Abstract
The first organization in England set up for the expressed purpose of disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda was ‘The Britons’. Henry Hamilton Beamish, who had originated the idea of forming a ‘society to protect the birthright of Britons and to eradicate alien influences from our politics and industries’, was unanimously elected president at the foundation meeting held on 18 July 1919. The fourteen people present agreed that
in view of the fact that there was no Society in Britain which was actively fighting the Alien Menace, the time had arrived to form a Society which would specialize in fighting the Alien Menace and seeing that our Country was governed by our own people.1
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Notes
The Times 6 December 1919. For bibliographical details of H. H. Beamish see B. A. Kosmin, ‘Colonial Careers for Marginal Fascists— A Portrait of H. H. Beamish’, Wiener Library Bulletin XXVII n.s. nr 30/31 (1973/74) pp. 16–23.
Henry H. Beamish — Silver Badge Candidate for Clapham (election pamphlet 1918).
J. H. Clarke, The Call of the Sword (London, 1917) p. 28.
J. H. Clarke (ed.), England Under the Heel of the Jew (London, 1918) p. 62.
R. Benewick, Political Violence and Public Order (London, 1969) p. 44, implies that the Britons’ anti-Semitism is not to be subsumed under the category of ‘racial anti-Semitism’. In view of the dominance of racial concepts in their ideology, I cannot agree with his judgement.
Ibid., II, nr 2 (March 1921) p. 2. On Liebenfels, cf. W. Daim, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab (München, 1958).
P. de Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften 4th edn. (Göttingen, 1903) p. 391. In 1937 the Polish Government set up a committee to investigate the possibility of settling Polish Jews in Madagascar, after a similar project, conceived in 1926, had been dismissed. In December 1938 G. Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, informed Ribbentrop that the French Government considered shipping 10,000 Jewish refugees there. The idea of a Jewish settlement in Madagascar was also mentioned to an English representative of the Anglo-German Fellowship at the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1935 by the NSDAP ideologist A. Rosenberg. MS ‘Notes on Germany and Austria 1932–5’ (Lord Mount Temple Papers): memorandum by E. W. D. Tennant, September 1935. On the Madagascar plan cf. Documents of German Foreign Policy 1918–1945 series D, vol. IV (London, 1951) nr 372.
R. Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (Chicago, 1961) pp. 260 ff.
H. Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS-State (London, 1968) pp. 55 ff.
L. Poliakov, Bréviaire de la Haine (Paris, 1951) pp. 50 ff.
K. G. Lüdecke, I Knew Hitler (New York, 1937) pp. 213–14.
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© 1978 Gisela C. Lebzelter
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Lebzelter, G.C. (1978). The Britons. In: Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918–1939. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04000-1_4
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