Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  Sir Claus Moser, a Jewish German refugee, who was to become a leading British economist, was only one amongst many able exiles who was interned but ‘forgave the implicit insult to their integrity, and went on to make distinguished contributions to British life’ (Calder, 1980).

  According to my mother, being interned the Isle of Man, was a cross between being at university and a holiday camp. Without wanting to detract from others experiences, she seems to have enjoyed herself - but then she had just come out of Holloway Prison.

  177. Weindling: ‘The Impact of German medical scientists on British medicine: A Case-study of Oxford 1933-45’

  178. The others were Burchardt, also from the Institute of Statistics, Kosterlitz: psychotherapy, Oldern: history, Steiner: medicine and Siegi’s good friend Uhlig: ‘medicine statistics’. (Weindling: SPSL 129/1 UA CQ/11/17). Uhlig for reasons unknown was interned for six months, having his first attempt to be freed turned down. Siegi and Uhlig (my father always referred to him as Uhlig, not by his first name) stayed in contact even after Uhlig’s return to Germany.

  179. Jacobsthal, another German émigré from Oxford, is recorded as first being held at a disused cotton mill, Warth Mill in Bury, Lancashire, probably but not definitely a different place.

  180. Abbey William: ‘Between Two Languages, German-speaking exiles in GB 1933-1945‘

  181. Hobsbawm was also an (unlikely) contributor to Die Zeitung, as he was a Party man and they did not take Communist contributors. He wrote to the literary editor, Wolfgang von Einsiedel, a relative of Bismarck, who accepted Hobsbawm’s literary contributions. Presumably, Lotte also dealt with von Einsiedel. Both my parents totally refused to ever go to hear Hobsbawm speak. I’d always assumed this was because of his Party allegiance but maybe their paths had actually crossed.

  182. Brinson and Dove (2014), drawn from SIS (Vivian) to MI5 (Liddell), 19.4.1939,TNA,KV2/1121/165a

  183. Although he had been a senior member of the Communist Party who had narrowly escaped death in the Spanish Civil War, Wintrinham was given the choice of his Party or his wife. 1937, the year of mass trials in the USSR, was also when significant CPGB notables in the UK were disciplined for ‘Trotskyist tendencies’. Even Pollitt, the General Secretary of the CPGB, was accused of being a spy for British intelligence’. Wintrinham believed his expulsion was as much to do with his belief in the Popular Front, rather than seeing the Popular Front as merely one tactic. Wintrinham, who, like Siegi, had dedicated his previous life to the Party, again similar to Siegi, always remained a Marxist.

  Early in the War, Wintrinham and some other International Brigadiers were involved in plans to set up partisan-type units in the event of a German invasion. His approach was regarded with suspicion by the authorities and his group was dumped and replaced by the far less activist Home Guard. He was described by Orwell as ‘a notable voice stemming the tide of defeatism‘ (Purcell, 2004, from Orwell’s letter to Partisan Review: 3.1.41) and briefly became a much loved figure, though not by the Government. Wintrinham was very critical of the CPGB’s position at this point not to fight, though he believed the government’s prosecution of the war was as much to do with defeating socialism (USSR) as fascism. He wrote that the war should be a fight for freedom, including by the colonies (Amazingly in 1942, Cripps asked Wintrinham to go to India to report on the possibilities of guerrilla fighting, and Wintrinham subsequently retained an active interest in this area, another overlap with Siegi.)

  Wintrinham was later a founder of a grass-roots, revolutionary movement, the Common Wealth. His slogan was ‘Turn the imperialist war into an antifascist war.’ But he insisted he did not want to attack the CPGB and wanted them as part of a popular front, to bring about ‘Victory through Democracy’. His position was to support Churchill in his war against the Nazis, but to campaign for its own policies. One of the groups Wintrinham spotted to be part of his alliance was the ‘1941 Committee’, referred to by Siegi (see main text) as ‘and co’. It was largely a group of respectable, even if generally radical, well-informed and often influential journalists or publishers, with whom Purcell suggests, Wintrinham felt comfortable. I can imagine Siegi’s hackles rising at this class allegiance. Common Wealth then contested (and won) by-elections on a leftist basis during the War when the main parties had agreed a pact. Acland, a practising Christian, had become deeply involved and there was a disagreement between him and Wintrinham, a committed atheist, over the importance of ‘morality in politics’ which Wintrinham deplored, a disagreement which came to dominate and weaken Common Wealth, which was closed down after the General Election in July 1945.

