Dowswell Aliens

The Chequered History of Britain's Wartime Refugees
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78590-835-4
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

The welcome given to refugees from fascist Europe is part of our fond nostalgia for Britain's role in the Second World War, nestling in our imagination next to images of evacuees clutching teddy bears, and milkmen picking their way through bomb rubble during the Blitz. But there is a darker side to this story. Then, as now, there was great suspicion, resentment and fear towards new arrivals, much of it kindled by the tabloid press. Then, as now, politicians dealt with a reluctance to accommodate refugees by hiding behind bureaucratic hurdles and obfuscation. Many of the 10,000 Kindertransport children who arrived here in the late 1930s have warm memories of the kindness they were shown, but half a million refugees were refused entry and most of them died as a result. And those who were accepted found their troubles far from over. While Britain fearfully awaited invasion in 1940, 30,000 Jews were interned as 'enemy aliens' and some were sent off to the colonies on dangerous and sometimes fatal voyages. Nor were Jews the only refugees clamouring for the thin gruel of public sympathy. Those fleeing fascism and civil war elsewhere in Europe found that whether they were met with kindness or hostility depended on the locals' political affiliations and newspapers of choice. Interweaving personal testimonies with historical sources, Paul Dowswell casts a fresh eye on the wartime era, painting a vivid picture of what life was really like for Britain's refugees.

The welcome given to refugees from fascist Europe is part of our fond nostalgia for Britain's role in the Second World War, nestling in our imagination next to images of evacuees clutching teddy bears, and milkmen picking their way through bomb rubble during the Blitz. But there is a darker side to this story. Then, as now, there was great suspicion, resentment and fear towards new arrivals, much of it kindled by the tabloid press. Then, as now, politicians dealt with a reluctance to accommodate refugees by hiding behind bureaucratic hurdles and obfuscation. Many of the 10,000 Kindertransport children who arrived here in the late 1930s have warm memories of the kindness they were shown, but half a million refugees were refused entry and most of them died as a result. And those who were accepted found their troubles far from over. While Britain fearfully awaited invasion in 1940, 30,000 Jews were interned as 'enemy aliens' and some were sent off to the colonies on dangerous and sometimes fatal voyages. Nor were Jews the only refugees clamouring for the thin gruel of public sympathy. Those fleeing fascism and civil war elsewhere in Europe found that whether they were met with kindness or hostility depended on the locals' political affiliations and newspapers of choice. Interweaving personal testimonies with historical sources, Paul Dowswell casts a fresh eye on the wartime era, painting a vivid picture of what life was really like for Britain's refugees.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dowswell, Paul

Leseproben

Introduction

A Proud Tradition?

Refugee, n.: Someone driven from his home by war or the fear of attack or persecution; a displaced person.

Oxford English Dictionary

The welcome given to refugees from fascist Europe is part of our fond nostalgia for Britain’s role in the Second World War, nestling in our imagination next to images of tiny evacuees clutching teddy bears, and milkmen stoically picking their way through bomb rubble during the Blitz. But there is a darker side to this story.

Today, we are frequently told our country has a long, proud tradition of helping refugees – not least by our government. On 14 April 2022, Boris Johnson told an audience in Kent: ‘For centuries, our United Kingdom has had a proud history of welcoming people from overseas, including many fleeing persecution.’

However, then, as now, refugees were seen as an unwanted burden. Then, as now, government used bureaucratic barriers and obfuscation to prevent their arrival. Then, as now, newspapers demonised them and created a climate of fear and resentment. Our attitude towards refugees has not substantially changed in eighty years,* and neither has the government’s method of approaching the problem.

That’s not to deny that we, as a country, have done useful and humanitarian things to help refugees. Many elderly Jews, for example, have fond memories of the kindness they received in Britain, when they came here as children before the war closed borders and prevented Jews from leaving the Nazi realm. ‘To my dying day, I will be grateful to this country,’ suggested one Kindertransport veteran in an article in the Times of Israel.

Many other refugees were not so lucky. In March 1939, a passenger ship named the St Louis sailed from Hamburg with 900 Jews on board. All the passengers carried visas permitting them entry to the ship’s destination, Cuba. These they had bought at the Cuban Embassy in Berlin for between $200 and $300 ($3,000 to $5,000 at today’s prices). When they arrived, the Cuban authorities had changed their minds about admitting them and they were refused entry. The captain sought permission to bring his human cargo to the United States and then Canada, both of which refused to take them. Returning across the Atlantic, the captain asked the British government if they would take his passengers. The refugees were told their applications would be considered if they returned to Hamburg and reapplied from there. It was now June and what seemed to be an inevitable war was less than three months away. But here, at last, events turned in their favour. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee – a Jewish refugee charity – agreed to pay a guarantee of $500,000 (around $8 million today) towards the financial cost of accommodating these desperate people. So, when the ship arrived in Antwerp en route to Hamburg, Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands agreed to take the passengers. Britain took 288. Of the other 600 or so, who went to mainland European countries, 250 were murdered by the Nazis in the years following the fall of Western Europe.

