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

Ducking and diving in Vichy France

By Andy Brooks

Szkolnikoff: Hitler’s Jewish smuggler: by Pierre Abramovici, Pen & Sword Books. Barnsley 2016, 223 pp, illus, £19.99. ISBN 978-1-47386-186-2 (hardback)

The popular perception of France under the German occupation is moulded by war-time propaganda that has echoed down the decades in a seemingly endless stream of films and TV dramas that portray the Germans as Nazi thugs who take anything they fancy from a helpless French population while spivs, much like Private Walker in Dad’s Army, use the consequential shortages to exploit their own people on the street. But this is only part of the story.
     That indeed was the reality for some. But for others it was more complex. Thousands of French men and women collaborated with the Germans under the reactionary Petain regime that took over after the 1940 armistice which left northern France under continued German military occupation. Some were French fascists who believed in Hitler’s ideology of hate. Others simply thought that they were playing safe on the mistaken belief that Germany was going to win the war. On the way some made a bit of money out of the Germans. Others made immense fortunes
     In June 1945 the charred body of a man was found dumped in a field near Madrid. He was Mendel Szkolnikoff. Born in Russia in 1895 he was a Karaite, a member of a small breakaway Jewish sect that was exempt from the anti-semitic laws of the Czarist empire. This worked in his favour in the 1940s because the Nazis did not consider the Karaites to be Jews either.
    Szkolnikoff started life as a petty trader in Czarist Russia before fleeing the Soviet Union in the late 1920s to run a number of small businesses from modest apartments in western Europe.
     This all changed following the fall of France in 1940. Within weeks of the armistice Szkolnikoff becomes a major player in the textile industry as a middleman between French manufacturers to supply fabrics and clothing to the SS, the Luftwaffe and the German navy. Literally from rags to riches “Michel” Szkolnikoff, as he calls himself now, is buying chateaux in France, mansions in Monte Carlo and stashing millions away in bank accounts in Monaco, Spain and Switzerland.
     How he got there and why he came to a sticky end are questions that the author, Pierre Abramovici, tries to answer in this life of what, clearly, was an extraordinary man.
     Nazi Germany, still at war with Britain and soon to be embroiled in what proved to be a fatal confrontation with the Soviet Union, wanted everything France could produce to help their war effort. As Vichy France was technically now neutral under the terms of the 1940 armistice the Germans had to pay for their imports. But the harsh economic regime that they had imposed on France, which included a colossally overvalued 20 to one exchange rate between the Vichy franc and the Reichmark meant that the French state ultimately always ended up footing the bill.
    Though the Petain regime encouraged collaboration few French manufacturers wanted to directly deal with the Germans. And this is where Szkolnikoff made his mark. He knew the power of expensive gifts that only money can provide. With a well-connected German wife and an ever expanding range of contacts within the German hierarchy and the Vichy establishment “Michel” built up a spectacular black market empire as well as a personal fortune said to be worth £377 million in today's money.
     This is a specialist book that tells us more about the methods than the man. But by shining a light on the murky world of the war-time black market it will remain essential reading for all students of the German occupation of France in the Second World War.
    

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.