I don’t normally see the London Review of Books, it’s too highbrow for me and costs £3.75 a week, for which I can buy a couple of excellent books generally at my local Red Cross bookshop. But I actually bought a copy, dated, 9 April 2015. A fine publication with much of interest. An article by Frances Stonor Saunders -“The Hobsbawm File” was particularly interesting.
Eric Hobsbawm was ackowledged as one of the finest historians writing in the 20th and early 21st century.He was born in Alexandria in 1917 and died in London in 2012. He had British citizenship but lived n Vienna and Berlin in his youth. His MI5 file stretched back to 1933 and was released in 2014. Correction : though MI5 kept tabs on him until he died, aged 95, his record since 1962 was “redacted.” However interesting those missing fifty years were, they are less interesting than the story of MI5’s acquisition of intelligence on the 16-year-old Hobsbawm in 1933. I never quite rubbed shoulders with the old communist, but, once, in Hampstead’s Royal Free Hospital, when I was waiting to see a consultant about a prostate problem, I found myself in the queue behind the old man. The thought that an MI5 agent was peering over his shoulder, or even, over mine own, is indeed Spooky with a capital S!
In 1933 the teenage Hobsbawm was a member of the Socialist Students Federation in Germany. On 30th March Guy Liddell, MI5’s Deputy Head of Counter-Intelligence, and a German speaker, arrived in Berlin, by invitation.He was joined by Frank Foley, MI6’s Station Chief in Berlin where they met up with Rudolf Diels, head of the German Political Police in Horst Wessel Haus, named after the thug the Nazis sang about. A couple of weeks earlier the HAUS had been named for Karl Liebknecht, a founder of the Communist Party, murdered in 1919.In March1933 Hitler had just come to power. The Communists had carelessly left their membership files behind them. And, while prisoners were being taken into Horst Wessel Haus for rough interrogation, the two British Agents sat copying the files in one of its rooms. That same week, Eric Hobsbawm, whose parents had died some years earlier, was taken to London by an uncle, and safety.
But not the freedom a citizen should expect to enjoy in a democracy. His letters were steamed open on the first floor of the Post Office’s St Martins-le-Grand Depot by the GPO’s Special Investigations Unit. The Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy, and J Edgar Hoover in the United States and the Hollywood Blacklist hogged the limelight. They wore hobnailed boots. But the British Security Services wear sneakers, and instead of wielding big sticks, except when necessary, employ nods and winks and wield a censor’s blue pencil. The BBC keeps a list of Speakers and Scriptwriters which it copies to MI5 for screening. Though Hobsbawm’s writings eventually brought him recognition, he would, surely have held a University Chair of more prestige in Britain had he been a friend of MI5, MI6, and their friend- Adolf Hitler??
I don’t know how much of the above information found its way into the mass media. Perhaps a piece in THE IRISH TIMES, which on 4 March 1933 greeted Hitler’s accession to power with unfeigned joy?
Comments are closed.