This immaculately researched and lucidly presented study concerns a subject hitherto neglected, or more likely evaded, by official writers on British Intelligence, for instance, by Christopher Andrew in his thousand-page ‘authorized history of MI5’, The defence of the realm (Penguin, 2010).

This new study is about the consequences of the policy of the British appeasement of Nazi Germany (which became collaboration in France) – specifically, its effect on the British treatment of the around 90,000 refugees (90 per cent of them Jewish) who had reached Britain by the beginning of the war.

Appeasement itself followed from the Chamberlain Conservative Government’s belief that Communism (the Soviet Union) was regarded as a greater threat than fascism (Hitler’s Germany), being thought of as a potential ally in a future fight against Communism. It followed that refugees, who had apparently fallen foul of such a potential ally, must be suspect and require surveillance, even if – as Jews or political opponents, or both – they had already served time in German prison camps.

The screening for possible selective internment on political grounds of all German and Austrian refugees began near the beginning of the war. It swiftly became the major preoccupation, not so much of the British government, as of MI5, its major internal intelligence service, aided by Special Branch.

The demand for the selective internment, initially of leading German and Austrian communists, had been understandably reinforced by the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939, as a result of which Communist party members could be seen as at least ambivalent about the war against Hitler.

The defection, at the same time, of the Soviet spy, Walter Krivitsky, who produced convenient lists of alleged Soviet spies among the refugees as a gift to his hosts, further encouraged the MI5 witch-hunt.

However, the Home Office kept its head, refusing to intern people just because they were Communists, releasing one German communist leader, Jürgen Kuzcynski, permitting the entry of Wilhelm Koenen, another, and refusing to intern the albeit often harassed Austrian Communist Eva Kolmer.

Such defeats of MI5 by the Home Office, under the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, who has hitherto often been unfairly cast as the villain of ‘internment’, are perhaps the most significant of the many discoveries of this important volume, which uses much newly-declassified material, especially individual files (though by no means all have been released).

The German conquest of the Low Countries – and the entry of Italy into the war alongside Germany – created increasing panic, culminating in Churchill’s famous order, ‘Collar the lot!’ (in fact referring to Italians resident here), resulting in the mass internment of some 40,000 refugees from enemy countries, after the fall of France in June 1940.

The fate of at least one of these represented a victory for MI5: at its request, the Jewish refugee Alex Nathan, an ex-Communist, who also happened to be a homosexual, was branded a possible Nazi agent and not released until August 1943. (MI5 had a nasty habit of thus branding those it really disliked, for instance, the distinguished Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, who fled to America.)

It was at this time that the embattled MI5 went on the offensive and started recruiting informers from the refugee community itself, often German Social Democrats or independent left wingers, particularly hostile to the German Communist Party, which, after its extreme sectarianism, including abuse of social democrats, was playing a leading role in opposition to Nazism, however fatally linked it had been to Stalin’s Russia, until Russia became an ally, after the German invasion of summer 1941.

This alliance, however, did not make any difference to MI5, for whom the Cold War had already begun – or had never stopped. It went on recruiting and using refugee informers, and employed distinguished men and women as agents. All such people are identified and described with scrupulous fairness here. However, the focus is on their victims – for what else can they be called? – like the young and admirably effective Austrian Eva Kolmer, Heinz-Alex Nathan (both already mentioned), the Communist actor Gerhard Hinze, who had left the Soviet Union just in time and was interned in Canada, and the brilliant photographer, Edith Tudor-Hart, whose active social commitment led her to become a Soviet courier.

The book also focuses on the men and women who tried to help the refugees – names familiar to many readers – like Bishop Bell of Chichester, Fenner Brockway, Storm Jameson, and Eleanor Rathbone, among others.

MI5 by no means had things all its own way. Its unevenness of judgment sometimes testified to its humanity and good sense. It initially gave Klaus Fuchs, the physicist, the benefit of the doubt, as it did the formidably well-connected German communist Jürgen Kuczynski. In fact, MI5’s mistakes and failures at this time may well account for this book being the first occasion on which this period of its existence has ever been discussed.

This is a very Camden book. The German and Austrian cultural organizations were in Belsize Park and off Finchley Road respectively, many of the refugees lived in the borough, and even ‘our own’ Hetty Bower has a walk-on part, as warden of a Czech hostel in Fortis Green.

Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove, A matter of intelligence: MI5 and the surveillance of anti-Nazi refugees, 1933–50, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014

[ Camden New Journal, 2014 ]