On the eve of #HMD2020, some uncomfortable stories from the last years of the British mandate in Palestine

November 1945. Just months after the liberation of the death camps, a British Army officer writes about the antisemitism of his colleagues. “We cannot allow Hitler’s work to be finished for him by a group of diseased minds acting in our name.

June 1946. Operation Agatha. “Black Sabbath”. Norman Rose’s account of British troops’ behaviour during round-ups of Palestinian Jews. Singing the Horst Wessel song. “What we need is gas chambers”

Roy Farran, among the most highly decorated British soldiers of the war, contrasting the “ungrateful well-fed whiners” with British soldiers who had been “urged forward to their death” by what he called “propaganda about German atrocities to the Jews”

And the British Army officer in charge of all of this. General Evelyn Barker. A vicious antisemite. “It’s time this damned race knew what we think of them. Loathsome people”.

Overseeing this at the political and governmental level, the post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin.