Abstract
This paper considers how many of the Communist refugees — German, Austrian and German-speaking Czechs — who were in exile in Britain during the Second World War, followed the dictates of the Party and returned home after the war to help rebuild their war-torn countries physically, politically, economically and socially. While the British authorities permitted the Czechs, as ‘friendly aliens’, to leave without too much delay, obstacles were put in the way of the German and Austrian refugees who frequently could not leave Britain until late 1946 or thereafter. The paper examines the relations between frustrated refugees and British officialdom as well as the reception the refugees received from their compatriots on their eventual ‘homecoming’. Generally speaking, the returning Communists did not fare well. In Austria, the returnees, many of whom were of course Jewish, were met with continuing antisemitism as well as anti-communism; in Czechoslovakia, as the Cold War set in, some were arrested while others fled once again; and in the GDR, the preferred destination of the returning German Communists, the label of ‘Westemigrant’ could prove a considerable handicap. All in all, despite the initial idealism, the common experience was one of disillusion and disappointment.
Although precise figures are hard to come by, it is generally reckoned that prior to the Second World War up to 80,000 German speakers — that is to say, principally Jewish and/or anti-Nazi refugees from Germany, Austria and German-speaking Czechoslovakia — sought refuge in Britain. Of these, possibly 5000 would have regarded themselves largely as political rather than racial exilesFootnote1 (though of course these two categories were frequently interchangeable). There were in fact exiled members of most of the political parties and organizations of the ‘Heimatländer’ to be found in Britain, and not just those of the Left. This included representatives of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte and of the Deutscher PEN-Club (renamed the Deutscher PEN-Club im Exil), other cultural and confessional groupings as well as a number of political groups of liberal, conservative or monarchist leanings — and even former Nazis such as Hermann Rauschning. But arguably the most significant political exile groups in Britain were those representing the parties of the Left, that is to say the Socialists, subdivided into several constituent groups, and the Communists. This paper will focus in particular on the exiled Communists and their efforts, following the Party line, to return home after the war — whether to Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia — to play a part in physical and political reconstruction.
To start with the Germans, by 1944, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD in exile in Britain, could claim almost 400 membersFootnote2 as well as a very active group of its youth organization, Freie Deutsche Jugend. One of its real successes was the establishment in December 1938 of the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, an important cultural centre for German exiles in London which attracted not only Communists but also many non-Communists to its activities. In addition, in 1941 its political adjunct, the Free German Movement, was founded. It is interesting to note that the Austrian Communists in Britain underwent remarkably similar developments, with the foundation of, inter alia, a very popular cultural organization, the Austrian Centre; a lively youth group, Free Austrian Youth; and a political arm, the Free Austrian Movement.
Some Communists arrived in Britain independently, such as the economist Jürgen Kuczynski, who already had good connections in Britain, in part through his father, the statistician Robert Kuczynski. The largest number, however, probably around 280,Footnote3 arrived courtesy of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia [BCRC] and its successor organization the Czech Refugee Trust Fund [CRTF] in 1938/1939. These were British-based organizations set up in the wake of the Munich Agreement and the subsequent German occupation of Czechoslovakia to rescue those who were particularly vulnerable under National Socialism, including of course the Communists. They encompassed Czech nationals (both German and Czech-speaking), but also a large number of German and Austrian political exiles who had escaped persecution in their own countries and were taking refuge in Czechoslovakia. Among the German Communists were writers such as Max Zimmering, artists like Heinz Worner and John Heartfield, and leading party functionaries such as Wilhelm Koenen and Heinz Schmidt, the latter playing a seminal role in arranging for Communist refugees firstly to flee Czechoslovakia and secondly to return home after the war.
It was one of the ironies of the pre-war years that after Munich the British government found itself sponsoring a sizeable group of leftwing activists, above all German Communists, the very people they least wished to admit. Indeed, the Security Service MI5 advised against their admission into Britain, for example in the case of the parliamentarian Wilhelm Koenen,Footnote4 but they were overruled by the more liberal Home Office. As a result, the German-speaking Communists were kept under close surveillance, as indeed was the whole Czech Refugee Trust Fund, dubbed ‘this appalling organization’ by MI5 in a confidential message to MI6 in March 1940.Footnote5 The situation was exacerbated by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, whereby the official Party line emanating from Moscow was that the war was an imperialist rather than an anti-fascist one. Communists in Britain, British as well as refugee Communists, whether they agreed with the Moscow line or not, had little choice but to keep a low profile during the early war years, a situation that was at least partially rectified by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941. From then on, at least, with the Soviet Union now a war ally of Britain, the Communists in Britain could work and be seen to work enthusiastically for the British and Allied War Effort.
