In May 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies above southern England, Nazi intelligence officers in Berlin were busily preparing for the expected invasion. Yet few people today realise the hatred reserved for Freemasonry, and to what extent this would have been vented in the event of a German victory over Britain.
    Upon the outbreak of war, Adolf Hitler ordered the creation of an overall directorate of Reich Security, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) which was divided into six main sections, and headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The Chief of the counter-espionage bureau IVE of the RSHA, prepared the Special Search List Great Britain, (Sonderfahndangliste G.B.), more commonly known as the Black Book. This list comprised some 2,820 names, and included the addresses of embassies, universities, newspaper offices and other companies to be dealt with. Freemasonry was marked out for special attention. Nazi agents listed the addresses of craft Grand Lodges in England, Ireland and Scotland, including also the headquarters of many side orders such as Mark Masons’ Hall, the Provincial Grand Lodges, and specific lodges such as Grand Masters, Antiquity, and Pilgrim. Famous personalities known to Hitler’s informants as Freemasons were also named, such as Winston Churchill, Labour’s wartime minister Herbert Morrison, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia Edward Benes, his foreign minister Jan Masaryk, and the Polish pianist and statesman, Ignace Padarewski 1.
    Even though the Bolsheviks in Russia had outlawed Freemasonry in 1924, the European fascist powers were driven by their belief in the existence of a Judaeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. As the decade un-folded, the situation across Europe grew even darker, and in Italy the movement fell to the Italian fascists led by the dictator Benito Mussolini. In Germany, the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter long ranted about the supposed perils of the Order, before the Grand Lodges there too were forced to close due to state intolerance in May 1935. Indeed, the Nazi movement’s first leader, General Ludendorff, had long before published a book condemning the Order in 1924, entitled The Destruction of Freemasonry through the Revelation of its secrets, which by 1940 had sold hundreds of thousands of copies and gone through many editions 2.
    In Spain, the military rebellion of July 1936 had ignited an all-out civil war, and throughout territory held by the Nationalist forces under General Franco, all masons, members of Popular Front parties and Trade Unions were arrested. Large numbers were executed 3. In an interview conducted with the Roman Catholic Tablet in 1937, Franco declared quite unequivocally that “the Spanish Republic did not find itself free of obligations. For the most part the leaders were Freemasons. ...In my opinion, Freemasonry, with all its international influence, is the organization principally responsible for the political ruin of Spain..”4. In fact, the blood-letting was so intense during the start of the conflict that between 18 July and I September, an estimated 75,000 were executed, a figure which included a large number of Freemasons 5.
    In England, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists did not quite share the same white-nuckle hatred as their continental counterparts. That was left to Spencer Leese’s extreme Imperial Fascist League, who regularly attacked Freemasonry in their monthly newspaper, The Fascist. One of their pamphlets, simply titled ‘Freemasonry’, stated : “It [masonry] is universal, and preaches the universal Brotherhood of Man, which means in practice the mongrelisation of the human species,” “It is subversive in a political sense, and was started by Jewry and is now controlled by Jewry for the purpose of paving the way for Bolshevism, as outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”6. Other titles included Race & Politics - A counterblast to the masonic teaching of universal brotherhood, and The Growing Menace of Freemasonry in Britain. Although the IFL was never large enough to constitute a major threat, Leese’s rantings reached sufficiently outrageous proportions in 1936 to make the Crown bring charges of seditious libel against him, and he spent six months in gaol 7. Uninhibited by incarceration, he later declared that the post-war Nuremburg trials were a “Jewish Masonic affair”8. Ironically, as Spain began to emerge from a struggle which left almost a million dead, the rest of Europe descended into a devastating conflict.
    What exactly might have befallen members of the craft had Hitler’s legions crossed the Channel can probably be best guaged by looking at events in France. Upon capitulation to German forces, the country was effectively partitioned, with the south under the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. Pétain started a special bureau of investigation whose job it was to expose Freemasons, who, as a result, lost their jobs, and in the occupied north were often visited by the Gestapo. In Paris, the headquarters of the irregular but largest of the French masonic Grand Lodges was occupied and used for anti-masonic propaganda. Many French masons were active in the French resistance movements, which only goaded the Gestapo to further persecution. Somewhere in the region of 1000 members ended their days in concentration camps9.
    Ominously, the man who was to head the SS operations in Britain, and who was assistant chief to Heydrich, was SS Colonel Dr. Frank Six. Later held responsible for wholesale slaughter on the Eastern Front, Six’s headquarters were to have been in London, where a number of Einsatzkommandos (Action Commandos) were to track down and arrest all targets. Chillingly, it was Department 4b.IVB which was given the task of dealing with Jews and Freemasons, as “enemies of the people and of the Reich”, and was to be personally headed by the infamous Adolf Eichmann, better known to history as “the technician of the Holocaust”. After the war, Eichmann escaped to Argentina, but was kidnapped by Israeli agents on 11 May 1960, tried in Israel, and hanged two years later. 10.
    After the war, the craft in England began to keep a far lower profile than it had done previously, and it is debateable whether or not that was intentional after all that had happened. Yet today, Freemasonry is once again in an era of openness, and all members of our Order can be justifiably proud of a tradition which rigorously opposed the dogmatic intolerance of Europe’s 20th century dictators.

1. The Black Book, reproduced by the Imperial War Museum.
2. AQC. Vol. 95, Ellic Howe, The Collapse of Freemasonry in Nazi Germany, 1933-5.
3. Prof. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War. p.165.
4. Why the Army Rose. Interview with General Franco, The Tablet, November 6 1937.
5. Thomas. The Spanish Civil War. p.173.
6. Freemasonry. p.22. Imperial Fascist League, 1935.
7. Robert Benewick, Political Violence and Public Order. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 1969.
8. British Fascism. Ed : Kenneth Lunn & Richard Thurlow, 1980. Croom Helm, London. p.62.
9. Information very kindly supplied by Pierre Mollière.
10. Introduction to the Nazi Black Book, by Terry Charman, Dept. of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum.
11. Created in 1929 by Spencer Leese, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, Leese helped run the Stamford branch, but broke to form the IFL as his advocacy of Hitler went a good deal further than Mosley’s.

Matthew Scanlan MA, is a member of CEHME, the Centre for Masonic Studies, Zaragoza University, Spain.