  184. Purcell, Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham 1898-1949

  185. This is however only part of what happened. Siegi had to contact an uncle who had left Germany pre-Nazism for the US, to provide a testimonial for the German Government that Siegi had worked for the ‘liquer fabrik’. When I visited Los Angeles in the early 1970’s, I was introduced to said uncle, now an elderly man, as Siegi’s daughter. He told me that he had stood on the roof of his factory in 1919 in Munich shooting at the revolutionaries!

  186. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Wilde#cite_ref-becher1989_7-0, accessed 25th March 2014

  Harry had a fascinating career. He survived the war, moving repeatedly from one country to the next. He knew Plievier well, another person of a working-class background who combined writing with revolutionary activities, a feature of the wide-ranging character of Germany’s revolutionary left at the time. (After fleeing to the USSR, Plievier returned to ‘E Germany’ after the war, but then moved to West Germany where he became a leading cultural figure. Harry moved in with the Plievier family.)

  After the war, Harry wrote copiously, including on Rathenau (a relative of Lotte’s), and in the 1960’s on the Black Power movement and put together a book of photos of and extracts on Trotsky. He was also involved with a documentary on Trotsky’s murder. He seems to have developed an interest in Trotskyist ideas rather than an identification with Trotskyism. Maybe this also contributed to the distancing between Harry and Siegi as Siegi, insofar as he held a coherent position on the USSR, though fundamentally critical of the USSR, seems to have retained a belief in the possibility it could still be changed from below.

  Although it is impossible to know, another possible cause of friction was Harry’s sexual identities; Siegi was a puritan on such issues. Harry appears to have had a close relationship (or probably rather more) with a fascinating figure, Jef Last, a Dutch ‘anarcho-Communist’.

  187. Amongst my father’s books in his office, was the autobiography: Angry Young Man by Leslie Paul. Paul was the founder of the Woodcraft Folk (a sort of left-wing co-ed alternative to the Boys Scouts) who became its leader from the 1920s into the 1930s. Paul had come out of a Christian tradition, then joined the CP during its Third Period and then returned to Christian Socialism, in fact becoming a priest. Here is a parallel with both Wilde and Pleviers, both of whom had come out of the tradition of Christian socialism. There is a shared concern with ethical socialism which had become Siegi’s preoccupation in his search for a new form of socialism after leaving the KPD.

  Chapter 8

  1947-1966 The Durham years. Drowning ghosts

  Siegi and Lotte moved to Durham in the winter of 1947, finally leaving again in 1966. Although not an exact fit, these were also the years when the Cold War was at its height. In fact, Siegi may have been lucky - another year or so, and the tentacles of the Cold War might have precluded his getting a new university job. Although Siegi continued his political activities by virtue of being a Branch officer for the Durham branch of University Union (AUT) (as I was delighted to discover) and teaching WEA classes of miners and ship-builders (which he loved), he does not appear to have been involved in the - very limited - debates about socialism or in any direct ‘socialist’ activity during this period. His move to Durham and into academia represented a loss in his earlier self’s sense of agency.

  It is too easy,
observing Siegi’s trajectory, to take it for granted that he and Lotte stayed in the UK. Taking the job in Durham, represented Siegi and Lotte finally closing the door on any idea of returning to Germany, though they may not have taken this as a conscious decision. We already know that Siegi had deep reservations about accepting Harry’s offer and in 1948, he also failed to respond positively to an invitation from Brecht to work with him at the Berliner Ensemble in E Berlin. The failure to accept such an offer reveals that, by around 1948, for Siegi, there is no going back.

