How Britain was half-hearted as the Holocaust loomed

The British welcome for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis is to some extent a myth, according to a historian. Sheena Hastings reports.

Bill Williams has cast new light on the way Britons responded to arrival of Jews fleeing Germany after the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s.

The migrants were, he says, “neglected across all sections of British society”. Even the Jewish community themselves, he argues in his book Jews and Other Foreigners, were inhibited by fears of an anti-Semitic backlash caused by letting in “alien” foreigners.

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Mr Williams, of Manchester’s University’s Centre for Jewish Studies, is one of the country’s leading scholars of Jewish migration to the UK, and believes Government offers of help were half-hearted although a Jewish businessman who could bring money and create jobs was given a hearty welcome.

The Quakers declared they would only support “non practicing Jews and Friends” - those with existing contacts within the Quaker community – and the Catholic Church did virtually nothing to help the immigrants. The particular focus of the book is immigrants who settled in the wider Manchester area, but Mr Williams believes their experience can be extrapolated across the country.

“Though both the British and Mancunians had strong humanitarian traditions, they were often undermined by self-interest, government policy, the failure to challenge it and anti-semitism. So these findings have a critical bearing on the notion of how in Britain we regard ourselves as a tolerant society.

“So much more could have been done to support the Jews – especially as the British knew what was happening in Nazi Germany. Many refugees were well treated, but many weren’t. There is a degree of complacency about our recent past, so it’s important to dispel that myth...Lessons should be learned from remembering how it really was.”

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Britain’s treatment of the Jews was no worse than that of many other countries, argues Mr Williams. Only 1930s Shanghai, which was ruled by Japan, was a true safe haven where Jews could arrive without a visa.
“Manchester, which touts itself as a beacon of tolerance, was particularly poor. The Lancashire Development Company, for example, was happy to bring in refugees but only if they were useful.

“Only the Rotary Club acquitted itself well, and that was down to two strong individuals who overruled hostility to the Jews within the organisation, opening a hostel for training refugees in 1938.”

Rather than welcoming any persecuted person, says Mr Williams, 70,000 visas were issued under the Aliens Act, and around 95 per cent went to Jewish refugees. “There were strict conditions attached,” says Mr Williams. “For instance, they had to prove that they had enough money to support themselves or a sponsor in this country who would vouch for them and see to all their needs.

“This meant that people who came tended to be the relatively wealthy middle class, and the poor had to stay behind. The authorities wanted people who would integrate quickly and adopt British culture and ways of living.” This meant that more orthodox Jews were not so welcome – although in some quarters ways and means were found to get round this prejudice.

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Solomon Schechter, a London rabbi, gave the name of a fictitious yeshivah (college for the higher understanding of Jewish religious texts) in order to smooth the path into Britain for some orthodox Jews.

Mr Williams isn’t saying that all Jewish refugees had a uniformly awful time, but he says their assimilation into British society was not necessarily an easy one. “Documents from the time show that children brought to Britain on the kindertransport rescue mission often found themselves in Christian households where they were expected to give up their religion. Some of them did it voluntarily, but others resisted, which must have made life quite difficult.

“Britain was among the most humanitarian countries, and we did save tens of thousands of lives by allowing those people to come and live here instead of staying in a place where they were losing their citizenship, living, education, prospects, and may well have lost their lives.

“But not everyone was welcoming – just as today we have David Cameron feeding off anti-immigrant prejudice with policies based on what immigrants can give us rather than the fact that many of them need our compassion.”

Jews and Other Foreigners by Bill Williams is published by Manchester University Press, £22.99.