Britain’s Jewish Communist Traitors
February
22, 2016 — 10 Comments
In his
plea for Britain to take in thousands more “Syrian refugees” Lord Alf Dubs tearfully recalls how he was brought
to Britain, aged six, from Prague, as a Kindertransport Jewish refugee.
His former parliamentary colleague, wealthy publisher Lord George Weidenfeld too, was fond of recalling
how he found sanctuary in Britain after fleeing Austria just before the war. He
said it was the main factor in his decision to help pay for the transport of
thousands of Syrian refugees into the west.
The
Kindertransport has been exposed as a confection of distortions, myths and omissions
previously in TOO, but there is another little awkward fact about the Jewish
refugees taken in by Britain before the war. And that is the remarkably high
proportion of them who chose to actively betray the country which gave them
sanctuary by acting as spies for Britain’s deadly enemy, the Soviet Union.
They not
only ensured that many British agents were sent to their deaths or capture, torture and long periods of imprisonment,
but played a crucial part in stealing the atomic bomb secrets that allowed the
Soviet Union to catch up and have its own atomic bomb by 1949. Their treachery
compromised the security of Britain and the West and probably extended the
length of the Cold War and the enslavement of the subject peoples of Eastern
Europe.
What is
more astonishing is that in many cases the British authorities took no action
against them to avoid official embarrassment. As a result some of Britain’s
foulest traitors were left free to enjoy their retirements in comfort and
security.
It is well-known that Jews were prominently involved in the left
throughout the twentieth century, including communism, that leftist politics
was mainstream within Jewish communities during much of that period, and that
leftist Jews typically continued to have a strong Jewish identity. Information
on Jewish involvement in communist spying increased greatly in the last
20+ years because in 1995 the USA began to open up its Venona Soviet code
decryption archive. Another eye-opening tranche of incriminating material came
via the publication of the Mitrokhin Archive spirited to the West by a
KGB archivist defector in 1992. Finally, in a spirit of damage control, in
2001, the British intelligence services began to open up some of their older
files for inspection in the National Archive. This led to the launch of
something of a cottage industry for authors who found an eager audience for
true-life stories about wartime espionage and derring-do.
Despite
the seriousness of their crimes the media has chosen to portray these traitors
as colourful romantics and their actions as the understandable acts of
misguided conscience. This murderous stab in the back by many Jewish refugees
towards the people who took them in, has gone completely unremarked.
Up until
recently this subject has been overshadowed by the Cambridge non-Jewish spies
of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean who all
defected to Moscow. They lived upper-class, raffish lifestyles and their
bohemian milieu lent the story a kind of perverted glamour. But they were
not even the most important spies in an enormous communist network which
reached into many institutions — a network of Russian and German exiles who
seem to have been overwhelmingly Jewish.
One of
MI5’s most embarrassing lapses concerned its failure to catch Edith Tudor-Hart. She was born Edith
Suschitzky in Vienna and on her first visit to Britain was deported from
Britain for suspicious communist activities but she returned in 1933 as a
political refugee after marrying an English doctor. From the moment she arrived
she was working as a Soviet agent and set up as a professional photographer in
an apartment opposite Abbey Road recording studio in north London.
She was
really working for another Jewish refugee — and Soviet spy controller — Arnold
Deutsch, and she couriered for the Soviet Union’s most
successful spy in Britain, the senior MI5 officer Kim Philby. As early as May,
1934 the three were meeting on park benches in Regents Park. By the time of the
Cambridge ring defections in 1952 she was strongly under suspicion but under interrogation denied everything. Soon
after she was admitted to psychiatric hospital after suffering a nervous
breakdown which MI5 interrogators took as an indication of guilt.
An old
MI5 file, released for view last year, said “From such evidence as is on record
(letters, observations etc.) she would appear to be a rather typical,
emotional, introspective and somewhat intellectual Viennese Jewess …. (L)ike so
many leftwing intellectuals of her generation, she displayed an unhealthy
interest in psychology and psychiatry”.
No further
action was taken against her despite the strong suspicions including her
photographic equipment being found in possession of another group of Jewish communist spies. She ended her days
running an antique shop in Brighton. A major exhibition of her photography took
place at the Scottish National Gallery in 2013 and a sympathetic Guardian article said her files not only
confirmed MI5’s suspicions “they also betray a degree of anti-semitism and
xenophobia within the agency.” (!) A Telegraph article described her as “the
spy with a conscience.”
The most
important Jewish spy was Melita Norwood who was born in England as
Melita Stedman to Latvian immigrant parents who were committed bolshevik
revolutionaries and spies themselves. She joined the Party in the thirties and
got a secretarial job at the offices of the innocuous-sounding British
Non-Ferrous Metals Association. This was to be her gateway into the heart of
the atomic bomb research establishment because she became secretary to Dr G. L.
