“I am sure that your Editor will understand how fully occupied I am at the present time…” Two typed, signed letters – one from Winston S. Churchill 10 days before he became wartime Prime Minister and one from Churchill’s Private Secretary less than a month into Churchill’s premiership – both regarding a German-Jewish journalist émigré who escaped Hitler’s Germany only to be deported by the British as an “enemy alien”
Admiralty House, London: 1940. This compellingly interesting item features two pieces of correspondence from early in the Second World War. The first is a typed, signed letter from then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill – just 10 days before he became wartime Prime Minister – to German-Jewish journalist and émigré Alfred J. Fischer declining an appointment to meet. The letter is accompanied by the original Admiralty envelope. The second typed letter is signed by Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Peck, dated 8 June 1940, on 10 Downing Street stationery, addressing an apparent request to make inquiries into “the case of Mr. Fischer”. Together, these two pieces of early Second World War correspondence are noteworthy for occurring during Churchill’s ascendance to the premiership, for featuring his signature on his Admiralty stationery in his final days as First Lord, and limning the fraught, perilous fate of German Jews, even those who made it to supposed haven on Allied shores.
Churchill’s letter is typed on a single sheet of Admiralty stationery, headed with a printed, blue Admiralty device and dated “30 April 1940” at the upper right. The salutation “My Dear Sir,” the valediction “Yours vy ty” [sic], and the signature “Winston S. Churchill” are all in Churchill’s hand. The letter politely rejects a request from journalist Alfred Fischer for a meeting, Churchill offering “I am sure that your Editor will understand how fully occupied I am at the present time…” The letter is accompanied by its original franked envelope, the flap featuring the raised, printed “ADMIRALTY WHITEHALL” device and still sealed with red wax imprinted with an Admiralty signet.
An additional “8th June, 1940” letter to Fischer is from John Howard Peck, the only one of Churchill’s wartime Private Secretaries to serve for the entirety of Churchill’s wartime premiership. This typed, hand-emended, and signed letter is on “10, Downing Street, Whitehall” stationery, printed thus at the upper right, with a “PRIME MINISTER” device at the upper left. The letter, written less than a month after Churchill became wartime Prime Minister, is addressed to a woman who made an appeal on Fischer’s behalf after Fischer was detained as a “Category ‘B’ alien. Peck writes: “…Mr. Churchill has had enquiries made into the case of Mr. Fischer but he regrets that nothing can be done in the matter at the moment…”
Each letter, as well as the envelope, is housed in its own clear, removable, archival mylar sleeve. The sleeves are housed in a rigid, crimson cloth folder.
Alfred Joachim Fischer
We know little about “Mrs. Hochner” other than her apparent concern and advocacy for Alfred Fisher. But Mr. Fisher’s story is known, at least in part, and is intriguingly interwoven with the general tragedy of allied internment of “enemy aliens” and the compound brutalities visited on German Jews fleeing Hitler’s Reich.
Alfred Joachim Fischer (1909-1992) was a German Jew working as a journalist for a liberal newspaper in Berlin at the end of the republic. In 1933, the year Hitler became German chancellor and the first concentration camps were established, Fischer began an emigration odyssey via Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, the Balkans, Palestine, and Turkey. In 1939 he “fled at the last minute from Prague” to Great Britain. But his flight from one persecutor only delivered him to another.
Fischer was detained as a potential Category ‘B’ enemy alien. Eventually he was among those deported to Australia on the HMT Dunera. The 57-day voyage was not only under threat by German U-boats; detainees faced regular beatings and robbery at the hands of British soldiers and officers on board.
As Fischer later recalled, “I was only allowed to take a few items with me, including a personal letter from Winston Churchill.” Ostensibly that was this same letter. (Translated from Fischer, In der Nahe der Ereignisse, p.177)
PLEASE NOTE THAT A CONSIDERABLY MORE DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THIS ITEM IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST. Item #006030
This compellingly interesting item features two pieces of correspondence from early in the Second World War. The first is a typed, signed letter from then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill – just 10 days before he became wartime Prime Minister – to German-Jewish journalist and émigré Alfred J. Fischer declining an appointment to meet. The letter is accompanied by the original Admiralty envelope, franked “30 AP 40”. The second typed letter is signed by Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Peck, dated 8 June 1940, on 10 Downing Street stationery, addressing an apparent request to make inquiries into “the case of Mr. Fischer”. Together, these two pieces of early Second World War correspondence are noteworthy for occurring during Churchill’s ascendance to the premiership, for featuring his signature on his Admiralty stationery in his final days as First Lord, and limning the fraught, perilous fate of German Jews, even those who made it to supposed haven on Allied shores.
