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00 - Prelim 4/5/01 1:29 pm Page i

EUROPE IN EXILE
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
00 - Prelim 4/5/01 1:29 pm Page ii
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
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EUROPE IN EXILE

EUROPEAN EXILE COMMUNITIES IN

BRITAIN 1940–1945

EDITED BY MARTIN CONWAY AND JOSÉ GOTOVITCH

Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
00 - Prelim 4/5/01 1:29 pm Page iv

First published in 2001 by

Berghahn Books
www.BerghahnBooks.com

© 2001 Martin Conway and José Gotovitch

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission
of Berghahn Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Europe in exile : European exile communities in Britain, 1940–1945 /

edited by Martin Conway and José Gotovitc
p. cm.
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-57181-759-X (acid-free paper) – ISBN 1-57181-503-1
(pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. World War, 1939–1945--Refugees. 2. World War, 1939–1945--
Governments in exile. 3. Great Britain--Emigration and immigration--
History--20th century. 4. Europeans--Great Britain--History--20th
century. 5. Refugees--Great Britain--History--20th century. 6. Refugees--
Europe--History--20th century. I. Conway, Martin, 1960–
II. Gotovitch, José.

D809.G7 E93 2001

940.53’08691–dc21 2001025283

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN 1-57181-759-X hardback
ISBN 1-57181-503-1 paperback
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
00 - Prelim 4/5/01 1:29 pm Page v

CONTENTS

Introduction 1
José Gotovitch and Martin Conway

Part One: Pre-histories

1. British Government Policy Towards Wartime Refugees
Colin Holmes 11
2. Pre-War Belgian Attitudes to Britain: Anglophilia and
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Anglophobia
Jean Stengers 35

Part Two: The Belgian Example

3. Belgian Society in Exile: An Attempt at a Synthesis
Luis Angel Bernardo y Garcia and Matthew Buck 53
4. Female Belgian Refugees in Britain during the Second
World War: An Oral History
Françoise Raes 67
5. The Reconstruction of Belgian Military Forces in Britain,
1940–1945
Luc De Vos 81
6. Belgian Military Plans for the Post-War Period
Pascal Deloge 99
7. The Commission pour l’Etude des Problèmes d’Après-Guerre
(CEPAG) 1941–1944
Diane de Bellefroid 121
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vi Contents

8. The Staff of the High Commissariat for National Security:

A Socio-Professional Profile
Eric Laureys 135

Part Three: The European Dimension

9. The Norwegian Armed Forces in Britain
Chris Mann 153

10. The Czechoslovak Armed Forces in Britain, 1940-1945

Alan Brown 167

11. The Social History of Polish Exile (1939-1945).

The Exile State and the Clandestine State: Society,
Problems and Reflections
Jan E. Zamojski 183

12. France in Exile: The French Community in Britain,

1940–1944
Nicholas Atkin 213

13. Dutch Exiles in London

N. David J. Barnouw 229

14. The Socialist Internationale: Society or Counter-Society?

Herman Balthazar 247
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

15. Legacies of Exile: The Exile Governments in London

during the Second World War and the Politics of
Post-war Europe
Martin Conway 255

Index 275

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
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INTRODUCTION
MARTIN CONWAY AND JOSÉ GOTOVITCH

As these lines are being written, the entire world is once again con-
fronted with the drama of large numbers of refugees fleeing their
native lands which have been ravaged by conflicts. The force of the
live television images transmitted most recently from Africa and
Kosovo proves without any doubt and without any need for the
slightest explanation the simple, brutal and terrifying reason for
these population movements: the refugees are seeking simply to save
their lives.
In 1940 Hitler’s invasion of Western Europe similarly provoked
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

millions of civilians to flee, motivated by a terror constructed or

transmitted by previous generations and reinforced by the events of
the 1914–18 conflict. For these refugees, the power of imagined
horrors was just as strong, if not stronger, than the real images
transmitted today. Terror certainly played a role in the decisions to
flee: the memory of the crimes perpetrated by the uhlans, the sack-
ing of Dinant, the burning of the library of the University of
Louvain and the shootings by the so-called francs-tireurs caused
many to flee from what they imagined to be the imminent prospect
of direct brutality. But so too did the memories of the experience of
exile during the First World War of the hundreds of thousands of
Belgians who had spent the war years in exile in France and Britain,
in a free society sheltered from the dangers of the military conflict.
Thus it was the First World War that for the first time created
mass exile societies, which, beyond divisions of class and ideology,
brought together national populations who lived together during
the military conflict in the expectation of a return to their homeland
after the military defeat of the enemy. In this respect, the exile soci-
eties of the First World War differed in their inclusive nature from
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2 Europe in Exile