Bailey, the head of Britain’s atom bomb project throughout the war, with access
to both his home and office safe. For decades she passed documents and secrets
to both the KGB and the Red Army’s GRU. She was identified as a security risk
in 1965 but no action was taken and she retired to leafy suburbia. Her spying
was confirmed by the Mitrokhin archive in 1992 but she was never prosecuted.
More recent files show she was more highly valued than the Cambridge spies
and was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the KGB. She never hid
her left-wing sympathies and when she leafleted her neighbourhood she was
tolerated as just another harmless English eccentric. Throughout her
spying days she was helped by her husband Hilary Nussbaum, who was also a
committed communist and who took her surname.
Because
of her treachery the Soviets were able to create a copy of the British atom
bomb within a year, and to catch up with the underlying technology within two
years. She ended her days comfortably in a sheltered housing complex in south
London while the Mail ran a breezy article about the “jam-making granny” spy who tended a garden
allotment. Like all the unmasked Jewish spies she expressed no regrets for
spying for Stalin.
Another
important Jewish refugee spy who inexplicably escaped prosecution was Ursula Kuczynski, also known as Ruth Werner though she had at least three
other names. Born in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish family she enjoyed an expensive
schooling and rich lifestyle but rejected it all to become a communist
revolutionary and spy. After working for the Soviets in China and Switzerland
throughout the war, she and her second husband Leonard Breurton came to live in
Oxfordshire where she worked as a courier for the Atom bomb secrets of yet
another Jewish refugee spy, the traitor scientist Klaus Fuchs who was caught by
the Venona interceptions and jailed in 1950 for passing atomic secrets. The file on Fuchs, who had joined the
Communist Party in his youth in Berlin, suggests he was helped in his
endeavours by a host of Jewish women including his sister, his mistress and
many others. Kuczynski also received eager help from her sister and
brother who were also communists.
Some
Jewish communist women were married to non-Jewish traitors and acted as
“handlers” for the various Soviet intelligence agencies. A good example
was Kim Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann who was born Alice Kohlmann
in Vienna. She initially fled to Britain as a refugee in 1933 and in fact
married Philby to get a British passport.
Philby
rose to become head of the anti-Soviet section of the Secret Intelligence
Service as MI5 is formally known and until recently was thought to be the KGB’s
most successful agent. Because of him, probably hundreds of agents who
were sent into the Ukraine and Albania, were caught and executed. After a long
career of helping Philby and betraying the country that gave her sanctuary and
after Philby’s defection, Friedmann was allowed to return to East Germany.
There
were many other Jewish women communist spies. In 1939 one of the Cambridge
spies, Donald MacLean, was working at the British embassy in Paris where the
Soviet spy overseeing him was Kitty
Harris, a Jewess from the East End of London, with whom he was
having an affair. Her real NKVD courier role was not revealed until 2001
via the Venona files. (She eventually married Earl Browder, chairman of
the CPUSA, the American Communist Party). She fled to the Soviet Union and died
of alcoholism in Gorky in 1966.
Then
there was Hildegard Pauline Ruth Gerwig, of German
Jewish extraction, who married two non-Jewish scientist traitors in turn and is
thought to have “run” both for the Soviets. First was Engelbert Broda, and the second was Alan Nunn May who worked deep within the
British atomic bomb project. Long suspected, Broda was only named as a
spy in 2009.
The
wartime BBC may have been a hive of communist fellow travellers but the
groupthink leftism was not shared by every employee, and one in particular was
patriotic and independent-minded enough to take his suspicions further. Eric
Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, may have been a socialist
but he detested Stalinism. Orwell listed those he thought too untrustworthy to
be allowed to work in propaganda and sent it to his bosses; they included those
who “in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined
that way and should not be trusted as propagandists”.
When, in
2004, George Orwell’s list of unreliables and
potential traitors was revealed it was met with outrage in left-wing circles.
The list is not perfect. But as time has passed more and more of Orwell’s judgements
have proved to be spot on. One of those he suspected was a Jewish political
asylum seeker who became one of the most important spies in Britain. Peter
Smollet was the name of a Daily Express correspondent who was born Hans Peter Smolka to a wealthy Jewish family
in Vienna. He was already an NKVD agent when he hurriedly left Austria for
Britain in the early thirties to escape a crackdown on communists. He arrived
in Britain ostensibly working as a journalist, but MI5 already had a file on
him because he was expelled from France for photographing a French armaments
factory.
Nevertheless,
well-connected, he soon landed plum jobs with the Daily Express, The Times
and eventually BBC as roving European correspondent while at the same time
being an agent for the Comintern (Communist International).
