to create new British Holocaust commemoration’, The Independent, 5 May 2014; Marcus Dysch, ‘Holocaust Commission event is a day to remember’, Jewish Chronicle, 8 May 2014. 89 Cabinet

Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: HMSO, 2015) p. 11, 16.

90 On the sacred dimensions of the Commission and its report see David Tollerton, ‘“A New Sacred Space in the Centre of London”: The Victoria Tower Gardens Holocaust Memorial and the religious-secular landscape of contemporary Britain’, Journal of Religion and Society, 19:4 (2017); Idem., ‘Britain’s New Holocaust Memorial as sacred site’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief , 13:2 (2017), 266–268. Also, Isabelle Mutton, ‘The Sacred Lineage of the UK’s new Holocaust Memorial’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief , 15:2 (2019), 266–268. 91 Cabinet

Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: HMSO, 2015), p. 9.

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the early 1970s92 was rehearsed with Britain’s actions juxtaposed against those of other nations and duly judged favourably. In the other, was unashamed self-congratulation. Notably, these two positions were able to coexist—as seen in what are becoming the oft-cited words of Ian Austin MP, who resolutely assessed that ‘this period defines what it means to be British. It is in Britain’s unique response to the Holocaust and its unique role in the war that gives us the right to claim a particular attachment to the values of democracy, equality, freedom, fairness and tolerance’.93 The headline recommendation of Britain’s Promise to Remember—a ‘striking a prominent new National Memorial’ to ‘stand as a permanent affirmation of the values of our society’ and to be accompanied by a ‘world class Learning Centre’94 —was immediately accepted and endorsed by Cameron, with broad cross-party support. The UKHMF was duly established to deliver the project and oversee a supplementary initiative of filming survivors living in Britain. Subsequently, the proceeding four years saw the project move through four phases: the search for and announcement of a site (January 2015–January 2016); the launching of an international design competition and selection of a winning concept design (September 2016–October 2017); the formulation of a design proposal, and its submission as a formal planning application (October 2017–December 2018); and the progression of the application through planning scrutiny (December 2018–present). The connection between the UKHMF project and ideas of nationhood were palpable across these phases, but their precise arrangement also underwent noteworthy changes. Interestingly, these shifts occurred at the same time as the fallout from the 2016 EU Referendum saw growing crises break-out in various quarters of British political life.

Brexit, Identity and Democracy The impact and effects of the EU referendum result on British politics were so deep and wide-ranging that they elude tidy formation or neat overview. Four years on from the event, shelves in bookshops and libraries bow under the weight of literature which has emerged to try and ‘make sense’ of the result and its aftershocks. Meanwhile, daily newsprint and online media continue to be dominated by Brexit coverage as commentators and journalists struggle to keep up with an ever-developing news story. To these ends, matters have been complicated both by the sheer emotions unleashed by Brexit and its unfolding in the so-called ‘post-truth era’ where there has been ‘a crash in the value of

92 A.J.

Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–1939 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).

93 Ian

Austin, cited, Cabinet Office, Britain’s Promise to Remember, p. 23.

94 Ibid.,

p. 13.

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truth’, and where ‘honesty and accuracy are no longer assigned the highest priority in political exchange’.95 For our purposes, two particular issues have come more and more to the fore since 2016. The first of these is national identity. The second is that of democracy and the democratic process. Each of these is complex and complicated phenomena. They are also intimately and intrinsically interrelated. But while it is only possible to briefly consider these issues, it is through exploring some of the ways in which national identity and political process have been impacted by Brexit that we encounter some interesting points of contact between post-referendum Britain and the current direction of statist approaches to Holocaust consciousness. The history of national identity in Britain is necessarily tied to the history of Great Britain as a plurinational polity, and to the individual histories of its constituent nations. To cite Linda Colley, this truism underlines how both Britain and the United Kingdom ‘are comparatively recent and synthetic constructs that have often been contested and in flux’.96 Moreover, as Alisa Henderson reminds us, the origins and composition of ‘Britain’ are such that there has arguably never been ‘a union of shared identities’, since Britishness has been viewed, understood, and experienced differently by the Isles’ various inhabitants.97 What served as the centrifugal force for centuries of course was empire, which—together with Francophobia and Protestantism—propped up the imagined community of Britain.98 After all, ‘British, by its very definition, is an imperial term, not a national one’99 meaning that the notion of Britishness as identity continues to be unavoidably inflected by imperial heritage and understandings of what that history amounted to. Tellingly, within British culture and society the enduring vision of Britain’s imperial history remains rose-tinted. In 2014, for example, a YouGov survey of over 1700 adults found 59% indicated the British Empire was something to be proud of rather than ashamed about.100 For David Olusoga, such perceptions come from the fact ‘we know too little of the actual history to make sound judgement’, meaning that artificially bifurcated debates over whether the empire was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ensue and are invariably resolved with ‘the

95 Matthew

D’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (London: Ebury Press, 2017), pp. 7–8.

96 Linda

Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion (London: Profile Books, 2014), p. 4.

97 Alisa

Henderson, ‘Brexit, the Union and the Future of England’, Political Insight, December 2018, 32–35. 34.

98 Madeline Bunting, ‘Don’t overlook the impact of empire on our identity’, The Guardian, 1 January 2007. 99 Mark A. Hutchinson, ‘A genealogy of the term British reveals its imperial history—and a Brexit paradox’, The Conversation, 21 December 2018. 100 Will

Dahlgreen, ‘The British Empire is “something to be proud of”’, YouGov, 26 July 2014. Available via: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/07/26/ britain-proud-its-empire.

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bad aspects of imperial history’ being ‘banished from further discussion’.101 The price that is paid for what Richard Gott calls our ‘benign, biscuit-tin view of the past’ is historical actuality: that is, the truth that imperial riches and the power that came with them were ‘the fruit of military conquest and of brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination’.102 Not only is this history commonly obscured, but so too are the mentalities that accompanied it—mindsets which, to draw on Colley again, were characterised by a ‘marked and confident sense of mission…frequent aggression and racial arrogance’.103 The salience of these features of imperial identity lies in how their fundamental precepts did not necessarily disappear with the dissolution of empire. Indeed, according to P.W. Preston’s provocative thesis, continuity from an imperial to a post-colonial Britain was actively fashioned by the post-war political elite. So as to manage ‘the collapse of the British state-empire system’, a twin strategy of ‘denial and confection’ was employed to construct what was ostensibly a new nation-state founded on ‘the political-cultural rhetoric of “continuing Britain”’.104 Where denial served ‘to veil [the] loss’ of both empire and imperial power, confection offered ‘a route a future intimately linked to that which had been lost’—partly through a reimaging of ‘the diminished former metropolitan core of the state-empire system’ as ‘a long-established nation-state’.105 Preston’s template provides food for thought in the quest to understand how Britain’s imperial legacies have—and have not—been confronted since 1945. Notably, he argues that the construction of ‘continuing Britain’ relied upon the Second World War as ‘a new foundation myth’, with ideas of ‘war and wartime’ enabling history and memory to be ‘stylized’.106 As noted in the Introduction to this volume, historians of Britain and the Holocaust have long been attuned to the stunting effect that Second World War memory has had on the development of Holocaust consciousness in Britain. Similarly, scholars have also picked out how the institutionalisation of the Holocaust into Britain’s historical culture at the turn of the millennium ‘failed entirely to bring to the public’s attention Britain’s own record of colonial atrocity’. In fact, suggested

101 David Olusoga, ‘Wake up, Britain. Should the empire really be a source of pride?’, The Guardian, 23 January 2016. 102 Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt (London: Verso, 2012), p. 3. 103 Colley,

Acts of Union, p. 18.

