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Anna Nyburg and Charmian Brinson eds., "Refugees from Nazism to Britain in Trade, Industry, and Engineering" (Brill, 2025)
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Podcast Host Intro
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mariam Olubodi
Welcome to the NBN, the podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm the host, Mariam Olubodi. Today I'll be talking to Dr. Anna Nieper about the book Refugees from Nazism to Britain in industry and engineering. Dr. Annan Haybaj studied Modern Languages and Literature at Toronto University, graduating in 1972. She completed an MA at the University of East Anglia, UK in 1976 in European literature at Imperial College London, where she had been teaching German, Italian and French from 1989. She started her PhD research at the University of London in 2002 with her supervisor, Professor Charmian Brisson, completing the doctorate in 2009. The subject was Refugee from Nazism to Britain in Art and Illustrated Publishing. This became a book in 2014 published by Faidon. In 1912 she published a biography of a refugee artist and a third book came out in 2020, the Clothes on Their Backs How Refugees from Nazism Re Fertilized the British Fashion Industry. In 2023, she was commissioned to write a 75 year history of the publishing giant Saints and Hudson, out in spring 2026. She is a Trustee of the Insider Outsider Festival and a committee member of the Research center for German and Australian excel Studies. You are welcome to the NBN, Dr. Ana.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Thank you very much.
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Mariam Olubodi
Alright, what was the main idea behind the book project? Invite me out.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes. Well, in fact, the full title of the book is it's yearbook number 24 of the research center for German and Austrian Exile Studies. In the research center, which has just celebrated its 30th birthday, we produce a book every year on a different theme. But it's true to say that the themes, the subject of these yearbooks rather depend on the interests of the members of the committee. I'm one of the committee members and most of the committee members, I think it's true to say, have a background in the humanities. Many of them will have a degree in history or maybe in the social sciences, something more like sociology, art history, or very often languages and literature like myself. So it's true to say that the themes of the yearbooks reflect these interests. But when I was researching for the book that you mentioned in the introduction, the Clothes on Our how the Refugees from Nazism to Britain Revitalized the Fashion Trade, I began to realize that the refugees had brought very much more to Britain than arts and humanities interests or things like media, photography, film, music and so on. The large number, the large majority of the refugees in fact were businessmen, were entrepreneurs, inventors, and they had brought certainly in the fashion industry, new technology, new business practices and so on, which reflected what was going on in Austria and Germany in the interwar period. That's the place they came from and the time they came. So I proposed that we had a one year book on something which reflected these subjects, trade, industry and engineering. Initially, I have to say there was a little bit of surprise from the committee because it's not things we were used to and we didn't have much expertise in those areas. But I was confident that we could still facilitate a conference and then later a book. So the conference took place in 2023 and the yearbook, which took two years to produce then, was the result of the conference.
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Mariam Olubodi
That's quite impressive. So to communicate the impact of the refugees on engineering and other related disciplines such as management, which is quite remarkable at that period, not in art and humanities. And you did it through conference, then later through the yearbook. That's impressive. Now that leads to the next question, which is there are several people who have contributed to the book. How have their contributions shaped the main idea that backed the book? Dr.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
So yes, we put out of course a call for papers and you don't know who's going to reply. And we had very many individual stories. Quite a few of the contributors were children or grandchildren of the original refugees. So they now, some of them for the first time, were taking a look at what their grandparents or parents had actually done at work. Not something that all children are interested in. So we had a very wide variety of stories in those different areas in trade, industry and engineering. I had hoped for a few more contextual contributions, but we did have at least three on a large project, an economic project, which took place from the 1930s up to and after the war. So that was good in contextualizing the whole situation, the economic situation of the refugees to Britain.
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Mariam Olubodi
All right, so even though the views that are product of the call were diversified, you were still able to contextualize the main idea around the theme which you wanted to project.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes.