those of the émigrés in Germany during the French Revolution, or,

before them, those of the Huguenot refugees expelled from France
on the basis of their religious belief. The exile communities of the
1914–18 conflict became in this way a ‘model’ that all those who
participated in this experience of exile were nevertheless resolved
never to have to relive.
Hitler’s dreams of domination of the whole of Europe, as well as
the Nazi racist ideology and its model of a prison-society, served,
however, to transform both the scale and the nature of the fear that
the German Reich inspired at the outbreak of the Second World
War. To the primal and all too justified fear of violence was now
added among the more aware sections of the population (who also
possessed the material means of acting upon their convictions) the
wish to escape at any price from Nazi domination, however ‘pacific’
in character its architects might claim it to be. The fall of France and
the decision of Pétain to choose the path of collaboration effectively
imprisoned some hundreds of thousands of European refugees,
many of whom had taken refuge in France from countries already
conquered ‘surreptitiously’ as a consequence of the Nuremberg
racial laws, the Anschluss, the Munich agreement or the Nazi-Soviet
Pact. Thus Britain became, or, rather, became once again, the only
combatant and friendly country willing to serve as a place of exile
and asylum.
It is necessary to emphasise the friendly element because for the
unfortunate Europeans forced into exile there were other possibili-
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ties that they could try to exploit. Sweden became a place of refuge
for some German Social Democrats. Switzerland opened its doors
to a very few, albeit on certain strictly-defined conditions. North
Africa, too, seemed briefly to offer the prospect of refuge, but one
that proved to be an ephemeral mirage as a result of its harsh cli-
mate and the control of the Vichy regime that imposed a harsh
regime of internment camps on the refugees. Others sought to cross
the Pyrenees from France into Spain, a journey that would be imi-
tated by many other resisters and escapees once the escape routes in
Nazi-occupied Europe had been established. For many of these
refugees, however, entry into Spain was via the Francoist camp at
Miranda, an institution that became a place of sinister memory for
almost two thousand Belgians as well as many Poles and French cit-
izens who mistakenly believed that by arriving in officially-neutral
Spain they had finally managed to escape from persecution.
The recently republished work by Varian Fry1 has also rightly
highlighted the importance of the United States as a place of exile,
aided by its neutrality during the years 1940–41 and by the presence
of various U.S. agencies in the unoccupied southern zone of France.
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Introduction 3

Exile in the U.S.A. had, however, a number of distinct characteris-

tics. The particular role played by American Jewish organisations
permitted the rescue of a good number of Jewish citizens not only
from Austria and Germany in particular but also from the rest of
Europe. In addition, the U.S. authorities deliberately sought to assist
members of the European intelligentsia to find refuge in the United
States. Finally, the decisions taken by numerous financial, industrial
and commercial companies to locate their head offices and their
capital reserves in the relative security of New York from 1939
onwards ensured that business leaders formed a prominent element
of this European refugee population. For those who did not fit these
criteria, Cuba and Mexico became alternative, and not entirely
unpleasant, places of refuge in the New World.
But nowhere outside Britain did European exile take on such a
structured form, which was rendered more official by the establish-
ment in London of the legitimate or reconstituted governments of
Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Norway and Poland. In
addition, it was in London that the Free French authorities found a
home as well as numerous other committees claiming to speak on
behalf of lands governed by the fascist forces.
Moscow, and, indeed, the USSR as a whole, also became a place
of wartime refuge, albeit a much more ambiguous one and one that
was often marked by tragedy. The Soviet occupation of the eastern
territories of Poland led to the pure and simple murder of some tens
of thousands of soldiers while many hundreds of thousands of oth-
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ers were deported to ‘distant regions’ of the USSR. Even so, the
reversal of diplomatic and military fortunes protected these
refugees, including many East-European Jews, from the Nazi mas-
sacres and genocide. Conscious of the need to prepare for the
post-war world, the Soviet authorities recruited among the Polish
and Czech refugees, as well as among those who had been ‘forced’
into exile, such as Hungarian, Romanian and even German prison-
ers of war, to form the leadership groups on whom they would rely
on to establish their subsequent control of central and Eastern
Europe.
Thus, to simplify greatly, it can be argued that the events of the
war years served to prefigure the divisions of the postwar era.
Already, long before the Cold War had begun to loom on the hori-
zon, the exile communities of Europe had divided into two
contrasting poles: around certain squares in central London what
would become the ‘Free World’ was being constituted; while, fur-
ther east, the Kremlin was using its pre-war and wartime refugees to
put in place the ‘Socialist world’ of the future.
It is therefore easy to see the importance that the experience of
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4 Europe in Exile

