Working For The War Effort
By Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove
Valentine Mitchell, £45
Reviewed by Amanda Hopkinson
German-speaking refugees from Nazism had more in common than merely belonging to what became known as the “immigré” community. Many obtained access to Britain thanks to professional skills across the spectrum as scientists, doctors, artists, academics and more. Keen to utilise their expertise in a common resistance to the spread of Nazism — which, by 1938, was leading to the military occupation of German-speaking countries — they accepted that translation skills had primacy in decoding and informing on enemy plans and propaganda.
Working for the War Effort tracks how the course of the Second World War was reflected in the British reception and treatment of the immigrés. Brinson and Dove have drawn on the considerable resources and connections of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (of which they are founder members) to reveal a change from an initial welcome, to increasing suspicion — and even paranoia, for example in the case of Communist sympathisers, following the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the incarceration of over 8,000 in offshore islands — up to the success of the immigrés’ own persistent harnessing of their abilities to the war effort.
From this rich selection of material, the authors have succeeded in constructing a cohesive narrative that goes beyond addressing the relationship between the refugees and the British authorities. Of particular interest is the manner in which they cross-reference political and cultural propaganda, including morale-boosting popular culture made by and for the immigré community.
This includes book publishing (Walter Neurath, founder of Thames and Hudson) and theatre (Martin Miller, founder/director/actor of the legendary wartime German-language theatre, Die Laterne, some of whose members later migrated to Hollywood).
More conventional propaganda involved the establishment of the Crown Film Unit (with Paul Rotha Productions contributing 14-minute propaganda shorts); BBC Radio (separately tailored services broadcasting to Germany and Austria, with Martin Esslin as an increasingly prominent contributor); and popular print media, from the daily Die Zeitung (with a circulation of 20,000) to Picture Post magazine (see below)founded by Hungarian Jewish immigré Stefan Lorant in 1938 and edited from 1940 by Tom Hopkinson with its five-million-a-week readership.
The book closes with a detailed bibliography and index, but with some omissions, such as that of Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts by Ernst Gombrich, a deconstruction of German propaganda by one of our greatest art historians who also happened to have worked at a “listening centre”, translating German broadcasts for the British government. Its relevance is enhanced by its having been published by the University of London, where the Research Centre is based. But, despite this quibble, Working for the War Effort is an impressively comprehensive and well overdue addition to the history of the period and the contribution of the immigré community.
Amanda Hopkinson is a translator and academic
