CHAPTER TWELVE
In 1936, at the height of the Partition debate, Churchill met Eugen Spier, a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism who was living in Britain. Churchill was looking for some means to make the Nazi danger more widely known to the public, with the help of leaders in all walks of public life. Spier later recalled how 19 May 1936 ‘saw the first luncheon of a new group, later called the Focus, aimed at bringing together representatives of all Parties and groups opposed to Nazism.’ Between May 1936 and the summer of 1939, Spier contributed £9,600 towards the organisation of the Focus.1 Its members gave Churchill an important phalanx of support in his anti-Nazi stance.2
While on holiday in France in 1936, Churchill learned more about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. On 13 September 1936 he wrote to his wife from the South of France: ‘I dined near Toulon with Frau Friedlander Fuld now Mrs Goldsmith Rothschild. She was pathetic about the treatment of the Jews in Germany. They have a terrible time. She is a remarkable woman.’3
Dominant in Churchill’s political philosophy was the primacy of open debate, fair play and equal rights. Speaking in Paris on 24 September – the object of this French visit – he set out what he believed to be the basic evils of both the Nazi and Communist systems. For him persecution of opinion and of race had no justification. ‘Between the doctrines of Herr Goebbels and Comrade Trotsky,’ he declared, ‘there ought to be room for you and me…’4
While in France, Churchill spent time with the Prime Minister, Leon Blum – who was soon to visit him at Chartwell – and with one of Blum’s senior Cabinet colleagues, Georges Mandel, both Jewish politicians and strong opponents of the appeasement of Germany. In 1940, Mandel was one of the French Cabinet ministers who argued in favour of continuing the war in North Africa. For this patriotic stance, and because he was a Jew, Mandel was murdered by the Vichy French police. Churchill was deeply moved by his fate, and in 1946 sent his son Randolph to represent him at the anniversary ceremony at the site in the forest near Fontainebleau, where the murder had taken place.5
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On 13 November 1936, Churchill wrote to his son Randolph to explain that the basis of the Anti-Nazi League, which he had recently helped to launch, ‘is of course Jewish resentment at their abominable persecution. But we are now taking broader ground rather on the lines of my Paris speech.’ A Peace with Freedom committee had been formed. It aimed ‘at focusing and concentrating the efforts of all the Peace societies like the New Commonwealth and the League of Nations Union in so far as they are prepared to support genuine military action to resist tyranny or aggression.’6
In his letter to Randolph, Churchill referred to the New York lawyer, Louis Levy, who had helped Churchill on a personal matter. This concerned Victor Oliver von Samek, a thirty-eight-year-old, twice divorced, Austrian-born Jewish actor, radio comedian and pianist known by his stage name as Vic Oliver, who had eloped earlier that year with Churchill’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Sarah. Churchill had asked Levy to find out the details of Oliver’s second marriage, to make sure that the divorce had been finalised – Churchill had already obtained details of the first marriage and divorce in Austria – and also to find out if there were ‘any more of these marriages besides these two.’ Levy was able to put Churchill’s mind at ease. Oliver was free to marry Sarah, and Churchill acquired a Jewish son-in-law.
Churchill was supportive of Sarah and her choice. When the couple travelled to the United States on a German liner, he made sure, through his contacts at the Home Office, that no harm would come to an Austrian-born Jew on board a German ship. Two years later, Churchill wrote to Sir Alexander Maxwell, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, who had served under him twenty-eight years earlier, of Vic Oliver’s wish to become a naturalised British subject. ‘Although,’ he wrote, ‘in the first instance, as you may have heard, I opposed his marriage with my daughter, I have come to like and esteem him greatly and I am sure that any assistance you can give to his wish will be well bestowed.’7
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In the East End of London, Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists and a group of predominantly Communist Jews clashed in 1936 in what was known as the Battle of Cable Street. Churchill’s concerns about Communism in Britain led him to write in the Evening Standard, three weeks after his Paris speech: ‘It is especially important that British Jewry should keep itself absolutely clear from this brawling. In Great Britain the law-abiding Jew need not look to the Communist for protection. He will get that as his right from the Constable.’8
Reading these sentences, Churchill’s friend Desmond Morton, a devout Roman Catholic, wrote to him: ‘I am no anti-Semitist, no more are you. It is a matter I do not remember your having touched upon in public before. The paragraph seemed to me to hint at more than it expressed.’9 What it did express was Churchill’s fear of any Communist affiliation and activity, whether by Jews or non-Jews.
