THE BLACK BOOK

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"The Black Book" is the informal name of a list of 2820 names of prominent politicians, artists, scientists, writers, and other persons of note living in Great Britain in 1940 and who for some reason or the other were bothersome to the Nazis. It was compiled by Walter Schellenberg (see above photo) of the SS. It was intended to be a reference guide for German troops on whom to arrest immediately once they invaded England. Twenty thousand copies were printed, but only two examples are known to have survived Allied bombings and exist today. One of them is in the Imperial War Museum in London.

One name not on the list is that of the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne in 1936. He was perceived, perhaps correctly, to be sympathetic to the Nazis, and the Germans hoped to recruit him as a puppet ruler during their occupation of the United Kingdom.

The list was not completely infallible and included a few persons who had previously died or emigrated from Great Britain.

Some of the names on the list, according to Wickipedia as well as the memoirs of Schellenberg, are the following:

Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

Sir Norman Angell, Labour MP awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 

Margery Corbett Ashby, feminist

Robert Baden-Powell, founder and leader of Scouting (the Nazis regarded Scouting as a spy organisation) 

Edvard Beneš, President of the Czechoslovakian government in exile 
Vera Brittain, feminist writer and pacifist

Violet Bonham Carter, anti-fascist liberal politician. Cryptically referred to as "an Encirclement lady politician" 

Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister 

Sydney Chapman, economist 

Winston Churchill, Prime minister (well, duh)

Marthe Cnockaert, First World War spy

Claud Cockburn, journalist 

Seymour Cocks, Labour politician (whose name undoubtedly caused him much grief when he was a youth at boarding school)

Chapman Cohen, secularist writer and lecturer

Lionel Leonard Cohen, lawyer

Robert Waley Cohen, industrialist

G. D. H. Cole, academic

Norman Collins, broadcasting executive

Edward Conze, Anglo-German scholar

Duff Cooper, Cabinet Minister of Information 

Noël Coward, actor who opposed appeasement and was an armed forces entertainer, homosexual, and connected with MI5 

Charles de Gaulle, Free French leader 

Sefton Delmer, journalist 

Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War 

Conrad O'Brien, SIS/MI6 Agent ST36, Agent Z3 for Dansey's Z Organization 

E. M. Forster, author 

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis and a Jew (died September 23, 1939) 

Willie Gallacher, trade unionist 

Sir Philip Gibbs, journalist and novelist 

Victor Gollancz, publisher

J. B. S. Haldane, geneticist and evolutionary biologist and Communist 

Ernst Hanfstaengl, German refugee. Once a financial backer of Hitler, he had fallen from favor and had fled Germany in 1937 

Aldous Huxley, author (who had emigrated to the USA in 1936) 

Alexander Korda, Hungarian-born British producer and film director 

Harold Laski, political theorist, economist and author 

Megan Lloyd George, politician

David Low, cartoonist 

F. L. Lucas, literary critic, writer and anti-fascist campaigner 

Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of the Czechoslovakian government in exile 

Jimmy Maxton, pacifist politician 

Naomi Mitchison, novelist 

Gilbert Murray, classical scholar and activist for the League of Nations

Harold Nicolson, diplomat, author and diarist

Vic Oliver, Jewish entertainer, originally from Austria. Married to Winston Churchill's daughter Sarah 

Ignacy Jan Paderewski, pianist, former Prime Minister of Poland 

Nikolaus Pevsner, German-born architectural historian 

J. B. Priestley, anti-Nazi popular broadcasts and fiction 

Hermann Rauschning, German refugee and once personal friend of Hitler who had turned against him 

Paul Robeson, African-American singer/actor with strong Communist affiliations 

Bertrand Russell, philosopher, historian and pacifist 

C. P. Snow, physicist and novelist 

Stephen Spender, poet, novelist and essayist 

Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl 

Lytton Strachey, died 1932, writer and critic 

Sybil Thorndike, actress

Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, politician, former German minister 

Beatrice Webb, socialist and economist 

Chaim Weizmann, Zionist leader 

H. G. Wells, author and socialist 

Rebecca West, English suffragist and writer 

Ted Willis, dramatist

Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist