Abstract
In 1939 Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, wrote these words of warning:
If Hitler is allowed by his own people and by the people and leaders of the world to remain in Germany, I fully believe that eventually there will be no Jews in Germany. … the Jews should recognize, once and for all time, that Fascism, no matter what its local colour or brand, is bent on the extermination of their people. They must join, rich and poor alike, in fierce and uncompromising action, against its continued existence and future conquests.2
As for the Jewish question no Nazi and few Germans except the violent anti-Nazis were sane on the subject. Their hate of the Jews was like a rabies that had infected a whole nation. Yet, if there is to be appeasement in Europe and some measure of understanding with Germany, the German attitude towards Jewry cannot be ignored. Hate is always unreasonable, but it is rarely groundless, even if the grounds themselves are mean and despicable. R. H. Bruce Lockhart1
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Notes
R. H. B. Lockhart, Guns or Butter: War Countries and Peace Countries of Europe Revisited (London: Putnam, 1938), p. 342. Lockhart was the author of the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ 1928–37; during the war he was Undersecretary of State in the Foreign Office and Leader of the Political Warfare Executive.
M. Dodd, My Years in Germany (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), pp. 261, 273.
T. Kushner, ‘Beyond the Pale? British Reactions to Nazi Anti-Semitism, 1933–39’, Immigrants and Minorities, 8 (1989) 143, 145.
T. M. Endelman, ‘Jews, Aliens, and other Outsiders in British History’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994) 964, 969.
See also Endelman, The Jews of Britain 1656–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) for a further discussion of the ‘emancipation contract’ theory.
H. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939–45, ed. N. Nicolson (London: Collins, 1967), p. 469 (13 June 1945); cited in Kushner, ‘Beyond the Pale?’, p. 156.
See also T. Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 2.
G. Orwell, ‘Anti-Semitism in Britain’, Contemporary Jewish Record (April 1945)
reprinted in G. Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 3: As I Please, 1943–1945, eds. S. Orwell and I. Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 378–88, here at pp. 383 and 387.
L. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
P. Shatzkes, Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry 1938–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002);
M. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Mandarin, 1991);
D. S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, 2nd edn. (New York: The New Press, 1998);
W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982);
Y. Bauer, Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994);
R. Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).
C. Sidgwick, German Journey (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1936), pp. 265–6.
N. J. Crowson, ‘The British Conservative Party and the Jews during the Late 1930s’, Patterns of Prejudice, 29 (1995) 15, 21, 31–2.
E. W. D. Tennant, ‘Hitler’, in The Man and the Hour: Studies of Six Great Men of Our Time, ed. A. Bryant (London: Philip Allan, 1934), p. 123;
Marquess of Lothian, ‘England and Germany’, Nineteenth Century and After, 121 (1937) 586. Tennant was a founder member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. On his business links with Germany
see N. Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis: British Economic and Financial Relations with Germany 1931–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 139–41.
Kushner, ‘Beyond the Pale?’, p. 156. See also Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) for further comments along these lines, for example (pp. 34–5): ‘Reactions to Nazi antisemitism in the democracies can only be understood by analysing both the strengths and the limitations of liberalism when faced with the challenge of an intolerant and ultimately genocidal state.’
A. Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich: Britische Augenzeugen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (1933–39) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), p. 299.
R. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 65. For some thoughts on why fascism failed in Britain, see chapter 6.
G. Orwell, ‘As I Please’, Tribune (11 February 1944), reprinted in The Collected Essays, vol. 3, pp. 112–15, here at p. 114.
J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 15, citing Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).
N. Webster, Germany and England (London: Boswell Publishing Company, 1938), pp. 23–4;
reprinted from the N. Webster, Patriot (October and November 1938) and revised. The Patriot continued to exist until 1940, and argued that there was a Jewish plot to destroy the British empire.
See also N. Webster, The Surrender of an Empire, 3rd edn. (London: The Boswell Publishing Co., 1933). Webster was a signatory to the Link letter to The Times in October 1938.
Truth, 7 July 1939, cited in R. B. Cockett, ‘Ball, Chamberlain and Truth’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990) 136.
C. Brooks, Can Chamberlain Save Britain? The Lesson of Munich (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1938), p. 138. On Brooks at Truth
see C. Hirshfield, ‘The Tenacity of Tradition: Truth and the Jews 1877–1957’, Patterns of Prejudice, 28 (1994) 78–83.
See also chapter 6, as well as my C. Hirshfield, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), chapter 2.
Cockett, ‘Ball, Chamberlain and Truth’, p. 131. See also R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 7.
O. Dutch, Germany’s Next Aims (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1939), p. 231.
See G. W. Price, I Know These Dictators (London: George G. Harrap, 1937); idem.