exile between 1939 and 1945 holds for an understanding of the

postwar world, and its implications at the governmental and diplo-
matic levels have been substantially examined in a number of earlier
works. The purpose and, we hope, originality of this volume lies in
its intention to look beyond the level of governmental authorities at
the ‘societies of exile’. Taking as its starting-point the largest exile
population in wartime Britain, the Belgians, it seeks to look at the
exile populations in the full diversity of their civilian and military
dimensions. The challenge of this international research project was
therefore to seek to explore the social composition and cultural val-
ues articulated by these thousands of exiles who shared in common
only their arrival in Britain as a consequence of frequently very dis-
similar choices, journeys and intentions.

Aspects of Exile

The diverse and multinational structure of the book takes as its

starting-point the history of the Belgian refugee community in
Britain, which was the focus of a research project directed jointly by
the Faculty of Modern History of the University of Oxford, the Free
University of Brussels (ULB) and the Centre d’Etudes et de Docu-
mentation Guerre et Sociétés Contemporaines (CEGES) of Brussels.
In the opening chapter, Colin Holmes analyses the manner in which,
in preparing to receive on its soil escapees from the looming Euro-
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

pean military conflict, Britain sought to reconcile its policy of strict

immigration control, established after the First World War, with its
unavoidable role as a place of refuge. Not surprisingly, it managed
to do so only with considerable difficulty and at the price of numer-
ous contradictions between the actions of the different branches of
the state apparatus. Nevertheless, if one considers the large number
of initiatives that the British succeeded in launching amidst the
chaos of wartime, one is obliged to recognise that the British gov-
ernmental system did succeed in adapting with remarkable
flexibility to the impossible conditions of these gloomy times. It is,
therefore, worth stressing that, in marked contrast to the memories
of the Belgians who fled to France in 1940, the Belgian wartime
refugees who managed to reach Britain have retained memories
composed exclusively of gratitude and admiration for their British
hosts. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that, as Jean
Stengers makes clear in his contribution, anglophobia and
anglophilia had both been present in Belgium since the nineteenth
century, with the former often prevailing over the latter.
The purpose of the chapter by Luis Bernardo and Matthew Buck
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
001 - Introduction 12/3/01 10:23 am Page 5

Introduction 5

is to escape from the Belgian governmental offices in Eaton Square

in London in order to explore the full social diversity of the Belgian
refugee experience. It demonstrates how the scattered Belgian com-
munities sought painstakingly to reconstruct their familiar and
cherished structures of sociability through schools, churches, trade
unions, lecture societies and musical concerts. Within this reconsti-
tuted and largely improvised society, it was the women who,
consciously or by force of circumstance, were obliged to play the
leading role. As the contribution by Françoise Raes demonstrates,
these women, be they pillars of family life, workers or members of
the auxiliary armed forces engaged on a path of feminist liberation,
found themselves also obliged to adopt the more traditional roles of
the (foreign) soldier’s wife, and therefore also of the war widow. All
aspects of the life of the Belgian community were inevitably domi-
nated by the war. A new army was created that, as Luc De Vos
stresses in his chapter, also acquired through its renovated struc-
tures and methods of fighting a new character that would form the
basis of the Belgian army of the postwar era. Plans for the future
constituted a major theme of the actions of the exile authorities, be
it the military planning investigated by Pascal Deloge or that by the
wide range of prominent Belgian exile figures brought together in
the Commission pour l’étude des problèmes d’après-guerre
(CEPAG) studied by Diane de Bellefroid. More than such planning,
it was, however, the more immediate prospect of social and politi-
cal troubles arising from the prospect of liberation that preoccupied
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

