Review | Lifeline to Freedom

The lives and political activity of Czech refugees from Nazism in Britain in the 1930s were complicated by British government hostility, but also by the zigzags of Communist politics dictated by the Soviet Union. Merilyn Moos reviews a recent book about the Czech Refugee Trust Fund.

The period of Nazi ascendancy is too often reduced to the Holocaust and the killing of millions of Jews. This construction both obscures the real causes of Nazism and of the extensive, though largely doomed, resistance to Nazism. The Communists were in the forefront of this resistance in Germany and elsewhere both before the Nazis took power and afterwards. This book’s focus is on those who fled Czechoslovakia for Britain including German and Austrian Communists (who had already fled the Nazis to Czechoslovakia) – but the book also casts light on the deadly zigzags of the Communist Party (CP) line.

The Czech Refugee Trust Fund (CRTF), which is the main focus of the book, was established by the British Government in July 1939 following the Munich agreement, when Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, essentially sought to ‘pacify’ Hitler by agreeing to Germany acquiring a large chunk of Czechoslovakia. The CRTF became responsible for looking after the approximately fifteen thousand refugees who arrived here from Czechoslovakia, which included a wide array of groups: Czechs, the largest group, but also Sudeten Germans and many Germans and Austrians.  But there were further political divisions: almost all the refugees were active anti-Nazis, some Social Democrats and many Communists from Germany and Austria and also Czechoslovakia. (Some also were fleeing because they were Jewish.) MI5 considered the CRTF a highly dangerous organisation. It is an irony of British Government policy at the time that while it was attempting to prevent Communists from seeking refuge here, it admitted so many Communists under the CRTF umbrella!

The tensions, if not enmity, between the Social Democratic and Communist groups of refugees was acute. The ‘Third Period’ of Communism – what is referred to as the ‘United Front’ or ultra-left stage of Comintern policy – had led the German Communist Party to view the Social Democrats as little better than Nazis, as the Communists saw them as upholding capitalism. Catastrophically, the Communist line was therefore to refuse to form an anti-Nazi alliance with them, thereby dividing a potential organised and coordinated working class opposition to the Nazis. (There were a very few local exceptions to this.)  A change of line came about around 1936 with the so-called Popular Front, which encouraged anti-Nazi cooperation, indeed including from bourgeois groups, but many of the Communist refugees carried on with a policy non-cooperation. This was especially true of refugees from Germany, where a Social Democratic Government had gunned down the 1918/19 revolution, and subsequent protests. 

Suddenly, men and a few women who had been at the forefront of struggle found themselves marooned in a foreign land, far away from the struggle at home. Carrying on any kind of anti-Nazi activity was virtually impossible, partly because it was logistically very hard to influence the struggle from so far away, and partly because the British government strictly forbade any form of political activity. It threatened to deport any refugee who was politically involved – a threat they occasionality carried out. In exile and isolated, the refugees turned against each other.

The different political groupings refused to meet with each other and would cold shoulder each other though living cheek by jowl in the refugee hostels.  Social Democrats denounced Communists, but worse, Communists denounced Communists, especially members who had strayed from the Party line, even accusing them of having Gestapo connections, or contact with the renegade ex-Nazi Otto Strasser – an accusation, as we now know, probably justified on a couple of occasions. Such denunciations were on occasion sent to the CRTF or even the Government. The leader of the Sudeten German Social Democratic group was accused of encouraging his members to spy on each other.

A non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR, was signed in August 1939. This was then adopted as ‘the line’ by Communists in Britain when the Second World War began in September 1939. Controversy about the reasons for this pact still continues: on the one hand, Stalin may have been buying time in order to build up the USSR’s armaments but, on the other, he was undermining the anti-Nazi struggle. Communist refugees in the UK repeated that the war was an imperialist war and we do not take sides. They would not participate directly in the war effort. Indeed, some on the non-CP left in the ‘colonies’ and, initially, in Britain, did see the war as a consequence of the rivalries of different imperialisms. But some Communist refugees struggled with the pact’s implications, which included the division of Poland between Germany and the USSR.

The USSR was, correctly, accused of establishing trade links with Nazi Germany as well as returning some Communist refugees in the USSR to Nazi Germany before it broke with Hitler to join the Allies. While this is not the place to review these issues in detail, certainly many of the early German Communist refugees and fellow travellers in the UK left or drifted away from the Party.

This position of neutrality also isolated the Communist refugees from many other refugees and, though little was popularly yet known about Nazism’s barbarity, made their opposition to the war generally very unpopular. When, in 1940, the Government introduced the policy of internment, they were especially gung-ho against Communist refugees, especially after the Communists had declared their neutrality,  sending them disproportionately to the ‘Dominions’ such as Canada and Australia, occasionally with catastrophic results.

Then the Communist Party line changed. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Comintern reversed its previous position. It now supported the war effort against Germany. Now the Communist refugees in Britain argued to support the war against the Nazis. (The book sometimes does not clarify how significant this was.) Indeed, they became so pro-war that they instructed their members to work hard and not to strike!  In 1943, as a gesture of goodwill to its Western Allies, the Soviet Union dissolved the Comintern. Heinz Schmidt, the leader of the group of German communist exiles, while continuing to stress the importance of German resistance inside Germany (though almost all its brave Communist underground leaders were by then dead or in camps), urged his members to help increase production. That was their contribution to the anti-fascist struggle. He also encouraged his members to be involved in pro-Ally propaganda, including for the government,  and to support the war in every way.

There were a variety of positions to the left of the Communist Party on what position to take on the war. They varied from ‘This is a war between future possible imperialisms’ to ’Nazi Germany’s internal contradictions mean it will collapse’ to  ‘Participate in the armed forces so as to subvert from within’. What is often forgotten is that, although forbidden by the government, strikes did continue. During the first few months of the war, there were over 900 strikes, almost all short. The number of strikes increased each year until 1944,  when there were 2000 stoppages, largely over wage demands or workplace conditions. Coal was particularly affected eg a strike in the Betteshanger colliery in Kent in 1942 which led to 1000 strikers being fined. The CP’s anti-strike position was, essentially, nationalistic.

The Communist refugees in fact had almost no contact with the British CP. This was in part to safeguard the refugees’ ‘political neutrality’, but it was as much to do with a  perception that being German or Austrian put you on the side of the enemy. Very few of the Communist refugees generally, with one of two exceptions, became involved  in British class struggles.

Towards the end of the war, the main concern of the Communist refugees from Czechoslovakia was to go home – though not so much among those who were Jewish, or among the Sudeten Germans. Ironically, the British, who had been so hostile to Communist refugees getting into the country were not keen for them to leave, fearing that those, especially from Germany and Austria, would attempt to form Communist governments. The CRTF was subsequently faced with a much smaller exodus from Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup of 1948. It was finally wound up in the 1970s.

The book reveals how unsympathetic the British Government was towards the refugees generally but especially the Communists, and how hard it was to be involved in class politics when in exile.

The Czech Refugee Trust Fund in Britain 1938-1975: Lifeline to Freedom by Charmian Brinson and Jana Barbora Buresova