Author Sybil Oldfield, in a new book titled "The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi List", revealed a so-called Black Book of Nazi Germany that included the names of over 3,000 prominent British subjects who would be rounded up after Hitler invaded the United Kingdom.
According to the book, those from the list were to be placed under house arrest or thrown into "newly constructed camps", or could face an even worse fate.
SS Col. Franz Six, a professor tasked with leading the elimination of any opposition to the Nazis in Britain, was greenlighted to “set up Einsatzgruppen [paramilitary SS death squads]… as the situation dictates and the necessity arises", Oldfield says.
The "Black Book", according to the author, was compiled under the oversight of SS Col. Walter Schellenberg, beginning in 1937. According to the Nazi book, “almost the whole of Britain was really controlled by very rich, assimilated British Jews,” and complained that Jews in the media promoted “anti-German influence.”
The tome served as both a "handbook" for troops occupying the UK while also containing names of people subject to arrest.
“Once I so quickly discovered that these anti-fascist Britons … were marvelous human beings — brave, humane, intelligent — the more I wanted to learn more and then share it,” Oldfield told The Times of Israel in an interview.
Among those included in the blacklist were Winston Churchill, then-UK Prime Minister, along with his cabinet; senior Labour politicians, trade unionists and well-known pre-war anti-fascists; and many British Jews. Particularly, there was the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann; Oscar Deutsch, owner of the Odeon cinema chain; film producers Ivor Montagu and Isidore Ostrer; and Lords Melchett and Bearsted from the financial sphere.
The list included Albert Einstein, as well as nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and Black singer Paul Robeson, although the three had already fled to the United States.
Not only people were subject to rounding up, but organisations as well, with publishing houses Penguin Books and the Left Book Club, the Middle England Rotary club, the Transport and General Workers Union, as well as the YMCA, the Workers’ Educational Association, and the Quakers, included in the list.
Oldfield said that the main goal of her book was to find out why the listed Britons were “suspected above all others of having the potential to obstruct the successful Nazification of Great Britain", along with making sure that what she believes is a "gap" in the historical record - the efforts of those resisting fascism and warning against Hitler before the war - is filled.
“It’s rather disturbing that the Nazis, who seem to exercise a sort of taboo fascination in popular consciousness, a forbidden darkness, always somehow get the headlines,” she noted to the outlet.