Postscriptum

Abstract

My introduction to political philosophy dates from the early war years and from friendships I made with refugees from Germany, who had a respect for philosophy characteristic of the German tradition, but seldom found in England. My duties with the London Civil Defence, extinguishing fires or lifting casualties from the rubble, did not greatly exercise the mind, but I had another job which gave me much to think about. On the top storey of Bloomsbury House, above the several floors occupied by the organisations responsible for Jewish refugees, I worked with agencies helping the so-called ‘Non-Aryans’, refugees not belonging to the Jewish community, but classified as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. It was seldom difficult for them to secure exeats; for Hitler, in order to demonstrate that other governments were as anti-semitic covertly as he was overtly, facilitated the departure of a Jew or non-Aryan who wished to leave. Various popular films and novels have since built up a myth that such people had to be ‘smuggled out’ of Germany, but until the war began in earnest this was not the case; it is only comforting for those countries which refused in the 1930s to let refugees in to imagine that Hitler refused to let them out. Even the ‘J’ on their passports was put there at the suggestion of the Swiss, to forestall refugees slipping in unnoticed as tourists.