As the war drew to a close, all members of the refugee population in Britain were faced with the question of what their next move should be. Generally speaking, there was not much appetite for returning home, especially among the Jewish exiles who had little or nothing to return to. With exceptions, only the Communists, and some Socialists, felt or were instructed that it was their duty to return home in order to participate in post-war reconstruction. In preparation, each of the groups of Germans, Austrians and Czech refugees organized suitable courses in subjects such as first aid or youth work that were considered to be useful in post-war conditions, even if the very keen Young Austrians betrayed a certain insensitivity in naming their programme of courses the ‘Jugendführerschule’.
Of the national groups waiting for the appropriate visas to leave Britain, it was the Czechs, as ‘friendly aliens’, who took priority (of course they too included a number of Jews in their midst who may or may not have identified as such). Another worry for the many Sudeten Germans within the Czech contingent concerned how they would be received in post-war Czechoslovakia — there had been much discussion of the likelihood of the expulsion of Sudeten Germans to Germany after the war — even though they had been reassured that anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans would be eligible for Czech citizenship. Late in the day, German speakers were being advised to learn Czech, a notoriously difficult language. Nevertheless, while German and Austrian Communists waited and watched for permission to leave Britain, repatriation to Czechoslovakia began to gain momentum, though still hampered by transport problems and other shortages. Otto Sling, for example, the Czech Communist Youth Secretary in Britain, who had studied medicine before emigration, was a member of the first medical unit to leave, on 1 January 1945.
By early 1946, news of the conditions that had greeted the returning Czech Communists had reached Käthe Beckmann in Britain who, in the absence of the group leader who had returned to Czechoslovakia, carried the responsibility for the welfare of the remaining Czech Communist refugees within the CRTF. Beckmann reported that, as German speakers, many of the repatriates had been sent on from Czechoslovakia to Germany, almost all to the Russian zone, where they had been given the task of assisting in the political reeducation of the German people. They had found themselves without possessions or friends there, settling down in very poor conditions, in crowded rooms, frequently sleeping on the bare floor. Many were ill but were compelled to continue working, often in completely inappropriate jobs, in order to earn their keep. Food was apparently so scarce that many of them had lost as much as four or five stone in weight: ‘Our friends are not to be recognized’, Beckmann wrote. ‘They look like spectres released from Belsen camp.’Footnote6
While these poor conditions were difficult enough to contend with, the fate of some of the Czech Communists from Britain who were appointed to post-war functionary roles within Czechoslovakia could turn out far worse. In the 1952 Slansky trial, an anti-Titoist show trial in Prague, fourteen leading Communists were charged with espionage and treason and eleven of them were executed. It was notable not only that a high proportion of them were Jewish (eleven of the fourteen accused and eight of the eleven executed) but also that in exile they had had connections with Britain and the CRTF. One of these was the economist and journalist Ludwig Freund, later Ludvik Frejka, who had risen to the position of Chief of the Economic Committee in the Chancellery of the President. Another was the committed youth organizer in British exile, Otto Sling, who on his return to Czechoslovakia had been appointed Communist Party Secretary in Brno. Sling had at first refused to admit to the charges levelled against him but ultimately was compelled to acknowledge his ‘guilt’ in having engaged in ‘hostile opportunistic activities’ while in England and establishing ‘espionage contacts’ there.Footnote7 Only in 1963, eleven years after their execution, were Sling and the others officially rehabilitated and acquitted of all indictments.