* * *

So, what is our ‘long and proud tradition’? Britain has been offering refuge, and assimilating other cultures from overseas, for centuries. In the previous millennium, Jews, Huguenots and Roman Catholics all arrived fresh from continental persecution. How much upheaval and resentment this caused it is difficult to gauge, but of all these groups, the Jews faced the greatest difficulties, not least with their expulsion en masse in the late thirteenth century. Manuscripts from the medieval era also show both defamatory depictions and the promulgation of the bizarre belief that Jews sacrificed Christian children in rituals.

Another bunch of newcomers, Flemish weavers – who arrived in fourteenth-century London as economic migrants rather than refugees – were set upon and massacred during the upheaval of the Peasants’ Revolt.

The first modern-day stirrings of unease with refugees fleeing to Britain occurred when 150,000 Jews arrived from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe during the pogroms of 1881 to 1921. This particular influx marked the first attempt to restrict refugees and led to the 1905 Aliens Act, which introduced immigration controls and registration for the first time.† From then on, who was allowed to come into this country became a matter for the Home Secretary. The newly created tabloid press also seized on the unease these new arrivals generated. On 3 February 1900, for example, the Daily Mail described Jewish refugees arriving in a British port thus: ‘When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare.’

A Conservative politician at the time, William Evans-Gordon, was a prominent anti-immigration campaigner who railed against the admission of ‘destitute foreigners’, claiming dramatically and without evidence in 1902 that ‘not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders’.

The beginning of the Great War brought a further influx of refugees, with 250,000 Belgians arriving when the German Army occupied their country. To this day, this remains the greatest single influx of refugees at one time. Newspapers, now under the stern control of the Defence of the Realm Act, were instructed to write favourably about these newcomers from ‘gallant little Belgium’. British assistance was seen as a necessary part in the propaganda campaign to justify fighting the war. Ninety per cent of these new arrivals returned to Belgium when the war ended.‡

In the 1930s, alongside the German and Austrian Jews fleeing from the Nazis, there was a further influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The Second World War would also add a quarter of a million Poles to the population, both during and afterwards, as well as 50,000 refugees from the Soviet Union.

Though Aliens will look at the many types of refugees who came to Britain to escape from fascism, much of its attention will focus on that most persecuted group, the Jews.

Germany’s Jews suffered the iniquities of Nazi rule in incremental steps. But for those who cared to take an interest, right from the start it was immediately plain that Germany would not be a safe place to live, even for the long-assimilated, many of whom had fought for their country in the First World War. Following Hitler’s electoral triumph in January 1933, the Nazis were swift to set up concentration camps and wasted no time passing laws to exclude Jews from the civil service and state schools. Out in the streets, Jews were subjected to physical attacks, business boycotts and book burnings. In the Nazi state, laws protecting citizens from such behaviour were no longer applicable to Jews.

So, the 1930s saw a gradual influx of increasingly desperate German Jews to other countries. But would-be arrivals to Britain faced a government anxious to exclude them, not least because the Great Depression had created millions of unemployed workers and they feared stoking antisemitism. Then, as now, there was a fear that immigrants of any persuasion would be taking jobs that should belong to British people. But the Nazi pogrom of Kristallnacht in November 1938 marked a change in attitude among the government and many British people. Restrictions were relaxed and more visas were made available. The Kindertransports were arranged for children under seventeen, who were mostly taken in by kindly souls or charities who had agreed to guarantee that their charges would not become a ‘burden to the state’. By the time war broke out on 3 September 1939, around 80,000 Jews had arrived in the UK. Many of them came on transmigration visas, granting them a temporary stay on condition they moved on to another country.

Having already endured several years of high anxiety, the Jewish arrivals, alongside other refugees, faced further concerns. Today, it is difficult to imagine the extent of antisemitism in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century. Certainly, it was far more widespread and out in the open than it is now. It’s also well to bear in mind that attitudes that are now considered unspeakable were more generally acceptable at the time. From the present, the Nazi T4 programme, with its determination to rid Hitler’s Reich of its physically and mentally disabled citizens, is rightly considered one of their more significant atrocities. But while German eugenicists, or racial scientists as they were known within the Third Reich, spoke of ‘life unworthy of life’, British civil servants could employ similarly disparaging terms in their professional language. In January 1939, the Home Office’s medical inspector complained to the Visa Office that a Polish child with cerebral palsy had been granted an entry visa. He was especially outraged because this boy was ‘a physical defective who [would] never be able to support himself’.§

It is sobering to realise that the Third Reich...