104 P.W.

Preston, Britain after Empire: Constructing a Post-War Political-Cultural Project (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 197.

105 Ibid.,

p. 36, 203.

106 Ibid.,

p. 19, 34.

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Dan Stone in 2004, ‘Britain’s Holocaust consciousness has provided a screen memory for colonial genocide’.107 Stone caveated his prognosis with the rider that noteworthy changes to this status quo were occurring within academia; this much was true and indeed were furthered over subsequent years. But in wider culture, however, the intervening years have—if anything—seen this ‘screen’ become even more of a safety curtain. It is of no coincidence that this has been the same period where the search for new ways of conceptualising Britishness and its history has become more acute and politically expedient (see also Gordon in this volume). That enterprise itself has been conducted against an emergent new ‘wave’ of ‘nationalist resurgence’ in the UK and beyond.108 This reassertion had multiple causes. The influence of devolution, the retreat from multiculturalism, and concerns over extremism have been noted already; to these we can add the ‘resurgence of economic nationalism’109 that followed the economic crises of 2008–2010, globalisation, and the European refugee crisis from 2015 onwards. While many of these developments were transnational and led to ‘arguments about belonging, culture, nationhood and identity…flooding across the Western world’110 in the British context they further animated long-standing ‘great questions’ over Britain, Britishness, and their place in the world.111 Notions of nationality and ideas of identity were central features of the EU referendum campaign. This was because, according to Richard Ashcroft and Mark Bevir, the referendum was ‘in large part about pluralism in culture, nationalism and citizenship’.112 Taking this to be so, and recalling how exercises in Holocaust remembrance and education were progressively used by governments between 1997 and 2016 as materiel for the construction of ‘Britishness’, it is possible to appreciate how it was inevitable that statist approaches to the Holocaust would become entangled with the politics and political culture of Brexit Britain. The promotion, for instance, of the UKHMF project jarred sharply with the rising levels of racism and intolerance that followed the referendum result—as it also did against the more endemic ‘entrenchment of views and formation of identities’ that solidified across

107 Dan Stone, ‘Britannia waives the rules: British imperialism and Holocaust Memory’ in Dan Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), p. 187, 190. 108 Ghia

Nodia, ‘The end of the postnational illusion’, Journal of Democracy, 28:2 (2017): 5–19. 11.

109 Marc-William

Palen, ‘Britain’s imperial ghosts have taken control of Brexit’, The Conversation, 26 June 2017. 110 Paul

Kingsnorth, ‘The Last Wolf’, New Statesman, 23 August 2017.

111 David

Marquand, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Phoenix, 2009), p. 3.

112 Richard Ashcroft and Mark Bevir, ‘Pluralism, national identity and citizenship: Britain after Brexit’, The Political Quarterly, 87:3 (2016): 355–359. 355.

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British society and often ‘led to the “otherisation” and demonisation of the opposing side’.113 What, then, of the second issue: democracy and the democratic process? It is instructive to note that the EU referendum took place in a general climate of ‘broken politics’. Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon recount how ‘faith and participation in British politics’ had been ‘progressively sapped’ by long-term factors such as simultaneity between political parties and ‘the shrinking role of elected government’, and short-term occurrences like ‘the [MPs] expenses scandal, the financial crisis and the austerity policies subsequently pursued’.114 While this did not significantly effect turnout, negative perceptions about the condition of British democracy were picked up by those campaigning to leave the EU, who duly ‘spun’ this into the ‘positive’ message that Brexit would bring ‘the renewal of democracy and the restoration of sovereignty’.115 Calls to reclaim sovereignty ignored the small but highly significant technicality that ‘the British people have never been sovereign’,116 yet appeals to democracy and sovereignty ‘were high-minded ideas that had the benefit of providing a politically correct rationale for casting a Leave ballot’.117 It was, therefore, all the more of a bitter irony that some of those campaigning for Leave had no scruples with engaging in practices few would associate with the coda of liberal democracy. At one end of the spectrum this included the official Vote Leave campaign making the ‘spurious’ claim on its campaign battle bus that Britain gave the EU £350 million a week and that this money would be invested in the NHS118 ; at the other, it entailed Vote Leave being fined by the Electoral Commission for breaking electoral law by exceeding spending limits, and the unofficial Leave.EU organisation also being investigated for alleged criminality. Grafted onto these behaviours was a distinctly populist approach to the campaign. ‘Fundamentally anti-pluralist’, this stratagem consciously negated ‘the norms of democratic politics’ and embraced ‘toxic divisiveness’.119 In the aftermath of the referendum result, many of the above tenets were mainstreamed by the Conservative government under the new leadership of Theresa May. Illustrative of the new tone and tenor of Brexit politics was the 113 Chaminda Jayanetti, ‘The overlooked dynamic at the heart of the Brexit “culture war”’, Prospect, 29 January 2019. Available via: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/ the-overlooked-dynamic-at-the-heart-of-the-brexit-culture-war. 114 Geoffrey

Evans and Anand Menon, Brexit and British Politics (London: Polity, 2017),

p. 24, 44. 115 Harold

D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 59.

116 James McDougall, ‘This “will of the people” talk must stop—we need a better democracy than that’, The Conversation, 6 February 2017. 117 Clarke

et al., Brexit, p. 59.

118 D’Ancona, 119 Tony

Post-Truth, p. 21.

Wright, ‘Democracy and its discontents’, The Political Quarterly, 90:1 (2019): 5–17. 16.