the Belgian exile authorities. Like many of the other exile regimes,
they were haunted by a ‘fear of the return’, both in terms of the
material difficulties that it would present as well as the prospect of
a rejection of their authority by the liberated population. They
therefore sought to prepare their return with care, creating an Haut
Commissariat à la Sécurité de l’Etat (HSCE) composed, as Eric Lau-
reys stresses, of individuals whom the government believed it could
count on as reliable.
This Belgian experience is then compared with those of the other
European refugee populations. Military matters inevitably loom
large in the case of the Norwegians and the Czechoslovaks, exam-
ined by Christopher Mann and Alan Brown respectively, as well as
in the very particular war experience of the Poles, despite the
remarkable range of Polish civilian exile activities examined in the
contribution by Jan Zamojski. Even the Free French were first and
foremost soldiers, though the dominating figure of General de
Gaulle has overshadowed the history of the French civilian popula-
tion, which, as Nick Atkin demonstrates, though small in number
and highly fragmented, contained a number of prominent figures
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6 Europe in Exile

both of that time as well as of the future. Much the same was true
of the Dutch exiles, among whom the presence of Queen Wil-
helmina, as David Barnouw analyses in his contribution, dominated
all of the imagery of the Netherlands at war.
A further and distinctive element of the exile communities in
London was the presence of many of the leading figures of the pre-
war Socialist Internationale. In his contribution, Herman Balthazar
explores this microcosm of exile in which both British and Belgian
figures played a leading role, as well as certain of the leading Social-
ist politicians of those countries, notably Germany and Austria, that
had been conquered ‘from the interior’. With its weaknesses and
internal divisions, the wartime Internationale exemplified not only
the tensions between patriotic loyalty and internationalism but also
the hope for a better future based on world peace. In the final con-
tribution, Martin Conway seeks to assess the impact which the
wartime exile regimes had on post-war society, as it moved almost
seamlessly from World War to Cold War. Though their immediate
impact was in many cases limited, their long-term contribution
could be argued to have been more significant.
Through their examination of these various aspects of exile, the
essays in this volume seek to provide a new examination of the Euro-
pean exile societies of the war years, the existence of which has
tended to be overlooked both in popular memory and in written
accounts. Certainly, in comparison with the sufferings of the popu-
lations of occupied Europe, the communities on the other side of the
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Channel appear as privileged groups, about whose experiences for a

long time it seemed almost indecent to speak. But, like all such
human entities, the history of the European exile communities
deserves to be examined, both because of its inherent value and the
unique experience that it comprised. As in any such crisis situation,
the destruction of the authority of traditional structures enabled pat-
terns of behaviour to emerge that in more normal times would have
remained hidden from view. For this reason, the phenomenon of
exile, it can be argued, can be used by historians to study the ‘mother
society’: the occupied country from which they sprang. Thus we
believe that this volume of essays provides, however imperfectly, a
contribution not merely to a neglected aspect of the history of the
Second World War but also to the wider history of modern Europe.

Acknowledgements

This volume, and the conference upon which it is based, could not
have come to fruition without the invaluable assistance of a large
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
001 - Introduction 12/3/01 10:23 am Page 7

Introduction 7

number of organisations and individuals. First and foremost, we are

indebted to the Wiener-Anspach Foundation of Brussels, which,
under the energetic leadership of its president Etienne Gutt, sup-
ported the conference held at Balliol College in Oxford in the
autumn of 1998. In addition, the Foundation funded a two-year
research project on the history of the Belgian refugees in Britain that
enabled two researchers (Matthew Buck at the University of Oxford
and Luis Bernardo at the Free University of Brussels) to undertake
a comprehensive analysis of the history of the Belgian refugee expe-
rience in Britain that will result in the forthcoming publication of a
joint-authored book in Belgium. Throughout their work, they were
assisted by Baron Jean Bloch, president of the Fondation de la
Mémoire, who through his expert advice, helped to design and
structure the research project. The conference in Oxford was also
made possible by valuable financial assistance from the British
Council, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Services Scien-
tifiques, Techniques et Culturels of the Belgian Federal Government
and the Regius Professor’s Discretionary Fund of the Faculty of
Modern History of the University of Oxford. For invaluable organ-
isational assistance, we are grateful to Lut Van Daele, Tina
Hodgkinson, Matthew Buck and Joseph Bord.
As editors, we are indebted to Marion Berghahn for her enthusi-
astic support for the project, to Christine Arthur for her expert and
accomplished translation of the French-language contributions to
the volume and to Alison Falby for her painstaking attention to the
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

detail of the editorial work. Above all, we are grateful to all of our
contributors for their commitment to this volume of collective
research.