Churchill continued to issue his warnings about Nazi tyranny. On 5 February 1937, in the Evening Standard, he wrote of how the Nazi regime in Germany was imposing its power and ideology. ‘The hate-culture continues,’ he pointed out, ‘fostered by printing press and broadcast – the very instruments, in fact, which philosophers might have hoped would liberate mankind from such perils.’10
That spring, Churchill was asked to write an article about an issue then much debated: should the Jews, wherever they lived, find ways to challenge the persecution of German Jewry, or should they leave that task to the governments among whom they lived. In a note that he dictated to his secretary on 26 April, Churchill set out for his literary assistant Adam Marshall Diston, the topics he wanted the article to cover. ‘Obviously there are four things,’ Churchill wrote. ‘The first is to be a good citizen of the country to which he belongs. The second is to avoid too exclusive an association in ordinary matters of business and daily life, and to mingle as much as possible with non-Jews everywhere, apart from race and religion. The third is to keep the Jewish movement free from Communism. The fourth is a perfectly legitimate use of their influence throughout the world to bring pressure, economic and financial, to bear upon the Governments which persecute them.’11
Churchill was about to gain a far wider readership for his articles than he could have imagined possible. The cause of this change was a Hungarian Jew, Imre Revesz – later known as Emery Reves. Setting up his literary agency in Berlin in the early 1930s, and syndicating articles by leading European democratic politicians, Reves was forced by the rise of Hitler to move his organisation to Paris. There he began again, extending the number of anti-Nazi writers whose worked he syndicated. On 25 February 1937, in London, Churchill and Reves met for the first time. They met again four days later, when Churchill agreed to give Reves exclusive rights for the publication of all his articles ‘of international interest’, outside the British Empire and North America.
Reves would arrange for the translations and, where possible, for simultaneous publication in all European countries. Reves would pay Churchill sixty per cent of the proceeds, with a guaranteed minimum of £25 for each article sold: more than £500 in today’s values. By the end of the year he had placed Churchill’s articles every two weeks in twenty-five different European cities, among them seventeen capitals: Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Luxembourg, Oslo, Helsinki, Riga, Tallin, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Kaunas, Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest and Budapest. Also among the regular publishers of Churchill’s articles were the main Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw, Vilna and Kovno, enabling three large Jewish communities to follow Churchill’s warnings. Reves also placed the articles in two Palestine newspapers read mostly by Jews, the Tel Aviv Hebrew-language Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem English-language Palestine Post.12
In an article in the Evening Standard on 17 September 1937, which Reves placed in newspapers throughout Europe, Churchill appealed to Hitler to become ‘the Hitler of peace.’ It was, he felt, the last chance for Hitler to halt the massive rearmament that could only mean war. ‘We cannot say that we admire your treatment of the Jews or of the Protestants and Catholics of Germany,’ Churchill wrote, ‘but these matters, so long as they are confined inside Germany, are not our business.’ What mattered was for Germany to give up its desire for conquest.13
In an attempt to seek constructive agreement with Germany, the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent a senior Conservative, Lord Halifax, to visit Hitler. The visit was discussed – and by some denounced – in the House of Commons on 21 December. Chamberlain expressed his regret that the debate was taking place at all. During the debate, Churchill, turning his back on his placatory appeal to Hitler of three months earlier, spoke critically of the persecution of the Jews in Germany. ‘It is a horrible thing,’ he said, ‘that a race of people should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born.’
Churchill went on to express his unease about Lord Halifax’s visit to Berlin at a time when Germany was beginning to demand the transfer of the industrially rich German-speaking region of Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. ‘We must remember,’ he said, ‘how very sharp the European situation is at the present time. If it were thought that we were making terms for ourselves at the expense either of small nations or of large conceptions which are dear, not only to many nations, but to millions of people in every nation, a knell of despair would resound through many parts of Europe.’14
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The mounting tension in Europe in 1938 and the situation in Palestine were inextricably linked. The continuing flight of Jewish refugees from Germany to Palestine was provoking renewed Arab violence, much of it Arab attacks and ambushes against the British, who built a series of Beau Geste forts throughout the country, with machine gun pillboxes at every entrance to Jerusalem. The Jews were also divided, with a small but active minority – fiercely denounced by Weizmann and Ben-Gurion – turning to acts of terror against both the Arabs and the British. A grim cycle of violence had emerged: Arab acts of terror against Jews, Jewish reprisals against Arabs, British military force against both sets of insurgents, Arab extremists murdering several hundred Arab moderates, and German and Italian radio propaganda inflaming Arab intransigence: all threatening the future sanity of a tormented Holy Land.
