Holocaust Memorial Day

They fought back

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day Joshua Levine, author, historian and ambassador for the RAF Museum discovers the hidden heroes who joined the RAF to fight for Britain against racism and anti-Semitism – fully aware they risked torture or execution if captured.

An extraordinary 20,000 Jews – six percent of the entire Jewish population of Britain – joined the wartime Royal Air Force. Thousands of Jews also joined from the Commonwealth. Together, they served as pilots, navigators, gunners, ground crew and Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) members.

In addition to Holocaust Memorial Day, an initiative celebrating their stories is clearly overdue – but the timing of the RAF Museum’s Jewish Hidden Heroes project is important. Anti-Semitism in Britain is more visible than it has been for many years. Sinister smears are creeping back into the mainstream, making this an important moment to take a stand. So let me begin this article with an assertion: Jews were not merely the passive victims of the Second World War. Jews fought back – and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the actions of the Jewish men and women of the wartime Royal Air Force.

Sam and Doris Miara were a Jewish couple from Cardiff, who ran a clothing business before the war. However, after Kristallnacht – a night of plunder, destruction and violence against Jews in Germany and Austria – the Miaras gave up their home and business and joined the RAF.

Doris joined the WAAF, and in 1941, Sam was serving as wireless operator and air gunner in the Middle East with 38 Squadron. That April however, Sam’s Wellington bomber set out on a bombing raid and never returned. Seven months later Doris received a letter from the Air Ministry concluding that Sam was dead.

This letter is in the archive of the RAF Museum – a collection I am lucky enough to spend time in, immersed in the lives of those, like Sam and Doris, who stood up to Nazism. Letters and diaries reveal how many of these individuals were eager to serve in the most perilous jobs, anxious to strike back at those who tried to deny their humanity. Bernard Kregor, for example, was a young Londoner who served as an ARP messenger boy during the Blitz, biding his time until he was old enough to join the RAF. When asked by an officer why he was volunteering to become a navigator on bombers, a particularly dangerous job, he replied:

“Sir, I am a Jew, and my war with the enemy began long before September 1939!”

Throughout his life, one of Kregor’s prize possessions was the official Jewish prayer book he received upon joining the RAF. In the ‘Prayer before Battle’ are the words:

“Give me the strength to do my duty this day as a true and loyal Israelite in this war for Freedom and Righteousness”.

The young Jewish Canadian William Nelson – who joined the RAF two years before the war – had a similar mindset to Kregor. Having previously dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany, Nelson wrote to his parents when his aircraft was refitted with bombs.

“I thank God” he said, “that I shall be able to destroy the regime that persecutes the Jews”.

Nelson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in May 1940. In June, answering Fighter Command’s call for pilots in anticipation of the coming battle, he requested a transfer, and began training on Spitfires. He joined 74 Squadron at Manston towards the end of July and was credited with five victories during the Battle of Britain. On 1 November – the day after the official end of the Battle – Nelson was shot down and killed. His body was never recovered.

Long before the United States entered the war, the first Jewish American pilot to fight against the Nazis was doing so with the RAF; first with 609 Squadron, then with 71 Eagle Squadron.

Aged 28, Andy Mamedoff was old for a Battle of Britain pilot. His family came from Russia, having fled to the United States twenty years earlier. His father had supposedly once arrested Stalin – making the family’s flight an eminently sensible act.

Mamedoff was an adventurer. He loved flying, gambling and the pursuit of pleasure, and he hoped that the war would provide it. Arriving in France when it was close to being overrun, he boarded one of the last ships bound for Plymouth. In England, he headed to the Air Ministry in London intent on finally tackling the Germans. After a Member of Parliament interceded on his behalf, Mamedoff eventually joined 609 Squadron. Mamedoff was soon in the thick of the action. Due to the intensity of aerial combat some young men retreated into themselves, but Mamedoff was

“always ready with some devastating wisecrack.”

He survived the Battle, and shortly afterwards met an aristocratic heiress whom he married in August 1941. However, less than two months later he was killed in an air accident.

Nearly 3,000 airmen were awarded the Battle of Britain clasp to the 1939-45 Star. According to research carried out by historian Martin Sugarman, thirty-four – or 1.2 per cent – were Jewish. Of the British aircrew, 1.1 per cent were Jewish, but only about 0.5 per cent of the general population of Britain was Jewish. The number of Jews who flew in the Battle of Britain was therefore significantly greater proportionally than the number of Jews in Britain.

