The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
attached to the headquarters of the exiled government under Edouard Benes (B98). H50, Hans Hartmann, was a brewer. Richard Israel Merton (M120) was a businessman. Wilburn Smith (S112) was a major in the US army. V49, Adrianus Vrinten, with several aliases, was a Dutch spy.
Contrary to Gollancz’s arrogant assertion, the List is strictly alphabetical, so rather than seventh of Britain’s ‘most wanted’, he is actually number 939 – even, alphabetically, his wife Ruth came before him! Figures on the List vary with each account, ranging from less than 2,000 to more than 3,000. Many of the names are duplicates, if only because the compilers were unsure of real names (as opposed to aliases) and because the Germans seem to have had particular difficulty with double-barrelled names. So U10, ‘Ustinov, Journalist, London’, has the Deckname (alias) Middleton-Peddleton. But he also has the alias of Peddleton-Middleton, so the same man, in fact, appears three times. He was the father of actor Peter Ustinov, rejoicing in the nickname Klop (bed-bug) and, as the List knew, was ‘brit N-Agent’; a spy. One account says that Peddleton and Middleton were on a bus route that passed his home and gave Ustinov the idea to confuse the enemy as far as possible.
Alongside each name is a date of birth, if known, and a place of residence. An occupation is there although, of course, this is misleading. Paul Robeson (R80) features as ‘negersänger’ but it was the man’s outspoken Communism that offended the Reich. His colour and his music, though both objectionable to the Nazis, were secondary. There were locksmiths, nursery-school teachers, racing drivers, even a private detective, but this has little to do with their inclusion on the List.
Where possible, the current whereabouts of a Listee is included, vital for the marauding Einsatzgruppen execution squads to do their job. Taken at random, Dr Artur Tester (T15) could be found at 14, James Place, London SW. Eberhard Heinrich (H90) was a draft-dodger, hiding at 63, Grafton Way, W1. The Jew David Curitz (C112) lived at ‘Four Winds’, Prescelly Rd, Cardiff, and so on. In some cases, we even have telephone numbers. Rupert Vansittart (V6), for example, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs until 1938 and chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Office, could be contacted on MAYfair 1144.
Alongside each name, too, is the Office (Amt) of the RSHA which wanted to talk to the individual. ‘Talking’ would have meant interrogation, with or without the use of torture, depending on circumstances. The RSHA itself was very new in 1940 and the Amter were still being modified and reorganised. Their particular specialisations are outlined in this book, giving us a clue, where nothing else exists, of exactly why these people are on the List at all. In some cases, täterkreis are added. This is a difficult word to translate but it loosely means ‘circle’ or ‘ring’ and is a reminder that many of these people were linked, by political inclination, religion, business pursuits or cause. Know one, know them all and, under interrogation, those ominous black lines in the original List could have been filled in.
I have no great faith in quantitative history but the List does throw up some interesting statistics. By my reckoning, allowing for duplications, there are 2,694 people on Schellenberg’s books. 231 of them were women, which immediately confirms the sexism of the time. There were no women in Churchill’s cabinet, none in the higher echelons of business and none in the church. Had this been a list of Nazis, the number would have been far lower because of the Reich’s concept of womanhood. With a few now infamous exceptions, breeding and housewifery were about as exciting as it got! The women who are on the List were either writers or politicians in the broad sense. Virginia Woolf (L116) is there. So are Viscountess Rhondda (R51) and Eleanor Rathbone (R12). They were remarkable people in a time dominated by men and the war itself was about to change all that. Many of them were mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts of men who had died in the trenches of the First World War and they are on the List because they opposed war in a dozen different national and international committees.
Many of the 2,463 men on the List felt the same way. Most of them were Victorians, born in the fin de siècle atmosphere of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Then, a European war was unthinkable. Britain was not only (just!) the ‘workshop of the world’ but stood at the head of the greatest empire in history. Those attitudes stayed with them, reflected in the diaries of men like Harold Nicolson (the List’s N31) and Alfred Duff-Cooper (D114), both of them working for the Ministry of Information, which was a peculiarly un-British institution set up in response to the war.
The bulk of the List (1,840 names) is made up of ‘foreigners’. In managing the numbers for the purposes of this book, I have broken the chapters down into various headings – political, academic, literary and so on. This is artificial, because there is a high degree of overlap. Harold Nicolson, for instance, is described as ‘Schriftsteller’ (writer) but also as ‘Politiker’ (politician). In the rough count of heads, I have made assumptions based on a person’s name and place of pre-war residence, which may not be strictly accurate. Some Jews, for instance, were among those academics forced out of Nazi Germany after 1933 by the increasing stringency of the Reich’s anti-Semitic laws. Others, like Viscount Samuel and the Rothschilds were ‘home-grown’, their families just as British as the Aryans the Nazis favoured.
Alphabetically, the largest number can be found in the ‘S’ category on the List, itself divided under that letter into four sections, each starting again from number one. Unsurprisingly, there are no ‘Q’s or ‘X’s and only five ‘Y’s. ‘K’ and ‘Z’, equally unsurprisingly, contain a high concentration of European names.
Many of those listed will probably always remain enigmatic. Their names must have been collected from a huge range of sources and no doubt folders of varying thickness would once have been held on them in the filing system of the Reich Security Office. They went up in the flames of Berlin as the Allies advanced in the twilight of the Nazi state.
Various commentators have suggested that the List was little more than a paper exercise, compiled by men who were obsessed with such things, the meticulous attention to detail for which the Reich was famous. I do not believe this to be true – the Polish example is proof of that. The Special Search List GB represented a core of leadership in all walks of life that had to be eliminated so that a British Reich could rise.
When she read the Manchester Guardian’s résumé of the List in September 1945, the novelist Rebecca West (W63) sent a more accurate telegram than she knew when she wrote to Noel Coward, ‘My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with.’
Notes
1 Coward, Noel, Future Indefinite, Heinemann, London, 1954.
2 Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang, Secker and Warburg, London, 1962. The broadcast to which Delmer refers is his off-the-cuff rejection of Hitler’s peace proposals in July 1940. He was not authorised to deliver this.
3 Quoted in Invasion 1940: the Nazi Invasion Plan for Britain by Walter Schellenberg, St Ermin’s Press, London, 2000.
4 Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Secker and Warburg, London, 1961.
THE WAR THAT WAS – SEPTEMBER 1939-JULY 1940
It was Friday, 1 September 1939 and little Sam Pivnik was out with his friends, playing football. It was a day he would always remember well because it was his birthday. He was thirteen. He could not quite remember, years later, who was with him – Jurek was there, the Gutsek boys; probably Yitshak