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decision by May’s government to try and trigger Article 50 (the mechanism by which the UK would formally begin to exit the EU) by invoking royal prerogative powers and thus circumvent Parliament. In the process of taking the government to court over the move, the claimant in the case—businesswoman Gina Miller—was attacked by politicians, sections of the media, and even the Attorney General for attempting to subvert the ‘democratic will’ of the people.120 Meanwhile, after ruling that the government did indeed need an Act of Parliament to trigger Article 50, the High Court judges in the case were depicted by the Daily Mail as being ‘Enemies of the people’ who wanted to ‘thwart the wishes of 17.4 million Leave voters’.121 Three months after the headline appeared, the man who came up with it—James Slack—was announced as Theresa May’s official spokesperson. As James McDougall has observed, the ‘will of the people’ refrain which rapidly became commonplace in Brexit Britain was ‘an obviously tendentious interpretation of the referendum result’.122 By the same token, Tony Wright notes that such assertions equally revealed a ‘failure to understand that democracy is not a single event but a dense and continuous process’ while conveniently ignoring how the result had shown ‘there is not a single “people”’. For those prepared to see it, the populist overtones of this rhetoric were crystal clear and only more arresting given that ‘populism’, in Wright’s words, ‘is democracy’s fire alarm’.123 What was being exposed was what Goodhart calls ‘the inherent tension between the two terms in liberal democracy—between the will of the people on the one hand and constitutional rights and law on the other as the source of legitimate decisions’.124 Yet equally apparent through the government’s actions, the discourse of many politicians and headlines of various media commentators was a refusal to acknowledge that liberal democracy had duly evolved in such a way as to respond to the problems of ‘popular will’ by mediation through ‘representative institutions’.125 Far from being the ‘enemy’ of 120 John

Ashmore, ‘Top Tory MP lays into “arrogant” fund manager’, Politics Home, 13 October 2016. Available via: https://www.politicshome.com/news/europe/eu-policyagenda/brexit/news/79819/top-tory-mp-lays-arrogant-fund-manager-over-brexit; Patrick Sawyer, ‘Woman leading Brexit legal battle accused of “special kind of arrogance”’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 October 2016; Mark Chandler, ‘Brexit legal challenge’, Evening Standard, 17 October 2016. 121 ‘Enemies

of the people’, Daily Mail, 4 November 2016.

122 James

McDougall, ‘This “will of the people” talk must stop—we need a better democracy than that’, The Conversation, 6 February 2017. 123 Tony Wright, ‘Democracy and its discontents’, The Political Quarterly, 90:1 (2019): 5–17. 6, 8. 124 David

Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 55.

125 Colin

Crouch, ‘Post-democracy and populism’, The Political Quarterly, 90:1 (2019): 124-137. 125; A.C. Grayling, Democracy and Its Crisis (Updated Edition) (London: Oneworld Publications, 2018), p. 113.

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democratic process (as it had developed in Britain), Parliament was in fact its bastion—and the only body with absolute sovereignty to boot. In the spring of 2017 Theresa May announced that a snap General Election would be held in June. May’s objective—to increase her parliamentary majority in order to secure a free hand in pursuing Brexit—was predicated on the belief that Parliament was failing to uphold its commitment to honour the referendum result. In the event, May lost her majority and in the resulting hung parliament found her room for manoeuvre further frustrated. Over the course of the next two years, the issues of national identity and the democratic process only became more pronounced. Following May’s repeated failure to secure consensus for a deal by which Britain would leave the EU, her resignation saw the ascent of Boris Johnson to the premiership in July 2019. Johnson, who had headed the Vote Leave campaign, duly embarked on a process of refashioning the Cabinet with his supporters. Over the following months, a rapid succession of unprecedented events took place. These included the unlawful prorogation of Parliament, accusations that the Prime Minister’s rhetoric was inciting violence, and the accumulation of evidence that Britain’s democratic processes are threatened by online platforms, foreign interventions and dark money.126 After finally achieving support for a General Election, Johnson’s Conservative Party fought a campaign during which it stood accused of doctoring interview footage of political opponents and misleading the public when, during a televised debate between Johnson and Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, its Press Office rebranded its Twitter account as an independent fact-checking organisation.127 When confronted about the latter occurrence on the BBC’s Breakfast programme the day after the debate, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab dismissed its significance, claiming: ‘no one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust’.128

126 ‘Supreme Court: Suspending Parliament was unlawful, judges rule’, BBC News, 24 September 2019. Available via: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49810261; Rowena Mason and Frances Perraudin, ‘Boris Johnson refuses to apologise for language about Jo Cox’, The Guardian, 26 September 2019; Jim Waterson, ‘UK democracy under threat and need for reform is urgent, says regulator’, The Guardian, 26 June 2018; Billy Perrigo, ‘British government delays report on Russian interference in Brexit vote until after election’, Time, 4 November 2019; George Monbiot, ‘Dark money is pushing for a no-deal Brexit: Who is behind it?’ The Guardian, 13 February 2019. 127 Rebecca

Speare-Cole, ‘Sir Keir Starmer video’, Evening Standard, 5 November 2019; Jon Stone, ‘Tories set up fake “fact-checking service”’, The Independent, 20 November 2019. 128 BBC

News, ‘Dominic Raab on “factcheckUK”’, 20 November 2019. Available via: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-50487624/dominic-raab-on-factch eckuk-no-one-gives-a-toss-about-social-media-cut-and-thrust.

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Britishness, the Holocaust, and ‘Democracy’ Over the past two decades, national identity and democracy have emerged as central issues in British politics. Even before the EU referendum of 2016, these issues had grown in significance thanks to long-term developments (such as the decline in British power, devolution, and revolutionary changes to Britain’s social and demographic make-up), and shorter-term occurrences (like post-Cold War European integration, fear of Islamic extremism, global economic turmoil, and major population movements). Under both Labour (1997–2010) and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–2015) questions of Britishness moved further to the foreground. Meanwhile Britain itself increasingly took on the appearance of what Colin Crouch has called a ‘post-democratic’ state, ‘where all the institutions of liberal democracy survived and functioned, but where the vital energy of the political system no longer rested within them, but had disappeared into small private circles of economic and political elites’.129 The course and conduct of the EU referendum accelerated these developments, sharpening their edges still further on a whetstone made of xenophobia and populism. Throughout this period, successive governments have continued to champion Holocaust consciousness. This process has itself become normative: though nothing is ever a given, the position of the Holocaust in British culture is presently such that were a government to turn its back on exercises in memory or educational initiatives, significant backlash would almost inevitably ensue. This state of affairs will not endure for perpetuity, of course, for as much as standing as testament to a welcome political consensus around the importance of Holocaust remembrance and education, it is also a reflection of the current usefulness that these enterprises are regarded to serve. As we have seen in this essay, over the last 15 years in particular, these uses have gravitated in particular towards the construction of national identity. In this respect, the UKHMF project is to be understood as part of an existing trajectory—though in its prospective size, scope, and symbolism, it remains literally and figuratively the most monumental expression to date. However, in the years since 2016, the development of this project has been such that the ‘usefulness’ of the Holocaust to conceptions of Britishness has taken a new turn. This has found form through an increased accent on how the UKHMF relates to notions of democracy. For all its invocations of Britain and Britishness, the Holocaust Commission’s 2015 report Britain’s Promise to Remember contained only three— largely passing—references to democracy. That September the UKHMF formally began searching for a site for the memorial by publishing site specifications and evaluative criteria. Interestingly, while the ‘affirmations of the values of British society’ were referred to in the document and invoked in the 129 Colin Crouch, ‘Post-democracy and populism’, The Political Quarterly, 90:1 (2019): 124–137. 126.