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Mariam Olubodi
So a chapter of the book discusses issues related to the impact of refugees from Nazism to the British social life. Could you highlight some of those areas of impact?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes, I think you're referring to the first chapter, which I particularly wanted to have as the first chapter because it's a survey of many, many of the areas to which the refugees contributed. And I think it has a title, something like toys, television, travel, Tourism. And that's a very wide area. And in each case, then Dr. Tony Morgan outlined a story about an invention or a company which was created by refugees. So, for example, you have to understand toast, toasted bread is a very big part of British culture because most people each toast at breakfast and one company created a toaster. In fact, already in Germany, they'd been working on electrical products, like small electric products, like toasters and lights and so on. And they invented a toaster which would had all the things that you need, for example, timing so that the toast doesn't burn, but is not undercooked, and also could accommodate quite a lot of slices. It's called a dualit toaster. And this very happily transferred to Britain. And I think it was more successful in Britain than it had been in Germany. In television, people worked. The refugees brought something new here because in Germany there were schools where you could train to do something called display. And in shops in Britain, apparently in the 1920s and early 30s, shop windows were very boring. They didn't have any concept of how to display goods. Whereas in Germany, for example, at the famous Ryman School in Berlin, you could do a whole course in display. How to arrange an exhibition, how to make an attractive shop window. So the Ryman school itself was Jewish owned. And of course all Jews were threatened under the Nazis. And the whole school, with some staff and students, had to flee to Britain. So then we had people here who understood about display. I'm referring a little bit more to my own book, fashion Book, who had a training in display at the Ryman School, later had a career at the BBC television, and she was able to create and design sets, so she knew what would look good on a television screen. So those are just two examples of the very, very many that Dr. Morgan covered in his book. And I like this very much because it showed the perhaps unexpected ways by using names that would be familiar to very, very many people. Dualit, for example. But nobody would have any idea that these had come from German Jewish refugees. And that is one of the great surprises, I think, to the British public, that things that they think of as iconically British are in fact not. And that's true not just of the refugees from Nazism, but refugees or immigrants from very many cultures to Britain.
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Mariam Olubodi
Okay, that is quite an exposition because it sheds light into how the Germans and other refugees who were in Britain at particular period of time have impacted on the social lives of the Britons using their skills, skills that they actually brought from their own nations. All right, so what are the contributions of the refugees to the industrial development of British.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Well, this is a difficult question because it's, as I implied already, perhaps it's more a story of individual contributions rather than there being a big overall industrial development. Perhaps I should just mention engineering. So engineering in Britain and Germany in the 1930s were two slightly different things. So perhaps this tradition of engineering in Germany is worth mentioning here. So in Germany, engineers were. If you called somebody an engineer and German engineer, then it meant he had studied at university and had a degree in England or in Britain, we use the word engineer indiscriminately. Maybe somebody who mended your car or heating or so on would be called an engineer, when really they should have been more of a mechanic. So engineering in Germany had a lot of kudos. And the engineers who came from Germany, if they had trained as engineers already, some of them, of course, were young and they trained in England. But if they came from Germany, then they brought a high level of serious study which they had acquired in Austria and Germany. And there were some incredibly enterprising people. When I read about them, I was quite shocked to think that they brought ideas that we are only introducing now, things to do with, for example, heating, now that we're in a crisis with fossil fuels and so on. And some of these engineers developed methods of using excess waste from Industry and importing the waste under the River Thames in London and heating blocks of housing, for example. So there was all sorts of very. There are individual stories of great invention and enterprise, but it's hard to say they had an overall impact on industry. That's a hard question to answer.
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Mariam Olubodi
Okay, please can you mention a few of those individuals who have done remarkable things in the area of engineering?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Well, the one I referred to there is not in fact in the yearbook. That's just from my general knowledge and from my research. We come later on to a company when we were going to talk about telecommunications and electromechanical engineering. There's an interesting refugee company created in Britain, but by three engineers who already worked together called Londex. And they didn't have a company together in Germany, but they formed together in Britain. And this Londex company invented tirelessly. I can't remember how many patents they acquired very early on after their arrival in Britain. And again, sorry, because I'm not an engineer, so I can't describe in any detail. But it was to do with alternating lighting. Alternating is very important when you need lights, for example, to go on and off. So in military terms, you need to have buoys in the sea to warn shipping of dangers or other ships and so on. And they were very. Londex were very strong in this area. And a lot of machinery that you need for manufacturing needs to have alternating current. And as I say, Londex, I'd love to remember the exact number of patents, inventions that they were responsible for in quite a short space of time. And they were a very small company. I hope that helps to answer your question a little bit.
