The list Orwell was not on (shamefully, perhaps)
I'm currently reading Sybil Oldfield's The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist (2020) and imagine my astonishment when I came across the name of George Orwell and it was not emboldened (all the names of individuals and organisations which appeared in the Book are emboldened in the text).
Yes, apparently George was not considered anything like the danger to the Reich that a whole motley crew of pacifists, humanitarians and woolly liberal writers (Forster, Woolf, e.g.) whom we suspect he despised if did not anathematise were.
(Given the pre-war records and activities of some of those pacifists and humanitarians, we are inclined to think that they would indeed have been putting up significant non-violent resistance, and they had form for effectively getting refugees out of Germany, moving Basque refugees across borders, etc, etc.)
Several of the individuals who were in the Black Book, I note, cross-referencing, appear in Orwell's own 'Red list' of '“cryptos” (secret communists), “fellow travellers” (communist sympathizers), or outright members of the Communist Party' which he apparently passed on to the Information Research Department in the post-war era.
Given how paranoid Nazi intelligence was - Boy Scouts, Esperantists, Rotarians and Freemasons were among the organisations they deemed on their list for suppression besides the ones one might obviously expect - I'm really, really surprised they overlooked Mr Blair.
(Naomi Mitchison, I may add, figures on both lists. I guess her brother JBS Haldane does not feature on Orwell's list because he was a known out Communist.)
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