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evaluation criteria under the bracket of ‘Location Iconic Impact’, no mention was made of or to democracy.130 Three months later, when Cameron used the occasion of HMD 2016 to announce that the memorial would be located in Victoria Tower Gardens and referenced national values, ‘democracy’ remained distinctly absent. In the government’s subsequent press release, democracy did feature in quotes provided by various persons commenting on the announcement; however, these references were principally in relation to how the chosen site meant the memorial was going to be ‘in the heart of our democracy’.131 In September 2016—three months after the shock of the EU referendum result—the UKHMF marked its next milestone: the launch of an international design competition for the memorial. The ‘heart of our democracy’ phrase reappeared in the government’s press release,132 but small indications of discursive change could be found on the competition’s microsite. Here it was noted that ‘the Gardens already has a memorial-narrative inspired by democratic values, which aligns the project’ while the specified design values emphasised that proposals needed to ‘be a logical and harmonious addition to the existing memorials in the Gardens, all of which can be viewed as a physical representation of the United Kingdom’s conscience and values’.133 The Tender Brief reinforced these ideas. The memorial’s ‘permanent interpretation spaces’ were, for instance, to look to ‘contextualise the Memorial’ within its environment, ‘under a broad range of themes including freedom, democracy, tolerance, struggle and equality’.134 A few weeks later in December, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, speaking for the Department of Communities and Local Government, gave an indication of how some envisaged this remit being realised. In the course of responding to a written question about why the Victoria Gardens had been chosen, Bourne asserted that ‘the Memorial will serve as a reminder of the depths of depravity that a seemingly enlightened society can plunge if it abandons its democratic values, and the importance of constant vigilance in protecting these values’.135 From the above events, it seems that those responsible for the UKHMF did not necessarily have the idea of linking Britain, the Holocaust, and democracy from the outset. Instead, it appears that a starting point for conceptualising 130 UKHMF,

National Memorial and Learning Centre: Search for a London Site (London: Cabinet Office, 2015).

131 Press release, ‘PM: Holocaust memorial will stand beside Parliament as permanent statement of our British values’, Gov.UK, 27 January 2016. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-holocaust-memorial-will-stand-beside-par liament-as-permanent-statement-of-our-british-values. 132 Press

release, ‘International design competition opens for new UK Holocaust memorial’, Gov.UK, 14 September 2016. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/int ernational-design-competition-opens-for-new-uk-holocaust-memorial-beside-parliament. 133 ‘Vision’, United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition. Available via: https://competitions.malcolmreading.com/holocaustmemorial/. 134 UKHMF/Malcolm 135 Hansard,

Reading Associates, Tender Brief (London: HMSO, 2016), p. 16.

World War II: Genocide: Written Question—HL3829, 19 December 2016.

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the project in this way came with the launching of the design competition. In drawing up the brief for interested parties, it appears there was a realisation that the memorial would need to be cognisant of the mnemonic themes of its immediate surroundings. How exactly was left open to designers. In October 2017 Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects were announced as winners of the design competition. A key feature of their design concept was the envisaged conclusion of the visitor route, whereby ‘visitors will emerge to see the classic uninterrupted view of Parliament—and the reality of democracy’.136 The notion of employing democracy as a synergising concept was evidently one which appealed to the competition’s jury. As its Chair, Peter Bazalgette put it, with the winning design the memorial would ‘stand in the shadow of parliament to remind us what happens when democracy and civil society is subverted’.137 Ed Balls, then fellow board member of the UKHMF, similarly advocated for this siting when he claimed ‘there is no location more fitting to honour the victims of one of humanity’s greatest tragedies than side-by-side with one of humanity’s oldest democracies’.138 In the Adjaye/Arad design and the acclamation the jury gave to it, it is possible to see the emergence of a distinct mnemonic narrative. This narrative was being emplotted around the physical configuration of the site, and particular interpretations of both the Palace of Westminster and British democracy. Over the following twelve months this narrative account was worked into a design proposal ahead of a formal planning application. When this was launched for public consultation in September 2018, it appeared against escalating criticism and concern about the rupture the project would cause to the landscape of the Gardens. Yet growing opposition did not seem to deter the UKHMF or its supporters. Rather—if anything—it seemed to embolden them by forcing the project’s narrative arc to be sharpened. For instance, when the proposals were launched, they were accompanied by the publication of an opinion piece in the Evening Standard by the new co-Chairs of the UKHMF—Ed Balls and Eric Pickles. The thrust of this article was that the site was ideal: ‘it will allow us to achieve our aim of holding Parliament to account’, they wrote, by reminding MPs of their ‘basic responsibility to protect British people of all faiths and backgrounds’. ‘After all’, they continued, ‘it was another parliament in Germany that legitimised the rise of the Nazi party and the laws that served

136 Press release, ‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects win UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition’, 24 October 2017. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/adjaye-associates-and-ron-arad-archit exts-win-uk-holocaust-memorial-international-design-competition 137 Harriet Sherwood, ‘Team lead by David Adjaye to design UK’s Holocaust Memorial’, The Guardian, 24 October 2017. 138 Press

release, ‘Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects win’.

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as the first steps towards the Holocaust, the laws that took away rights from the Jewish people of Europe’.139 Leaving to one side the problematic teleology evident in this understanding of Holocaust history, the article’s valorisation of British democracy was echoed by then Secretary of State for Communities, James Brokenshire, at the public launch of the proposals. The memorial would, he claimed, ‘stand as a stark reminder that a central role of democracy is to encourage tolerance for ethnic, religious and racial differences and fostering religious freedoms, individual rights and civil responsibility’.140 The new-found prominence of ‘democracy’ within the project was also visible in the exhibition boards created for the consultation. One of the most unequivocal illustrations of this was the statement ‘this Memorial stands as a reminder of the importance of our democracy in standing for our shared values of mutual respect and tolerance for people of all faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds’.141 While elsewhere the boards did reiterate linkage between the memorial and the responsibility and accountability of elected politicians, this did not mix-up or dilute the overarching message that the horrors of the Holocaust both legitimate British democracy, and illuminate its inherent virtuosity. In December 2018 the UKHMF published its final design proposals, prior to the planning application submission. Modifications to the designs had been made in response—principally—to concerns about the memorial’s footprint on the park and associated logistical issues. Alongside these revisions was the promise that the learning centre would have a focus on ‘The Impact of the Holocaust on Britain’: it would ‘set the Holocaust within the British narrative: historically, politically, and culturally’ in a ‘balanced’ way. This commitment also placed even greater emphasis on the nexus between the site, the Palace, and democracy. As the UKHMF Mission Statement, published alongside the final designs put it, ‘the view of Parliament…will serve as a permanent reminder that political decisions have far-reaching consequences’. Tellingly, however, this motion towards self-awareness was coupled with a reassertion of difference and distance. For, as the Mission Statement continued, by setting history’s worst example of the disintegration of democratic values against the greatest emblem of Britain’s aspirations for democracy, it [the

139 Ed

Balls and Eric Pickles, ‘Why a new memorial to the Holocaust is essential’, Evening Standard, 3 September 2018.