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Back in Britain, most of the Austrian and German would-be returners were left waiting until well into 1946 for news of when they too would be permitted to return home. The Germans were particularly active campaigners, thanks largely to their leading functionary Heinz Schmidt, who was responsible for organizing the repatriation of members of the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, the affiliated Free German Movement as well as of the Schmidt Group of German Communists registered with the CRTF (there would have been a fair degree of overlap between the membership of these three bodies). The Free German Movement sent a delegation (consisting of Heinz Schmidt and the Social Democrat Karl Rawitzki) to the UK Foreign Office on 25 June 1945 only to be informed that ‘the whole question of German refugees was under consideration and that no decision has […] yet been taken’.Footnote8 The Foreign Office’s actual views on repatriation, though not imparted to the refugees themselves, were set out the following day in a memorandum to the Military Permit Office:
We should […] be grateful if you would, for the time being, refuse permits to any German refugee in this country who is or has been an active member of any German political organization either past or present in Germany or outside it, including of course organizations like the Free German Movement.Footnote9
Like the Germans, the Austrian Communists, too, with a few prominent exceptions, were initially frustrated in their wish to return home, a frustration that was all the greater when it was announced that the first Austrian national elections would take place in November 1945. Leading Communists in exile in Britain were very largely prevented from playing a part in the elections by being barred from re-entering Austria in time. At the end of 1945, two Free Austrian Movement functionaries in British exile, Franz West and Eva Kolmer, who, exceptionally, had managed by then to make their way back to Vienna, attempted to lobby the British occupation authorities in Vienna about fellow Communist exiles still awaiting visas. West reported:
We had an experience there such as I had never had with the British authorities in all the preceding years. The British — it was part of their usual manner of going about things that they never made a direct statement unless it was on something very pleasant. Otherwise they would say: ‘It’s under discussion’, or ‘We find your suggestions very interesting’, or something like that. And in Vienna we said to them: ‘Pollak is back, Czernetz is back [i.e. leading Social Democrats], in the meantime other members of the Trades Union group have arrived back.’ And to that, the official […] gave a very brief answer: ‘Well you know, there are quite enough Communist emigrants arriving back from Moscow. We’re therefore in no particular hurry to bring them back from London as well.’Footnote10
But in fact, following the Austrian elections, the desire to return home on the part of some of the Austrian Communists and others in Britain was clearly waning. For one thing, the elections proved a bitter disappointment: whereas the Communists had counted on obtaining 20–25% of the vote, they succeeded in gaining merely 5.2% and only four parliamentary seats. Reports of terrible living conditions in post-war Austria, of the brutal behaviour of Russian occupation forces and of continuing antisemitism would also all have been important factors here (ultimately outweighing the encouragement of a few sympathetic Communist politicians in Vienna such as Viktor Matejka or Ernst Fischer).
Indeed, Jenö Desser, who was the functionary responsible for the winding down of the London-based Austrian Centre and a reliable witness of refugee morale at this time, claimed that of the Austrian Centre’s many members, ‘a large number would have returned to Austria had the election results been different’.Footnote11 Interestingly, for different reasons — personal in one case, professional in the other — two of the highest profile Austrian Communists in Britain, the leading functionary in the Austrian Centre and Free Austrian Movement, Eva Kolmer, and the musician and Cultural Secretary at the Austrian Centre, Georg Knepler, each made their lives after the war not in their native Austria but in the German Democratic Republic.
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Following the fruitless Foreign Office meeting, the Free German Movement continued to issue press statements, hold numerous meetings and seek the help of prominent Britons, including supportive British MPs like the Labour member Herbert Hughes and the independent Vernon Bartlett. Parliamentary questions were asked on why the refugees were unable to return, but still events proceeded at snail’s pace. The Manchester-based refugee Bruno Kretzlaff-Kresse later ironically recalled his own efforts to leave Britain: in a reversal of their pre-war stance, ‘the same British authorities who had once tried to prevent us from entering England now wanted to keep us in England at all costs’.Footnote12
Well into 1946, the long awaited return of the activists to Germany continued to be plagued by delays and postponements. On 5 January 1946, Heinz Schmidt had sent the Foreign Office a detailed list of all the frustrations to date, the many appeals to the authorities and the repeated disappointments.Footnote13 A month later, on 7 February, John Hynd, Minister for Germany, had apologized for the delay but had still not offered them anything definite. So at this point, Schmidt appears to have taken matters into his own hands, and successfully applied for a military permit to visit a Communist Party congress in Germany; while in Germany, he planned also to use the chance to discuss the repatriation of his members. A highly experienced journalist, he sent back a series of three articles to the Free German Movement’s London newspaper, Freie Tribüne, of which he had previously been the editor: one from Berlin, one from the Soviet Zone of occupation and the third from the British Zone.Footnote14 In these he made no attempt to downplay the destruction or the impact of defeat on the demoralized population, but he also included some encouraging details: these included news of reconstruction already being undertaken by the SPD and KPD and, in particular, of the new movement to unite the two workers’ parties. (This would lead to the formation that same year of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei [SED], acclaimed by the KPD but ultimately deplored by the SPD.)
