My father, the German refugee who fought the Nazis as a ‘secret listener’

As the far right fulminates about who ‘belongs’ in Britain, let’s remember Fritz Lustig, who arrived here in 1939, just months before war broke out. Initially jailed as an ‘enemy alien’, he played a vital role in a top-secret military intelligence unit

Robin Lustig

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, Fritz Lustig, my father, was a 13-year-old schoolboy growing up in Berlin. He was a budding musician with dreams of becoming a professional cellist but, by the time he left school four years later, it was clear that under the Nazis, even though his family had largely cast aside their Jewish heritage, his options were going to be extremely limited.

Neither he, nor any of his anxious relatives, could possibly imagine the scale of the horrors that lay in store – but after the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938, it was impossible to ignore the gathering storm clouds.

So, like millions of young men before him and since, he decided that his future lay away from home, and in April 1939, two weeks after his 20th birthday, he became a refugee, arriving by boat in Southampton, his beloved cello clutched firmly at his side. An unaccompanied male of fighting age, seeking asylum and hoping for a chance of a better life. Sound familiar?

Admittedly, he didn’t clamber ashore after having risked his life crossing the Channel in an inflatable rubber dinghy. But he was a foreigner, with a foreign accent and no qualifications other than his school leaving certificate. He was the sort of undesirable alien referred to by a London magistrate, and quoted approvingly in the Daily Mail, in 1938: “The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage …”…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/02/my-father-german-refugee-who-fought-nazis-as-secret-listener

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