On 20 October Churchill published his thoughts in an article in the Daily Telegraph entitled ‘Palestine at the Crossroads’. The article appeared three weeks after the Munich Agreement, of which Churchill was one of the leading opponents. At Munich, to Hitler’s surprise, Britain and France had pressed the Czechoslovak government to let him annex its industrially rich Sudetenland region, which was also Czechoslovakia’s natural and fortified line of defence. ‘Amid world preoccupation,’ Churchill wrote, ‘the conditions in Palestine have passed into eclipse,’ but ‘the lull in Europe, while the victorious Nazis are gathering their spoil, forces us to turn our eyes to this distracted country, for which we are responsible.’ It was a ‘shocking scene’ that met the view. ‘The whole of this small province is sinking into anarchy. Jews and Arabs carry on hideous vendettas of murder and reprisal. Bombs are thrown among harmless villagers on market days. Women and children are massacred by Arab raiders in the night. The roads are being broken up. The railways have largely ceased to work.’
British control was proving hard to maintain. ‘A considerable portion of the British regular army, together with large bodies of armed police, hold the main centres of Government, and sally forth upon foray and patrol.’ A ‘rival administration’ had been set up by the Arab ‘rebels’ and ruled over considerable areas. In addition, ‘the rebels are powerfully aided by arms, explosives, money and propaganda from German and Italian sources.’
Every few days the newspapers reported Arab deaths in action against the British. ‘The spectacle is vexatious and discreditable,’ Churchill wrote. ‘Great Britain is called upon at immense expense and trouble, and some loss of life, to carry on a policy of severe repression, with all its painful features, not for her own sake, but because of the bitter racial feud which has now developed between the Arab and Jew.’ Hitler and Mussolini ‘mock at the ill-success of our methods,’ pointing the moral of British ‘inefficiency’. It was a charge, Churchill noted, for which there was ‘more than sufficient foundation.’
With the start of the Arab riots in 1936, Churchill pointed out, the British Government had found ‘the line of least resistance’ in sending out the Peel Commission. After further delays, ‘during which the state of the country steadily deteriorated’, a second Commission, headed by Sir John Woodhead, had been sent out ‘to report upon the methods by which the report of the first Commission should be brought into operation. Meanwhile everything grew worse: murders began and reprisals were taken, reinforcements were brought in driblets, strong measures were taken by halves, and so by an unbroken process of vacillation and weakness the country has degenerated into its present horrible plight; and a blood feud has grown between the Arab and Jew, of which the end cannot be foreseen.’
One solution that had been proposed was ‘to throw up our task as insoluble’ and return the Mandate to the League of Nations. Britain would have to admit ‘that we had tried our best, and that we had found ourselves incapable of discharging our duty.’ No doubt Germany and Italy ‘would eagerly come forward’ to offer to take over the Mandate, ‘if only for the strategic advantages which Palestine would offer to them.’ But if the Mandate were not to be given up, what, Churchill asked, remained? His answer was clear: ‘There remains only the policy of fidelity and perseverance. We must unflinchingly restore order, and suppress the campaign of murder and counter-murder between the two races. We must give protection to the large Jewish community already established in the country; but we should also give to the Arabs a solemn assurance embodied if possible in an agreement to which Arab and Jew should be invited to subscribe, that the annual quota of Jewish immigration should not exceed a certain figure for a period of at least ten years.’
Churchill recognised that proposing any form of restriction on Jewish immigration for the coming ten years would, as he wrote in his article, ‘arouse a furious outcry, and involve us in a long and thankless task, but should it seem the only way, we must face it with steadfastness and conviction if we are still to preserve our good name.’15
That outcry was not long in coming. On the day after Churchill’s article, Lionel Bakstansky, General Secretary of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, wrote to Sir Archibald Sinclair, Churchill’s friend and a friend of the Zionists, that Churchill’s statement ‘that the large Jewish immigration of 1933/5 was a cause of the upheaval,’ overlooked the fact ‘that immigration coincided with a period of the greatest prosperity which Palestine has enjoyed.’ As for Churchill’s suggestion of restricted Jewish immigration for a period of ten years, ‘I need not tell you,’ Bakstansky wrote, ‘how surprising it is that such a suggestion should come from him, who was responsible for the introduction of the economic absorptive capacity principle in 1922, and how unfortunate it is that he should lend his weight and authority to such a proposal at this particular juncture in the history of the Jewish people, when between six and seven million Jews in Europe are for all practical purposes either homeless or devoid of permanent security.’
