The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow

       INTRODUCTION

       SEARCHING THE LIST

      In July 1940, as the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht stood poised across the Channel to invade Britain, Walter Schellenberg, SS Brigadeführer, leader of Amt IV EII of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA), was ordered to compile a list. It would contain the names of individuals, British and foreign, who could be seen as the spearhead of anti-Reich elements in the United Kingdom. A similar list had already been drawn up for Poland and the result was that most of the 61,000 names on that list had been imprisoned or murdered by the end of 1939.

      Officially called the Sonderfahndungsliste GB (the Special Search List Great Britain), it came to be known as the Black Book. It was almost certainly typed on upright Mercedes typewriters with their QWERZ keyboards in the bowels of RSHA headquarters in Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Office III near the Hohenzollern Strasse buildings occupied by SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Did Adolf Hitler, the ultimate originator of the List, actually see it? We do not know. He never set foot in a concentration camp either but we know that he created the mindset that gave rise to them. There were originally 20,000 copies run off but today only two originals survive. The rest were either burned in the Nazi rush to destroy evidence at the end of the war or were buried in the falling masonry of intensive Allied bombing raids.

      When the two copies fell into British hands, by September 1945, the Manchester Guardian carried an article naming a handful of famous Listees. The reaction from some is very telling. Noel Coward (C96 on the List) wrote later:

‘If anyone had told me at that time that I was high up on the Nazi black list, I should have laughed and told him not to talk nonsense. In this, however, I should have been wrong, for, as it ultimately transpired, I was.’1

      Sefton Delmer, the Daily Express’s Berlin and Paris correspondent, who was about to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE) as the List was compiled, said:

‘This list…was among many secret documents captured by the Allies in Germany in 1945. Number 33 on the list was a certain Sefton Delmer … He was to be handed over, said the list, to Dept. IVB4 of the Central Reich Security Office … I like to think it was my maiden broadcast that put me there.’2

      Victor Gollancz, founder of the Left Book Club, said:

‘I was very high on Hitler’s list of people to be dealt with in England. I think, as a matter of fact I was number seven out of about 2,000.’3

Walter Shirer, the influential American journalist who covered many of the big stories of the Second World War, referred to it as ‘among the more amusing “invasion documents”’.4 There speaks a man whose own country had never been bombed and was not staring invasion in the face. There is nothing remotely amusing about a list of people ear-marked for death – ask the 61,000 Polish dead and their families.

      Shirer was the first to refer to the List in his now iconic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1961. The complete list was not available to the public in Britain until 1969 and the first historian to discuss it was David Lampe in The Last Ditch (Cassell & Co. 1969). His Appendix E reprinted the List for the first time without any detailed evaluation of its contents. Lampe was more concerned with the proposed invasion itself and how the British, especially the Auxiliary units, would have responded. Over thirty years later, Norman Longmate used the List for his counter-factual work If Britain Had Fallen (Greenhill Books, 2004) but again, it only forms a fraction of his central thesis. The full List appeared again as an adjunct to Walter Schellenberg’s Gestapo Handbook, published in English translation in 2004.

      I am not surprised that so little has been written on the Black Book. The original typing is not that clear and there are innumerable ‘typos’ – the List was compiled in a hurry, clearly by different hands – and the photocopying necessary for research purposes has blurred the font still further. We should not imagine that either the collation of evidence or the typing itself was done by fanatical, diehard Nazis. Most office work in the Reich, as elsewhere in Europe, was carried out by women and most office workers had pressures put on them which had nothing to do with ideology. Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov was certainly not a Nazi. She was a Russian who found herself, by a variety of circumstances, working in Berlin in 1940. She did not work on the List, or for the RSHA, but her Berlin Diaries contain a wealth of information on the humdrum, everyday experiences of office life – jamming typewriters, breaking tapes, lousy coffee and the office octopus! We should bear all this in mind when we find numerous clerical errors in the List.

      The original copies had ruled lines for the insertion of other names which would have been added by the Gestapo or Einsatzgruppen as they rounded people up. There were also photographs of twenty-nine Listees (there may once have been more), which now are of too poor a quality to reproduce but which would have aided identification at the time. The twenty-eight photographs (two are of the same individual, Captain Albert Brandon, also known as Albert Burrell) are across the spectrum. G.