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Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.
The Nazi occupation of the small Channel Island of Alderney irreversibly altered the landscape and lives of both the contemporary population and the subsequent generations. The evacuation of the island’s 1,500 inhabitants in June 1940 paved the way for a period of occupation by the Germans that would last until May 1945. In 1941, Hitler issued an order to fortify the Channel Islands and make them an ‘impregnable fortress’; thus creating ‘Adolf Island’. This book seeks to collate and combine historical and archaeological data relating the occupation landscape in order to produce the definitive guide to the events that took place during this period. It addresses yet unanswered questions relating to the purpose of the occupation, the lives of the labourers, known and missing, and the post-war reaction to this legacy.
investigatory records in which further named and unnamed individuals and groups who reportedly died or were executed are also referred to. Therefore, this chapter presents, for the first time, a more definitive account concerning the missing – who they were, what they experienced and how they died – and a revised minimum number of deaths. In doing so, as well as enhancing knowledge about the nature of Nazi persecution on Alderney, it is our intention to provide information that may benefit the families of the
entering Britain as a result of Nazi persecution, this support was based on that leadership’s estimation that it would only need support for around 4,000. However, the German occupation of Austria in March 1938 and of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 dramatically increased the number of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution (increasing to about 55,000 arriving in Britain by 1939, at a cost to the Jewish community of more than £3,000,000) 69 and furthermore the outbreak of war prevented Jewish refugees from returning. As a result, British Jews were faced with providing long
1999, a plaque was unveiled at the House of Commons ‘In deep gratitude to the people and Parliament of the United Kingdom for saving the lives of 10,000 Jewish and other children who fled to this country from Nazi persecution on the 126 The Kinder Kindertransport 1938–1939’.44 From its earliest days, saved has been the description used to justify and then to celebrate the movement of refugee children to Britain. With its Christological connotations, the word emphasises the role played by the rescuers and tends to subsume the individuality of the rescued. The first
’s faulty memory being on the Nazi persecution of German Communists instead. The fact that internal resistance to Hitler had been virtually non-existent was overlooked, as was the fact that many of the now East German citizens had been socialised in, and had believed in, Nazi Germany. 7 Instead, SED propaganda claimed the moral high ground by portraying West Germany as a hotbed of still fervent Nazis, now loyal citizens and servants of the Federal regime, colluding with Israeli monopolists to subjugate the Arab peoples in a quiet, but powerful, attempt to dominate the
more nuanced insight into the evolution of the forced and slave labour programme, and the accompanying experiences of those caught up in it. We have sought to highlight the spatial and temporal fluidity of landscapes of Nazi persecution – something which was missing from the few publications that had examined the camp landscapes. 2 By addressing the multiple phases of camps and worksites, and demonstrating the relationships between the experiences of labourers and guards before and after their time
Volodymyr Zaiats – a Ukrainian citizen born in Boromlia – was one of millions of victims of Nazi persecution during World War 2 (WW2). An electrician by training, Zaiats was first sent to Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a ‘protective custody prisoner’ on 18 July 1942. 1 After a short period of release, he was transferred to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg on 14 December 1942. 2 But Zaiats was not murdered in either of these now-notorious SS-run concentration camps. Instead, on 5 April
victims in the Jewish diaspora. 10 The measurement and assessment of how many refugees had entered Israel, for what reason, and when, dominated much of the initial discussions. 11 The numbers provided by the Israeli authorities claimed that at least 500,000 refugees had arrived in Israel since 1933 to escape from, or after having endured, Nazi persecution and extermination attempts. The Israelis also calculated that they would require US$3,000 per refugee in order to guarantee the rehabilitation and integration of the victims of Nazi persecution. But the German side
never, ever become a bystander.18 Such identification inevitably renders bystander History more morally immanent than some fields of enquiry even into the Holocaust, because, as David Wyman argues, ‘we were the all too passive accomplices’ to the Shoah.19 But who exactly were the bystanders in the past? Der Stellvertreter was Deputy of us all. The Vicar of Christ stood as the conscience of all humanity, representative of all humankind who were in a sense the bystanders to Nazi persecution. But historians cannot draw the category so widely. Functionally it is not even