In drawing attention to contemporary accounts of Nazi persecution, this book joins a growing body of scholarly work which tackles a persistent myth in British historical memory of the 1930s and 1940s – that Britain knew nothing about the scale of the particular persecution of Jews under Nazism until it was too late. Its case studies focus on the English publication and reception of memoirs written by both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who narrated their experiences of persecution under Nazism for British readers. Building on crucial previous studies into contemporary British institutional responses to Nazism and the persecution of Jews,1 Reading Hitler’s Victims reveals that accounts about Nazi persecution were mediated to British readers in ways that aligned with ordinary people’s prejudices and assumptions about who Nazism’s main victims were, and that these changed throughout the periods of appeasement and war. Going beyond official government institutions and instead looking at the ways in which victims’ memoirs were selected, translated and marketed for British readers by publishers, my study sheds light on the role of the private, individual prejudices and worldviews of ordinary British people, and how these unofficial frameworks interacted with official state censorship policies to shape the ways Nazism and its victims were perceived and discussed in the British public sphere at the time.
It is well known by historians that the landscape of Nazi persecution changed throughout the period of Hitler’s rule, with the first groups of victims primarily being persecuted for political reasons rather than other factors such as ethnicity, religion, sexuality or disability, as was later the case.2 However, some Jews were targeted for no other reason than being Jewish right from the start, too, as we shall see in chapter 1. Though information about Jewish persecution was always available, the ‘victim’ trope which carried the most traction for British people thinking about Nazism was that of the ‘ordinary’ (Christian) German, and this remained the case throughout the years of appeasement, war and the ‘Final Solution’. Jewish victimhood, on the other hand, was a theme that was subject to both unofficial and official forms of censorship in British public discourse throughout this period. My study reveals how censorship of Jewish victimhood was effected in unspoken ways from the very beginning of Nazi rule; even when publications ostensibly tried to draw attention to Jewish victimhood, they could only do so in certain ways which ‘mitigated’ the focus on Jewishness or Jewish suffering, while other victim identities were given centre stage. As a result, my study calls for a reassessment of British historical narratives about the Second World War and its responses to Jewish persecution, and casts doubt on many of the moralistic ‘lessons’ that the history of the Holocaust has increasingly been seen to ‘teach’ us since the 1990s.
In 1937, Observer editor James Garvin described the issue of settlement or war between Britain and Nazi Germany as ‘the greatest question in the world’.3 Based on five years of interdisciplinary research, this study illustrates how German and Austrian refugees’ memoirs contributed to answering that question for British readers. Should Britain fight Nazism? And if so, why, and for whom? Refugees’ memoirs had an important role to play in answering these questions for British readers. They offered an insider’s perspective about the realities of life under Nazi rule, the evolving systems of Nazi violence and persecution, and the identities of its victims.
British book readers were fascinated by stories about international politics and conditions in other countries, and my study places refugee memoirs of Nazi persecution within the significant market genre of what I call ‘overseas explainers’ (discussed in more detail below). The British public at large also had a significant capacity for humanitarian concern for oppressed groups, but British empathy for victimised Jews rarely trumped empathy for ‘ordinary Germans’, and so Jewish experiences of persecution under Nazism could only be represented in limited ways, when they were represented at all.
However, Jews were not the only victim group who had to shape their experiences in particular ways to reach British audiences. I will argue that all accounts of Nazi persecution had to be presented in ways that fitted with British readers’ pre-existing ideas about what Nazism meant, whom Nazi violence was targeting, and why. These ideas were informed by British readers’ other political views and beliefs about a range of issues, including ‘racial’ identity and belonging, the legitimacy of state violence in principle, ideas about Empire, and the promise or threat of Soviet Communism. By examining how accounts by Nazism’s victims were received within a wider context of other factors that influenced British responses to Nazism, my study brings new insights to build on previous works that have critically explored the rationales and discourses, in government, the public and the Press, during the appeasement period.4 As Gannon has put it, Hitler and Nazism ‘were simply slotted in amongst the already important and mainly divisive issues which in fact determined the reactions [of British observers] to the new leader and government itself’.5 Amongst the many competing and polarising ideas (which I will briefly explore in more detail below), the issue of Nazism’s persecution of Jews did not rank highly among the factors that influenced how most British people thought about Nazism. Instead, my study suggests that other identities and ideological frameworks had a greater influence on the ways that refugees were able to present their experiences to British readers through their memoirs. Ambivalent feelings about Jews as a group was an important factor in how British observers responded to news of persecution. As a result, the Jewishness of Nazism’s victims was often minimised, or censored altogether, from refugee memoirs for British readers. Exploring how refugees’ memoirs contributed to British understanding of Nazism allows us to focus in on the question of identities in their ideological contexts: which victims’ stories mattered to British readers, and why?
I will argue that during appeasement, Nazi persecution memoirs were mainly structured around the threat Nazism posed to the political Left, and Communist victims took centre stage in the British imagination of Nazi persecution. Though initially there was little support for Communist victims in Britain, empathy for left-wing victims of Nazism grew alongside the expansion of the British antifascist popular front. During wartime, I will argue that the official wartime narratives defined the conflict with Nazism as a battle for ‘Christian civilisation’ and family values, and that the refugee memoirs which received the greatest government backing as propaganda texts were those which represented ‘ordinary’ (that is, Christian) Germans as Hitler’s prime victims. I will show that while efforts were made by British publishers to share and amplify accounts of Jewish persecution, these accounts were often influenced by the British ‘anti-Jewish discursive environment’,6 which required translators and editors to mask or ameliorate the specific Jewishness of Jewish refugees’ experiences. Instead, a focus on the threat Nazism posed to Christians and Christianity held greater purchase for the majority of British observers, as Christianity was still the common lens through which most Britons saw the world, as recent work has striven to highlight.7 Overall, I will argue that most refugee memoirs which were published for British readers during appeasement and war worked hard to exonerate good, Christian, ‘ordinary Germans’ and to differentiate them from bad, dangerous ‘Nazis’,8 often at the expense of drawing attention to the severity of the Jewish persecution.
