Arrival of Jewish refugee children, port of London, February 1939. Wikicommons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S69279. Some rights reserved.While between 50-75,000 refugees were admitted to the UK between 1933-1949, this number was only about one in ten of those who applied. Even after the government knew about the camps, it turned its back on all those attempting to flee. (The Daily Telegraph was one paper that reported in June 1942 that over a million Jewish people had been killed).
The government’s arguments were shared by leading members of the Jewish establishment: too many Jews would encourage anti-Semitism, and the more one takes in, the more will want to come. Better to have strictly controlled access and then assimilation will be so much easier.
While not all the people trying to escape Nazism were Jews (the Communists for example are regularly ignored), the racism against Jews was only too real amongst sections of the establishment, right and left. The government, in particular the home secretary, the Labour MP Morrison, essentially refused sanctuary to Jews attempting to flee Vichy France. As Morrison repeatedly explained, letting them in would ‘stir up an unpleasant degree of anti-Semitism’. Finally, in late 1942, 1-2000 refugees were accepted. As David Cesarani has documented in Justice Delayed (1992), even after the end of the war, the Labour government refused to let Holocaust survivors into the UK, while admitting thousands of former waffen SS.
