Читать книгу The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain - Mei Trow - Страница 6

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. Anderson-Foster (A48) was a British agent. A82, Werner Aue, was a vice consul in Antwerp. Josef Forst (F80) was a Czech officer, 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.’