  On the 9th September 1947, Siegi became naturalised (Certificate A231511, National Archives). Without naturalisation, there was no certainty that he - and other refugees - would be allowed to stay in the UK. Again, we forget that naturalisation was not something the refugees assume; indeed many refugees were most concerned they would be returned to their countries of origin after the end of the war. The wartime British government, unlike the American, refused to grant British citizenship to the refugees, even if they were serving in the Forces. Almost all initial rights to enter into UK had been given on a temporary basis, though, with the outbreak of war, the Government ceased to pursue issues of possible deportation. Neither Siegi nor Lotte could have taken for granted that they would get citizenship.

  Aliens could theoretically apply for naturalisation after five years of residence in the UK, but the influx of refugees in the 1930s had worsened the existing backlog in the Home Office. More seriously, Morrison, a Labour member of the National Government and later a Labour Home Secretary, opposed naturalisation, voicing the opinion that too many refugees/Jews would risk an explosion of antisemitism (London, 2003). Similarly, R.G. Somervell, the Labour interim Home Secretary in 1945, stated that it was unwise to offer refugees settlement. The Government should not accept liability for the refugees who had been admitted on transit visas. Repatriation should be considered, although without the use of force (London, 2003). Chuter Ede, the subsequent Labour Home Secretary, refined this position: aliens of good character should not be arbitrarily expelled but he planned to enforce deportation orders against ‘undesirables’, a position endorsed by Clement Atlee, the Labour Prime Minister (London, 2003). Churchill, ironically, stood out against deportation. Ede employed delaying tactics towards the processing of applications, but the Labour Government never carried out their threat of deportation.

  But there was an extra threat against people who were seen as Communists. Although we know that Siegi had come to be seen as contributing to the war effort, as the Iron Curtain slowly came down following the end of the war and snapped shut in around 1948, the climate towards Communists in the UK become ever more frosty. A secret Home Office letter from the Home Secretary in reply to Mr. Roland Robinson, M.P. asked about the difficulties arising out of divided allegiance as disclosed by the Fuchs case. Fuchs had been found to be ‘spying’ for the USSR.188

  I quote from the last section of the letter: I therefore intend for the present to refuse applications for naturalisation from (a) known members of the British Communist Party or of any foreign Communist Party

  (b) persons who, though not avowed or known members of a Communisst (sic) Party are associated with Communist activities in such a way as to cast doubt on their loyalty

  (c) persons who in the past have been members of a Communist! Party or have been closely associated with Communist activities’ (National Archives, CAB/129/38)

  Although the Fuchs affair spills open after Siegi became naturalised, the memo reveals clearly that an especially close eye was kept on Communists or people associated with communism.189

  Naturalisation must have come as a relief to Siegi (and Lotte). He was now settled in the UK and could finally stop worrying about the possibility of being deported. It also allowed him to bring up his young daughter as British. He could turn his back on the horrors of the past. How far he succeeded in this is another matter.

  But Siegi, as a political refugee who had remained on the left, was unusual in preferring to remain in the UK. Many Communist refugees and exile organisations did plan on returning to Germany. Towards the end of the war, the Freie Deutsche Bewegung, a covertly Communist organisation, amongst others, made extensive preparations for the return home and the deployment of activists in key areas in post-war Germany, going as far as matching names to places (Brinson, 2011). In a separate piece of research I conducted, I established that two out of the four KPD parents exiled in the UK, whose ‘children’ I interviewed, returned to Germany, in one case to the East (or rather the area under Soviet control), the other to the West. The third person’s father was only in the KPD for a couple of years as a young man and then had drifted rightwards. In the fourth case, the father had fled to the USSR, then to the UK and had then become ‘apolitical’.190 Unlike the refugees who came here as a result of antisemitism who tended to see the UK as their future home, the political refugees hoped and prepared to return to their countries where they had been political activists and where they planned to try to build socialism after the ravages of Nazism. I suspect that the ‘comrades’ who were most likely to stay in the UK were those who had fallen out with the KPD.191