140 UKHMF,

‘Public consultation marks next stage in development of UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre’, 4 September 2018. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/public-consultation-marks-next-stage-in-development-of-uk-holocaustmemorial-and-learning-centre. 141 UKHMF,

‘Public Exhibition Boards (September 2018)’. Available via: https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/uk-holocaust-memorial-public-exhibition-boards.

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memorial] will stand as a permanent reminder of the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy to be vigilant and responsive whenever and wherever those values are threatened.142

This particular reading of history was reiterated in comments made by UKHMF co-Chair Ed Balls, who framed the memorial as a reminder of ‘the lives lost and the communities torn apart in the wake of decisions made in another parliament, not so far away in in time or distance from our own’.143 If anyone was uncertain of the centrality that the UKHMF project was now understood to have in British society, Brokenshire made this clear a fortnight later, stating as he submitted the proposal to Westminster City Council: ‘the planning application submitted today is a key milestone in this important national programme that will deliver a national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre at the heart of our civic and democratic life’.144 In the above ways, between 2016 and 2018, the UKHMF project sought to recast the relationship between Britain, Britishness, and the Holocaust. In the process, conceptions of democracy became integral. From one perspective, the Holocaust was read and understood through a particular imagining of democracy. Instead of the annihilation of European Jewry being grounded in its temporal context of the Second World War, the genocide was presented as emerging directly out German democracy. As Balls—again—would put it in 2019, ‘it was a parliament in Germany which made decisions to begin the process that culminated in the Holocaust’.145 This intentionalist interpretation, which also seemed somewhat unaware of the collapse of democracy in the final years of the Weimar Republic and the means by which the Reichstag operated during and after the Nazi consolidation of power, showed no cognisance of how the contingencies of war impacted Nazi anti-Jewish policy or that thousands of non-Germans instigated, facilitated or profited from the murder of their Jewish neighbours. Such complicating factors would, of course, invalidate the idea that a primary causal factor in the Holocaust was the failure of German democracy in the 1920s and early 1930s. But what a skewed reading such as this did allow for was an ‘Othering’ of (German) democracy against its British variant. For all the nods towards MPs being aware of their responsibilities and pledges to 142 UKHMF,

‘Public Exhibition Boards (December 2018)’. Available via: https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/uk-holocaust-memorial-public-exhibition-boards.

143 UKHMF, ‘Press release: UK Holocaust Memorial to reaffirm Britain’s commitment to stand up against antisemitism, prejudice, and hatred’, 5 December 2018. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-holocaust-memorial-to-reaffirmbritains-commitment-to-stand-up-against-antisemitism-prejudice-and-hatred. 144 Press release, ‘Planning application submitted for Holocaust Memorial’, Gov.UK, 20 December 2018. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/planning-applic ation-submitted-for-holocaust-memorial-proposed-for-next-to-parliament. 145 ‘“I have no doubt it will be built”— Ed Balls and Lord Pickles defend Westminster Holocaust Memorial plans ahead of crunch vote’, Jewish Chronicle, 23 August 2019.

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objectively approaching Britain’s historical record in the 1930s and 1940s, this reading of British democracy through the prism of the Holocaust necessarily carried with it implications of superiority and moral rectitude. As Heather Wheeler MP, speaking for the government in May 2019 put it, ‘the UKHMF believed that the location close to Parliament…was an important statement about the importance of democracy as a protector against tyrants’.146 What could also be discerned—through declarations that the memorial would show how ‘we all need to speak up to Parliament’147 and claims it will spur ‘all of us to stand up whenever our shared values are threatened’148 —was an understanding of democracy as ‘rule by the people’. The trouble with that literal understanding, as Ian O’Flynn notes, is that ‘rule’ and ‘people’ can have very different meanings.149 In reality ‘the meaning of democracy is not settled’ and ‘actual democracies are work in progress’150 ; an anathematic truth in the context of Brexit Britain.

Coda It is impossible to determine with precision and exactitude the extent to which the political culture of Brexit Britain has influenced the recent strategies of conjoining Britishness, the Holocaust, and democracy. That said, the impact of Brexit on British society has been so consuming, so all encompassing, that it would be ignorant to dismiss the notion it has had no effect at all. Indeed, leading figures have themselves pointed to the contemporary social and cultural context in the course of championing the UKHMF project. Ed Balls and Eric Pickles, for example, have written of the need ‘to be brave in times like these, when it’s clear our British values of intolerance and equality are under threat’.151 Balls has also stated ‘this is the right time to remind our elected representatives and all of us in our democratic society, the job of Parliament is to preserve the liberty of all’152 ; while James Brokenshire has contended that ‘education on the Holocaust and subsequent genocides is one

146 Hansard,

National Holocaust Memorial Centre and Learning Service: Written Question 256929, 29 May 2019. 147 Balls

and Pickles, ‘Why a new memorial’.

148 James

Brokenshire, cited, Press release, ‘Planning application submitted for Holocaust Memorial’. 149 Ian O’Flynn, ‘Brexit: The differing versions of democracy deployed by both sides of Britain’s political impasse’, The Conversation, 10 April 2019. 150 James McDougall, ‘This “will of the people” talk must stop—we need a better democracy than that’, The Conversation, 6 February 2017. 151 Balls 152 ‘“I

and Pickles, ‘Why a new memorial’.

have no doubt it will be built’”, Jewish Chronicle.

