Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  132. In Margaret Dewar’s autobiography: The Quiet Revolutionary, she talks of her friend, Vladimior one day ‘disappearing’ from Berlin in 1930, because, she discovered, the Party had sent him to Paris. The idea of comrades accepting Party instructions as to where they should go is not as far-fetched as it might seem to us now.

  133. In Margaret Dewar’s autobiography: The Quiet Revolutionary, she talks of her friend, Vladimior one day ‘disappearing’ from Berlin in 1930, because, she discovered, the Party had sent him to Paris. The idea of comrades accepting Party instructions as to where they should go is not as farfetched as it might seem to us now.

  134. There is an intriguing overlap with Indian matters, as early committee statements bear the same names of the advocates of the Meerut defendants (Pennybacker, 2009).

  135. Indeed, the Jewish establishment groups saw their role as to help to restrict the inflow of all refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish. Given crucial responsibility for vetting the refugees by the Government, their recommendations were at points more restrictive than the Government’s.

  136. Toller deserves more recognition in the UK. He had come to the UK after the Reichstag fire when he eluded the knock of the Gestapo because he was fortuitously in Switzerland. In fact, he had already visited here earlier when he had met with the ILP; in 1927, he had become involved in the setting up of the League against Colonial Oppression (with Münzenberg). Toller made the first of many reappearances between 1933 and 1938 in the UK, first testifying before the Legal Commission of Enquiry into the Burning of the Reichstag (set up by Mũnzenberg) and subsequently campaigning against Nazism at a variety of writer’s conferences, speeches which all received wide publicity, as well as speaking at the NCCL, WEA, various universities and the Anglo-Soviet Friendship league.

  But, unlike in his 1920s more Marxist self, Toller’s denunciations focused on Nazism’s attack on intellectual freedom and on innocent German writers, but this may be explained because he too had to avoid being seen as politically active (Dove and Lamb, 1995). He saw himself as a writer as having a moral responsibility to attack Nazism though, like Siegi, his line was that literature should not offer ‘neat resolutions or happy endings’. Again, like Siegi, he emphasised the importance of internationalism. (My father always had a soft spot for the UN.) In 1938, Toller anticipated Jewish pogroms, something Siegi got completely wrong. It seems highly likely that Siegi will have known him.

  137. Just how difficult is illustrated by the failure of many of the SPD EC, a far more respectable bunch than the KPD, to gain admittance here, too often with deathly consequences (Jenny Taylor, talk on Social Democracy in Exile, IGRS 12.1.12) Britain only accepted an estimated 1:10 applications from Jews between 1933 and the outbreak of war (Pennybacker, 2009).

  138. The ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932, after having been one of the groups that set up the Labour Party initially. It is sometimes forgotten how much to the left of Labour the ILP was, Maxton in particular. Maxton had become leader of the ILP faction whilst still in the Labour Party on an anti-MacDonald, anti-gradualism, anti - class collaborationist platform, though there was also a strong pro-MacDonald, anti-disaffiliation minority in the ILP. Maxton was a key figure in pressing for disaffiliation from the Labour Party after the dreadful 1929-31 Minority government and MacDonald’s subsequent betrayal when he headed the National Government, composed largely of Tory MPs (Cohen, 2001).

  A sense of how left Maxton’s politics were can be garnered from a meeting of the Second International in 1931, held in Vienna, when the ‘social-democratic’ grouping’, including Maxton the leader of the ILP delegation, urged the SPD to overthrow capitalism (Carr, 1982)! Maxton’s sponsorship of Siegi was therefore not just the sponsorship of any left leaning MP. However, Maxton was more wary of collaboration with the CP than the ILP as a whole, who were generally in favour of the organisation collaborating with the CP around political prisoners and exiles, amongst other issues (Pennybacker, 2009). Maxton died in 1946, still a sitting MP. Unfortunately, a search of Maxton’s accessible letters has not revealed any corroborating correspondence but this was one ‘fact’ about how he got into the UK that my father consistently insisted on.

  139. My thanks to Gidon Cohen for this idea (in private correspondence).

  140. I remember being astonished when I discovered that my parents’ friend was the leader of the London County Council (LCC)!