With Tom Lawson and Andy Pearce, I am ‘concerned that the Holocaust story we are telling ourselves and our children [today] is not as complex as it might be’, and I agree that ‘we must relearn the history of Britain and the Holocaust, if our memories of it are to have any purpose’.9 In the face of a growing gulf between the reality of the Holocaust and the way it is remembered (or better, mythologised) in British culture,10 this study calls for a more critical and accurate understanding of Britain’s historical relationship to the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust, and for an end to ‘Britain’s morally untarnished and unproblematic referencing of the war’.11 Such a critical reckoning is particularly necessary in view of ongoing plans to erect a new British Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Whitehall.12 The wording on the memorial’s website states: ‘The Holocaust – a British Perspective: Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility’.13 While the first part of this statement (confronting evil) suggests an adherence to mythologising and universalising tropes of memory, the second part (assuming responsibility) would actually require an approach rooted in historical detail that does not seek to draw an overarching moral meaning from Britain’s relationship to the Holocaust, but rather to explore it as a complex series of real events and responses that might not fit into a simplified moral framework of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The case studies gathered here can contribute the necessary details to understand that ‘[people in] Britain did actively engage as historical actors before, during, and after the Holocaust’, and to challenge the ‘familiar, partially mythologised, narratives of refuge, war, and rescue’ that still dominate in British Holocaust memory.14 Such a critical reckoning will have important implications for notions about British values and identity, not to mention illuminating the origins of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Michael Fleming has described the persistent myth that Britain ‘knew nothing about it [the mass killings of Jews]’ as ‘the elusiveness narrative’,15 and points out that it is still frequently propagated even in mainstream national channels, despite the factual inaccuracy of such claims. Indeed, popular discourse in Britain retains a narrative that Britain did all it could to help the Jewish victims of Nazism, with particular emphasis on the history of the Kindertransport as an example of Britain’s good conduct. In consequence, Britain’s role as a ‘righteous nation’16 during the Second World War, and an empathic allegiance with Hitler’s Jewish victims, has taken a central place in conceptions of British national identity.17 However, this allegiance is historically inconsistent, as the present study will show. Though Nazism’s persecution of Jews did not, of course, begin with mass murder, my study illustrates that it was already difficult, if not impossible, even in the early years of Nazi rule, to engage British readers in stories of Jewish persecution written by those who had experienced it.
Today, many English speakers first encounter the Holocaust through victim testimonies that were published after 1945, such as The Diary of Anne Frank (first published in English translation in 1947), the works of Primo Levi, beginning with If this is a Man (1947), and Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960). The explosion of Holocaust survivors’ testimony after the Eichmann Trial in 1961, and particularly from the 1980s onwards, has led this period of post-war history to be termed the ‘era of the witness’.18 While the sheer number of Holocaust testimonies which have been shared since the end of the war have led some critics to point to a ‘surfeit’ of Holocaust memory, or to question the ethics and motivations behind Holocaust memorialisation,19 there is a concurrent myth in the Anglo-American sphere that the scale of the Jewish catastrophe was not widely known or understood as the mass killings were actually taking place.20 Historians’ efforts to prove that knowledge about the scale of the killings was, in fact, available, have not succeeded in permeating public memory.
It is possible that the myth of British (and American) ignorance has been unintentionally served by the post-war boom in ‘Holocaust testimony’, which is now an established literary genre. The late surge in testimony may have added weight to the myth that nothing was known at the time, and that only now, long after the fact, have these testimonies come to light.21 It is my hope that shedding light on the memoirs of Nazism’s victims which appeared before and during the war might help to complicate our assumptions about contemporary British understanding of and responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. By going back in time before the canon of post-war ‘Holocaust testimonies’ by Wiesel, Levi, Améry and others, and striving for a focus on the immediate present of the Nazi years, this study explores how German and Austrian refugees’ memoirs of Nazi persecution, by both Jews and non-Jews, were mediated for British readers at the time. My case studies show that throughout the period 1933–1945, British observers did not see Nazism in a political and ideological vacuum, and nor did they understand the conflict between Nazism and its victims in black and white terms. If we are to accurately remember this history, we must look more critically at the sources, narratives and victim tropes that have shaped British understanding of the period, both at the time and since.
We have been told (most notably by Elie Wiesel)22 that reading survivors’ testimonies is the only way to encounter the Holocaust that does not indulge in some degree of unethical fantasy. But as many have noted, and as literary scholar Ruth Franklin aptly puts it, ‘To consider any text “pure testimony,” completely free from aestheticizing influences and narrative conventions, is naïve’.23 Again, readers of memoir might be initially motivated by the promise of unmediated truth implied by the ‘autobiographical pact’.24 But as Herges and Krimmer have summarised, ‘few memoirs live up to the standard of truth [that the pact guarantees]’.25 What’s more, as Peter Davies has noted, ‘almost everything that we know about the Holocaust is gained through translation’, our dependency on which ‘has a profound effect on the creation, mediation, transmission, and reception of knowledge about the Holocaust in all the cultural and linguistic contexts in which this knowledge is important’.26 The present study of memoirs by Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Nazism show that these texts are highly sculpted products, subject to various constraints and agendas, rather than authentic, ‘pure’ sources of truth. For example, commenting on the editorial changes implemented in Anne Frank’s diary, including the removal of passages describing her adolescent sexuality, Tim Cole argues: ‘The result of the editing of her father and the first publishers of the diary was to create a girl who was in many ways the perfect “victim.” Not only was she young and female, but she was also “innocent.”’27
Like Cole, Hilene Flanzbaum sees the shaping of Anne Frank’s diary into an innocent, hopeful and optimistic text as key to what has been termed the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust.28 But my study shows that such sculptural and tonal changes are not merely a post-war phenomenon, nor are they limited to the American context. Already at the time, stories about Nazi persecution were shaped for British audiences in line with prevailing narrative frameworks and tropes of victimhood that were already circulating in British society, and gradually changing through the years of appeasement and war. As Carolyn Dean reminds us, the term ‘“victim” is a historically mutable category’.29
This study adds to a growing body of work by Peter Davies, Angela Kershaw and Joanna Rzepa, among others, exploring the role of translation in mediating understanding and memory of the Second World War and Holocaust.30 Reading Hitler’s Victims shows that refugees who wanted to publish their memoirs of Nazi persecution with literary presses, both before and during the war, faced the need to shape their accounts in accordance with prevailing British prejudices, tropes and discourses. The question of how these memoirs were selected, mediated and marketed by publishers and translators, and received by English book buyers, is the red thread running through all of the case studies gathered here.
While the word ‘testimony’ has sacred associations, the word ‘Holocaust’ is no less heavily weighted. With John Petrie, I see the term ‘Holocaust’ as ‘a subtle verbal obstacle’31 to accurate understanding of the events of this period of history. Its rooting in the post-war perspective encourages a teleological approach to the period. The word is commonly associated with the years of the ‘Final Solution’. But such a teleological approach obstructs an accurate understanding of how the processes of Nazi persecution and destruction unfolded from 1933 onwards. Furthermore, there is no scholarly consensus about the period implied by ‘Holocaust’, nor regarding whose deaths the term includes – whether those of Jews alone, or also of other victim groups.32 As Davies puts it, ‘the Holocaust as a single “event” is a retrospective construction in history and philosophy, as an object of study, thought, or commemoration’.33 Given my intention in this study to avoid reading retrospectively ‘with an eye to “who got it right”’,34 in this book I avoid the term ‘Holocaust’ where I can, and prefer to use the more general term ‘persecution’. I also choose not to deliberate between the categories of ‘survivors’, ‘witnesses’ and ‘victims’, but rather go by the assumption that all refugees from Nazism who published their memoirs at the time saw themselves as victims of Nazi oppression, though they may each have had different reasons to flee.
