Reading Hitler’s Victims

It is often assumed that the first memoirs to be written by survivors of Nazi persecution were only published after the war, but this is not the case. Reading Hitler’s Victims is the first study to explore the personal memoirs that were published for British readers by refugees from Nazi persecution, both before and during the war. By asking whose memoirs were published, and why and how they were shaped by translators and editors, this study reveals the changing victim tropes that took centre stage in the British imagination of Nazism between 1933 and 1945. Jewish victims were rarely represented, and instead, German and Austrian Christians came to represent ‘what Britain was fighting for’. This publishing history reveals how unofficial censorship practices shaped British public discourse about Nazism’s victims, and argues that a focus on victim narratives makes such censorship inevitable.