  141. My thanks for this point to Susan Pennybacker (in private correspondence).

  142. Münzenberg at one point flirted politically with Strasser, the political leader of the SA who claimed to represent the ‘socialist’ wing of Nazism and was purged by Hitler in 1934 (McMeekin, 2003), something I strongly suspect, Siegi would have found very difficult to forgive. This further lessens the chance of the link being through Münzenberg to Maxton. Münzenberg was also one of the most strident and vocal Third Period anti-Social Democratic exponents, regularly calling the Social Democrats fascists (McMeekin, 2003), something else which would have kept him and Siegi apart.

  143. My mother once told me a story of regularly walking past a cake-shop, and imagining choosing and eating one of the cakes. From memory, she was talking of her time in Paris but at least there she was earning.

  144. Initially, Meyer appears as little more than a music critic, who may not have had much political gravitas, but he was almost certainly more important than that. He was born in 1905, one year younger than Siegi. The Exil analysis notes him as a bourgeois intellectual who joined the Party in 1930, in Berlin (like Siegi) where his close associates were Eisler, whom he had studied under, and Busch, both KPD musicians. He was active in various workers’ music organisations (like Siegi) and a critic for Rote Fahne. He, like Siegi, had the role of putting his knowledge to use in the revolutionary struggle. He fled slightly later than Siegi came to London. Like Siegi, he was one of the very few political refugees, who chose to come to London, arriving as early as July 1933, when he appears to have entered as a student of music (Brinson and Dove, 2014). MI5 were surprisingly uninterested in him. According to Brinson and Dove, he was not initially a member of the Party, though this is not what the different lists, referred to in the main text, reveal. He became a university and WEA lecturer on music. Unlike Siegi, he returned to E Berlin in 1948.

  In E Germany, Meyer became a famous and much feted musicologist and the darling of the E German /Soviet bureaucracy, close to the party apparatus, particularly Bush and Klempner. Although Eisler had also returned to E Germany, and wrote the E German national anthem, it appears there was later a serious falling out between the Eisler camp with Meyer. Meyer died a natural death in 1989 in E Germany. Siegi must have known Meyer from Berlin onwards but my parents’ failure to ever mention him, unlike Eisler, suggests deep political/ personal differences.

  145. Such a source has to be interpreted in the light of Lotte trying to prove her innocence and MI5 trying to establish whether she was a spy for the USSR. Lotte claims she does not know what she is being accused of. For some time, I too wondered whether Lotte could have been a low-grade spy but the balance of evidence in McClouglin’s ‘Left to the Wolves’ (2007) persuaded me finally against this.

  146. KV2/1012/24a.

  147. MI5, despite keeping watch on Tudor-Hart, did not appreciate quite how important she was. They were far more concerned with Jürgen Kuczynski. (See Brinson and Dove, 2014).

  Lawn Road’s residents reveal a glowing array of leading Bauhaus exiles, as well as politicos. Gropius, the ‘leader’ of the Bauhaus movement and Brener lived there in one of the few modernist buildings, and provided a social centre for the Bauhaus émigrés as well as modern British sculptures such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. None of them were in the exile group as none were Communists, so Siegi is unlikely to have known them, except as neighbours. Nonetheless, having German radicals as neighbours may have offered a limited comfort. Gropius, amongst others, left the UK after a couple of years for the more sympathetic culture of the US
A.

  148. One ironic parallel between Siegi and Lotte, and the Kuczynski clan was many of them also moved to Oxford. Given that Siegi would have felt additionally vulnerable after leaving the KPD exiled group, the appearance of the Kuczynski’s would, I guess, not have been welcome.

  149. Jürgen served in the leadership group of the KPD until 1944, acting as political leader until 1939, and again from June 1940 to July 1941, when he was replaced briefly by Heinz Schmidt, and then by his friend Siegbert Kahn (Matthew Stibb: ‘Jürgen Kuczynski and the Search for a (Non-Existent) Western Spy Ring in the East German Communist Party in 1953’ in Contemporary European History, 20, 1, Cambridge University Press 2010). On the Kuczynski family as a whole, and in particular their roles in wartime London, see R. C. Williams, Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Anthony Glees, The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion, 1939–1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); also Anne McElvoy, The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life and Legacy (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).

