A very British hit list

 by Daria Bedenko

The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist: Sybil Oldfield, 448 pp, Profile Books London 2020; Hardback £25 ; Paperback £9.99 Kindle £8.85

The Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, had a plan for the invasion of the United Kingdom in 1940.It was called Operation Sea Lion. But the Germans failed to achieve air and naval superiority over the English Channel and the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain
    Now new details of the failed plan have come to light. Author Sybil Oldfield, in a book titled The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi List, looks at those who would be the first to go if Hitler had won. The Nazi ‘Black Book’ hit-list contains the names of over 3,000 prominent British subjects who would be rounded up by the Germans had they succeeded in occupying Britain.
    Those on this ‘Black Book’ list were to be placed under house arrest or thrown into “newly constructed camps”. Some could face an even worse fate.
    SS Colonel Franz Six, a professor tasked with leading the elimination of any opposition to the Nazis in Britain, was green-lighted to “set up Einsatzgruppen [paramilitary SS death squads]… as the situation dictates and the necessity arises”, Oldfield says.
    The Black Book was intended to serve as a handbook for troops occupying the UK while also containing names of people subject to arrest. Compiled under the oversight of SS Colonel Walter Schellenberg it claimed Jews in the media promoted “anti-German influence” and that “almost the whole of Britain was really controlled by very rich, assimilated British Jews”.
     “Once I so quickly discovered that these anti-fascist Britons … were marvellous human beings — brave, humane, intelligent — the more I wanted to learn more and then share it,” Oldfield told The Times of Israel.
    Among those included in the blacklist were Winston Churchill along with his cabinet; senior Labour politicians, trade unionists; well-known pre-war anti-fascists and many British Jews. They included the man who later became the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann; Oscar Deutsch, the owner of the Odeon cinema chain; film producers Ivor Montagu and Isidore Ostrer; and Lords Melchett and Bearsted from the financial sphere.
    The list also included Albert Einstein as well as nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and Black singer Paul Robeson, although all three had already fled to the United States.
`    The round up didn’t only target people. Organisations were also going to be dealt with by the Nazis. These included Penguin Books and the Left Book Club, Freemasons and the Rotary club, the Transport and General Workers Union, as well as the YMCA, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Quakers.
    Oldfield said that the main goal of her book was to find out why the listed Britons were “suspected above all others of having the potential to obstruct the successful Nazification of Great Britain” along with making sure that what she believes is a “gap” in the historical record - the efforts of those resisting fascism before the war - is filled.
     “It’s rather disturbing that the Nazis, who seem to exercise a sort of taboo fascination in popular consciousness, a forbidden darkness, always somehow get the headlines,” she said.
Sputnik

Rocket Wars

by Ben Soton

V2 by Robert Harris. London: Hutchinson (2020). Hardback: 320pp; rrp £20.00. Paperback:320pp; rrp £10.99.

Historical fiction is a good way of learning historical facts; more people died making the V2 missile than were killed by it. Its victims included 200,000 slave labourers as well as 2,700 civilian casualties mostly in greater London. With this in mind its creator Wernher Von Braun, who was after all an officer in the SS, should have been put on trial for war crimes. The V2 rocket, correct name Retribution Weapon II is the subject and title of Robert Harris latest novel. The novel revolves around two opposing groups of people; those who launched it and those employed to stop it.
    Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) is part of a group of women using mathematical formulae to calculate the location of the V2 launch sites. She is stationed in the northern Belgian town of Mechelen, recently liberated by the allies. Kay is led astray by vivacious friend Barbara; a touch of Bletchley Girls meets Sex and the City. The local population is desperately short of food and it is difficult to know who to trust. Around eight thousand Belgians joined the Walloon Legion; later integrated into the SS and responsible for numerous atrocities in the Soviet Union.
     Although it was largely destroyed by Soviet forces in the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket in February 1944 its founder Leon Degrelle saw the SS as the first European Army. Are there any more reasons why Remainers should shut themselves away in darkened rooms and hang their heads in shame?
    Ninety-four miles away in the Dutch town of Scheveningen, close to the Hague is Dr Rudi Graf. His job is to launch the V2s. Graf’s story is intertwined with innocent boyhood dreams of space travel, combined with disillusionment with an evil and soon to be defeated regime. Much of Graf’s story concentrates on the technical failings of the V2 and as the novel reaches its climax Graf struggles continually harder with his conscience.
    V2 was written in the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. There are no doubt parallels between today’s NHS workers in the fight against Covid-19 and those, like the WAAF who worked in the backrooms of World War II to limit the damage done by V-weapons. Harris, despite his dreadful politics is still a master of historical fiction and V2 is no exception.

Drive the racists off the streets

Reports that former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson has applied to join UKIP is causing ripples amongst what’s left of that Eurosceptic party. Even Nigel Farage seems dismayed at the prospect of someone once seen as the leader of a bunch of racist thugs joining the party he once led.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, thinks “the British working class will be electrified” if he joins UKIP. But Robinson is a vain man with an inflated view of his own importance and UKIP counts for little these days.

Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, much later said that his subsequent heirs were “dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants” who were presumably Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Mosley seldom got anything right after he left the second pre-war Labour Government but he was, on this occasion, spot on.

Robinson’s followers largely consist of the ageing racists in the two rival “football lads” movements that having been marching through unwelcoming streets to hurl abuse at Muslims, and everyone else they hate, during the summer break in the football season. These drunken thugs are not Hitler’s legions nor Mosley’s Blackshirts. They cause misery through the trouble they stir wherever they go and their antics can incite random violence against ethnic minorities. But Robinson is not the Duce and the rabble who follow him are not going to March on London anytime now.

The ‘Football Lads’ are very loosely organised former football hooligans and veteran neo-Nazis. Their main agenda is to engage in street fighting and they will pick on any likely target. When they fail to find one, they fight each other. This has totally sabotaged efforts by their leaders to claim they are not racist.

They pose no threat to the state but they do terrorise minority communities, and give police and local authorities justification for rigid social control measures that affect all political activists.

We shouldn’t, of course, ignore the growth of right-wing extremism. The Ukraine government is controlled by fascist movements that extol war-time Nazi collaborators, and the success of the mis-named Swedish Democrat party in the country’s recent general election and the growth of other far-right parties across the rest of the European Union has sent alarm bells across the continent.

Whilst the Blairite and Zionist fifth column within the labour movement carry on with their bogus ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign there is a crying need for a new mass movement to drive the racists off the streets.

Communists must support all the existing anti-racist and anti-fascist movements, as well as taking up John McDonnell’s call for the relaunch of the Anti-Nazi League in response to Islamophobia and the recent upsurge in hate crimes across the country.

Jeremy Corbyn’s number two said: “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”

The ruling class is not inherently racist, but it has always used racism to divide and weaken the working class. When any worker suffers abuse or discrimination because of their race, religion, gender, sexuality or for any other reason, the class as a whole is weakened, and it is the responsibility of the whole class to combat racism and all other divisions of the class.

This is why the New Communist Party does not support separate organisation for workers of different colour, religion or gender. The class must stand united on the basis that an injury to one is an injury to all.