I have structured this book in such a way that the chapters can be read in isolation, though occasional cross references will be helpful for the reader. The chapters handle their primary texts in roughly chronological order. Part I deals with texts published during the period of appeasement (and very early wartime period, in the case of chapter 3), while part II deals with the years of war. Each chapter employs a three-pronged interdisciplinary approach, blending literary-critical textual analysis, translation studies, and historical enquiry into archival primary sources. Using traditional historical research methods based on primary documents from archives and other historical research studies, I outline each author’s personal experiences (i.e. the events which led them to create their memoir), and how their memoir came to be published in Britain. I then analyse the narrative, language and style of the published English versions to explore how they convey their author’s experiences to readers. Where possible, I also conduct a descriptive translation comparison of the original German-language versions (with their English translations), informed by Toury’s method of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS).35 This method (discussed in more detail below) focuses on the identification and comparison of ‘coupled pairs’ from the ‘primary text product’, revealing where the translator has altered meaning or emphasis from the source text into the target text, and inviting ‘higher-level generalizations + explanations’,36 that is, interpretation of how translators have been influenced by prevailing narratives and discursive norms in the shaping of their material.
Chapter 1 of this study traces the memoirs that were produced in English translation by Communist and Socialist victims of Nazi persecution. I explore how the British willingness to extend empathic allegiance (more on this term below) to Communist victims grew throughout appeasement, as British observers’ views about the Spanish Civil War increasingly came to influence the way they thought about Nazis and Communists in Germany. As the antifascist British Popular Front grew, German Communist victims were no longer seen as ‘foreign’ and ‘dangerous’ actors who deserved what they got, and instead became increasing recipients of British empathy.
Chapter 2 explores the challenges faced by Jews who wanted to publish memoirs describing their persecution as Jews under Nazism in interwar Britain. As no memoirs were able to surmount these institutional hurdles, this chapter instead explores how an anonymously published documentary text, The Yellow Spot, positions itself as a reliable source explaining Jewish persecution and victimhood for British readers. I also consider the translation and marketing strategies used by the publisher.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to the publishing output of the Hungarian refugee, Stefan Lorant, whose memoir, I was Hitler’s Prisoner, was the most widely read refugee memoir in this study, as it appeared with two different publishers and in numerous editions throughout appeasement and war. I also explore his use of other media such as his magazine Picture Post, and the BBC radio, to publicise his text and to conduct unofficial propaganda spreading his own political ideas to wide audiences in Britain and Germany (partly in collaboration with Winston Churchill before he was Prime Minister).
Chapter 4 steps back from the individual case studies in order to set out the British Ministry of Information’s (MoI) propaganda policies during the war, exploring how the new wartime narratives engaged with various issues such as Jewish victimhood, the idea of Empire, Communism, and ideas about the ‘German character’. (I explore these ideas in more detail below.) I also consider how wartime restrictions on British publishing practice and living conditions altered the reading landscape.
Chapter 5 then turns to the two refugees who received the strongest direct endorsement of the British MoI during the war: Hermann Rauschning and Irmgard Litten. I explore how these two writers’ memoirs were presented as representative of the British wartime narrative which framed the war as a battle for Christian civilisation.
Chapter 6 then considers the two memoirs that were published by Jewish refugee writers who explicitly documented their persecution as Jews under Nazism for British audiences. I explore how the need to abide by British wartime discursive norms limited how Jewish writers could present their experiences, and effectively made them present their stories as ones of ‘universal’ rather than specifically Jewish significance.
To conclude this study, I consider how ideas of identity and victimhood have shaped, and continue to shape, dominant British narratives about this period of history, even though such narratives obstruct accurate understanding of this period’s political and ethical complexities, many of which are still playing out in the world today.
Alongside my literary-critical reading of the memoirs under investigation, much of this study relies on traditional methods of historical inquiry into non-literary primary sources, usually held in archives. These sources primarily consist of government records and memoranda; personal papers; publishers’ archives (e.g. readers’ reports, correspondence, contract books and sales ledgers); and the British Press of the 1930s and 1940s (accessed through paper holdings, and digitised collections, including: the online British Newspaper Archive; The Gale Times Digital Archive, 1785–2014; the Gale Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855–2021; Pro Quest; and UK Press Online).37 My understanding of the British Press landscape and its significance is chiefly based on Gannon’s work, as well as the 1938 Report on the British Press compiled by an independent non-party group, PEP (Political and Economic Planning), and the 1949 Mass Observation report, The Press and its Readers.38 The 1938 report by PEP is particularly useful in showing the regional distribution of national papers.39 The impact of regional papers on informing public opinion should not be underestimated, as some of these publications, such as the morning daily Yorkshire Observer, had ‘considerable followings’.40 The two newspaper sections most relevant to my study are book reviews and letters to the editor, both of which come under the content category of ‘features’. PEP estimates that ‘Features as a whole in national popular dailies were read or seen by about 70 percent of newspaper readers’, and that book reviews ‘attracted the interest of about one-third’.41 Though it is impossible to say with certainty how many people would have read the Press responses to refugees’ texts discussed in my study, this material certainly warrants consideration. The report by PEP described the Press as ‘the principal agenda-making body for the everyday conversation of the ordinary man and woman, and, therefore, for that elusive element called public opinion’. The report goes on to note that the Press shaped public understanding of news and affairs, to the extent that we must consider it as a significant agent in determining how the issue of Nazi persecution of its victims was understood by British readers. PEP summarised that newspapers and their controllers wielded, ‘three important powers – the power of initiative, in putting subjects on the agenda . . .; the power of excluding from the agenda subjects which they choose to ignore; and the power of presentation; so that in extreme cases the same piece of news may, differently treated, lead either to a panic or to a confidence’.42 Press responses to memoirs by victims of Nazi persecution can, it follows, be of great significance in revealing whose memoirs were ‘put on the agenda’ for the British public, how they were presented, and why.
Beyond the Press, a number of other written sources and archives have also been of use in informing the analysis of this study. Regarding books, rather than newspapers, I have drawn on topic collections and diary entries from the Mass Observation Archive relating to British people’s reading habits and attitudes. I have considered records from the BBC’s written archive centre in cases where a refugee-author has also participated in radio broadcasting. I also draw on post-war reflections by refugee authors in order to illustrate a memoir’s publication history. These post hoc accounts were sometimes given in interviews, or featured as part of the preface in the post-war German editions. In all cases, however, I treat these post hoc accounts with a degree of suspicion, as they may be inaccurate. When discrepancies arise between post hoc accounts and other contemporaneous primary sources, such as stock books and other documentary evidence, I privilege the latter.