  150. Much has been written by and about Jürgen who returned to E Germany in 1945, in remarkable circumstances. (He was in the American Sector of the city, having returned courtesy of the USA army.) He joined the SED and was appointed Professor at Humboldt University in 1946. He became a leading E German economist and published copiously on Marxist economics and theory. He served as the President of the Society for the Study of the Culture of the Soviet Union, 1947-50, telling his members: “He who hates and despises human progress as it is manifested in the Soviet Union is himself odious and contemptible“, though he was later purged because of Stalinist suspicions of those who had dallied in the West and, just as sinful, were Jews. (The leadership of the E. German Communist Party were the people who had gone and subsequently returned from Moscow, suspicious of those who had messed with the West!) Nevertheless, Jürgen prospered both under Walter Ulbricht and indeed became the advisor on external affairs to Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor. He is still thought of highly by many ‘ex’ KPD members.

  151. Hermann Duncker, originally in the SPD, joined the KPD Zentrale at the very beginning; his role became the education of activists. Arrested in 1933, he managed to flee to Denmark in 1936, and finally got to the USA in 1941, presumably via the UK at some point from 1936. He returned to E. Germany in 1947 and became an academic (Broué, 2005).

  152. My thanks to Irene Fick for the loan of this letter.

  153. One interesting statement in Ilse’s letter is that Isabel Brown, a prestigious British CP member, had told Ilse that she had contacted Ellen Wilkinson who had in her turn contacted Neville Chamberlain, who then, after the Munich agreement, had admitted 1000 Communists, who had arrived here by plane from Czechoslovakia, to be greeted by Margaret Mynatt. But in the P.S. to her own letter, Ilse makes clear that the number is disputed and might have been significantly less than this. I have not come across such a high figure elsewhere.

  154. Margaret Mynatt’s path to refugeedom was not dissimilar to Siegi’s. She had lived in Berlin from 1929 where she had worked as a journalist, joined the KPD and the circle around Brecht. She fled Berlin soon after the Reichstag fire and travelled via Prague and Paris to London, arriving, like Siegi, in 1934. It seems impossible she and Siegi did not know each other. Once in the UK, where she had rights of residence through her father, their paths diverged - Mynatt became and remained an activist, including, with her so useful British passport, ferrying money from the Comintern in the USSR to illegal Communist Parties in Europe (Brinson and Dove, 2014).

  155. One need look no further than Trotsky’s disappearance from the side of Lenin in the photos taken soon after the Russian Revolution. (See, for example, ‘The Vanishing Commissar’.)

  156. The translation of Leske’s work is thanks to Irene Fick.

  157. Merker returned to E Germany and survived to become the main opposition to Ulbricht, who imprisoned him before he did anything, because he had been in the West and said something special had to be done for the Jews, and was therefore a Zionist imperialist agent.

  158. Although it falls outside this paper, Leske tells us that the KPD were able to maintain a ‘German freedom broadcast 298’, with the agreement of the Spanish government, from near Madrid between January 1937 and March 1939, when Madrid fell to the fascists. Is it possible that the NKVD sent the Irish born, low-grade Russian spy, Brian Gould Verschoyle (who features in Lotte’s story) as a radio engineer to Spain with this in mind?

  159. The Gestapo had amassed the names of 60,000 Germans in exile, with a special responsibility for political oppositionists (J and P Barnes, 1993). I suspect my parents would have known about every suspicious death - and there were a few in these early years of left-wing German exiles - and trembled.

  160. It is worth remembering that these arguments, which this is not the place to go into, are part of a much larger debate across the left at the time and since, about the character of communism in the USSR and when or whether it degenerated or indeed was defeated. It took the suppression of E Berlin in 1953 and Hungarian uprisings in 1956 to open the cracks in the Stalinist monolith in 1956, almost twenty years after Siegi had walked away. Even in the 1950s and 60s, a regular - and, at the time, inexplicable - stream of publications used to arrive at our home in Durham relating to the USSR.

