Others marked as “most wanted” were social reformers like Nettie Adler, daughter of a chief rabbi and activist for impoverished Jewish women, and humanitarian Victor Gollancz. Only around 11 per cent were women, among them prison reformer Marjorie Fry and actress Sybil Thorndike, reflecting, said Oldfield, the fact that “the Nazis didn’t think there would be important women to worry about”.
Early reports after the war mostly focused on the list’s non-Jewish celebrity names, such as Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, EM Forster, JB Priestley, Sylvia Pankhurst, Noel Coward and actress Dame Sybil Thorndike.
But as Oldfield’s book makes clear, more than half were Jews, including what she has calculated as amounting to 2 per cent of all Jewish refugees in Britain at the time. Her book provides pen portraits of the entire list, from future Nobel laureate Ernst Chain to the largely forgotten artist Eduard Arnthal and writer Stefan Zweig.
“The papers [at the time] were only interested in the English non-refugees so people haven’t really realised until quite recently that the Gestapo were out to get Jews again,” said Oldfield. In fact, for the Nazis the list was about “getting rid of the evidence of Jewish brilliance”.
“They despised Jews, they could not believe that Jews could do anything, and these were all the people who refuted that, because they were brilliant minds, people who were exceptional in every field.”
The Gestapo drew up the list by pouring over anti-fascist leaflets and simply by reading the papers, looking at signatories of letters to The Times or the Manchester Guardian railing against appeasement. “They were counter-intelligence, it was partly their job was to find out who were the ideological enemies,” said Oldfield. “There were different kinds of people who were very, very strongly anti-Nazi, whether they were pacifists or refugee rescuers or reformers, and so they knew they had to get rid of them, fast.
“When you’re fighting a war you’ve got to get rid of the people who don’t share your values, who are going to undermine you. They thought who would be their ideological enemies,” she said. “If the Nazis had invaded [these people] would have been absolutely first to die.”
Oldfield, who consulted sources including the Association of Jewish Refugees’ archive, said the list was a key to the Nazi plan “to Nazify Britain”. “I hadn’t understood how detailed they were already in working out who they first had to get rid of,” she said.
Although most copies were destroyed in bombings of Germany, the list was discovered after the war and copies are now housed in archives including the Imperial War Museum. It also named as targets numerous “Vereinigungen” (associations), including most Jewish groups, every political party and myriad trade associations and representative groups, from the Quakers to the Jewish Board of Guardians and the YMCA.
The Gestapo left space for additional names. “It was a rushed job just before the invasion, and I think they realised this was something they were going to have to continue with,” said Oldfield. “It could have been much longer [had things gone the way they were hoping]. It would have run to millions, because there would have been many, many more Jews.”
In some cases, the Nazis’ research failed: Albert Einstein and the nuclear physicist Leo Szilard were featured despite having already moved to New York, and Sigmund Freud remained on it posthumously. Some were included despite being what Oldfield calls “ultra-fascists,” simply because they had jumped ship when it became obvious war would break out; not least George Ward Price, a Daily Mail writer “who was Hitler’s favourite British journalist” and a good friend of Oswald Mosley.
Most, however, were staunch anti-fascists, and many would go on to contribute to British life. Others met more tragic ends; Oldfield has uncovered the fate of Rudolf Oden, a German-Jewish lawyer who fled to Britain and struggled to continue to work.
Despite his outspoken anti-Nazism, he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’, before opting to emigrate to America for an academic job. Setting sail in 1940, he and his wife never made it after their ship was torpedoed.
Another sad story is that of Lina Wertheimer, the Jewish secretary of Richard Merton, a German-Jewish steel industrialist who had made it to Britain. Despite his best efforts to get her a visa as his housekeeper, she never got out and is believed to have died in Sobibor.
Although the list’s existence was unconfirmed during the war, those on it would have suspected they were “most wanted”. “They were going for people who had stuck their necks out to be anti-Nazi,” said Oldfield, whose German grandparents were socialists and pacifists. “The Gestapo lived by making lists of people to get rid of.”
Oldfield’s book attempts to recover the often-forgotten stories of these pre-war anti-Nazi campaigners. “I was very happy to discover these marvellous people. These were heroes and heroines of humane lives,” she said. “It’s about telling the stories of the people who have been forgotten about, who we don’t know about.”
In her view, we don’t know nearly enough about the anti-Nazis. “These people haven’t had enough attention and if the Nazis paid them attention then it’s rather important that we should to see why,” she said. “This list is in one way a great document of British history.”