Drawing on a broad range of extra-textual and paratextual material, as well as sources in the publishers’ archives (e.g. correspondence, readers’ reports, sales records, and marketing campaigns) broadens the empirical base of my study beyond mere literary-critical analysis and descriptive translation studies. As translation scholar Jeremy Munday argues, a DTS work which is limited to the ‘primary text material’ alone, without recourse to further primary sources ‘remains rooted in an analysis of that product and dependent on the analyst’s more or less subjective deduction of the process which underpinned it’.43 With the aim of avoiding subjective interpretations as far as possible, I draw on a range of sources and methods from historical, literary and translation studies. The three dimensions of my study, historical inquiry, textual analysis, and DTS translation comparison work together and are mutually informative. This three-pronged approach enables me to create a publishing microhistory of the memoirs of anti-Nazi refugees for English readers before and during the war.
For many of the memoirs under investigation in this study, it is possible to compare the published English translation with a German-language text that was either published contemporaneously with the English text, or after the war. Unfortunately, in one case (Käthe Cohn’s Escape from Berlin) no German-language text exists. Writers without recourse to personal funds or the support of political networks were rarely able to publish their accounts in German in the 1930s, as this had to be done through foreign publishers, for example in France, Switzerland or Czechoslovakia. After the war, only those former refugees whose stories still held interest for post-war audiences were published. This was usually in view of those writers’ post-war careers (e.g. Stefan Lorant, Bruno Heilig, Wolfgang Langhoff) or their pre-war social status (e.g. Irmgard Litten, whose memoir was published in German in East Berlin in 1947). The scarcity of archival materials relating to Käthe Cohn’s Escape from Berlin can be interpreted as further evidence for the little significance with which her account was regarded at the time. Since the archive is an institution created by the powerful, archives reproduce the cultural and social hierarchies of the society in which they exist.44 As Munday puts it, ‘records and documents that are not included are thereby denied status and are discarded as “debris”’.45 I include Käthe Cohn’s Escape from Berlin in this study, despite the lack of an available German original for translation comparison, in order to draw attention to this underexplored and fascinating text.
Where possible, and in all other case studies, an important goal of this study is to draw particular attention to the role of the translator, making them visible as mediators of information about conditions under Nazism for contemporary British audiences. As Davies has argued, this act of ‘making visible is still a key task of the translation scholar working in Holocaust studies’.46 But when we pay attention to the translation of a ‘Holocaust witness’ text (which, I suggest, is true for all the texts in this study), we often find ourselves torn between two contrasting approaches, as Peter Davies has argued. One attitude is to prioritise the victim’s original account as presenting an ethical ‘truth’ and to see any translation ‘in terms of loss and distance’. The other approach ‘understands translation as taking place within a network of influences, constraints and obligations towards many different parties, that sees the translator as a creative and engaged agent, [and] draws attention to cultural context and difference’.47 Whilst it can be insightful, then, to reveal differences between source text and target text, to judge all instances of infidelity in negative terms would be to underestimate the degree to which translators make informed decisions as mediators between two different cultural contexts. The differences between Source Text and Target Text are not merely ‘losses’, but can perhaps also be seen in terms of ‘added value’, because the translator has made the text accessible to readers in a new linguistic and cultural context. As Davies puts it, a sensitive analysis of a translated Holocaust witness text ‘has to take into account target culture requirements as well as the intentions of the witness’.48
Translators do not act alone, but work within industry networks informed by cultural discourses. In view of this fact, translation studies scholar Jeremy Munday has argued that a microhistory of particular translators and translations can ‘serve to uncover the power relations at work in the production of the literary text’.49
In my efforts to uncover the ways that translators have shaped and moulded their original German texts in new ways to suit the audience of British readers in the 1930s and 1940s, my goal is not to ethically judge or condemn translators. Rather, I try to see them as agents working in concrete sociological conditions,50 usually with little financial reward for their time, and often lacking in institutional support. Of the eight memoirs examined in this study, three were translated by women (Lilo Linke, Betty Aaronson, and Eva Meyerhoff), who were acting without the support of a literary agent. Aaronson seems to have been an amateur translator (explored in chapter 2), while Linke (chapter 1) and Meyerhoff (chapter 6) were creative writers whose bilingualism enabled them to produce literary translations. Linke and Meyerhoff were also refugees themselves, and it is possible that Aaronson was too (see chapter 2). The named male translators examined in this study (James Cleugh, Bernard Miall, and E. W. Dickes) may have enjoyed somewhat better institutional support than their female refugee counterparts, but their working lives as translators were still characterised by long hours and low pay, as Munday has demonstrated in the case of Miall.51 Overall, the case studies examined show that translators’ work is always informed by their own individual contexts and constraints, by the institutional policies of their employer and production context, and, on a broader level, by social and national discourses. Unpicking the work of these translators can show us these dynamics at work.
Carolyn Dean’s work has been fundamental to my study through its exploration of the different ways in which Holocaust victimhood has been constructed in the post-war period. As I mentioned above, she points out that the very term ‘victim’ is a ‘historically mutable category’52 and has reflected in detail on the question of ‘why some victims evoke compassion and some do not’.53 She notes how ‘our affective relations with victims is shaped and controlled by historical narratives about them’, and that ‘cultural ideals . . . define exemplary victims in particular ways’. She points out that external factors may lead a historian to ‘aversion, fascination, or indifference to some victims and not others’.54
Though such transferential tendencies are undoubtedly common in cases of historical enquiry and memory, the case studies gathered here show that contemporaries of the 1930s and 1940s were equally prone to let external factors guide their responses to refugees’ claims to victimhood under Nazism. British observers did not see Nazism and its victims in a moral and political vacuum, but rather brought a number of different ideas and prejudices with them when they tried to understand what was going on in Germany, and what it meant for Britain and the British. Why did British observers care, or not care, about the threat that Nazism posed to its victims? Why did some victims attract British empathy when others did not?
In my analysis of refugees’ persecution memoirs, I explore how the language and structure of the text, as well as editorial decisions such as cuts, omissions and paratextual framing all serve to foster a relationship of trust between reader and narrator/protagonist, which can lead to an empathic relationship. I use the term ‘empathic allegiance’ to determine this bond that can form between a reader of a persecution memoir and the author/protagonist of that memoir.
But as well as examining the memoirs on a textual level for how their narratives create the conditions for empathy between reader and narrator, it is important to consider the discursive and ideological contexts in which these memoirs emerged. These external factors affected a reader’s predisposition to empathise with particular refugee authors of memoir, while dismissing others. There were numerous competing conditions for empathic allegiances active within the interwar British public consciousness, and they were not universally shared by all British people, but rather had the potential to divide British society. The most powerful ideas fuelling ‘us and them’ thinking were ideas about ‘race’,55 political orientation (sympathy for, or fear of, Communism), and a range of ideas about the role and legitimacy of the British Empire in the world. The four most important of these polarising ideas will be explored in what follows, and throughout this study.