Back in London, the waiting continued, made all the more painful by the fact that in the meantime visas were being issued to German civilian repatriates and even to some returning Prisoners of War. Finally, on 16 July 1946, in the House of Commons, Hynd announced a scheme for ‘a limited number of refugees’.Footnote15 Despite continuing problems with visas and transport, the first group managed to leave Britain the following month, on 7 August 1946. One of this group was Siegbert Kahn, Secretary of the Free German Movement, who recorded some of his impressions of the arduous journey back. For a start, the party had been detained in Brussels for two days by Belgian customs officials; then the night-time train journey through German cities that had been rendered virtually unrecognizable by the war proved traumatic. Aachen, for one, had been reduced to rubble, while in Cologne the relatively unscathed cathedral stood tall surrounded by ‘a desert of bomb damage’. Finally in Berlin, Kahn observed the twofold ‘Nazi inheritance’, i.e. not only the devastation of the city but also the utter demoralization of the Berliners, and predicted: ‘It will take a long while to remove the bitterness together with the rubble of the Nazi inheritance.Footnote16
Most, if not quite all, of the German Communists returning from exile in Britain chose for political reasons to opt for the Soviet Zone of occupation, soon to become the German Democratic Republic. Those, who like Johann Fladung, a former chairman of the Free German League of Culture in London, resettled in Düsseldorf, in the British Zone of Occupation, evidently did so with the Party’s permission and remained a Party activist. While, as mentioned previously, exact numbers vary from source to source, a figure of 220 visa applications for the Soviet Zone was published in September 1946 in Searchlight on Germany, the journal of the British Council for German Democracy (a British support organization of the Free German Movement).Footnote17
Although the physical conditions the repatriates encountered on their return to the Soviet Zone were harsh in the extreme, they would have been encouraged initially by the regime’s very real attempt to reclaim the cultural tradition disrupted by the Nazis; it was a tradition which the artists, writers, academics and others among the Communist refugees had themselves striven to represent in exile. It would not be long, however, before the deep ideological and psychological division began to set in between those who had spent the exile period in the Soviet Union and those who had been in the West, the so-called ‘Westemigranten’.
With the onset of the Cold War, spy fever began to set in throughout East and West. The Rajk anti-Titoist show trial in Budapest and the Slansky trial in Prague, while not precisely replicated in the GDR, still had their repercussions there, for example in the hounding and imprisonment of the former exile in Mexico, Paul Merker. Where the contingent from Britain was concerned, connections were made between some of them and the Anglo-American brothers, Noel and Hermann Field, who had been condemned as ‘imperialist agents’ in Prague and were imprisoned in Hungary and Poland respectively. Among the many things held against them were their links with the Czech Refugee Trust Fund offices in London where Hermann’s wife, Kate Thornycroft, had been employed.
One of the repatriates from Britain most directly affected by this was Hans Siebert, a well-known educationalist, who in London had been one of the refugees responsible for the very successful Freie Deutsche Hochschule. On his return to Berlin, Siebert had been appointed to major national positions in the education field, such as Chief Educational Advisor to the Central Secretariat of the SED. In the course of the purge, however, that accompanied the Slansky Trial, Siebert was dismissed. Not only had he been registered with the CRTF but — still worse — he had married an Englishwoman who was — worst of all — none other than Priscilla Thornycroft, Kate Thornycroft’s sister. This made the unfortunate Hans Siebert Hermann Field’s brother-in-law. As a result, Siebert was heavily censured and demoted to a provincial post in Dresden.
One can cite numerous examples of dismissals and disappointments suffered by the ‘Westemigranten’, by the artist Heinz Worner, for example, formerly Chairman of the Artists’ Section of the Free German League of Culture and very active in artistic circles in British emigration. After his return to Berlin, he voiced his disappointment at being passed over for posts for which he considered himself to be eminently suitable. He reported, moreover, that he was by no means alone in this, pointing to his fellow artists from British exile Theo Balden, Dorothea Wüsten and René Graetz as suffering a similar fate.Footnote18 On the other hand, the same disregard does not appear to have been directed against John Heartfield, the pioneer of photomontage and likewise a ‘Westemigrant’, who may well have been offered a certain protection by his international reputation.
Doubtless, the economist and academic Jürgen Kuczynski also had his reputation to thank for his avoidance of long-term official opprobrium, despite being reprimanded during the late 1950s for deviating from the Party line and being required to recant.Footnote19 However, Kuczynski proved to be an expert in navigating such situations; and, a few further vicissitudes notwithstanding, remained a popular public intellectual in the GDR for the rest of his long life.