The correspondence
Churchill’s letter is typed on a single sheet of Admiralty stationery, headed with a printed, blue Admiralty device and dated “30 April 1940” at the upper right. The salutation “My Dear Sir,” the valediction “Yours vy ty” [sic], and the signature “Winston S. Churchill” are all in Churchill’s hand. The body of the letter, typed in two paragraphs, reads:
“It is with great regret that I must let you know that I can see no possibility of making an appointment to see you in the near future. I am sure that your Editor will understand how fully occupied I am at the present time, and I hope that you will convey to him my very deep appreciation of the sympathy and support which he has always accorded me.
The friendship and support of the Turkish people at this time is a great encouragement to us all.”
To the left of Churchill’s autograph valediction and signature is typed “Alfred J. Fischer, Esq.”
The letter is accompanied by its original envelope. The large, 10.25 x 8 inch (26 x 20.3 cm) envelope is printed in blue “WINSTON S. CHURCHILL” at the lower left. The recipient’s address is typed in four lines: “Alfred J. Fischer Esq., | 55 Sudbourne Road, | London, | S.W. 2.” At the upper right is the red, circular “LONDON E. C. OFFICIAL PAID” postage stamp timed and dated “10-PM 30 AP 40”. On the verso, the flap of the envelope features the raised, printed “ADMIRALTY WHITEHALL” device and the flap is still sealed with red wax imprinted with an Admiralty signet.
The letter from John Peck is on “10, Downing Street, Whitehall” stationery, printed thus at the upper right, with a “PRIME MINISTER” device at the upper left. All but the autograph signature “J. H. Peck” and a single word emendation (“but” replacing “and”) are typed. The letter is dated “8th June, 1940.” and reads:
Dear Madam,
I am wrting in reply to your letter of the 24th May addressed to the Prime Minister. Mr. Churchill has had enquiries made into the case of Mr. Fischer but he regrets that nothing can be done in the matter at the moment. The Orders recently made provide the internment of all Germans between the ages of 16 and 70 who had been placed in Category B (that is, those who were subject to the special restrictions to which enemy aliens are liable under the wartime Aliens Order). It is appreciated that a general Order of internment is bound to involve hardship in individual cases, and but [hand emendation] I am afraid that there is no prospect of this case being reviewed in the near future. Your representations however are being borne in mind in case it should become possible to set up some system for reviewing individual cases.
Yours Truly,
Below and to the left of Peck’s autograph signature “J. H. Peck” is typed “Mrs. Hochner.”
Condition
Condition of Churchill’s 30 April 1940 letter to Fischer is good plus. The stationery is complete apart from a single file hole punch at the upper left corner. The type, Churchill’s writing, and the Admiralty device all remain distinct. Nonetheless the paper is lightly soiled overall with short closed tears to a maximum depth of 1 inch (2.54 cm) along the right and bottom edges, some wrinkling along the right edge, and a single, off-center vertical crease to the right of the centered Admiralty device. Condition of the original, franked envelope is also good, a single horizontal crease matching the location of the single vertical crease on the letter it once contained. The envelope is raggedly torn open along the top edge, leaving the original Admiralty signet-stamped wax seal intact on the envelope flap. The envelope is also edge worn and soiled. The wear to Churchill’s letter and accompanying envelope is understandable given the notional deportation odyssey it suffered with Fischer. (See further below.) Moreover, wear and soiling notwithstanding, it is the original franked envelope sent from the First Lord of the Admiralty 10 days before he became Britain’s Prime Minister. Condition of the typed letter on “10, Downing Street” stationery from J. H. Peck is very good plus, the stationery complete with no loss or tears, only lightly soiled, with a single vertical and single horizontal crease, these ostensibly from original posting.
Each letter, as well as the envelope, is housed in its own clear, removable, archival mylar sleeve. The sleeves are housed in a rigid, crimson cloth folder.
Alfred Joachim Fischer
We know little about “Mrs. Hochner” other than her apparent concern and advocacy for Alfred Fisher. But Mr. Fisher’s story is known, at least in part, and is intriguingly interwoven with the general tragedy of allied internment of “enemy aliens” and the compound brutalities visited on German Jews fleeing Hitler’s Reich.
Alfred Joachim Fischer (1909-1992) was a German Jew working as a journalist for a liberal newspaper in Berlin at the end of the republic. Fischer had moved with his parents to Berlin in 1923 and worked as a freelance journalist for liberal newspapers since the late 1920s. In 1933, the year Hitler became German chancellor and the first concentration camps were established, Fischer began an emigration odyssey via Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, the Balkans, Palestine, and Turkey. In 1939 he “fled at the last minute from Prague” to Great Britain. But his flight from one persecutor only delivered him to another.
