Reading Hitler's victims: refugee memoirs of Nazi persecution for British readers during appeasement and war

Pilsworth, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7379-0996 (2026) Reading Hitler's victims: refugee memoirs of Nazi persecution for British readers during appeasement and war. War and Genocide. Berghahn.

Abstract/Summary

This book is the first study of the translation, publication and marketing of literary memoirs by both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution for British readers during the years of Nazi rule. By exploring the different political and religious victim tropes that took centre stage in the British public imagination of Nazi persecution, it reveals that Jewish victims were rarely represented. Instead, during the war, the study shows that German and Austrian Christians came to represent ‘what Britain was fighting for’. This publishing history highlights the centrality of unspoken, unofficial censorship practices in British cultural institutions of the period, arguing that a focus on victim narratives makes such censorship inevitable.