BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND ITS FRIENDS by Donal Kennedy

On 24 February 1933 Police and Brownshirts raided Karl Liebnecht Haus in Berlin, headquarters of the Communist Party. Its Chairman , Ernst Thalman, was arrested on 3 March. He managed to smuggle out details of his treatment – “They ordered me to take off my pants and then two men grabbed me by the back of the neck and placed me across a footstool. A uniformed (Political Police) officer with a whip of hippopotamus hide in his hand then beat my buttocks with measured strokes. Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice.Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across my chest and back. I then collapsed.”  Thalman was held prisoner for eleven years until murdered on Hitler’s orders in 1944.

By April  25,000 Communists were in “protective custody.” The Nazis’ first concentration camp was set up at Dachau to hold them. Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany on January 30.

Frank Foley MI6 Station Chief at the British Embassy in Berlin and Guy Liddell, a German-speaking MI5 Agent from London, visited the former Communist HQ which had been renamed Horst Wessel Haus, after a Nazi “hero” on 31 March and stayed there for ten days, sorting out the records of Communist Party members which had fallen into NAZI hands. Rudolf Diels, a Nazi Security Chief explained that it was his intention to exterminate communism  in its widest sense. Liddell reckoned that “Jews,communists and even social democrats ‘were being submitted to every kind of outrage”  but with Foley  he got on with his work in a room set aside for them, whilst interrogations continued in other rooms .Liddell left Berlin on 9 April after a convivial dinner with Joachim von Ribbentrop, later Ambassador in London and Foreign Minister, hanged in 1946 for War Crimes.

Sixteen-year-old Eric Hobsbawm, a British citizen, was living with his aunt in Berlin after his parents had died. He was a member of the Socialist Students Federation and his details were amongst those shared by the Nazis with British Intelligence. Hobsbawm left Berlin the week the Liddell arrived there.  MI5 read his letters and tapped his phones until he died, aged 95, in 2012. Two years after his death  it deposited about one thousand pages of their files on him covering the period June 1942 to December 1963. It seems many files compiled during that period were witheld and that he was under surveillance for another three decades as a “hardliner” or “Category A ” communist., and that  MI5 still holds files kept until 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There was never any indication that he was involved in illegality, immorality or spying. Hobsbawm alleged that there was a silent but comprehensive effort to eliminate known party members from positions connected with British public life.

He was one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century but he was marginalised by the conservative British establishment in academia and media, an establishment more comfortable with whip-wielding Fascists than with left-leaning  scholars.

(Based on an article “Stuck on the Flypaper – Mi5 and the Hobsbawm File” by Frances Stonor Saunders in THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS  9 April 2015.)