Other western repatriates who appear not to have encountered such difficulties include the Communist parliamentarian Wilhelm Koenen. Despite having played a prominent role in the Free German organizations in Britain, Koenen returned to play a central role in the political development of the GDR, being a member of the SED’s Central Committee until his death in 1963. Max Zimmering, poet and author of numerous prose works for adults and children, to take a further example, was evidently also approved of by the regime despite his exile in the West. He won numerous literary prizes, including the coveted National Prize of the GDR in 1969. One of his books was the engaging Die unfreiwillige Weltreise (1956) which transformed Zimmering’s exile experiences, more specifically his internment experiences in Britain and his deportation to Australia, into a semi-fictional story for younger children.
A variation on a theme is offered by the case of Horst Brasch, who had led the organization Free German Youth whilst in Britain. On his return, Brasch had progressed through the SED hierarchy, becoming a member of the Central Committee and rising to the position of Deputy Minister of Culture. But his career was interrupted by an unwelcome occurrence, at least as far as he was concerned: Brasch’s British-born son Thomas criticized the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops and Horst Brasch himself was removed from office, only returning later to public life in a relatively minor capacity. Thomas Brasch, an author and film director, was imprisoned for ‘anti-state agitation’ and was later expatriated from the GDR. He subsequently settled in West Berlin from where, through his work, he continued to be a source of embarrassment to his father.
It is curious that the positive way in which Horst Brasch, leader of the Free German Youth while in exile, was initially received in the Soviet Zone did not accord with the dismissive reception afforded to the organization itself. In particular, the British organization was not acknowledged as a forerunner of the eponymous Berlin-based youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend: any acknowledgement of antifascist activity carried out by refugees in the West would have been politically unacceptable. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that a collective volume of memoirs compiled by former British-based Free German Youth members, Das war unser Leben: Erinnerungen und Dokumente zur Geschichte der Freien Deutschen Jugend in Großbritannien, 1939–1946, could not be published until 1996, that is until well after the fall of the wall and the collapse of the GDR.
One of the first of the Westemigranten to be seriously admonished and demoted by the GDR authorities on his return from exile was none other than Heinz Schmidt, that tireless Communist functionary. It was Schmidt who, among many other things, had overseen the pre-war escape from Prague to London of German Communists and other antifascists through the Czech Refugee Trust Fund and who had then engineered the post-war return to Germany of numerous Party members. By all accounts a brilliant man with exceptional journalistic and organizational talents, in 1946 Schmidt joined the staff of Berlin Radio as head of the department ‘Issues of the day’. The following year he was promoted to director of Berlin Radio, a crucial post in a divided city. In October 1949, however, he was accused of being too close to some of his western contacts, more specifically of ‘nationalistic arrogance’ and ‘English sickness’.Footnote20 He was removed from his post, and ‘exiled’ to rural Mecklenburg to manage a collective farm complex. With him went his new wife, Eva Kolmer, former leading light of the London Austrian Centre and as important a figure within the Austrian emigration in London as her husband had been within the German equivalent. As part of their political rehabilitation, the couple were required to follow a correspondence course in the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism.Footnote21 Heinz Schmidt eventually worked his way back into political favour and in 1956 he became the editor of the satirical magazine Eulenspiegel. Within a year, however, he had brought about his own downfall by proposing to publish a caricature of party leader Walter Ulbricht; he was dismissed and his political reputation never fully recovered. Eva Schmidt-Kolmer, on the other hand, who in the GDR completed the medical training she had started in pre-war Vienna, went on to made a distinguished career for herself in the field of public health.
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The post-war return of the Communist activists from Britain to their countries of origin does not make for cheerful reading, marked as it often was by disappointment and disillusion. Even those comrades who retained their faith in Communism as the antidote to Fascism were deeply shaken by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and by events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. As we have seen, many of the repatriates to Czechoslovakia were treated harshly, Communists or not. In Austria, meanwhile, the returning Communists — and Communists in general — soon proved to be of little consequence politically.