The one, nearly constant, refrain which we see throughout British discourses across the political spectrum and throughout the periods of both appeasement and war, is the readiness to include ‘ordinary Germans’ in empathic allegiance, and to exclude Jews. Jews could be excluded from British empathic allegiance for any number of reasons, as different groups tended to associate Jewishness with different undesirables.56 In the British public sphere at this time, for example, Jews could be denied empathic allegiance either through their association with the political Left (by those on the Right), their association with capitalism and financial power (by those on the Left), or because they were perceived as ‘racially’ other (by anyone who bought into ‘racial’ thinking, which, at this time in history, was most people).57 Comparing British interwar responses to a series of outbursts of violence, including German atrocities committed during the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, and pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, Rusell Wallis has shown persuasively that while ‘Most foreign victims of mass violence – and in some cases their oppressors – could be cast and then re-cast in the British imagination to make them worthy of support . . . this was not the case for Jews’.58 So while Jews were not subjected to persecution in Britain in anything like the manner of Jews in continental Europe, nor were they ever seen as fully deserving of British empathy when such persecution took place. Instead, as Kushner has noted, in Britain as well as other liberal democracies, there was often a ‘search for rationality in Nazi antisemitism’, and a tendency ‘[to see] German actions as exaggerated, unjust, but understandable reactions to a real Jewish irritant’.59 This inability to fully empathise with Jews, and to see antisemitism as ‘well-earned’60 was one important factor in determining how British people reacted to news about the widespread violence that ushered in Hitler’s rule. Though key previous studies of appeasement have admitted that negative ideas about Jews played a role in its rationale, my study provides greater detail and nuance about how British ideas about Jews, in comparison with other victims of Nazism, affected the way that their accounts of persecution were shaped and received in Britain.61
I draw on a number of important works which have explored the antipathy towards Jews in twentieth-century British society. Tony Kushner’s pioneering work on this subject has concluded that British responses to Nazi antisemitism were dictated by two different forms of antisemitism, which he calls ‘assimilationist’ and ‘exclusionary’. For British Liberals (including Liberal British Jews), though it was abhorrent to discriminate against someone because of their birth, it was possible to find Jews irritating if they failed to assimilate sufficiently into British society. On the other hand, there were many in Britain who, despite Liberal protestations to the contrary, maintained the more Conservative viewpoint that ‘the Jews were and always would be an alien “race”’.62 For Kushner, these two approaches combined so that ‘the British public was inhibited in its understanding of the real cause of Nazi antisemitism’, and the ‘contemporary literature in Britain during the 1930s focused on the Jewish role in provoking antisemitism’ rather than challenging it.63 As literary historian Bryan Cheyette has noted, the expansion of print culture in Britain from the 1890s onwards also ‘enabled gratuitously racialized portrayals of Jews, once marginal, to have a widespread appeal within mainstream culture’.64 For Cheyette, this new ‘print version of mass democracy’ also mainstreamed political forms of antisemitism which had previously remained on the fringes of public discourse. In her important study of government responses to the Jewish refugee crisis, Louise London has also argued that ‘British stereotypes of Jews were significant in making them out as members of a group that was difficult, even dangerous, to help’.65
Historian Arie Dubnov notes that, in line with an exceptionalist understanding of British identity which took form in the 1900s, ‘antisemitism’ was understood at this time as a continental ‘foreign problem’, not something to be found in Britain.66 Nevertheless, privately held and occasionally expressed anti-Jewish sentiments were a common feature of twentieth-century British society.67 In his historical inquiry, Dubnov attempts ‘to address the absence of institutional antisemitism together with the presence of prejudice against Jews in modern Britain’ (and he ultimately concludes that ‘antisemitism’ is too blunt an instrument with which to understand the ambiguity and complexity of relations between Britain and Jews/Jewishness).68 My own study provides further food for thought here, as it shows how British publishers and translators acted in ways which showed suspicion of Jewish victims of Nazism, even as they printed their memoirs of Nazi persecution and decried Nazi antisemitism.
If there was not a large market for Jewish victims’ accounts during and immediately after the war, this is not because survivors were ‘silent’. Testimonies were available, especially in the countries from which Jews had been deported, and even (though to a lesser degree) in English translation.69 However, Cesarani notes that these early accounts showed ‘a curious lack of self-referentiality and evasiveness’, and that ‘many Jewish survivor writers hid their identity or stressed their pacifism’.70 The examples in my own study suggest that the British publishing industry effected an indirect censorship of Jewishness from survivor accounts, as Jewishness was often minimised or erased during the translation and editorial process. In this regard, translators and publishers of refugees’ memoirs had a role to play not only in ‘establishing the visibility of victim groups’ under Nazism, but also in obscuring them.71
It is also important to remember, however, that Jewishness was never the sole criterion which defined a victim of Nazism from the British perspective. Other identities and political affiliations also had an influence on how victims’ accounts were perceived, and we will explore the other most important factors in what follows.
Both before and during the war, memoirs by victims of Nazi persecution could not engage British readers without participating in a powerful and widespread British discourse that was concerned with establishing the true nature of the German character. In his valuable study, Britain, Germany and the Road to the Holocaust, Russell Wallis uses the term ‘working towards the Germans’ to describe the widely noted phenomenon in interwar Britain of trying to understand the appeal of Nazism, and not to write off the Germans as a people. This willingness to include Germans in empathic allegiance arose largely in responses to the First World War, as well as through ‘racial’ thinking that perceived Britain and Germany as sharing an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage and language.72 In the interwar period, accounts of German atrocities in the context of the First World War were thought to have been wildly exaggerated – part of the manipulative propaganda which had cruelly duped a generation of young British soldiers to go to their death in the trenches for no good reason.73 A result of this thinking was that most British people were now unwilling to believe that Germans were capable of committing atrocities. Indeed, Wallis demonstrates that most people in interwar Britain tended to see Germany as a nation ‘just like us’, which had been cruelly mistreated by the Treaty of Versailles, buying into the narrative of German victimhood which had been so successfully propagated by the interwar German Right.74
The violence that ushered in Nazism’s rule was widely reported on in the British Press, as numerous studies have shown.75 However, efforts in ‘working towards the Germans’ created a tendency to try hard to see the best in Nazism, to blame Nazi violence on a minority of young thugs or fanatics, or to excuse its excesses of violence as a temporary necessity in any ‘revolution’. Some British responses went further to explain the violence, spreading disinformation about Jewish bankers boycotting Germany, in effect making Nazi violence against them justified.76 But largely, the tendency to understand and justify Nazi violence did not spring from malign intent, but rather from a well-meaning desire for even-handedness towards Britain’s former enemy. Dan Stone has argued that, ‘at least until the outbreak of war, Hitler’s regime was not viewed in all quarters with the same moral outrage that one might expect and that one could be at almost any point on the political spectrum and still find something positive to say about it’.77
To Conservative British observers of German politics, Nazism and Communism were often perceived as unwelcome symptoms of the same problem, that is, a need for a radical change in government due to the failure of Weimar democracy. Given the inevitability of such a change, many British people, especially among the property-owning classes, saw a Nazi Germany as preferable to a Communist Germany. For those British observers who were neither pro-Communism, nor approved of Nazism, it was possible to differentiate between Nazis and ‘ordinary Germans’, so that an enduring faith in the goodness of ‘ordinary Germans’ was able to survive in the face of increasing news about Nazi oppression and violence. Out-and-out Communists, on the other hand, had a completely different interpretation of Nazism that was informed by Marxist thought (see my discussion below).