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Mariam Olubodi
Yes, it has shed a lot of light on it. At least we know that. So what I'm more concerned about is this Lohndex, the inventor, or let me say the pioneer of the one that drives the organization. Is it the German or from other part of the world? Are they, are they also Germans or who are they?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes, we are talking about a small group when we talk about the immigration to Britain, from Nazism to Britain, we are talking about a smallish group, about 80,000 people in all came from Germany and later Austria, where the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. So the Jewish population, but also the Jews were not the only persecuted group. We had people in left wing politics. So for example, people active in trade unions, in socialist politics or communist politics, where all their lives were in danger. The Nazis would incarcerate them and often execute them. So Germany to start with, then Austria from 1938. Then the Nazis, the army, the German army moved into Czechoslovakia. And then that Jewish population also fled to Britain late in the 1930s. And you have also people in the neighboring countries, maybe like Poland, for example, with a Jewish population and a very small number from the Netherlands. So that was difficult for people to come. By the time it was 1940, when they too were occupied, it wasn't possible to travel to Britain. So very many of those people perished. But, yes, that's why we are talking about this specific group. And they are very interesting, as I've already implied, because they were a very specific group. They came from, unlike earlier influxes of specifically Jewish immigrants to Britain at the turn of the century. So the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, those Jewish immigrants came from very poor, very underdeveloped areas of Russia and Poland. They were mostly very religious. And they came to the East End of London and worked in quite, shall we say, menial occupations. They worked in making garments as tailors and small shops and so on. But the people who came a generation later in the 1930s were quite sophisticated. I'm making a generalization here. The 80,000 people, obviously they weren't all exactly the same, but they had mostly had the benefit of a very good German or Austrian education. Many of them might have been to university, and as I said, their training schools, arts and crafts and technical colleges were ahead of Britain in many ways. So that's why they were quite a specific group of immigrants. And particularly interesting in that they made such a disproportional impact on British life.
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Mariam Olubodi
Thank you very much. I want to believe that the book captures some parts of this history. People's contributions in this book capture this histories, some not specifically, all because, you know, different papers are different contributors have different themes they have addressed. Okay, so now to the next question. During the Second World War, I want to ask, because the book mentions some of those things, what are the wartime challenges that militate against the industrial efforts of the refugees, and how did they overcome these challenges?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Well, this is a very important point, of course, because most of the refugees arrived in the late 1930s, and we all know that World War II broke out in September 1939, so they hadn't had a long time in to get established here. But I'll start by saying that on the one hand, refugees suffered the same as the British population in that there was a shortage of all materials, including foodstuffs, because Britain in those days was very dependent on their colonies, which they called the Dominions. So they had very much food arriving from Canada, from Australia, from different countries in Africa. But when the war started, the German fleet attacked British ships in the Atlantic, so they had a very, very good submarine fleet and shipping was no longer taken for granted. So there was a shortage of many materials. The government quickly introduced rationing to try to be fair to everybody. And there were certain things that you couldn't get. I myself, I'm 75 years old, and the rationing continued until the early 1950s. And I remember when I had my first banana when I was age three. My mother remembers my not wanting the banana because I thought it was bent. This shows you. So a British child was not used to imported food at that period, so they suffered along with the British population. Many of the refugees remarked on how patient and tolerant the Brits were at that time, instead of complaining that they just got on with it. Of course, this affected manufacturing, many of the things that they would normally use. The goods that they used to make clothes, for example, were also rationed. So this was part of a bigger picture. There were, however, additional problems for the refugees in their work. And I know you're going to ask me about internment, but internment was something that happened as a mass step by the government in 1940, and this had huge implications for many of the refugee companies, most of which had only just started. Would you like me to go on and explain about the internment of aliens?