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of the most powerful tools we have in the fight against prejudice, intolerance and misinformation’.153 Statements like these illustrate how aspects of the political culture generated by Brexit have seeped into the consciousness of leading figures involved in the promotion of Holocaust consciousness. While connecting projects like the UKHMF to the broader contemporary context may have the benefit of investing it with perceived relevance, it is not without potentially deleterious implications. This is especially so given the present condition of democracy and the democratic process in Britain. As noted, far from being in rude health, ‘British’ democracy resembles ‘the crisis of a patient hit by pathogens (populism and nationalism) against which no proper antibiotics are on hand’.154 Blighted by long-running structural deficiencies and out-moded political institutions (which, as Nicolas Boyle astutely points out, were products of and for imperial rule),155 the crises wrought by Brexit have accelerated ‘democratic deterioration’156 and heightened the potential for behaviours commonly associated with ‘illiberal democracy’.157 Seen in this way, the Houses of Parliament are far from the bastions of democracy that some might presume. One could suggest of course that this only increases the argument for a project like the UKHMF to be sited in the Victoria Tower Gardens—that such a juxtaposition is warranted precisely because of the fragility of Britain in the twenty-first century. Certainly the discursive frame that has evolved around the site of the memorial has come to work in such a fashion, with the location of the memorial becoming a key legitimising factor which has lent the project a purpose it did not originally have. However, wrapping the memorial up in a narrative template that extols of the inherent virtuosity of British democracy has risked making the project a hostage to fortune. Almost inevitably a political enterprise such as the UKHMF could not avoid being impacted by the political culture which emerged—and to some degree was cultivated by successive governments— after 2016. But the project has itself courted controversy and, in the process, only further exacerbated these issues.

153 UKHMF, Press release, ‘Prime Minister leads unprecedented support for Holocaust Memorial’, 7 May 2019. Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-min ister-leads-unprecedented-support-for-holocaust-memorial-as-further-25m-committed. 154 Ghia

Nodia, ‘The end of the postnational illusion’, Journal of Democracy, 28:2 (2017): 5–19. 15.

155 Nicholas Boyle, ‘The end of England: How the Brexit storm shattered national identity’, The Tablet, 12 September 2019. Available via: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/ 16688/the-end-of-england-how-the-brexit-storm-shattered-national-identity. 156 Wright, 157 Fareed

‘Democracy and its discontents’, p. 16.

Zakaria, ‘The rise of illiberal democracy’, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997. Available via: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/rise-illiberaldemocracy.

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In 2019, for example, the Westminster City Council’s planning portal saw a dramatic spike in the number of supportive comments for the UKHMF application. This coincided with the government paying the public engagement firm Big Ideas £118,000, who then ‘oversaw’ the submission of this feedback. Allegations that the government was trying to ‘rig’ the process ensued.158 These accusations were grafted onto earlier concerns that a newly created All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Holocaust Memorial was seeking to ‘railroad’ the project through.159 Then, in November 2019, the government decided to ‘call in’ the UKHMF planning application, thereby taking the planning decision out of the hands of the local council. As a result, following a public inquiry, the government will be duly invested with ultimate power over ruling on planning permission.160 Opponents of this move argued it amounted to little more than an ‘undemocratic power grab’.161 More measured, but no less stinging criticism came from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth. Describing the location as a ‘strange choice’, Lord Williams suggested the whole project amounted to a ‘fig leaf covering a lack of sustained thinking about educational strategies’ to combat ills like antisemitism.162 Major memory projects inevitably attract contestation, but controversies such as the above sit awkwardly with declarations that tie this particular enterprise with ideas and idealisations of democracy. However, by the time it has been completed the UKHMF project may face more immediate and existential challenges. Though Britain’s protracted legal departure from the EU was finally completed in January 2020, one can say will a degree of assurance that the ramifications of Brexit will dominate British politics for years to come. No-one can know if a strange death of the Union will ultimately occur, but the kindling for such a potentiality remains. At the time of writing fervour for a second referendum on Scottish independence persists, there are predictions that a desire for Welsh independence will grow, and calls for a border poll in Ireland have gathered momentum.163 158 Ella Jessel, ‘Government accused of trying to “rig” Holocaust memorial consultation’, Architect’s Journal, 4 June 2019; Daniel Sugarman, ‘Government accused of trying to “rig” public consultation’, Jewish Chronicle, 31 May 2019. 159 ‘Critic of Westminster Holocaust memorial accuses supporters of “railroading” plans through’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 October 2018. 160 Ella

Jessel, ‘Government calls in Holocaust Memorial planning application’, Architect’s Journal, 6 November 2019.

161 Ella Jessel, ‘Holocaust Memorial protestors furious over “undemocratic power grab”’, Architect’s Journal, 6 November 2019. 162 Rosa Doherty, ‘Former Archbishop of Canterbury says location for Holocaust memorial is a “strange choice”’, Jewish Chronicle, 27 December 2019. 163 Sky

News, ‘Scottish independence’, 19 December 2019. Available via: https://news. sky.com/story/scottish-independence-sturgeon-to-demand-the-power-to-hold-anotherreferendum-11890282; Adrian Masters, ‘From Brexit to independence: What next for

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The wheels of such developments turn, of course, at very slow speeds with no assured destination. But in the possible circumstance that the Union is down-sized or dissolved in the near future, then one of the key foundation stones of the UKHMF project—its purported ‘Britishness’—will be immediately eroded. This does not in itself invalidate the construction of a memorial to the Holocaust; it does, however, call into question the wisdom of welding a Holocaust memorial to something as fractured, ethereal, and potentially volatile as British national identity. For even if ‘Britain’ survives Brexit, the memorial and learning centre will still have to confront the nationalisms that exist within the United Kingdom—and, since these nationalisms have grown in urgency and potency throughout the 2000s, they cannot be easily ignored. Similarly, it may also be necessary to revise the validity or usefulness of general notions like ‘British’ collective memory of the Holocaust or conceptions of a Holocaust consciousness in Britain. Indeed, in recent years it has already been possible to discern evidence of a form of nationalisation of Holocaust memory within parts of the United Kingdom—from talk of Irish and Scottish ‘heroes’ of the Holocaust to attempts to institutionalise memory through initiatives like the Scottish Holocaust Era Study Centre, Holocaust Education Trust Ireland, and the Jewish History Association of South Wales.164 Whether these developments are the start of a trend remains to be seen. What they do intimate is Holocaust memory in Britain is becoming more ‘localised’ within the constituent parts of the Union. In so doing, they also raise questions about how—if at all—this is process is playing out within the UK’s largest component part: namely, England. It is here that we cannot help but crash into ongoing issues around English nationalism and the so-called ‘English Question’.165 Having both acquired added edge and urgency since 2016, and become bound up with debates over the democratic settlement of the United Kingdom and its constitutional arrangements, England has indeed Wales?’, ITV News, 13 December 2019. Available via: https://www.itv.com/news/wales/ 2019-12-13/from-brexit-to-independence-what-s-next-for-wales/; Adam Price, ‘Welsh independence will follow Scottish example’, The National, 15 December 2019. Available via: https://www.thenational.scot/news/18102175.adam-price-welsh-independence-willfollow-scottish-example/; Gareth Gordon, ‘The political A to Z of 2019 in Northern Ireland’, BBC News, 3 January 2020. Available via: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-nor thern-ireland-50859201; ‘Calls intensify for border poll’, The Irish News, 14 December 2019. Available via: https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2019/12/ 14/news/calls-intensify-for-border-poll-in-wake-of-unionist-defeat-1790703/. 164 JP O’Malley, ‘Remembering a forgotten Irish hero of the Holocaust’, Independent.i.e., 8 January 2018. Available via: https://www.independent.ie/life/rememberinga-forgotten-irish-hero-of-the-holocaust-36462261.html; The Church of Scotland, ‘Thousands march in honour of Holocaust “hero” Jane Haining’, 12 April 2019. Available via: https://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/news-and-events/news/2019/thousandsto-march-in-honour-of-holocaust-hero-jane-haining; BBC News, ‘Jewish communities: “Race against time” to preserve south Wales history’, 5 November 2019. Available via: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-50299817. 165 BBC

