Sybil Oldfield - The Black Book

THE BLACK BOOK

Britons on the Nazi Hit List

SYBIL OLDFIELD

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC 1 A 7 JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Sybil Oldfield, 2020

Extract from W. H Audens Twelve Songs from

W. H. Auden Selected Poems(Faber & Faber, 2010).

Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset in Swift Neue by MacGuru Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 508 2

eISBN 978 1 78283 697 1

In memory of my husband Derek Oldfield, 19242008 and my companion Gwen Shaw, 19232018 two rare spirits.

We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead.
Natalia Ginzburg, Human Relations, in The Little Virtues

Whom to thank first?

My dear companion, the late Gwen Shaw, was an indispensable support right into her nineties, with her unfailing belief in the project. All her seven children took a more than polite interest in the book, but I owe special thanks to Daniel, Phil, Martin and Cathie Shaw who went out of their way to help me with research questions and computer knowhow.

I am indebted to my friend Dr Elspeth Knights for her many helpful comments and for tracking down material in the British Library and to the late Professor Edward Timms, Professor Rod Kedward, Professor John Roehl, Professor Cedric Watts and Nicholas Tucker, all former colleagues at Sussex, who read parts of the manuscript or else encouraged me to keep going. As did my friends, the historian Lyn Smith and her late husband Peter Smith. Abhinav Kumar and Andrew Huggett were indispensable word-processing buffs and, as always, I owed a lot to the patience and knowledge of the librarians at the University of Sussex.

Finally, my agent, Maggie Hanbury found me my publisher and Ed Lake of Profile Books found me my assiduous, skilled editor Natasha Lehrer. My copy editor, Penny Gardiner, was superb.

Thank you all.

Few people nowadays know very much about the Gestapos Black Book and its implications. Even fewer know of more than a dozen of the most famous English names that it included. Anonymous, with no publisher, and stamped GEHEIM!(SECRET!), it was compiled in German by the Gestapo and their informants at some time between 19367 and July 1940, in readiness for a German invasion of Britain.

This is the first serious attempt to identify, classify and analyse a significant sample of the hundreds of anti-Nazi men and women, both British-born and refugee, targeted by the Nazi secret police in the Black Book. I deliberately include as Britons those Jewish refugees who, stripped of their German or Austrian citizenship, would become naturalised British and who comprise the majority of those on the List. I also include those of them who contributed indispensably to the British war effort but who did not become permanent British citizens after the war.