G. W. Price, Year of Reckoning (London: Cassell & Company, 1939);
B. Nichols, News of England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938);
D. Reed, Insanity Fair (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938); idem.
D. Reed, Disgrace Abounding (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939). On these three journalists, see Kushner, The Holocaust, pp. 41–2. I discuss Reed below and Ward Price in chapter 4.
On British fascist activities after the outbreak of war, including their continued antisemitic campaigns, see Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice; A. Goldman, ‘The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism in Britain during World War II’, Jewish Social Studies, 46 (1984) 37–50; Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, pp. 344–67; idem.
A. Goldman, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40 (London: Constable, 1998). Goldman tellingly argues (p. 48) that, ‘despite its government, the British people on the whole remained true to their tradition of tolerance’.
J. Wolf, Some Impressions of Nazi Germany (London: The Golden Eagle Publishing Co., 1934), pp. 25, 24, 26, 27, 48.
C. W. Domville-Fife, This is Germany (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1939), p. 17.
A. P. Laurie, The Case for Germany: A Study of Modern Germany (Berlin: Internationaler Verlag, 1939), p. 32.
G. E. O. Knight, In Defence of Germany (London: Golden Eagle Press, 1933), pp. 6, 7, 10; idem.
G. E. O. Knight, Germany’s Demand for Security (London: Golden Eagle Press, 1934), p. 12. See also Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, pp. 70–3, 77.
J. Murphy, Adolf Hitler: The Drama of His Career (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934), p. 137. Murphy went on to (mis)translate Mein Kampf for Hutchinsons.
A. Raven-Thomson, The Coming Corporate State (London: BUF, n.d. [1935]), p. 15.
M. Fry, Hitler’s Wonderland (London: John Murray, 1934), pp. 96, 102.
The Marquess of Londonderry, Ourselves and Germany (London: Robert Hale, 1938), p. 111, citing a letter from the author to Ribbentrop of 21 February 1936.
L. Woolf, Barbarians at the Gate (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), p. 213.
N. Hillson, I Speak of Germany: A Plea for Anglo-German Friendship (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1937), p. 15
G. Bolitho, The Other Germany (London: Lovat Dickson, 1934), pp. 223, 252. The exiled Count Potocki’s Right Review, 1 (1936) put forward a similar argument: ‘If the Jews want to be treated as human beings, as far as we are concerned all they have to do is behave as such. In the meantime it is the Jews themselves who invented human racialism, and who stick tenaciously to it to the public and private detriment of all outsiders: and Aryan racialism is nothing but a reaction against this.’
C. Hamilton, Modern Germanies as Seen by an Englishwoman. With a Postscript on the Nazi Regime (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933), pp. 180–1.
Sir A. Willert, The Frontiers of England (London: William Heinemann, 1935), p. 39.
H. P. Greenwood, The German Revolution (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934), pp. 55–6, 59–60, 192.
J. Brown, I Saw for Myself (London: Selwyn and Blount, n.d. [1935]), p. 132.
C. Cunningham, Germany To-day and Tomorrow (London: John Heritage The Unicorn Press, 1936), pp. 29, 35.
R. Hastings, The Changing Face of Germany (London: Frederick Muller, 1934), p. 49.
J. B. White, Dover-Nürnberg Return (London: Burrup, Mathiseon & Company, 1937), p. 20. White was Director of the Economic League Central Council 1926–45. During the war he fought with the Rifle Brigade and worked for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. After the war he became Conservative MP for Canterbury (1945–53).
R. Hughes, The New Germany (London: Athenaeum Press, 1936), pp. 10, 12, 24, 25; Lord Sydenham of Combe, ‘Foreword’ to
A. H. Lane, The Alien Menace, 5th edn. (London: Boswell Publishing Co., 1934), p. xv. On Combe
see M. Ruotsila, ‘Lord Sydenham of Combe’s World Jewish Conspiracy’, Patterns of Prejudice, 34 (2000) 47–64. The language of C3 and Al populations derives from the ‘national efficiency’ movement at the turn of the century, geared primarily toward military readiness. For the locus classicus of the argument
see A. White, Efficiency and Empire (London: Methuen and Co., 1901) and, for discussion
G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971). For use of this language in the context of organicist attitudes to diet, see D. Matless, ‘Bodies Made of Grass Made of Earth Made of Bodies’: Organicism ‘Diet and National Health in MidTwentieth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 27 (2001) 362 and 364.
