... And the Policeman Smiled Read Free Page A

community would look after its own. The burden was a heavy one but, at the time, even Schiff himself had no idea just how heavy. He thought in terms of perhaps four to five thousand refugees entering Britain over several years and assumed that a high proportion of these would be able to bring some money with them.
    He was quickly disillusioned. Within weeks the Jewish Refugees Committee was overwhelmed by appeals for help. More staff was taken on and the Committee moved out of its cramped accommodation in the Temporary Shelter to larger accommodation at Woburn House, in Bloomsbury.
    Of greater concern was the Nazi clampdown on the export of capital. Theoretically, the twenty-five per cent escape tax still applied but, since all other money had to go into blocked funds to be released at Government discretion and always at a heavily depreciated rate, the real escape tax was nearer one hundred per cent. It was clear that the work of the Jewish Refugees Committee could not be sustained without a massive fund raising campaign.
    In May 1933 Lionel de Rothschild and Simon Marks, patriarch of the Marks and Spencer empire, led the way in setting-up the Central British Fund for German Jewry. With a call for a ‘unitedeffort of all British Jews in aid of their German brethren’, the CBF brought in no less than £250,000 (close to £10 million by current values), in under a year. Through the CBF, the Jewish Refugees Committee set up lines of communication to American Jewry in the hope of raising more money and to the high commissioner for refugees at the League of Nations who was still the best prospect for finding countries where refugees could be resettled.
    In both directions the going was hard. Moving with the national inclination towards isolationism, American Jewry was slow to respond to appeals for funds and unwilling to lobby the administration to adopt a more liberal policy on refugees. At the same time, cleverly thought-out schemes for giving the Germans some commercial advantages in return for releasing Jewish capital were rejected on the grounds that such manoeuvres would merely support an unsavoury dictatorship. Nor did it help that 1934 was a relatively quiet period in German-Jewish relations which lulled all but the most pessimistic into a sense of false security.
    As for the League of Nations, James Macdonald and Norman Bentwich were away on their travels, busily getting nowhere. Received courteously in all countries except Poland, where anti-Semitism was a way of life long before Hitler had anything to say on the subject, they were never short of advice on where to send the refugees. New Mexico was highly favoured, being suitably remote and unspoiled, but in the event of unforeseen objections there was always Central or South West Africa, North China, Central America, Northern Australia and Alaska. ‘The more remote and emptier the region,’ noted Bentwich, ‘the more detailed were the plans. It proved an ineradicable fallacy that the greatest number of persons could be put into the empty places. A knowledge of colonisation was much rarer than that of geography.’
    Given a free choice most of those fleeing Germany would have opted to resettle in another European country or in America. But there was a growing counter-attraction in the Middle East. While Zionism had never been a strong movement in Germany, Palestine was an increasingly powerful draw for young people.
    Administered by Britain acting as a mandatory power on behalf of the League of Nations, Palestine was the designated Jewish National Home and had been so since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But no one, including Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the World Zionist Movement, could say if the National Home was tobe self-contained or simply a Jewish state in a predominantly Arab land. Having for years pussy-footed with Jewish nationalist aspirations, the current British policy was to restrict Jewish immigration in the forlorn hope of