News, ‘English Identity’, 5 June 2018. Available via: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-england-44210984?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cd2 zkn36wv8t/englishness&link_location=live-reporting-story.

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emerged as a nascent but identifiable ‘political community’, underpinned by an increasingly popular and politicised national identity.166 The nature of that identity however remains very much fractured. As Michael Kenny puts it, English identity is best ‘conceived as a terrain where the imagination wanders, and where dreams and aspirations are powerfully asserted and altered’.167 If, post-Brexit, Britishness is being reimagined, then the same may also be said of Englishness. And nowhere is this coterminous process better seen that on the site of the Palace of Westminster. Importantly, a distinctive feature of ‘the new Englishness’ which presently enjoys much cultural currency is its ‘idealised view of the past’.168 ‘Defensive and backward looking’ and marked by a ‘cultural obsession with tradition and nostalgia’,169 the condition of this national identity is such that it does not appear to be ready, willing, or able to either unmoor itself from the myths and memories of World War Two or confront the mound of other skeletons from its past. These include, of course, those many victims of that once ‘lethal and innovative’170 phenomena: English antisemitism, which has been—and continues to be—‘an important part of English history and culture’ (see also Kushner in this volume).171 Such realities do not preclude the possibility of ‘English’ Holocaust memory emerging in the coming years. But nor do they make it likely that the re-shaping of British Holocaust consciousness currently taking place will facilitate a rigorous or robust ‘working through’ of history and memory. Perhaps we should not be altogether surprised by this: after all, as Paul Kingsnorth has written, ‘a nation is a story that a people chooses to tell about itself’,172 and at times of crisis and uncertainty the stories that are crafted rarely demonstrate or leave space for reflexivity. Even so, neither stories nor narratives are neutral; to cite Mark Laity, they provide a ‘frame of reference’ and an ‘organising framework for action’.173 For these very reasons, in an epoch scarred by assaults on

166 Andy

Maycock, ‘England: The Brexit election?’ Political Insight (2017): 12.

167 Michael

Kenny, ‘The Genesis of English nationalism’, Blog, Centre on Constitutional Change, 30 August 2016. Available via: https://www.centreonconstitutionalchange.ac.uk/opinions/genesis-english-nation alism. 168 Andy

Beckett, ‘Albion Ltd’, The Guardian, 23 May 2005.

169 Stuart

Cartland, ‘Cultural nationalism: Brexit and the rise of nostalgia identity’, Cultural Matters, 11 July 2018. Available via: https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index. php/culture/theory/item/2856-cultural-nationalism 170 Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. xl. 171 Michael Ragussis, ‘Review: The “Secret” of English Anti-Semitism’, Victorian Studies, 40:2 (1997), 295–307. 296. 172 Paul

Kingsnorth, ‘England’s uncertain future’, The Guardian, 13 March 2015.

173 Mark

Laity, ‘Storytelling and Politics’, Inaugural PSA/British Library lecture, 20 February 2018. Available via: https://www.psa.ac.uk/resources/mark-laity-storytellingand-politics-how-history-myths-and-narratives-drive-our-decisions.

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truth, a fragmenting of political consensus and the fraying of liberal democracy in the face of a ‘mainstreaming of fascism’, 174 the way that nations storify the history of Holocaust—and storify themselves through and by it—requires continued vigilance and scrutiny. Acknowledgements The genesis of this chapter lies in a seminar entitled ‘Forgetting the Holocaust in the Era of Global Holocaust Remembrance’ held at the Lessons and Legacies 2018 conference. I am grateful to the participants of that seminar for the invigorating discussions which enriched this chapter. For their helpful comments on its development, my thanks to Dan Stone and Tom Lawson. All websites last accessed 16 September 2020.

174 Gary Younge, ‘Patriotism needn’t be negative—but it has to be honest’, The Guardian, 3 January 2020.

Index

A Adjaye, David, 403, 451, 454, 457, 458, 460, 463, 497 Anglo-Jewry, 18, 60, 76, 79–82, 304, 314, 459, 461 Antisemitism, 6, 9, 11, 23, 24, 28, 40, 44, 47–53, 56, 58, 67, 70, 96, 101, 247, 255, 260, 295, 326–328, 330, 332, 334, 340, 343–345, 351, 374, 435, 442, 458, 464, 480, 485, 502, 504 Arad, Ron, 403, 451, 497 Armenian genocide, 4, 14, 237, 433 Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), 82, 86, 87, 106

B Balls, Ed, 244, 451, 479, 497, 499, 500 BBC, 28, 103, 115, 119, 125, 127, 128, 130, 176, 243, 244, 248, 251–253, 255–257, 265, 275, 336, 348, 351, 460 programming, 254–257 Bergen-Belsen, 2, 153, 154, 172, 173, 182, 185, 189, 190, 207, 245, 261, 263, 290, 376, 389, 431, 480, 486, 487 The Belsen Trial, 141, 156, 170 Liberation, 19 Black Lives Matter, 2 Blair, Tony, 218, 429, 439, 474, 476

Bloxham, Donald, 13, 21, 22, 184, 201, 204, 221, 229, 432 Board of Deputies, 54, 80, 121, 122, 130, 304, 306–309, 314, 317, 318, 321, 459, 460, 462 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , 276–278, 299, 380, 381 Britain Brexit, 111, 471, 472, 491, 493, 494, 500, 502, 503 Britishness, 3, 33, 240, 243, 445, 472, 473, 487, 489, 491, 495, 499, 500, 503 democracy, 1, 39, 438, 488, 489, 493, 495, 496, 498–502 far right, 96, 304, 315, 316, 322 government, 1, 4, 5, 7–10, 14, 25, 121, 204, 210, 215 ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ award, 481 immigration, 7, 9, 22, 40, 43, 63, 70, 78, 82, 84, 86, 100. See also Refugees national identity, 31, 389, 390, 395, 400, 402, 403, 440, 472, 473, 489, 503 British Empire, 14, 15, 78, 219–223, 226–232, 234, 236, 238–240, 458, 489 Colonial violence, 220, 222, 227, 229, 231, 232, 235, 237, 239 decolonisation, 15, 226, 228, 230, 235