When, on 30 April, Churchill wrote to Fischer politely declining a meeting, clearly Fischer was working as a journalist and, of course, Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty. Things quickly changed for both men. Ten days later, Churchill became wartime Prime Minister. Fischer’s change of fortune was less salutary.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, there were approximately 80,000 potential “enemy aliens” in Britain. Fearing that spies or those willing to assist Britain’s enemies were among them, and facing the very real prospect of invasion by Nazi Germany, it was decided that all Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 would appear before special tribunals and be categorized into three groups.
· ‘A' - high security risks, numbering just under 600, who were immediately interned;
· 'B' - 'doubtful cases', numbering around 6,500, who were supervised and subject to restrictions;
· 'C' - 'no security risk', numbering around 64,000, who were left at liberty. More than 55,000 of category 'C' were recognized as refugees from Nazi oppression. The vast majority of these were Jewish.
By May 1940, with Britain’s security situation continuing to deteriorate and “an outbreak of spy fever and agitation against enemy aliens”, Italians were also rounded up. (BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a6651858.shtml)
The letter from Churchill to Fischer, seemingly declining an interview request from Fischer, was sent on 30 April 1940, just before Churchill was appointed Prime Minister and the Government decided to inter category B aliens. Unfortunately for Fischer, he was in category B. As Fischer later wrote in his autobiography, “There could be no more loyal friend of the British than me. To be locked up by them as “enemy alien”… contradicted all logic.” (Translated from Fischer, In der Nahe der Ereignisse, p.177) Fischer’s complaint does not seem hyperbolic; “That many of the ‘enemy aliens’ were Jewish refugees and therefore hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Nazis was a complication no one bothered to try and unravel…” (BBC)
It’s clear in the second letter, a response to a Mrs. Hochner on 8 June 1940, that Fischer was already interred by that time and an appeal was made on his behalf to release him. The reply from Churchill’s Private Secretary, J. H. Peck, states “Mr. Churchill has had enquiries made into the case of Mr. Fischer but he regrets that nothing can be done in the matter at the moment… It is appreciated that a general Order of internment is bound to involve hardship in individual cases, but I’m afraid there is no prospect of this case being reviewed in the near future.” As it happens, there would be impetus to reverse the order to inter those of Category B much sooner than anticipated. Unfortunately, that impetus was tragedy and conspicuous injustice.
More than 7,000 internees were deported, a majority to Canada, some to Australia. One of the transport vessels, the SS Arandora Star, en route to Canada, was torpedoed off the Irish coast by a German U-boat on 2 July 1940. Most of 714 lives lost were those of internees. The sinking of the Arandora Star was a particularly brutal fate for the internees aboard, who had, often with great difficulty and hazard, escaped the Nazis, only to be again placed at risk by the British and consequently killed by the Germans after all.
Fischer was among those deported to Australia on another ship, the HMT Dunera, just a week after the sinking of the Arandora Star. As he later recalled, “I was only allowed to take a few items with me, including a personal letter from Winston Churchill.” Ostensibly that was this same letter. (Translated from Fischer, In der Nahe der Ereignisse, p.177)
The 57-day voyage was not only under threat by German U-boats; detainees faced regular beatings and robbery at the hands of British soldiers and officers on board. When the Dunera finally docked in Sydney, the Australian medical officer who first boarded the ship was appalled at the condition of the detainees, so much so that he had the commanding officer court-marshalled. The sinking of the Arandora Star and the treatment of detainees on the Dunera catalyzed sympathy towards aliens and vocal objections in Parliament ensued, so that those listed as Category B and C were slowly released.
Fischer returned to London from Australia the following year and worked for “various English newspapers. After the end of the war he reported as a traveling correspondent for well-known newspapers and broadcasters from all over the world.” Fischer returned to Berlin in 1959. (Fischer, In der Nahe der Ereignisse)
Winston S. Churchill in late April 1940
During the 1930s, Churchill spent nearly a decade out of power and out of favor, warning against the growing Nazi threat and often at odds with both his Party leadership and prevailing public sentiment. As the Second World War approached, he passed into his sixties with his own future as uncertain as that of his nation. But in September 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill was asked to join the wartime Cabinet, reprising the First Lord of the Admiralty role he had played in the First World War. Eight months later, amid the manifest failure of Chamberlain’s leadership, Churchill became wartime Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 – just 10 days after he signed this letter to Alfred J. Fischer. Churchill later recalled: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” (Gilbert, Vol 1, 526-27)
It was to be perhaps even more of a trial than Churchill anticipated. When Churchill became Prime Minister, the war for Britain was not so much a struggle for victory as a struggle to survive. Churchill’s first months in office saw, among other near-calamities, the Battle of the Atlantic, the fall of France, evacuation at Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain. One understands why Churchill was not making time to meet with a journalist on 30 April 1940. By contrast, Peck’s 8 June 1940 reply to “Mrs. Hochner” about Alfred Fischer’s apparent internment may seem a bit more harshly dismissive to a modern reader. That the Jewish Fischer had escaped the genocidal scourge of the Nazis only to be detained by the British was both a cruelty and an injustice – neither of which are character flaws commonly attributed to Churchill.