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Mariam Olubodi
Please, please, please, please, go ahead. You can go ahead, please.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
So we imagine you have in Britain then, around 80,000 refugees, as I've said, from Germany and Austria, and all was well until war broke out. By 1940, Britain was in a desperate position in the war. They felt very isolated. All around them, countries were being occupied. Norway had fallen to the Nazis, the Netherlands, France, very, very quickly, our main ally. And Britain was very, very frightened. We were very frightened we would be next on Hitler's list. And there was a fear of something called fifth columnists, that is to say, people who would be in, in our case, Britain from Germany, who were acting as spies and who would secretly been helping Nazis to arrange an occupation of Britain. So to exclude these fifth columnists, Churchill, in June 1940, introduced a mass internment. That is to say, he rounded up and arrested thousands and thousands of these refugees and put them behind barbed wire in internment camps on a small island in the Irish Sea, so between Ireland and Britain, called the Isle of Man. There were a few other camps as well. And to most of the refugees, this was a terrible shock. And also for many of them, it reminded them of having been arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany. They feared the worst. They thought, will we be executed? What will happen? What will happen to our families? There was no benefit in those days, no helpful families. And so some of the companies which I talk about in the book, then they run aground, they went bankrupt, they couldn't work because the very man who was running them Was now arrested and there was no income. In some cases the wives, if they had the right background, carried on running the companies. There are a few cases of that. And in other cases their government realized that the refugee companies were crucial to the war effort. This is a very important theme to the whole story is that the British government was very keen to support refugees if they were useful, if they were useful for the war effort, if they were scientists, engineers and so on. The British government wanted them, there was no problem and they were released from internment. Some of them weren't even interned at all because of the connections they had and because they were big employers of many, many employees for all companies in Britain. They had to obey the government and change, say for example, from making normal clothes over to making army uniforms, army boots and so on. And there are many examples of this. So this is something that affected both the refugees and the normal British manufacturers.
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Mariam Olubodi
Okay, so the internment I think is becoming something that is clearer. So some of those jail refugees were held captive while others who are very useful to the British economy that could actually impact on the war positively actually kept working in support of the ongoing work at that time. All right, could you comment on the refugees effort in engineering with emphasis on areas such as telecommunications and electromechanical engineering?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes, well, I've already talked about Londex. That's the main one for I think you could call it both of those electromechanical and telecommunications.
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Mariam Olubodi
Can you think of any other impact?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
No. Others of engineering were different sorts of things. For example, one of the. To me, the main chapters that we had on engineering really dealt with the preparation of metal for the aviation industry. Metal rolling. They were a very interesting family called Loewy. The Loewy brothers came from Germany, already active in engineering. And along with another company called Mechalastic, which has already been covered in another book, they were responsible for upgrading British airplanes. So that they were. I mean, obviously a lot of the war was fought in the air, so aviation was extremely important. And there were two Lerwy brothers and one of them was instrumental in improving British aviation and with creating engines for Rolls Royce aircraft, for example. And the other brother, after the war went to America and worked for NASA in the space industry. So that just shows you the caliber of the engineering qualities that they had and that they brought with them.
