Adolf Hitler: Expert discusses Parkinson’s symptoms

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The nation fell silent on Sunday to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice serving their country. Each year, two minutes’ silence is held at 11am to commemorate the British and Commonwealth servicemen and women in the two world wars and later conflicts. Remembrance parades returned to a more normal format this year, as coronavirus restrictions made last year’s services a very different affair. Members of the Royal Family and other dignitaries laid wreaths at the Cenotaph, although the Queen did not attend due to a sprained back.

An estimated 70-85 million people are believed to have died in World War 2, the deadliest military conflict in history.

That figure equates to some three percent of the 1940 world population.

Adolf Hitler had planned an invasion of the UK, through a plan codenamed Operation Sea Lion, which was ultimately scrapped.

Hitler’s reasoning for not invading was revealed in archived Russian files, from the lengthy interrogation of Friedrich Paulus, Germany’s highest-ranking prisoner of war.

Plans for an invasion in October 1940 were axed due to the bad weather at the time, by which point ‘Sonderfahnungliste GB’ had been compiled.

The ‘Sonderfahnungliste’, which translates as ‘especially wanted list’, was a secret list of nearly 3,000 prominent Britons who the Nazis intended to round up upon invading the UK.

The details of the ‘Black Book’ were revealed in the 2020 book ‘The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi List’, written by academic Sybil Oldfield.

The Nazis carefully made plans to wreak havoc had they crossed the English Channel.

Some 20,000 Gestapo troops would have swept the UK, armed with copies of the ‘Sonderfahnungliste’.

Ms Oldfield wrote that some of those on the list would have been placed under house arrest, while others would have been placed in newly constructed camps.

Others, however, would have suffered a much worse fate.

The list was discovered in Berlin at the end of World War 2, in the headquarters of the Reich Security Police.

It was originally supplemented by the Gestapo’s Informationsheft GP — effectively a handbook to the UK for occupying troops.

Among those on the list were Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden (Secretary of State for War), Sigmund Freud and Robert Baden-Powell, the leader of Scouting, which the Nazis viewed as a spy organisation.

The list contained a host of errors, however, as Mr Freud had died within weeks of the outbreak of war.

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Also on the list, Neville Chamberlain died in November, 1940, just six months after stepping down from his premiership.

Well over half of those on the list were refugees, who had fled to the UK before the war.

Of the refugees on the list, Ms Oldfield told The Times of Israel in March: “Germany’s loss was England’s gain.

“I hope people will think that we did owe a lot to those refugees,” Ms Oldfield added, who is the daughter of a German refugee herself.

“Perhaps refugees aren’t the destitute, naked miseries that somehow they’re taken too often to be.”

Ms Oldfield said she had combed the list for clues.

She said: “Once I so quickly discovered that these anti-fascists Britons were marvellous human beings — brave, humane, intelligent — the more I wanted to learn more and then share it.”

Ms Oldfield added that, while the Gestapo did not have “octopus tentacles” on British soil, they were not short of informers.

The number of names on the list is unclear. The Israel Times reported the list had 2,619 suspects and a further 400 organisations which needed to be disbanded.

An archived report in The Guardian from the time says there were “more than 2,300” on the list.

The organisations on the list were deemed likely to resist the Nazis, and included the Church of England, the YMCA and the Boy Scouts. 

The Guardian spoke to some of those on the list at the time.

Cartoonist David Low said: “That is all right. I had them on my list too.”

Just two copies of the list are known to have survived, as the warehouse in which the 20,000 booklets were stored was destroyed in a bombing raid.

One is in London’s Imperial War Museum, and the other is noted in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

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