He
covered the German entry into Prague at the behest of his boss at the BBC,
Soviet mole Guy Burgess, and was also reporting to the other Soviet master spy
Kim Philby. In 1961 Smollett was interrogated but was released through lack of
evidence. He eventually fled, not to the Eastern bloc, but to the family landed
estate in Austria and died, wealthy and comfortable, in 1980. He was finally confirmed
as a Soviet agent by the Mitrokhin archive in 2003. Smollett, incidentally, got
his revenge on George Orwell by persuading several publishers not to publish
his allegorical novel Animal Farm, a seminal work of
anti-totalitarianism.
In its
coverage the BBC prefers to portray these wartime spy
investigations as hysterical “Red Scares.”
But in 1953 there was
concern about the Jewish emigre head of the BBC’s Russian service who seemed to
be bending over backwards to portray the Soviet Union in a positive light. He
is said to have made the BBC Russian service as left-wing as the New
Statesman and Nation. The name of this man Anatol
Goldberg was on a list of suspected fellow-travellers — or
worse — submitted by a worried Conservative MP. Goldberg was initially defended
but later discreetly shunted sideways and removed from this post, although he
stayed as a commentator. In retirement Goldberg wrote an admiring biography of
Stalin’s notorious genocidal propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg which was so one-sided
even the New York Times found it hard to take. So
what was the truth about Anatol Goldberg? The answer presumably lies in the
archives of the KGB or MI5.
And what
of Lord Victor Rothschild who, like his friend Kim
Philby, was a wartime MI5 officer. He owned an apartment at 5 Bentinck Street in Marylebone. At various
times this raucous establishment hosted soirees that included at least three of
the Cambridge spies as well as the notorious Zionist traitor John Strachey who became a Labour MP.
No
conclusive proof of betrayal by Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild has ever
emerged, but rumours continue to swirl around his name. He denied any
wrongdoing to the end of his life, but an Australian author and espionage
expert Roland Perry was not convinced and accused him of being a spy in a book
called The Fifth Man. Perhaps more time will
tell.
Incidentally,
what was the wealthy publisher, Viennese-born Lord Weidenfeld, doing among that nest of
traitors in Bentinck Street? When he died last month he was lauded for his work
in flying thousands of “Syrian refugees” into Poland and said it was the least
he could do, having been a wartime refugee into Britain himself. What did he
have in common with Philby, Burgess and MacLean?
It would
be appropriate here to mention the well-known case of George Blake, who was
born in Egypt to a Jewish father and English mother. As a communist
schoolboy he fled from wartime Netherlands to Britain and returned the
country’s generosity by spying for the Soviets. He was caught, sentenced to 42
years in prison, but then escaped and was spirited behind the Iron Curtain by
British peace campaigners. He is still alive at 93 and the unusual
circumstances of his escape created a mini book and film industry which invariably treats him and
his co-conspirators with great affection.
How sad
so few of these authors and film makers sought to spare a thought for Blake’s victims.
Britain’s
failure to prosecute wartime spies has become impossible to hide in recent
years thanks to the opening of these archives. But there seems to be a silent
consensus that there is one aspect of these failures which should not be probed
too hard, and that is the ethnic dimension. As glaringly obvious as the
predominant Jewishness of these spies, it is totally off limits as regards
scrutiny or even comment.
This is a
very brief survey but there are many other cases in the archives and many more
questions than answers. What is in the unpublished files on notorious Stalinist
apologist Eric Hobsbawm who was honoured by Tony Blair
but kept under close wartime surveillance by MI5? Was the friendship between
this fanatical wartime communist historian and Cambridge spy Guy Burgess
entirely innocent?
And what
of another Cambridge friend of the gregarious Guy Burgess and an open supporter
of the Soviet Union, the Marxist physicist don J. D. Bernal? Today university buildings
are named after Bernal, a pioneer of crystallography, but in 1931 he
organised two trips to Moscow where Cambridge scientists were politely grilled
by their Soviet counterparts, much to the alarm of many. Mysteriously,
Bernal’s post-war scientific reputation has survived his espousal of the bogus
Stalinist science of “Lysenkoism.” It also survived his receipt of the Stalin
Peace Prize and his membership in the notorious communist-front World Peace
Council. There are also worries about Churchill’s chief scientific adviser Lord Zuckerman, some of whose files remain closed.
And MI5
built a huge file on science popularizer Jacob Bronowski who became famous through his 1970’s
television series The Ascent of Man. Bronowski, who worked in military
research, was so loud and abrasive about his Soviet sympathies that he alarmed
his colleagues, and MI5 labelled him a security risk. The BBC has
since portrayed him as the victim of a monstrous injustice. But why was he
blocked from working in atomic research?
The few
of the proven Jewish traitors who have sought to exculpate themselves have
explained that they were doing it for world peace, that in passing the secrets
of the Atom Bomb to the Soviets that they helped create a fairer, more equal
world. How sad that in doing so it involved such a murderous stab in the
back to the people who so generously took them in.