Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism, 1939-40 (History and Politics)

This book is a study of British anti-Semitism in the last six months of peace, and the first year of the Second World War. It shows how, against the backdrop of an endemic British 'social anti-Semitism', a virulent form of this tendency was able to emerge in the late Thirties, above all in a variety of extremist movements. These movements gained their strength from the popular obsession, in 1939, with Jewish responsibility for the approaching war (seen as 'The War of the Jews' Revenge'), and with the myth of the Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot. Inevitably, these views were closely related, in many cases, with pro-Nazism. At the end of his last book, Fellow Travellers of the Right, which dealt with pro-Nazism in the mid-Thirties, the author hazarded the view that, after Hitler's march into Prague March 1939, this tendency almost died out. The present book is the proof that the generalisation was mistaken.

In the pre-war context, anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism were often views held by the most patriotic of people. For most, therefore, the outbreak of war was a signal instinctively to perform their patriotic duty. But there were others who found themselves in a considerable dilemma, torn between patriotism and their desire to subvert a war they believed Britain to have been tricked into understanding. Typical of the views involved was a speech made by Sir Oswald Mosley to a well attended luncheon at the Criterion Restaurant as late as 1 March 1940: 'The real reason why the British Government have declared war on Germany is because Britain is controlled by Jews and they desire to see the end of the present German government so that they can resume their exploitation of the German people'.

Central to the arguments advanced here is Captain Ramsay, the only British MP to be imprisoned in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B. The pre-war Membership List of his Right Club, which for almost 50 years had been believed to be lost, has recently been discovered. A bare list of names of this kind would of course prove little in itself, but it has provided the basis for extensive researches into the views and activities of many of the individuals listed. These researches, and those into many other figures in the period, provide a great deal of evidence as to the views and activities of those in the various anti-Semitic and/or pro-Nazi circles in 1939.

This is an important book written from primary sources.