Note

1. V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945; published in French translation

as Le massacre des juifs, Paris, 1999.

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001 - Introduction 12/3/01 10:23 am Page 8
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
01 - Chapter 1 12/3/01 10:25 am Page 9

PART ONE

PRE-HISTORIES
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
01 - Chapter 1 12/3/01 10:25 am Page 10
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
01 - Chapter 1 12/3/01 10:25 am Page 11

BRITISH GOVERNMENT POLICY TOWARDS

WARTIME REFUGEES
COLIN HOLMES

Arrivé à huit heures à Weymouth après une traversée qui avait duré
neuf heures, nous débarquâmes à une heure et apprîmes que l’on
avait l’intention de nous envoyer dans une ville industrielle du Lan-
cashire; nous étions stupéfaits. Etre obligés de quitter les plages
ensoleillés et l’air limpide de Guernsey pour aller vivre dans une
atmosphère de fumée, de pluie et de brouillard, voilà un avenir peu
attrayant.
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A school essay on evacuation, written in December 1940, quoted

in B.A. Read, No Cause for Panic – Channel Islands Refugees
1940–45
I had my trepidations for a long time.
But yesterday I could wait no more.
I went to the phone and dialled a number: my number!
At the other end of the line, in my house, I heard an unknown voice
saying that I wasn’t there. I asked him if he knew what had happened
to me, where I was, and he said he had moved in recently and that he
didn’t know.
I know perfectly well where I am . . . I am not really here, and over
there,
I am no more.
‘Neither Here nor There’, by Himzo Skorupan, in The Bend in
the Road: Refugees Writing

‘The refugee crisis is a major world issue of the 1990s.’1 In other

words, the problems of the uprooted have continued to attract
attention, even if, as in the past, the precise definition of ‘refugee’
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12 Europe in Exile

has proved slippery.2 Much of this recent interest has focused on the
world beyond Europe, which increasingly since 1945 has witnessed
major refugee migrations. As a result, many African, Asian, and
Middle Eastern nations now contain a far higher proportion of
refugees relative to their populations, than any European state.3
However, Europe has also witnessed the continual creation of
refugees, evident most recently in the upheavals in the Balkans. Reli-
gious and racial antipathies in Europe have both contributed to
such problems. So too have the ravages of war, even though some
groups displaced from their homelands through wartime pressures
would not technically count as refugees under certain definitions.4
In the case of wartime exiles, the events of 1939 to 1945 assumed
a particular significance: ‘All told the number of people displaced by
the . . . war in Europe amounted to 30 million — a number that is
unfathomable in terms of human lives’.5 During these years, ‘Fron-
tiers where each immigrant had been carefully filtered were crossed
by millions whose passports were guns and whose visas were bul-
lets. They set in motion millions of others who marched unarmed
between streams of blood and tears’.6 Britain could not stand aside
from such developments.

A Fascinating Mixture of Nationalities and Races

In 1940 Britain stood exposed to Nazi Germany’s expansionist poli-

Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

cies. One is reminded of an earlier conflict, recalled in Wordsworth’s

poetry, when the country had stood alone ‘the last that dare to strug-
gle with the foe’, on that occasion in the shape of Napoleon’s
France.7 In 1940 a literary evocation of the country’s mood can be
found in George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, written during
the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombardment. This explained its arresting
opening sentence: ‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are fly-
ing overhead, trying to kill me!’8 If Orwell’s work carried signs of
apprehension, it also contained seeds of hope. ‘If we come through
this war,’ he wrote, ‘the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been
one of the great turning points in English history.’9 The War might
lead to major structural changes and society might change for the
better.
This remark on the defeat in Flanders reminds us once again that
between 1939 and 1945 the history of Britain was inextricably
linked with events in Europe. It has been suggested that during these
years Britain ‘experienced the most remarkable and large-scale
migration of peoples in its history’. As a result of the arrival of peo-
ples who had fled in the face of Nazism, the country became ‘a
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
01 - Chapter 1 12/3/01 10:25 am Page 13