  But there were many reasons Siegi and Lotte would never have gone back. They did not want to return to a country which had just murdered many of their family and comrades. In terms of returning to Western Germany, Siegi knew that the system of government had not been de-Nazified. Nor could he return to East Germany because he and even more so Lotte, were paranoid - though with good reason - that the Stasi were out to get them. Moreover, I suspect Siegi had the sense to realise that returning to German soil was never going to return him to the political scene he had once been active in. Indeed, according to Palmier (2006) the ‘comrades’ and literary figures who did return apparently did not have a good time: initially feted, there soon developed a suspicion between those who had left and those who had stayed. Life had moved on and there was no way back.

  Siegi and Lotte moved into a terraced house, built in the 1860s, on a hill so steep, there was a hand rail to help! Durham city was built on seven hills, it was said, like Rome! The house’s only renovations over the intervening eighty years were restricted to a built-on tiny galley kitchen (where my mother erratically produced amazing Germanic three course meals) and a freezing microscopic bathroom. Siegi had borrowed the money to buy the house from Lotte’s Anglicised relatives who, as I gather from the correspondence, did rather well out of the deal, which left Siegi very cross.

  Durham was their first real ‘home’ since Berlin and they had no furniture or anything else to put in their house. There was linoleum on the floors; most of the furniture my father picked up at auctions which were sources of an assortment of rather wonderful, at the time unpopular heavy Victorian furniture, odd bits of already worn carpets and some once fashionable sets of very old beautiful plates, bowls, cups, etc. Somehow or other, our ‘silver’ had come out of Germany and we ate with exquisite gold and silver plated cutlery.

  I certainly remember us as having little money. The house was hardly heated, except for one room with its ever-hungry anthracite stove. I was so cold at night, I could not sleep. I never received pocket money. But what they did spend money on was that once every two years, they went on a foreign holiday. I think this was one of the few times they were content. Yet I remember once, in Paris, probably around 1949. It was July 14th and the streets were full of the noise of celebration. Suddenly my parents pulled me violently into the nearest church. Terrified, I asked what was wrong. The policemen were carrying guns, my father told me in a voice which said: Are you an idiot that you didn’t notice? Then I was told how the Nazis fired from the ‘balconies’ at De Gaulle as he marched down the main aisle of Notre-Dame to celebrate the liberation of France in August, 1944. For my parents, that was yesterday.

  Where they refused to go was Germany, except on an occasion probably in 1948, when, I now realise, they needed to be in situ to try to sort out some unresolved financial matters. The trip was a disaster.
I was at the time a little girl with a halo of fair curls. A man approached us and picked me up declaring’ Ein arisches Mädchen’. My parents turned grey and fled. Then there was a second incident. In a rare break to their normal silence, they actually told me that one man whom we had encountered had been castrated. My inexpressive parents were overwhelmed with upset.

  I have no nostalgic feelings towards Durham though this was where I spent my childhood and grew up. But there were good moments. My father regularly used to take me for walks with the dog though not with my mother (who usually said she was too busy). We could walk straight into the countryside from the back of our house and we used to go for long strolls with the dog, past well-cultivated large allotments and small farms with their assorted livestock. The older I got, the more difficult my father found me-and I him - but for the first ten or so years of my life, my father would make a point of taking breaks from his work to spend time with me and, as I now realise, behaved towards me as if my being a girl made no difference at all to what he expected of me.

  Siegi settled into Durham university life. Hobsbawm (2011), a life-long Communist, casts light on how Siegi may well have felt. Writing about the impact of the Korean conflict on him, Hobsbawm says: ‘To me, a young fellow, the conventions and courtesies of college life could barely conceal that many, perhaps most, of those I dined with at high table regarded me as a potential or actual traitor’. He continued that the possibility of internment again seemed real. Hobsbawm also reminds us of the execution of the Rosenbergs at this time in the US for being atomic spies and how sensitive the British authorities were to American pressure about spies and Commies. The Cold War did not just make enemies of ‘Communists’, it created an ideological climate where left-wing ideas became dangerous.