But Churchill had been Prime Minister for less than a month when Peck replied to Mrs. Hochner about the unfortunate Mr. Fischer conveying the Prime Minister’s “regrets that nothing can be done in the matter at the moment.” In the 29 days that Churchill had been Prime Minister, Nazi Germany had invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Only an incredible mobilization of British civilians helped effect a near-miraculous evacuation of 224,000 British and 111,000 French soldiers from Dunkirk. Incredibly, this was more than twice as many soldiers than the Allies would land on Normandy beaches in the world’s greatest amphibious assault four long years later. Four days before Peck signed his letter, on 4 June 1940 in the House of Commons, Churchill gave one of his most defining – and defiant – wartime speeches. Churchill told Parliament “We shall never surrender” but also soberly cautioned that “Wars are not won by evacuations”. Two days after Peck’s letter, Norway surrendered to Germany, six days after Peck’s letter the Germans entered Paris. A month after Peck’s letter, the relentless German bombing that would be known as the Battle of Britain began. Hitler intended the Battle of Britain as the preparatory effort to gain air superiority prior to a cross-channel invasion, and for a long time to come the British faced the very real prospect of German jackboots on English soil.
As he prophetically said in his letter of 30 April when he was still only First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was “fully occupied”. His premiership would be as hard and fraught as his ascent to it. However callous it seemed, Britain’s prime minister faced exigencies more dire than the fate of a German-Jewish émigré caught in the deeply bitter irony of Allied internment. As John Howard Peck noted years later, “It is difficult to describe or imagine the loneliness of someone in Winston Churchill’s position with the burden of responsibility that he carried and the knowledge that however much he shared or delegated it, the ultimate decisions were his.” (Peck, Dublin from Downing Street, p.68) Peck was certainly in a position to observe Churchill with some authority.
John Howard Peck
One of Churchill’s team of four private secretaries throughout the Second World War, Sir John Howard Peck’s (1913-1995) tenure with Churchill began in April 1940, while Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty. “Peck… had been working since the outbreak of war as Chatfield’s Private Secretary in the Office of the Minister for the Coordination of Defence. Now his minister was gone, and Churchill had taken over Chatfield’s responsibilities at the Military Co-ordination Committee. It was to help with these responsibilities that Peck was summoned to the Admiralty, to be co-opted into Churchill’s Private Secretariat.” (Gilbert, Vol. VI, p.216)
As if to underscore the veracity of Churchill’s own contention in his letter to Fischer about how “fully occupied” he was, Churchill did not even have time to properly meet the new member of his staff. On 9 April 1940, after waiting all morning to be admitted to an introductory session with Churchill, Peck was instructed that “the best thing would be to take him some papers and act as if I had been working for him for months.” So Peck did. He later recalled Churchill simply said “So you’ve come to work for me.” Peck replied “Yes, please, Sir” and thereafter concluded “I was in.” (Peck, Dublin from Downing Street, pp.65-6) “Peck was to remain a member of Churchill’s Private Office for the rest of the war.” (Gilbert, Vol. VI, p.220) Peck became the only one of Churchill’s wartime Private Secretaries to serve for the entirety of Churchill’s wartime premiership.
Peck more than earned his keep. On one occasion, he “saved Downing Street by putting out an incendiary bomb that had entered diagonally through an upper window and ignited some bedding.” Peck was also a Downing Street air-raid warden, and on occasion had the unenviable task of asserting his authority to order Churchill into the shelter at No. 10, telling his grumbling Prime Minister “I’m sorry Sir, I’m in command here. You really must go, too.” (Roberts, Walking with Destiny, p.605)
Peck went on to become an accomplished British diplomat, rising to become the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the Council of Europe from 1959-1962, Ambassador to Senegal and Mauritius from 1962-1966, and Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office from 1966-1970. Peck’s final posting was as Ambassador to Ireland from 1970-1973. Peck served at a particularly difficult time in Anglo-Irish relations, including the “Bloody Sunday” shooting of unarmed civilians by British troops and the subsequent burning of the British embassy in Dublin. A sign of Peck’s mutual affinity with Ireland, he settled in Dublin after retirement at the end of his ambassadorship. (Hourican, Dictionary of Irish Biography).
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