During the war, while it became very difficult in Britain to defend Nazism in any way, there was still a reluctance among the British population to be stirred up to see Germans as the enemy, and the idea endured that most ‘ordinary’ Germans were, in fact, the victims of Nazism. Far from being seen as a war to end the oppression of German, Austrian and other European Jews, the war against Nazism was framed as an effort to preserve ‘Western Civilisation’ and to liberate the non-Nazi Germans from the yoke of Nazi oppression. It follows, then, that refugees’ memoirs for British readers tended to present the majority of ‘ordinary’ (that is, Christian) Germans as non-Nazis or anti-Nazis, or in other words, as Nazism’s victims.
Assessing the level of ‘Empire awareness’ at the metropole of nineteenth-century Britain has become an important subject of historical inquiry in the ‘post-colonial’ era.78 How conscious were most Britons of the fact that their nation ruled the world’s largest Empire? Naturally, those in government had a heightened awareness of the existence and needs of Britain’s Colonies and Dominions, and the desire to retain them was a considerable factor in the rationale for appeasement.79 There was also a small but passionate British anti-colonial movement, and the international League Against Imperialism was based in Britain between 1933 and its dissolution in 1937.80 Assessing the nation as a whole, it has been suggested that (critical) interest in the Empire as a topic emerged in a pattern of ‘boom and bust’,81 and that a changing awareness of the needs and vulnerabilities of the British Empire also influenced the ways that British people understood conflicts in other parts of the world, such as Abyssinia, Spain and China.82 What was the effect of ‘Empire awareness’ on British responses to Nazism?
I find that the idea of Empire took on increasing importance when British people tried to understand Nazism, because they often thought about Nazism in reference to themselves. This was partly the result of Nazi messaging, which positioned Germany as an imperial power that had been unfairly deprived of its colonies by the Versailles Treaty.83 During appeasement, and even more so during the war, Nazi propaganda presented the British Empire as greedy and exploitative, arguing that Britain should not hoard so much territory for itself when other countries (Germany) did not have sufficient living space.84 This propaganda challenged British observers and required them to think of themselves in terms of Empire, even when they might not otherwise have seen the British Empire as particularly relevant to them.
For the British left wing in the early 1930s, the Empire was a moral problem and a weak spot in the face of British claims to being a Liberal Democracy.85 During the first violent years of Hitler’s rule, a consciousness of Britain’s record of oppression and violence throughout the Empire weakened the British Liberals’ ability to take the moral high ground when critiquing Nazism’s use of violent methods. Wallis has shown that there was widespread acknowledgement that Britain was also guilty of committing recent atrocities against colonial subjects. Key examples were the Amritsar massacre (also known as the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre) of April 1919 in the Punjab, in British India, when colonial police opened fire on a crowd of pro-independence protestors, killing and injuring thousands.86 During the Irish Civil War (1919–1921) it was also widely known that British soldiers (notably the Black and Tans regiment) had committed arbitrary attacks on civilians in reprisals for IRA acts of insurgency. Black and Tans soldiers were known for their brutality against Irish homes and businesses, burning down farms, and beating and killing civilians. With memories of such violence still fresh in the mind, many Liberals in Britain thought it would be hypocritical to castigate Germany for Nazi ‘excesses’ of violence when we, too, had made mistakes of this kind.87
For the Conservative Right, the Empire was a problem because it was in danger of being lost, due to growing claims for independence by its colonial subjects. Those British observers who bought into ‘racial’ thinking about the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ (which, at this time, was most White British people),88 were also hard pressed to argue against Hitler’s demands for greater territorial power and colonial possessions, given that the Germans were a people ‘like us’. British claims to hold onto its Empire thus had to be carefully justified in opposition to Nazi Germany’s demands for territorial expansion and global dominance, and Nazism’s ambitions to rival the British Empire created an identity crisis for supporters of the British Empire.
During the war, international Nazi propaganda attacked Britain’s image of itself as a benevolent global force, hoping to fan the resentments that were already brewing throughout the British Colonies and Dominions. For its own German audiences, Nazi propaganda defended its use of brutal methods and concentration camps by drawing attention to human rights violations committed by British Imperialists. For example, the academic Arnold Springborn’s 1939 history of the British Empire was titled Über Lügen und Leichen zum Empire: Englands blutiger Weg zur Weltmacht (The Empire of Lies and Corpses: England’s Bloody Path to Becoming a World Power). This propaganda text drew attention to Britain’s historic role in the African slave trade, also accusing them of ‘theft’ in Europe, of ‘betrayal and murder’ in the Middle East, of ‘freeloading’ in America and of ‘murder’ in India.89 In a similar vein, the 1941 Nazi film Ohm Kruger threw light on the British use of concentration camps during the Boer War.
Overall, Nazi propaganda painted the British Empire as immoral, oppressive and decaying, and according to one BBC official in 1942, this view was also ‘very widespread’ in Britain.90 Certainly, confronting Nazism also posed significant challenges to Britain’s own self-image. As a result, defending and celebrating the Empire, stressing its benevolent and civilising global mission and the voluntary participation of its Colonies and Dominions became key to British propaganda, both internationally and on the home front.91 This was most important during the war, of course, but ideas about the role and legitimacy of the British Empire in the world were also important during appeasement as they influenced the ways that British observers responded to Nazism’s use of state-sanctioned violence, its increasing territorial demands, and its ultimate ambitions for global dominance founded on a belief in ‘racial’ superiority.
Though ideas about Empire do not feature explicitly in the texts under investigation in this study, we will see that they did influence the ways that British readers interpreted and responded to these texts, specifically regarding their explanations about Nazism’s violent methods and ultimate global ambitions. Importantly, the idea of Empire was also inextricably intertwined with the idea of ‘racial’ hierarchy, and so Nazi persecution and violence against Jews that was justified in terms of ‘racial’ difference was received by British observers who were familiar with the concept of ‘racial’ difference and hierarchy, and who rarely challenged these beliefs. In interwar and wartime Britain, ‘ideas of racial hierarchy derivative of the colonial experience . . . facilitated the domination of colonial subjects, understanding their place in the world as being below that of the European ‘race’ in a world hierarchy of humanity’.92
As the need to oppose Nazi Germany intensified after 1939, Tom Buchanan has shown that some British antifascists who had previously been equally committed to anti-Imperialism now ‘found a new respect for “their” empire’, particularly after 1939, and we will see some examples of this thinking in chapter 4. Defining Britain and its war against Nazism sometimes relied on acts of cognitive dissonance, as exemplified by a speech given by Neville Chamberlain in November 1939 which argued:
If Imperialism means the assertion of racial superiority, if it means the suppression of the political and economic freedoms of other peoples, if it means the exploitation of the resources of other countries for the benefit of the Imperialist country, then I say that those are not the characteristics of this country, but that they are characteristics of the present administration in Germany.93
The double standard implied by the Allies’ war aims regarding the role and legitimacy of the British Empire was not lost on contemporary observers, particularly after Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter of August 1941.94 For example, a BBC worker in 1941 noted that the problem encountered by broadcasts on the topic of Empire was how to show ‘that our democratic professions are not a hypocritical pretence’.95 In conclusion, confronting Nazi Germany’s imperialist ambitions presented significant challenges to Britain’s self-image. On the one hand, this confrontation stimulated more critical thinking about Britain’s own claims to its Empire, while on the other, it strengthened ideas about British exceptionalism, along the lines that the British Imperial claims, by definition, could be nothing like Nazi Germany’s.