Three years after the Battle of Britain, Ken Adam also joined 609 Squadron. However, Adam was unusual even among this multinational group, for not only was he Jewish – he was German. Born Klaus Adam in Berlin in 1921, his family moved to London when he was thirteen. Despite his German nationality, Adam was accepted into the RAF.

Adam flew Hawker Typhoons, a fighter bomber which supported ground troops. The low level ground attacks led to huge pilot losses, with 151 Typhoon pilots killed during the Normandy campaign alone.

“During the war it was amazing I didn’t crack up” said Adam. “But I always managed to scrape through. Partly because I had collected a series of friends around me who I’d discuss anything with. I was not afraid to say that I was scared at times.”

Dying was not Adam’s only fear. A Jew could never be certain how he would be treated if captured by the Nazis. But for a German Jew the prospect was bleaker still. “We were very proud to have him with us,” recalled the squadron’s Medical Officer, “(but) I was certain that he would never reach a POW camp, and that summary execution was on the cards for him.”

Ken Adam survived the war however, and entered the movie business. Over the course of a distinguished career as a Hollywood set designer, he created the look for every James Bond film of the 1960s and 70s. He was knighted and won two Academy Awards, yet his sideboard always gave prominence to a model of the Hawker Typhoon. For Sir Ken Adam, the wartime RAF was a family reflecting his own values of tolerance and freedom.

None of the men and women discussed so far are still alive – but I am lucky to be in regular contact with two Jewish men who served with Bomber Command. Alfred Huberman was a tail gunner with 576 and 83 Squadrons while Laurence ‘Benny’ Goodman was a pilot with 617 Squadron. Despite their hugely dangerous roles, both survived the war, and are extremely proud of the part played by Bomber Command.

Laurence was handpicked to join the iconic 617 Squadron, dropping the massive Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs towards the end of the war. He took part in the raid which finally sank the Tirpitz in late 1944, and the raid on Hitler’s retreat, Berchtesgaden, in 1945. Alfred, meanwhile, completed thirty eight operations, and took part in Operation Manna, dropping food to the Dutch population starving under German occupation. Named after God’s gift to the Israelites in the wilderness, the operation involved 33 squadrons dropping a total of around 7,000 tons of food. It is an honour to spend time with these men.

We will soon be at a point where there is nobody left who can recall these events. Living memory is fast turning to history. This is why it is so crucial that we remember the stories of these Jewish men and women who helped to preserve freedom for those of us who come after. They did fight back – the evidence is here. We owe them so much, and the importance of remembering this cannot be overstated. Crash-landing on the outskirts of Amsterdam, Stevens managed to reach his old home in Hanover but was captured shortly afterwards.

To finish, I would like to relate a story that stands apart. Flying Officer Peter Stevens was a Hampden pilot with 144 Squadron, but he was also – unknown to the RAF – German. The story begins with Georg Hein, a Jewish refugee from Germany sent to England in 1934 by his mother to escape the Nazis. After later dropping out of university his life went off the rails, culminating in a term in prison for fraud. Released at the start of the war, Hein was told to register at a police station as an enemy alien. He did not do so. Finding the birth certificate of an old school friend – Peter Stevens – who had died years earlier, Hein attended a recruitment centre and joined the RAF under Stevens’ name. Peter Stevens – as Hein was now known – joined 144 Squadron and trained as a navigator then a pilot on Hampdens. Meanwhile, the Home Office continued to search for him.

On the night of 7 September 1941, just as the police were closing in, Stevens’ aircraft was shot down over Berlin. Effecting his best English accent, he declared himself to be Peter Stevens and claimed the protection of the Geneva Convention. In captivity, he mounted repeated escape attempts. In Oflag XXIB he broke out via a tunnel and caught a train to Berlin before being re-arrested. He subsequently hid among a group of camp guards and tried, unsuccessfully, to sneak away with them. He even acted as the German language advisor for the famous ‘Wooden Horse’ escape from Stalag Luft III in 1943.

At the end of the war Stevens was liberated and returned to Britain, whereupon the authorities had to decide what to do. Rather than make an example of him however, Stevens was not only allowed to retain his assumed identity, but also promoted to Squadron Leader and awarded the Military Cross for his repeated escape attempts.

For most of those discussed above, the war was a brutal struggle to resist the breakdown of civilisation; to strike back against an unthinkable evil. This was surely true for Stevens also. But it was also his opportunity for redemption and rebirth. The war allowed Georg Hein to become a new man.