Although there were exceptions, the situation of activists returning to the GDR was frequently hazardous, the double demotion of Heinz Schmidt, as outlined above, providing a striking example. He died in September 1989, only weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is interesting to note that, despite political disfavour, he had not been forgotten by those comrades he had saved: in the funeral oration delivered by the GDR historian Ernst Diehl on 13 October 1989, in which he recalled Schmidt’s role in rescuing hundreds of Communists and other antifascists from Czechoslovakia, or in a meeting a few months prior to his death at which some of the people he had saved had assembled personally to thank him.Footnote22
It remains an open question as to whether the efforts of the idealistic repatriates, against the odds, to reconstruct their damaged countries were ultimately in vain or whether any longer or shorter-term benefits were derived from them, either for the Party, for themselves or for the post-war societies they were aspiring to shape. In the end, any hopes for the future of Communism the returning exiles may still have harboured, stemming from the pre-war, wartime and post-war years, were surely dashed by the extraordinary collapse of more or less the entire system in or after 1989.
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Charmian Brinson
Charmian Brinson, MA, PhD, is emeritus professor of German at Imperial College London. She is also a founder member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She has lectured and published extensively on Germans, Austrians and German-speaking Czechs in exile in Britain between 1933 and 1950, a recent book being Working for the War Effort: German-speaking Refugees in British Propaganda during the Second World War, 2021 (with Richard Dove). Together with Jana Buresova, she is currently preparing a book-length study of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund.
Notes
1 For example, Werner Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Gruppen in Großbritannien, 1940–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Widerstandes gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschichte, 1969), pp. 23, 26.
2 See Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Gruppen in Großbritannien, p. 47; Birgid Leske, Marion Reinisch and Mathias Hansen, ‘Exil in Großbritannien’, in Exil in der Tschechoslowakei, in Großbritannien, Skandinavien und Palästina, ed. Ludwig Hoffmann et al. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1980), p. 180.
3 See Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove, A Matter of Intelligence: MI5 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees 1933–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 92.
4 See Kell to Maxwell, 30 January 1940, The National Archives [TNA], KV2/2714, 17A.
5 White to Vivian, 13 March 1940, TNA, KV2/2715, 34.
6 Beckmann to Delevingne, 4 November 1946, TNA, HO 294/77.
7 Proceedings of the Trials of Slansky, et al., in Prague, Czechoslovakia, November 26–27, 1952, as broadcast by the Czechoslovak Home Service, pp. 204, 208; see https://archive.org/stream/ProceedingsOfSlanskyTrialPrague1952/ProceedingsOfTheTrialsofSlanskyComplete_djvu-txt, accessed 8 February 2020.
8 Memorandum (Selby), 25 June 1945, TNA, FO 371/46803.
9 Ibid.
10 Interview with Franz West, no. 92, Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, p. 391.
11 Jenö Desser, ‘Mein Lebenslauf, 8. März 1904 — 8. März 1984’, unpubl. ms. in possession of Hans Desser, Vienna, p. 95.
12 Bruno Retzlaff-Kresse, Illegalität — Kerker — Exil: Erinnerungen aus dem antifaschistischen Kampf (Berlin: Dietz, 1980), p. 315.
13 TNA, FO 945/587, 377E.
14 See ‘Reiseeindrücke aus Deutschland,’ Freie Tribüne, 20 April 1946 (8, 8), 4 May 1946 (8, 9), 18 May 1946 (8, 10).
15 Hansard, 125 HC Deb. 5s, cols. 1043–44.
16 Kahn to Stillmann, 24 August 1946,Kahn Papers, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde [SAPMO-BArch], NY 4329/ 37.
17 ‘Our Friends Are Going Home’, Searchlight on Germany, 1, 6 (September 1946).
18 Heinz Worner statement, 28 November 1947, Heinz Worner Archive, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
19 For the campaign against Kuczynski, see for example, Mario Kessler, ‘Jürgen Kuczynski und Alfred Meusel im britischen Exil’, in Britain and the GDR: Relations and Perceptions in a Divided World, ed. by Arnd Bauerkåmper (Berlin: Philo, 2002), pp. 225–26.
20 ‘Beschluss über die Lage am Berliner Rundfunk, 18. Oktober 1949’, in Rückkehr in die Fremde? Remigration und Rundfunk in Deutschland 1945 bis 1955, ed. by Hans-Ulrich Wagner (Berlin: Vistas, 2000), p. 152.
21 See Eva Schmidt-Kolmer, ‘Erinnerungen an Lehr- und Wanderjahre in Sachen Gesundheitsschutz für Mutter und Kind (1949–1961): Entwurf’, unpubl. ms, 22 November 1986, SAPMO-BArch, Sg30/2237.
22 ‘Rede zur Trauerfeier für Genossen Heinz Schmidt’, SAPMO-BArch, Sg Y30/1909/2.