Alongside the idea of ‘working towards the Germans’, a widespread ambivalence about Jews, and ideas about Empire, the final important concept which shaped how refugees could present their experiences of Nazi persecution for British readers was the perceived promise, or threat, of Communism. The 1930s are sometimes referred to as Britain’s ‘red decade’, even though the Communist Party of Great Britain never had more than 20,000 members, and never came even close to taking power.96 The most important parties in 1930s British politics, in order of importance, were Conservative, Labour and Liberal.97 By contrast, the German Communist Party (KPD) had as many as 300, 000 members in 1932. The last years of the Weimar Republic saw rising political tensions between the Conservative/National Right and the Communist left, and both sides made increasing use of violent tactics.98 Increasing polarisation and the growth of street-fighting Combat Leagues (‘Wehrverbände’) throughout the years of the Weimar Republic allowed the Right to stoke fears that the Communists were allegedly preparing for a civil war. Violent rhetoric and the idea that a civil war would be an inevitable part of the final confrontation with capitalism were common tropes within KPD discourse in the 1920s, and this filtered across to observers of Weimar Democracy’s collapse in Britain.99
In Dirk Schumann’s analysis, despite ‘the Communists’ aggressive propaganda and readiness to engage in violence . . . at no time did they pose a serious threat’.100 However, as Nazi-instigated street violence increased, especially in 1932, ‘the course that the KPD pursued, and its supporters’ behaviour during the political fighting in the streets, seemed to confirm in every respect the picture that had been painted of the Communists as an enemy’.101 As the Weimar Republic threatened to collapse, many British observers, even senior figures on the socialist Left, ‘still refused to differentiate between threats from the left and the right to Weimar democracy’, hoping that Germany would be able to navigate the tensions without falling prey to an extremist government on either side of the political spectrum.102
After the Nazi assumption of power, historians estimate that between one third and one half of German Communists were, at least temporarily, imprisoned and subjected to violence in the course of Nazi rule.103 Certainly, tens of thousands of German KPD and SPD sympathisers became victims of Nazi terror methods during the pre-war years. However, many commentators, both in Germany and abroad, saw the Nazis’ response to left-wing opposition as at least partially justified, in view of the threat they allegedly posed to the new regime. Pointing out that many saw similarities between Nazi and Soviet methods of maintaining power, Griffiths highlights the commonly occurring narrative of ‘Russia is just as bad’.104 In short, British observers of the Nazi terror tended to interpret it according to their own understanding of the promise or threat of Communism, and so memoirs by Communist and Socialist victims of Nazi persecution had to mediate their accounts in ways that took British attitudes and prejudices into account.105
By Communists and pro-Communists, Nazism was seen as the inevitable final stage of capitalism, and it was thought that it would soon be overthrown by a working-class revolution that would finally establish a Soviet system. According to Marxist doctrine, Nazi rank and file followers should be seen not as evil monsters, but as people who might yet be converted to the cause of Communism in time for the final revolution. However, within Communist discourse, a number of tropes about Nazis soon also took shape, which associated Nazis with mental instability, sadism and degenerate homosexuality.106 We will see some of these tropes in chapter 1, as we explore how Communist memoirs presented Nazi persecution to British readers during the appeasement period. The changing British perceptions of Communism during war in response to the Nazi-Soviet pact (August 1939) and the Soviet Union later joining the Allies (June 1941) will be explored in chapter 4. In a nutshell, we must remember that Nazism was always understood by British observers in relation to Communism in one form or another, and that this is true of every stage during appeasement and war.
So we have established that, years before the war and ‘Final Solution’ began, Germans and Austrians fleeing Nazi persecution, including both Jews and non-Jews, were writing accounts of their experiences under Nazism, and some of them were published for English readers. But who read them, and why? Before we turn to the memoirs, we should first consider how they fitted into the British literary marketplace, how they reached their readers, and who these readers were.
Most British people read books at least sometimes, and around half the population read ‘much’.107 Among readers, however, there were more borrowers than buyers, particularly among the working-class majority of the population. Only about a quarter of the population bought books at all, and in general, most book buyers belonged to the middle and upper classes. This means that sales figures for a particular book only partly indicate the extent to which it permeated society because they do not reflect the impact of a book among working-class readers, who mainly used libraries.
Library circulation figures are even harder to come by than sales figures, but it is sometimes possible (e.g. by reading regional newspapers) to find out which books were acquired by which libraries, and which books were in popular demand. A Mass Observation survey conducted in 1940 shows that fiction was the most popular type of literature to be borrowed among all classes, but especially among the working classes. Within fiction, the most popular genres were crime and thriller, followed by adventure, cowboy, romance, and ‘light’ fiction.108
Given British readers’ generic preferences for entertaining fiction, memoirs of Nazi persecution by refugees were highly unlikely to make the bestseller lists. However, there was a niche for refugees’ memoirs within the non-fiction genre of what I call ‘overseas explainers’. Often taking the form of ‘inside scoops’ on foreign affairs, these books were a source of fascination to an interwar British public ‘highly attuned to the cacophony of international crises’.109 Important publishers in this genre were Victor Gollancz (a key figure throughout this study, who is explored in more detail in chapter 1), and, after 1938, the Penguin Specials series (explored in chapter 2). Other important publishers were Allen Lane (later Allen & Unwin), and Martin Secker (later Secker & Warburg), though most publishing houses at this time produced texts in this genre at one time or another. The University Presses (Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), naturally, produced erudite and academic ‘takes’ on overseas affairs. However, the approaches taken by non-fiction explainer texts in the more popular series, such as Gollancz’s Left Book Club, or the Penguin Specials series, were often no less sophisticated in their arguments and approaches to international politics and overseas affairs.
