CHAPTER 9 - Enemy Aliens

Abstract

This chapter discusses F. E. Simon's fight against Nazi-ism. Simon was convinced, and many others with him, that should Germany defeat England, those refugees who had made no secret of their loathing of the Nazis and particularly those in responsible positions would be the first picked victims of Hitler's vengeance. That this would have been the case was later proved by the capture, after the war, of the Nazi Black List for Great Britain, a naively haphazard document, listing alongside the obvious socialist enemies, in the form of all the trade unions in the country, such apparently innocuous organizations as the Y.M.C.A. and the Boy Scouts Movement. Among the individuals marked down for retribution were members of the government, writers with or without political affiliations—it almost seemed as though to have been heard of in Germany was sufficient evidence against one and the majority, though by no means all, the socialist and Jewish refugees; among the latter were Simon and Kurti. The Simons' overwhelming concern was of course for the children. Simon would carry on the fight against Nazi-ism wherever he was and in the moments of his greatest depression after Munich, he felt that the States might be the only country where that would be possible.