Book review: Hitler’s British Traitors by Tim Tate

In later years, Father Kruger served the parish of Christ the King in Grangemouth and its website provides some of the relevant detail. Kruger was the son of Jewish parents and came to Edinburgh at the age of fifteen with his brother Hans as refugees from Nazi Germany. Soon afterwards he was picked up on his way to church ‘wearing his school uniform of Edinburgh Academy’ and deported to a detention camp for aliens in Canada.

In his fascinating study of British fascists, fifth columnists, treachery and spying, Tim Tate argues that the treatment of ‘enemy aliens’ is one of the reasons why a book like this has taken so long to appear: ‘The roundup of thousands of Germans and Italians – many of whom were entirely innocent of any Nazi taint – was unquestionably a shameful period; that hundreds of them died when a ship transporting them to camps in the Dominions was sunk by a U-boat, compounded the tragedy.’

The ‘unease’ surrounding British policy of internment without trial, Tate says, helps explain why the information required to write the book remained classified for so long. The dossiers held by MI5, the Home Office and the Treasury Solicitors Department should have been released before the millennium under the fifty year rule or, at worst, under Freedom of Information after 2000, but they have only recently been made available. This secrecy was underpinned by a false ‘nothing to see here’ narrative which dismissed the idea of a fifth column as a chimera.

Tate contends that there is a lot of see, including three plans to launch a violent fascist revolution involving some of the leading public figures in the land and a series of spying episodes which have only now come to light. He identifies a number of ‘familiar names from aristocratic fascist circles’ including the Duke of Buccleuch who had attended Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebration in Berlin in 1939. Later he was earmarked for the Quisling cabinet’s ‘food and agriculture’ brief in the event of a successful coup.

Buccleuch was not the only Scottish connection. The Duke of Bedford who was to be Prime Minister in the putative ‘Coalition Government of National Security’ also had a Scottish estate. Archibald ‘Jock’ Ramsay was the Conservative MP for South Midlothian and Peebles and his anti-Semitism was ‘obsessive and overwhelming’. In 1939 he formed ‘The Right Club’, one of a bewildering array of fascist organisations in Britain but probably the most effective. Within six months ‘it would penetrate sensitive government ministries, the armed forces the police and even MI5 itself.’

Our view of British fascism is coloured by the P.G. Wodehouse character Roderick Spode, seventh Earl of Sidcup and leader of ‘The Black Shorts’. Bertie Wooster thought Spode was seven feet tall, eventually growing to nine foot seven. By contrast, many of the foot soldiers who were enlisted to help the Nazis seem to diminish as you look more closely. Jessie Jordan, for instance, a hairdresser from Dundee, was at the centre of a Nazi spy network which operated before the war. Described here as ‘Illegitimate and unloved’, she responded to the four year term imposed on her at the High Court in Edinburgh by saying ‘the sentence is my medicine and I can take it’. The Dundee Courier described her as a serviceable tool. Many of the other less privileged fifth columnists were similarly serviceable - drunks, fantasists, petty criminals, or on their uppers.

The real life fascists from Spode’s social strata, however, are another matter. They had the power to cause serious problems and avoid serious consequences. The same authority that exposed innocent school children to the possibility of being torpedoed was much slower to subject its aristocratic Nazis to public scrutiny. The various ways in which they were protected while others met the full force of the law is a running theme here. Plus ca change.