Four Thousand Lives: The Rescue of German Jewish Men to Britain in 1939 (2)

By: Clare Ungerson

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Synopsis: In November 1938 about 30,000 German Jewish men had been taken to concentration camps where they were subject to torture, starvation and arbitrary death. This book tells the remarkable story of how the grandees of Anglo Jewry persuaded the British Government to allow them to establish a transit camp in Sandwich, in East Kent, to which up to 4000 men could be brought while they waited for permanent settlement overseas – known as the Kitchener camp. The whole rescue was funded by the British Jewish community with help from American Jewry. Most of the men left their families behind. Would they get their families out in time? And how would the people of Sandwich – a town the same size as the camp – react to so many German speaking Jewish foreigners in their midst? There a well organized branch of the British Union of Fascists in Sandwich. Captain Robert Gordon Canning, a virulent anti-Semite, lived there. He and his grand friends from London (including the Prince of Wales before the abdication) used to meet there to play golf at Royal St George’s. (After the war, Canning purchased the bust of Hitler sold at the auction of goods from the German embassy and kept it in his house.) This background adds to the drama of the race against time to save lives.