British Government Policy Towards Wartime Refugees 13

fascinating mix of nationalities and races’.10 That phenomenon, in

which Europeans in exile featured prominently, certainly caught the
attention of some observers who lived through the War, as a graphic
description of wartime London clearly shows. The writer vividly
recalled:
French sailors with their red pompoms and striped shirts, Dutch
police in black uniforms and grey-silver braid, the dragoon-like mor-
tar boards of Polish officers, the smart grey of nursing units from
Canada, the cerise berets and sky-blue trimmings of the new para-
chute regiments, the scarlet lining of our own nurses’ cloaks, the
vivid electric blue of Dominion air forces, sandy bush hats and lion-
coloured turbans, the prevalent Royal Air Force blue, a few
greenish-tinted Russian uniforms and the suave black and gold of the
Chinese navy.11
London, then, even cosmopolitan London, looked different during
the wartime years as a consequence of the arrival of military per-
sonnel from other countries.12 One needs to take a wider
perspective, however, and sweep up other groups in order to paint
a fuller picture. Jews featured heavily in Europe’s population move-
ments during the War, particularly in consequence of their forced
deportations to the death camps, but some Jews from continental
Europe did manage to enter Britain. It has been suggested that a fig-
ure of ‘no more that 10,000’, would constitute ‘a reliable estimate’
of the net increase in the Jewish refugee population during the
War.13
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

But what of the still broader picture? A history of the immigra-

tion service, written from an insider’s perspective, captures the
bustle of activity created by the outbreak of war: ‘Overnight the
whole complexion of work both at Headquarters and at the ports
had changed completely and the Immigration Officer found himself
with all sorts of new powers to enforce.’14 Departures and arrivals
both came under scrutiny and 1940 proved to be a particularly busy
time for monitoring the latter. Indeed, fears surfaced in official cir-
cles that troop movements might become clogged up by the
presence of the refugees.15 One can find newspaper pictures at this
time of Belgians in flight and numerous references to the arrival of
Dutch exiles.16 Press reports also dwelt on the preparations then
under way to cope with this immigration.17 However, it is far from
easy to ascertain the precise scale of such movement.
It has been claimed that 60,000 alien refugees reached Britain
between May 1940 and December 1943, a key period for immigra-
tion. However, this figure does not include Allied forces living in
Britain.18 Another more recent source has suggested that ‘over
70,000 refugees arrived in Britain during the Second World War’.19
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
01 - Chapter 1 12/3/01 10:25 am Page 14

14 Europe in Exile

But is there any official estimate? In 1943 a parliamentary answer,

which took account of the situation in 1939 as well as entry during
the War, gave a figure of 150,000 refugees, including children, who
were then living in Britain.20 Then, three years later, the Aliens
Department of the Home Office maintained in a report addressed to
the Foreign Office on the number of wartime refugees that:
If children are excluded, the number of refugees who were in Britain
at the outbreak of war or who entered subsequently was not less than
150,000. Excluding children, some 70–80,000 German, Austrian
and Czech refugees were residing in Britain by the outbreak of war in
September 1939; and from May 1940 to December 1943 when the
United Kingdom became the immediate base for the attack on
Hitler’s continental fortress, some 60,000 refugees entered the coun-
try.21
It can be understood why 1943 was used as the upper chronologi-
cal limit in this report: after that date intending refugees were often
advised to stay where they were and to await their fate at the end of
the war. In other respects the Home Office memorandum is less
than satisfactory: there is a vagueness as to which groups it counted.
However, a figure of 150,000 refugees living in Britain during the
war, almost half of whom entered the country in the course of the
war, and of whom the Belgians numbered 15,000, would seem to be
reasonable.
Copyright © 2001. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contributions to the War Effort

Whatever the precise numbers, the presence of refugees sheltering

from Nazi terror could be turned to Britain’s advantage. Some
35,000 Polish military personnel were among the early arrivals. Fol-
lowing the defeat of Poland they had re-grouped initially in France
and then, with the subsequent collapse of that country in the face of
the German advance, had made their way to Britain.22 Not that
these refugees constituted the only exiles from Poland. In accor-
dance with the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, a
rapprochement that stunned Europe’s other capitals, and following
the German attack on Poland in the subsequent month, the eastern
part of the Polish state had been annexed by the USSR, with Ger-
man approval. The Soviet authorities subsequently killed leading
members of the Polish elite in this part of the country; one recalls
the Katyn forest massacre carried out by the NKVD, as we now
know, on Stalin’s orders. Moreover, some 1.5 million Poles found
themselves deported to remote regions of the Soviet Union.23 Some
deportees did not survive but others did, and with the breakdown of
Europe in Exile : European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest
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