Among the genre of ‘overseas explainers’, works on Nazism and Germany created a particular subset. Dan Stone has explored many of these texts and attempted to ‘trace the availability and influence of [such] books on the English-speaking public’.110 But Stone’s study notes that, ‘the bulk of this literature is still unknown’ and ‘there are many more obscurer texts still waiting to be discussed’.111 Reading Hitler’s Victims builds on Stone’s study by adding the category of refugees’ memoirs into the picture of what was broadly available at the time for British book buyers who wanted to find out more about Nazism.112 Refugee’s memoirs of Nazi persecution belong in this genre, since they were regarded as works of non-fiction that were intended to elucidate the reader’s understanding of contemporary conditions overseas. As well as accounts by anti-Nazi refugees, accounts by Anglophone foreign correspondents, diplomats113 and even travel writers114 who had witnessed the advent of Nazism first-hand proved to be very commercially successful. These memoirs appealed to British readers who craved more information about conditions under Nazi Germany, and who may have been frustrated by what were perceived as unreliable news reports and a plethora of competing sources of information.115 While I was conducting this research, I noted the titles of relevant works whenever I discovered them, mainly by reading the contemporary Press, and created a database of books about Hitler/Nazism/Germany for British readers, which forms the basis for the appendix in this book, as well as Figure 0.1 below. This dataset may not be completely exhaustive, but it is sufficiently rigorous to broadly represent what was available for British readers at the time on the topics of Germany/Nazism.
Figure 0.1 shows that the first highpoint in demand for book-length ‘explainers’ about Nazism and Germany can be identified during the first year of the dictatorship (1933–1934).116 The second boom in titles came in 1938, as it was becoming increasingly clear to the British public that the problem of Nazism was not going away, and even those who had previously tried to see the best in Nazism were now abandoning this attempt. However, the boom in books about Nazi persecution in 1938 can also be understood as a result of increased supply, not just demand, as changes in British refugee policy meant there were more refugees coming to Britain from Germany and Austria at this time.117 Victor Gollancz gave the impression of being overwhelmed with refugees’ book proposals when he wrote to Harry Formison on 10 June 1938:
I just can’t publish twenty or thirty books on Austria. It is literally a fact that they have been coming in on me – finished books, half finished books, chapters, synopses, and the rest – at the rate of two a day since Vienna fell. . . . What on earth am I to do? As a matter of fact, there is not a market at present for one book on Austria – you can see, therefore, my difficulty when I am faced day after day with propositions of this kind.118
Gollancz clearly felt in 1938 that there was only a limited market for titles about Nazi persecution. However, once war had begun, there was a new need for material dealing with Nazism/Germany from a critical angle (see chapter 4), and we can see a consistently high number of new titles for the year 1939 in Figure 0.1. The apparent dip in titles published in 1940 must be understood within the context of wartime paper shortages at this time, which placed the publishing industry under significant strain, and meant that fewer titles were published across the board.119 After 1941, Figure 0.1 illustrates that interest in explainers on Nazi Germany diminished significantly, and that numbers of new ‘explainers’ published about Nazism and/or Germany reached their lowest point in a decade in 1944/45, as Nazism’s defeat seemed increasingly certain. At this point in the war, rather than learn and think about Nazism, British readers wanted to look to the future and to consider ways forward in a post-war world.
Figure 0.1. Graph showing number of new titles of memoirs, explainers or ‘inside scoops’ about Nazism, Germany or Austria, published in Britain between 1933 and 1945. The data and individual titles for these works can be found in the appendix to this study. Image © Ellen Pilsworth.
Crucially, it is important to remember that Nazi Germany was far from the only foreign country of interest to British readers during the years of this study. Other overseas concerns also came and went, sometimes competing for British interest with the issues of Nazi persecution in Germany and, from 1938, Austria (see Figure 0.1.). For example, in 1935, at the time when the antisemitic Nuremberg laws were instituted in Germany, the British Press’s interest in Nazism had been almost totally eclipsed by the crisis in Abyssinia. As Russell Wallis has shown, there was a significant outpouring of public support for Abyssinians at this time, vastly outweighing British responses to the Nuremberg laws.120 The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 (which was widely reported on in Britain as having been welcomed by most Germans),121 and the outbreak of Civil War in Spain a few months later, completely dominated the British public interest in foreign affairs. After the bombing of Guernica in April 1937, Britain witnessed an ‘immediate and widespread humanitarian response to the victims’, leading to the development of a scheme which brought 4,000 Basque children to Britain for temporary refuge.122 By contrast, after the annexation of Austria by Germany in February 1938, Wallis notes that the British Press tended, again, to downplay reports of Nazi abuse of Jews, and to mitigate German guilt for them, following the impulse of ‘working towards the Germans’. In the policy realm, as Louise London has shown, the wholescale changes made to British immigration requirements in the wake of the Anschluss were intended to make things harder – not easier – for Jewish refugees to reach Britain.123 While British support for appeasement increasingly plummeted throughout 1938, the main reasons for this were Germany’s unceasing territorial expansion (Austria in February, the Sudetenland in September) and demands for the return of its former Colonies, rather than the suffering of German, Austrian and Czech Jews.124 The November Pogroms (Kristallnacht) against Jews throughout Nazi-held territory in 1938 were, for many in Britain, simply the ‘last straw’, as the pogroms proved that Hitler’s regime would not be tamed. The British Press responded to news of the destruction, arrests and violence with widespread indignation, and most papers suggested that more should be done to help Jews fleeing this persecution ‘although they themselves could offer few workable solutions to the refugee crisis’.125
Overall, it is important to remember that the British interest in understanding Nazism, and in engaging with accounts given by its victims, was always part of a larger context of engagement with other political causes and crises. British observers engaged with the subject of Nazism and its persecution of victims through lenses that were influenced by external factors, including negative or ambivalent feelings about Jews, an investment in positive Anglo-German relations, awareness of Empire, and political ideas about the promise or threat of Communism, which was seen by many to be the only possible alternative to Nazism. As the persecution of Jews under Nazism went on, it was increasingly observed internationally in the context of the resulting ‘refugee crisis’, and possible solutions to it. In his study of the British Press during appeasement, Gannon concluded that ‘again and again we have seen how attitudes towards other problems and issues determined newspaper policy towards Germany’.126 The same is true for British publishing houses, and for individual readers.
Studying how German and Austrian refugees’ accounts of persecution under Nazism were translated for – and received by – British readers can show us far more about dominant concepts and conditions in 1930s/1940s Britain than it can about conditions under Nazism in Germany or Austria. Editors, translators and publishers all had a role to play in mediating victims’ texts in ways that would make them accessible to British audiences, but their interventions also affected the way that victims’ experiences were understood in Britain, sometimes obscuring details that, with hindsight, seem profoundly important. Prejudices and confirmation bias played a large part in shaping how British observers responded to accounts of Nazi persecution by both Jews and non-Jews. On the whole, my study suggests that British people read memoirs by victims of Nazi persecution not only to learn about Nazism or to understand international politics, but, more importantly, in order to have their own ideas (both hopes and fears) confirmed. In my concluding chapter, I consider the elision of details about victims’ identities as a form of censorship, and reflect on the inevitability of such forms of censorship in a political framework determined by narratives of victimhood.