  161. I did ask my parents why they had not gone to fight in the Spanish Civil war, and never received a clear answer. There are, I think, many reasons: they did not have the right to return to the UK and so would have not left lightly. Siegi was already emotionally and physically exhausted. They neither supported the International Brigades nor, in Siegi’s case, unambiguously the POUM. Nevertheless, my mother did - unusually - ask me on a couple of occasions: Do you think I should have gone?

  162. Karl Korsch had been Marxist and was forced to leave the UK in July 1935 when he was refused permission to extend his stay. However, the grounds for his exclusion were in part the suspicion that he had collaborated with Nazis (Brinson and Dove, 2014).

  163. Lotte tried and failed to get into the LSE. Despite her 1sts in her first and second year studying economics at Humbolt University, Berlin, LSE stated she would have to take the English matric before they would consider her. She then tried - but failed - to get an International scholarship for refugees to study there, and then gave up. She was understandably not willing to bow to the LSE’s at best myopic nationalism. It was a turning point in her life, and not for the better.

  164. A small irony - according to these Nazi (and indeed MI5) records, Moos left the Jewish religion on 5 March 1929. Did Siegi have ‘Jew’ on his birth certificate (although, as we have already seen, he was registered at secondary school as Protestant)? Whether he ‘renounced’ Judaism simply by failing to fill ‘Juden’ into a census or whether he actively renounced it at a synagogue, is not known.

  165. For anyone interested, check MI5 files, Barry McCloughlin’s Left to the Wolves: Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror, and David’s Perman’s biography of Lotte: Stranger in a Borrowed Land.

  166. ‘Left to the Wolves’ by Barry McCloughlin (2007) includes both a substantial section on Brian and Lotte and also a photo of Brian. I felt like a traitor when I confronted my mother, who had never said a word to me of Brian, with his photo. I was crossing a deep emotional line from respecting my parents’ wish for silence to my wish for knowledge. Lotte’s response was extraordinary, particularly as she was supposedly suffering from quite advanced dementia and her eye-sight was poor. She held the book close up to her face, with Brian’s photo on the frontispiece, and declared: ‘I won’t come well out of there’.

  167. My thanks to Irene Fick for translating these.

  168. My thanks to Prof Herald Hagerman for kindly sending me a copy of: German speaking economists in British exile 1933-45 (2007).

  Chapter 7

  1938-1947 Life at Oxford: ‘ A whole world separates me from the line’.

  It is not possible to do more than surmise why Si
egi’s politics slowly shifted towards a more left social democratic stance. Yet it is in this period, at the Institute of Statistics (IOS) at Oxford University, that we see the emergence of an ‘academic’ viewpoint which is more left Keynesian, than ‘conventional’ Marxist. These years also were a time when the earlier personal upheavals in Siegi’s life slowly calmed down.

  It is remarkable how Siegi, a refugee and active member of the KPD, who only arrived in the UK in early 1934, had transformed himself into a reputable academic within four or five years. Here we will first examine Siegi’s role at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. He was appointed as research assistant in January 1939. In the early 1940’s, he is doing work for the ‘Free French’. Internment will form the next section. Siegi (and Lotte’s) involvement with Die Zeitung will then be evaluated. The final section of this chapter will look at other papers Siegi was writing at this time where he attempted to develop an alternative basis to socialism and developed an economically based critique of Nazism. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the situation of academic exiles in the UK in the mid 1930’s, in particular at the IOS.

  Siegi was one of over hundred German speaking economists who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 (Hagerman, 2006)168 but he arrived too early to benefit from the measures which were rapidly introduced here. Many others were forced to leave after the Nazis had passed the ‘Restoration of Civil Service Act’ in April 1933, which encouraged the removal of ‘’undesirable people”, including academic professors, who had civil service status. The Act also limited the number of Jewish students, to be followed by the ‘Jewish’ medical and legal professions. (My mother always told me she had been thrown out of Humbolt University, Berlin, because she was a woman, something I never doubted. In fact, it must have been this Act.)