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Mariam Olubodi
All right, now to the question, how has the book communicated initially conceived idea?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Yes. Okay. Well, yes, you never know what you're going to get when you have a call for papers, of course. And I'm confident that it gives an interesting and very varied idea of the contributions made by the refugees. I did mention early on the idea of contextualizing, and I had wished for one chapter, at least on the economic context, and nobody came forward with that. So I hope this will be made up elsewhere, that people will pick up this idea and maybe produce a different sort of book. So basically, what I'm saying is I wanted one chapter which would explain first of all, the economic situation in Britain. Well, you have to know there was very high unemployment in the 1930s. There had been the stock market crash, 1929 in America. But in Britain, the decline of the coal and steel industry is crucial for industry. Thousands and thousands of unemployment. In some areas it was almost 50%. So obviously that's, you know, you could say that's a good place for entrepreneurs to arrive, and that is very true. But I also knew that there were regulations imposed on refugee companies. Just one example, they had to have a British director on their board of directors. But that's all I know. I wanted an expert who would explain in much more detail what a refugee bringing his or her company to Britain, what they would have to do. What about funding all of these things? It would have been very nice to have something to set the scene a little bit more. So whereas I'm very pleased with the chapters we had, I wished for even more for the book.
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Mariam Olubodi
So some of the chapters you had that didn't capture the economy, which areas did they focus on?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Sorry, could you say that again?
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Mariam Olubodi
Yes. You said you expected some of the chapters to speak about the economic situation at that period, but you have less chapters focusing on those areas. So which areas do they cover more? Those existing chapter in this book, what are the areas?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
So there were three contextual chapters, in a sense, and they all focused on the problem that I have just referred to. In the northeast and northwest of Britain was the highest. Unemployment. That's where there used to be mining, coal mining and so on. And there was a wonderful project called the Special Areas. So it's an example of incredible ingenuity and flexibility, and I wish that we had that nowadays. So local government and national government, members of Parliament realized that on the one hand, there was unemployment in Britain, but on the other hand of dangered entrepreneurs who were working, you know, had perfectly successful companies. So they went physically across to Germany and invited these Jewish, largely Jewish entrepreneurs to come to Britain and set up their companies here. And the Great Trading Estates project was launched in the northeast and northwest of England. And by 1947, they were employing More than a quarter of a million local people. And one of these companies, at least I'm sure more, is still going today. They're called Kangol, who make headgear, they make berries. During the war, they made berries for the army as part of the uniform. But nowadays they've moved to America and they still make woolen berets that everybody wares. So that's just one example. So the great trading estates was covered in three chapters, whereas the other chapters really are more about individual companies and individual entrepreneurs.
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Mariam Olubodi
Right, thank you for that beautiful piece of information. So we know what it covers and what we should look forward to. Maybe possible subsequent volumes. All right, so what message do you have for the audience and readers?
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Well, I'm pleased you asked me that, because last week, it was the 18th of November, we had a launch for this book and we held the launch because of the connection with engineering. We held the launch at Imperial College London, which listeners might know is a specialist university for science, technology, engineering, engineering and medicine. And it's where I used to work. So we held the launch there and we had a very, very lively discussion. Very topical in Britain at the moment is policy on current refugees. You may know that we have refugees arriving on small boats from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, possibly Iraq and so on, and the government doesn't have a clear policy and changes its mind constantly. And the latest version of their policy is actually quite, we think, quite cruel. And we had a discussion, all the guests and many of the authors of chapters were all there at the launch, which was lovely. And Professor Brinson, who is one of the founder members of the research center, quoted from one of the essays a rather important quote. And this resulted in a letter being published in the Guardian newspaper. Now, the Guardian is one of our most important national newspapers. So on the following Saturday, I will quote now from the letter the author, who is Professor Miriam David, wrote, my father's life was plagued by antisemitism and Nazism and becoming a refugee. In concluding her introduction to the launch, Professor Brinson quoted the closing sentence to my essay in volume 24. It is equally relevant as a critique of Shabana Mahmoud's proposals for asylum seekers. This is our government, as many attending the launch attested. Quote, the lesson of this, surely, is that we should try as best we can to make sure that refugees lives are made as good as they can be and not blighted by the scars of war and crimes against humanity, let alone racism and discrimination of any kind.
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Mariam Olubodi
Hello, Dr. Annis.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Hello.
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Mariam Olubodi
All right, thank you very much. For being with us today on the NBN.
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Dr. Anna Nieper
Dr. Anna, it was a pleasure. Thank you.
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Mariam Olubodi
So I look forward to having you around next time.