The ‘Homecoming’ of the Activists: How the Communist Refugees Returned from British Exile

Abstract

This paper considers how many of the Communist refugees — German, Austrian and German-speaking Czechs — who were in exile in Britain during the Second World War, followed the dictates of the Party and returned home after the war to help rebuild their war-torn countries physically, politically, economically and socially. While the British authorities permitted the Czechs, as ‘friendly aliens’, to leave without too much delay, obstacles were put in the way of the German and Austrian refugees who frequently could not leave Britain until late 1946 or thereafter. The paper examines the relations between frustrated refugees and British officialdom as well as the reception the refugees received from their compatriots on their eventual ‘homecoming’. Generally speaking, the returning Communists did not fare well. In Austria, the returnees, many of whom were of course Jewish, were met with continuing antisemitism as well as anti-communism; in Czechoslovakia, as the Cold War set in, some were arrested while others fled once again; and in the GDR, the preferred destination of the returning German Communists, the label of ‘Westemigrant’ could prove a considerable handicap. All in all, despite the initial idealism, the common experience was one of disillusion and disappointment.