K. G. W. Ludecke, I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), p. 72.
R. Garbutt, Germany: The Truth (London: Rich and Cowan, 1939), pp. 196, 199.
V. Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), pp. 79, 81–2. Bartlett had worked for the BBC, Reuters, the Daily Mail, the Daily Herald, The Times, News Chronicle and the World Review. He was a pacifist and member of the Anglo-German Group.
E. O. Lorimer, What Hitler Wants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 49. On Nazi race theory, see p. 58.
J. W. Dunne, The League of North-West Europe: A Solution to the Present European Crisis (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1936), p. 19.
V. G. Lennox, ‘The Ambitions of Hitler’, in Germany: What Next?, ed. R. Keane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 114.
R. Dell, Germany Unmasked (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934), p. 61. Dell made a comparable statement with regard to race-theory. Although he said (p. 34) that ‘All the great nations are of mixed race and the Germans themselves are far from being racially pure’, he later observed that whilst, ‘as far as is known, Hitler is not of Jewish origin, he can hardly be of pure “Nordic” race, for he has certain Mediterranean characteristics’. This confusion about race-thinking — condemning its ‘excesses’ but having faith in its fundamentals, such as that the idea of different races is a sound one — helps explain the self-contradictory position often taken with regard to the Jews.
R. A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), pp. 61 (Darré), 63ff, 69.
See, for example, J. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939 [1935]);
J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938).
M. M. Green, Eyes Right! A Left-Wing Glance at the New Germany (London: Christophers, 1935), pp. 72, 73–5, 82, 122.
H. Sellon, Europe at the Cross-Roads (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1937]), p. 179. In 1940, Sellon became Professor of International Politics at the University of Reading. On the question of ‘national minorities’
see M. Levene, ‘The Limits of Tolerance: Nation-State Building and What It Means for Minority Groups’, Patterns of Prejudice, 34 (2000) 19–40.
S. Dark, The Jew To-Day (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1933), pp. ix, 43.
C. Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933), pp. 171–2.
E. Mowrer, Germany Puts the Clock Back, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), pp. 177–8.
J. A. Cole, Just Back from Germany (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), pp. 232–3. Cole became a sergeant in the intelligence corps and, after the war, a Foreign Office civil servant in Berlin. From 1958 to 1973 he worked for the BBC.
J. Gloag, Word Warfare: Some Aspects of German Propaganda and English Liberty (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1939), pp. 83, 84.
E. Hambloch, Germany Rampant: A Study in Economic Militarism (London: Duckworth, 1939), p. 79.
See also Hambloch, ‘The Power behind European Freemasonry’, English Review, 63 (1936) 568–79, another ‘exposé’ of the Jews.
P. Tabor, The Nazi Myth: The Real Face of the Third Reich (London: Pallas Publishing Company, 1939), p. 78.
F. Tuohy, Craziways, Europe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 45.
E. Taverner, These Germans (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1937), p. 139.
H. Lichtenberger, The Third Reich (London: Duckworth, 1938), p. 283.
H. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution of Destruction (London: William Heinemann, 1939), p. 99.
Major J. R. J. Macnamara, The Whistle Blows (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1938), p. 156.
Cf. H. S. Ashton, The Jew at Bay (London: Philip Allan, 1933), p. 122: ‘Jewry is as impregnable as is the Christian faith itself.… The Jews always await their moment when to strike, but strike they will. They are simply awaiting their moment and discretion to them is always nine parts of valour.’
See also A. D. Cohen, ‘The Future of the Jew’, English Review, 62 (1936) 225–30.
R. Bernays, Special Correspondent (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 233.
W. Zuckerman, ‘Nazis Without a Jewish Policy’, Fortnightly Review, 138 (1935) 86.
J. Steel, Hitler as Frankenstein (London: Wishart & Co., 1933), pp. 110–11.
G. N. Shuster, Strong Man Rules: An Interpretation of Germany Today (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), pp. 277–8.
F. L. Schuman, The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism, 2nd edn. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), p. 327. His view was echoed by Mowrer (Germany Puts the Clock Back, p. 186): ‘All in all, it might have been well for his persecutors to remember that possibly the Jews could get along better without the Germans than the Germans without the Jews.’
F. Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 183.
Cf. O. I. Janowsky and M. M. Fagen, International Aspects of German Racial Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. xix, for the claim that ‘Policies of hatred or violence cannot be confined within any frontier and will not stop with the Jews’, a logical and more convincing extension of the kind of argument being put forward by Borkenau. A similar argument to Borkenau’s was put forward by R. Olden, the former political editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, in his Hitler the Pawn (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 393: ‘Formerly one felt inclined to believe that the Germans were anti-Semitic. Now, however, since Jewish shops, Jewish doctors and lawyers, after years of official boycott and degradation, still have a clientele large enough for them to make a living, one must presume that the people’s appreciation of Jewish achievement outweighs its aversion to the Jews themselves.’