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 T. Lawson and A. Pearce (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8

507

508

INDEX

memory of, 439, 503 British values, 32, 33, 145, 243, 393, 445–447, 458, 459, 461, 472, 477, 483–485, 500 C Cameron, David, 2, 181, 403, 450, 471, 486 Cesarani, David, 19, 31, 152, 184, 205, 209, 212, 220, 221, 304, 380, 394, 405, 432 Channel Islands, 41, 287, 288, 299, 389, 397, 480 Churchill, Winston, 14, 117, 119, 203 Cinema, 28, 262–264, 269, 271, 272, 275–277, 279, 280, 306, 406. See also Film Cold War, 18, 182, 202, 204, 205, 207, 215, 236, 267, 314 Coronavirus, v–ix Coward, Charles, 26, 137–139, 151, 269 D Daily Mail , 142, 308, 319, 493 Daily Mirror, 126, 187, 192 Daily Telegraph, 85, 119, 135, 308, 313, 316, 318, 329, 476 Documentaries, 30, 108, 212, 265, 348, 350–352, 363 E E715 (camp), 137, 138, 141, 143, 145, 150, 269 Eden, Anthony, 9, 67, 117, 124 Eichmann trial, 18, 29, 199, 270, 284, 285, 294, 317–319 Escape from Sobibor (1987), 275, 276 European Union (EU), 33, 445, 452, 453, 471, 474, 485, 486, 488, 491–496, 502 F Fascism Anti-fascism, 37 Battle of Cable Street, 54

British National Party (BNP), 310 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 37, 53, 83 National Front (NF), 210 Film, 264, 275, 345. See also Cinema Foley, Frank, 116, 445 Foreign Office (UK), 10, 11, 62, 185

G Genocide (1974), 265, 270 Gilbert, Martin, 9, 10, 115, 139, 350, 394, 410 Gove, Michael, 485 Grese, Irma, 142, 191, 198 The Guardian (inc Manchester Guardian), 94

H Historiography of Britain and the Holocaust, 8 History, 27, 207, 363, 446 Holocaust (1978), 270 Holocaust Commission, 2, 3, 13, 14, 25, 32, 368, 444, 445, 471, 486, 487. See also UKHMF Britain’s Promise to Remember (2015), 3, 4, 6, 384, 486, 487, 495 Holocaust consciousness cosmopolitanism, 481 development and evolution, 22, 28, 220, 262, 270, 348, 364, 430, 452, 490 post-war ‘silence’, 23 Holocaust education aims, 17, 24, 482 student knowledge and understanding, 374, 378 teaching practice, 480, 485 Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), 27, 348, 364, 406, 431, 450, 479, 485 Holocaust Exhibition (IWM) narrative, 236, 339, 373, 382, 385, 386, 390–395, 414, 424, 436 origins, 406 representational approach, 407 Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), 1, 21, 32, 181, 202, 218, 221, 290, 345,

INDEX

361, 368, 403, 405, 424, 429–431, 433–435, 441, 450, 475 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), 5, 430, 457 Home Office (UK), 59–61, 63, 65, 67–69, 76, 79, 83, 110, 124, 432, 433, 436, 485 Hyde Park Memorial Garden, 456, 460, 462

I Imperial War Museum (IWM), 1, 21, 150, 181, 222, 265, 290, 347, 368, 389, 390, 406, 450 Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, 222 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 370 Stockholm Declaration, 370

J Johnson, Boris, 494

K Kindertransport , 2, 3, 7, 25, 41, 81, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102, 104, 106–110, 217, 287, 385, 397, 480 Kitty Hart/Hart-Moxon, Kitty, 6, 30, 299, 347, 355, 363 Kramer, Josef, 155, 182, 186, 199 Kristallnacht , 7, 63, 372 Kushner, Tony, 10, 18, 29, 41, 77, 97, 108, 110, 177, 261, 266, 304, 407

L Labour Party, 6, 46, 103, 119, 125, 131, 132, 431, 435, 443, 464 Lawson, Tom, 21, 383, 391, 407, 455, 505 Levene, Mark, 16, 21, 228, 433 Literature, 5, 28, 51, 109, 160, 228, 281, 285, 298–300, 305, 317 Louise London, 11, 13, 24, 59, 77, 97, 325, 385

509

M Memory, 26, 363 Mosley, Oswald, 24, 37, 46, 311. See also Fascism N National Curriculum, 19, 21, 32, 290, 367, 369, 377, 402, 411, 431, 438, 479 Nuremberg, 78, 183, 201–203, 207, 215, 266, 272, 282, 284, 372, 453 International Military Tribunal (IMT), 183, 185, 191, 201 Nuremberg trials, 282 O Orwell, George, 327, 328, 333, 346 P Palestine, 8, 9, 17, 60, 69, 86, 87, 123, 124, 162, 205, 221, 231, 235, 236, 247 White Paper (1939), 9 Pearce, Andy, 23, 33, 220, 261, 270, 310, 353, 389, 408, 429 Pickles, Eric, 244, 443, 451, 497, 500 Polish Government in Exile, 116, 118, 119, 121–123, 125, 126, 130 Prevent, 446, 482, 483 Prisoners of War, 135, 136, 191–193, 205, 395, 415 R Racism, 6, 23, 83, 231, 299, 370, 371, 401, 402, 409, 436, 457, 458, 491 Rathbone, Eleanor, 103, 252 Refugees, 58, 60, 62, 64, 68, 71, 81, 93, 103 S ‘Schindler’s List’ (1994), 21, 262, 274–277, 279, 380, 430, 452 Second World War anniversary(ies), 275 British experience, 389

510

INDEX

memory(ies), 18, 20, 93, 208, 217, 407, 439, 490 Stone, Dan, 21, 26, 202, 222, 405, 432, 454, 491, 505 Survivor testimony, 142 Swastika epidemic, 29, 303, 310, 316, 323 T Tasmania, 16, 234, 235 Television, 256, 318 U UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, 373 United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation (UKHMF), 450, 471

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 18, 393, 409, 453, 463 United States of America, 76

V Victoria Tower Gardens, 450, 451, 456, 457, 460–464, 496, 501. See also UKHMF

W War Crimes, 116, 133, 210, 212–217, 406 War Crimes Bill, 212, 215 Winton, Nicholas, 81, 107, 116, 286, 445