It was also ‘unfortunate’, Bakstansky wrote, that Churchill’s article should have appeared ‘at a moment when we have reason to believe that the British Government itself is contemplating its future policy in Palestine on the basis of a severely restricted Jewish immigration.’ Hitherto the Zionists had noticed ‘some reluctance’ on the British Government’s part to proceed with such a policy ‘in the light of their knowledge of House of Commons opinion and their belief that such a policy would not command friendly support in Parliamentary circles.’ Churchill’s article, however, might ‘change the whole situation and induce the Government to proceed with a distinctly restrictive policy. We feel that it is most urgent that it should be made known to the Government that Churchill’s view is not supported by those who have played a leading part in the Palestine controversy in Parliament.’16
Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues were convinced that the Arabs were not to be alienated. They saw the issue in the perspective of Britain’s dependence in the Mediterranean and Middle East on Arab and Muslim goodwill. In 1938 Britain was the largest single ruler of Muslims in the world, with twenty million Muslim subjects in British India alone. In addition to its own Muslim subjects, Britain was reliant upon two independent Muslim countries, Egypt and Iran: Egypt for the security of the Suez Canal and the imperial route to the East, and Iran for the security of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s production, essential for Britain’s oil-burning warships.
The Cabinet was convinced that a quiescent Arab and Muslim world was essential for Britain, and that if appeasement was required to secure that quiescence, the government’s commitments to the Jews in Palestine were an obvious sacrifice. The fate of the Jews in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv had become vulnerable to pressure exerted in Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Baghdad and Riyadh; pressure that was proving all-too effective.
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The worsening situation in Germany had come to dominate Jewish concerns. One weekend in May, Churchill was at a country house in Dorset where the other guests included James de Rothschild and his wife Dorothy. A few days later, James de Rothschild, a member of the Other Club, the private dining club of which Churchill was a founder, wrote to him of how ‘you spoke with such sympathy last week’ about the Jewish situation in Germany. But Rothschild reminded Churchill that he had mentioned ‘that the number of Jews in the various professions and occupations had been, in the days before Hitler, very high in comparison with the proportion which Jews bore to the total population.’ This claim, Rothschild pointed out, had been ‘fostered by Nazi propaganda, and has been widely accepted.’17
With his letter James de Rothschild enclosed an article that had appeared in the Manchester Guardian more than two and a half years earlier, on 3 January 1936, ‘which disproves this by official German statistics.’ The article noted that Nazi propaganda ‘speaks of a Jewish monopoly and complains that non-Jewish Germans were unable to find a place in these professions’ but that ‘a glance at the official statistics proves the contrary.’
The 564,379 Jews of Germany at the most recent census – that of 1925 – made up 0.9 per cent of the total German population. The highest Jewish percentage before Hitler came to power had been among lawyers – both barristers and solicitors – where it amounted to 16.25 per cent of the German population. The percentage of Jewish doctors was 10.88. In German cultural life, 5.61 per cent of theatre producers were Jews, 5.05 per cent of editors and authors, 3 per cent of actors and dancers, 2.44 per cent of painters and sculptors, and 2.04 per cent of musicians and singers. Among university teachers the percentage was 2.64 per cent. The percentage of Jews among teachers in the elementary and secondary schools was 0.53 per cent. These percentages, commented the Manchester Guardian, were ‘neither a stranglehold nor a monopoly.’18
In the light of these facts, Churchill never repeated his erroneous remarks. He followed closely the developments in Germany, which included increasingly rapid rearmament, and the onward thrust of anti-Jewish legislation and violence.