F. E. Jones, The Battle for Peace (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 54.
R. Pascal, The Nazi Dictatorship (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934), pp. 141, 146.
E. Henri, Hitler Over Europe? (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1934), p. 127.
M. Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A History of Sixteen Centuries (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1939), p. 362.
P. F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (London: William Heinemann, 1939), pp. 6, 187.
On the development of these ideas, see P. F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (London: Heinemann, 1978)
and J. E. Flaherty, Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1999), pp. 21–9.
For an early appreciation, see W. H. Carter, ‘The Challenge to Democracy’, Fortnightly Review, 146 (1939) 665–71. Cf. Dark, The Jew To-Day, p. 8: ‘the Jew, I repeat, is the bourgeois par excellence.… It is therefore inevitable that, in every revolt against the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, against both its deficiencies and its ideals, the Jew should be the first person to be attacked.’
F. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), p. 107.
G. Feder, Hitler’s Official Programme and Its Fundamental Ideas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), p. 57.
D. Thompson, ‘The Record of Persecution’, in Nazism: An Assault on Civilization, eds. P. Van Paassen and J. W. Wise (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), p. 12.
Shuster, Strong Man Rules, p. 99. Cf. G. Norlin, Hitlerism: Why and Whither? (London: Friends of Europe, 1935), p. 15: ‘anti-Semitism is fundamental in the Nazi movement, and it is clear that in the long run, if Hitlerism continues to prevail, the atmosphere in Germany will be suffocating to any member of the Jewish race or to any one even remotely tainted with Jewish blood.’ What this means in terms of a prediction is hard to say.
F. Seidler, The Bloodless Pogrom (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), pp. 7–8, 55, 131.
W. Steed, Hitler: Whence and Whither? (London: Nisbet & Co., 1934), p. 129.
J. L. Spivak, Europe under the Terror (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 116.
S. H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built (London: Methuen Publishers, 1937), pp. 261, 263.
O. G. Villard, Inside Germany (London: Constable & Co., 1939), pp. 62, 66. The chapters of the book were first serialized in the Daily Telegraph.
R. Reynolds, When Freedom Shrieked (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), pp. 211, 269.
World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), pp. 229, 283.
See also German Fascism, The Reichstag Fire Trial: The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (London: John Lane, 1934).
I. Cohen, ‘The Jews in Germany’, Quarterly Review, 261 (1933) 14. Later he referred to the new wave of antisemitism as ‘a distressing commentary upon the state of modern civilisation’.
See I. Cohen, ‘The Jewish Tragedy’, Quarterly Review, 263 (1934) 252.
L. Sturzo, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Quarterly Review, 261 (1933) 172.
F. Ermarth, The New Germany: National Socialist Government in Theory and Practice (Washington, DC: Digest Press, 1936), p. 37.
G. Warburg, Six Years of Hitler: The Jews under the Nazi Regime (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), p. 26.
W. Steed, Hitler: Whence and Whither? (London: Nisbet & Co., 1934), p. 144.
M. S. Wertheimer, ‘The Nazi Revolution in Germany’, in New Governments in Europe: The Trend Toward Dictatorship, eds. V. M. Dean et al. (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1934), p. 145.
G. Sacks, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Jew-Baiting (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), pp. 153–4.
J. K. Pollock, The Government of Greater Germany (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1938), p. 52.
P. J. S. Serrarens, Germany under National Socialism (Oxford: The Catholic Social Guild, 1933), p. 5.
K. Heiden, A History of National Socialism (London: Methuen & Co., 1934), p. 307.
H. Picton, Nazis and Germans: A Record of Personal Experience (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 63.
H. W. Blood-Ryan, Göring: The Iron Man of Germany (London: John Long, 1938), p. 209. See also p. 182 for Blood-Ryan’s scoffing at those rank-and-file Nazis who were ‘naturally to expect that the 600,000 Jews in Germany were to be exterminated.… The Nazis came to power, but the bloody pogrom did not become the order of the day’.
P. Harlow, The Shortest Way with the Jews (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), pp. 238–9.
For the reasons why Belsen wrongly became identified in the British consciousness as the worst Nazi death camp (when it was not a death camp at all), see the essays in J. Reilly et al., eds., Belsen in Memory and History (London: Frank Cass, 1997).
O. Keun, Darkness from the North: An Essay in German History (London: H. & E. R. Brinton, 1935), pp. 25, 62, 76–7.
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Stone, D. (2003). The Quintessence of Nazism? The Third Reich and the Jews, 1933–1939. In: Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505537_4
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