Vansittart’s “hate Germany” pamphlets

1941

“There is now more and more division of opinion—the question is implicit from the start but people have only recently become aware of it—as to whether we are fighting the Nazis or the German people. This is bound up with the question of whether England should declare her war aims, or, indeed, have any war aims. All of what one might call respectable opinion is against giving the war any meaning whatever (“Our job is to beat the Boche—that’s the only war aim worth talking about”), and this is probably bound to become official policy as well. Vansittart’s “hate Germany” pamphlet is said to be selling like hot cakes.” [George Orwell, Wartime Diary 7 February 1941]

George Orwell’s copy of Sir Robert Vansittart‘s Black Record is now in the British Library:

“I think the majority opinion would now be that we are fighting the German people and not merely the Nazis. Vansittart’s hate-Germany pamphlet, Black Record, sold like hot cakes.” [London Letter (to Partisan Review) 15 April 1941]

1942

“Whom Are We Fighting Against?

“This question, which obviously had to be answered sooner or later, began to agitate the big public some time in 1941, following on Vansittart’s pamphlets and the starting of a German daily paper for the refugees (Die Zeitung, mildly Left, circulation about 60,000). Vansittart’s thesis is that the Germans are all wicked, and not merely the Nazis.” [London Letter (to Partisan Review), 1 January 1942]

“The Vansittart controversy rumbles on in books, pamphlets, correspondence columns and the monthly reviews. “Independent” candidates, some of them plain mountebanks, tour the country, fighting by-elections.” [London Letter (to Partisan Review), 29 August 1942]

1944

“By some arrangement the Soviet government have made, most of the Russian propaganda books are published by Hutchinson’s, a big octopus publisher who puts out not only very cheap tripe-novels but vicious anti-left pamphlets and semi-fascist stuff from Vansittart’s followers.” [Letter to Philip Rahv, 1 May 1944]

George Orwell also owned a number of pamphlets by figures such as John Middleton Murry responding to Black Record.