Yvonne Kapp - British Policy and the Refugees, 1933-1941

'When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.'

Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)

Yvonne Kapp and
Margaret Mynatt

With a Foreword by Charmian Brinson

First Publishedin 1997 in Great Britain and in the United States of A merica by
FRANK CASS & CO. LTD.

Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 100 17 USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1997 Yvonne Kapp
1996 Foreword 1997 Charmian Brinson

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

Kapp, Yvonne

British policy and the refugees, 1933-1941
1. Refugees Government policy Great Britain History 20th century

I. Title II. Mynatt, Margaret
325.2'1'0941'09043

ISBN 978 0-7146-4797-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978 0-7146-4352-6 (paper)
ISBN 978 1-3150-3680-9 (eISBN)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Typeset by
Vitaset, Paddock Wood, Kent

British Policy and the Refugees, largely written during the second half of 1940, came about at the time of Britain's lowest ebb in the fight against National Socialist Germany. April, May and June 1940 had witnessed dramatic and ominous events on the continent: one by one, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France had been invaded by the German Army and, falling in quick succession, now formed part of German-occupied Europe. In late May and early June the British Expeditionary Force had had to be evacuated from Dunkirk with considerable loss of life as well as very serious losses in equipment. To many it seemed merely a matter of time until Britain, too, would be invaded.

The political events in Germany in the preceding seven years, the period of Nazi supremacy there, had resulted in large numbers of Jewish and political refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia seeking refuge in those European countries that had since fallen to Germany or, as in Britain, were anxiously facing such a prospect. In France, in fact, almost all adult male German residents had been arrested at the outbreak of war, regardless of the status of the majority of them as refugees from Nazi oppression. In his influential Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, Sebastian Haffner, in exile in Britain, had condemned France's attitude to its potential allies in the fight against Nazism as a 'catastrophic defeat on the psychological battle field' and had maintained further:

The internment of German emigrants is not a trifling bureaucratic lapse, but a deliberate political gesture. It says more clearlythan any ministerial speech that the war is being waged against the German people, including those who have proved themselves anti-Hitlerian and friendly to the Allies.

As the present study indicates, the containment of the upwards of 70,000 German-speaking refugees in exile in Britain proceeded initially in a rather less hasty manner. On the outbreak of war, a few hundred enemy aliens were interned as an immediate security measure while the remainder were soon afterwards categorised by tribunals according to their perceived degree of security risk (with 'A' indicating a high risk factor, 'B' that some uncertainty could be held to exist and 'C' that loyalty to the British cause was not in question). Category 'A' aliens were then also interned, category 'B' were subject to certain restrictions, while category 'C' by far the majority continued to enjoy unrestricted freedom. 'The principles', as the authors of this book, Yvonne Kapp and Margaret Mynatt, themselves concede, 'were reasonable.' Yet, on an individual level, there were very many instances where the system was patently unjust, attended as it was by much confusion and ignorance as well as by inconsistencies from tribunal to tribunal. For example, some tribunals took a highly unfavourable view of socialist or communist refugees who came up before them regardless of the impeccable anti-Nazi record many of them enjoyed and categorised them accordingly. Indeed, to cite only one such case, in March 1940 the New Statesman and Nation was moved to speak out against the treatment meted out at a Hampstead tribunal to the noted economist and statistician Jrgen Kuczynski, who had previously been active in the communist underground in Nazi Germany, and his father, the population expert R. R. Kuczynski, then lecturing at the London School of Economics:

I cannot understand why R. R. Kuczynski could ever have come under suspicion at all, as he is a researcher with a world-wide reputation, and has never had any connections with a political party. But the judge seemed to find grounds for suspicion even in his trips to America and asked him, to the old man's surprise, whether he had any connection with an espionage system in Bloomsbury House! Finally, in summing up his case, the judge remarked 'I am not going to intern you to-day,' and in granting his wife a 'B' certificate stated that the ground was that she was living under the subversive influence of her husband. When her husband protested and reminded the judge that he was teaching at the London School of Economics, the judge replied ominously, 'I know all about the London School of Economics.' J. Kuczynski was subjected to an even severer cross-examination. It seemed to be held against him that he had written Hunger and Work and Freedom Calling, although the Ministry of Information has given the latter pamphlet its blessing ... He was also pestered about the mysterious espionage system in Blooms-bury House, and when he replied that he had no connection with it, the judge added 'That doesn't answer the question, you might be connected with someone who was connected with the espionage system.' The result of this remarkable examination was a 'B' licence for the elder and internment for the younger Kuczynski. The j udge seemed suspicious of any trace of anti-Nazi activity ...