George Richardson Lecture: Quakers and Nazis: The Stories We Tell

In the 1930s and 1940s, members of the Society of Friends pursued a number of remarkable, controversial, and highly-publicised strategies meant to provide tangible assistance to people who were being oppressed by the Nazi regime.
Quaker work on behalf of people whom the Nazis were persecuting—or whom the Nazis had persecuted—began in 1933 and continued throughout the 1940s. That work was carried out by Friends living in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States.

From the 1930s up until the present day, writers such as Guy Aiken, Bettina Brand, Henry Cadbury, Debórah Dwork, Christopher Isherwood, Rufus Jones, Leonard Kenworthy, Hertha Kraus, George Mosse, Stephen Norwood, Rosalie Regan, Hans Schmitt, Elizabeth Vining, and William Howard Wriggins have told stories about the ways in which Quakers interacted with Nazis. Watt’s lecture will highlight some of the major themes that emerge from a survey of those presentations.