In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria. The swastika flag was raised over the Austrian parliament building and Hitler entered Vienna in triumph. The persecution of Jews began from the first days of the new regime. Writing in the Daily Telegraph on 6 July, Churchill drew attention to events in Austria since its annexation by Germany four months earlier. ‘It is easy to ruin and persecute the Jews,’ he wrote, ‘to steal their property; to drive them out of every profession and employment; to fling a Rothschild into a prison or a sponging house; to compel Jewish ladies to scrub the pavements; and to maroon clusters of helpless refugees on islands in the Danube; and these sports continue to give satisfaction.’ It was part of the policy of German Nazism, Churchill added, ‘to treat with exemplary rigour all persons of German race who have not identified themselves with Nazi interests and ambitions.’19
Eight days after Churchill wrote this article, he and Professor Lindemann met Gauleiter Foerster, the leader of the Nazi Party in the Free City of Danzig, which had been separated from Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. Foerster had long demanded the city’s re-unification with Germany. The first topic Churchill and Foerster discussed was the Jews of Danzig, numbering 4,000 in all. According to Churchill’s memorandum of the conversation, which he sent to Lord Halifax: ‘I remarked that I was glad they had not introduced the anti-Jewish laws’ in Danzig. To which Foerster replied that the Jewish problem was not acute in Danzig, but that ‘he was anxious to know whether this type of legislation in Germany would prevent an understanding with England. I replied that it was a hindrance and an irritation, but probably not a complete obstacle to a working agreement, though it might be to comprehension. He appeared to attach great importance to this point.’20
Between the end of 1938 and the outbreak of war a year later, all but 1,600 of Danzig’s Jews had been allowed to emigrate. Many of the remainder left in early 1940, and were on board the doomed passenger liner Patria, with whose fate Churchill was to be directly concerned. Only six hundred remained in the city when the deportations began in 1942; almost none of them survived.
At Chartwell on 19 August, another of Churchill’s German visitors was Major Ewald von Kleist, one of the German General Staff officers opposed to Hitler’s expansionist plans, who told Churchill that if they could only receive ‘a little encouragement they might refuse to march’ against Czechoslovakia.21 After Kleist’s visit, Churchill appealed publicly for the German officer corps to overthrow Hitler. Responding to this in a speech at Weimar on 6 November, Hitler attacked Churchill by name. ‘Mr Churchill has declared openly that in his opinion the present régime in Germany should be abolished in cooperation with internal German forces who would put themselves gratefully at his disposal for the purpose. If Mr Churchill had less to do with émigrés, that is to say, exiled foreign paid traitors, and more to do with Germans, then he would see the whole idiocy and stupidity of what he says. I can only assure this gentleman that there is in Germany no such power as could set itself against the present régime.’22
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On 28 October the German Government had begun a mass expulsion of all 20,000 Polish Jews resident in Germany. The expulsions, which took place amid scenes of brutality and hardship, provoked Herschel Grynszpan, the seventeen-year-old son of one of the families expelled, to shoot and mortally wound a diplomat in the German Embassy in Paris. The shooting took place on 7 November. Two days later the German newspapers accused Churchill of being linked to the murder plot. The Angriff newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Minister of Propaganda, Dr Goebbels, headlined the murder: ‘The work of the instigator-international: A straight line from Churchill to Grynszpan.’
The Angriff article went on to state: ‘While in London the Churchill clique, unmasked by the Führer, was busy with sanctimonious deception, in Paris the murder weapon spat in the hands of a Jewish lout and destroyed the last measurable remnants of credibility in the assertion that agitation for war and murder against the Third Reich has never been carried on or contemplated.’23
Despite Hitler’s allegations, there had been no international plot, only a desperate act by a despairing individual. But when the German diplomat succumbed to his wounds, it was made the excuse for a violent anti-Jewish pogrom throughout Germany, beginning in the early hours of 10 November. More than a thousand synagogues and places of worship were set on fire, several thousand homes ransacked, hundreds of Jews savagely beaten, and more than ninety murdered. Within a few days, 30,000 Jews were arrested: scholars, doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, shopkeepers, teachers, men who had once played a leading part in German national and civic life, and former front-line soldiers who had fought in the German army in the First World War. All were sent to concentration camps, where most were beaten and tortured, and several thousand were killed. Anti-Jewish measures intensified. On 13 November the Jews were ordered to cease all trading and business activities by the end of the year. A massive fine was then imposed on the whole Jewish community of Germany for the Paris murder.
Churchill’s correspondents kept him informed of these developments. From Paris, Emery Reves sent him full reports of what he had learned. In London, Ian Colvin, a British journalist with well-placed contacts in Berlin, sent Churchill notes of a secret speech Hitler had made, just after the pogrom, to ‘three or four of the highest functionaries’ of the German Foreign Ministry. The notes began: ‘He wanted to eliminate from German life the Jews, the Churches, and suppress private industry. After that, he would turn to foreign policy again.’24