MI5, the Security State and Communist Political Refugees from Nazism in Second World War-Era Britain: The Case of Gustav Beuer, 1938–1946

This article examines the British Security Service’s monitoring of Gustav Beuer, a Sudeten German communist and former member of the Czechoslovak parliament who arrived in London as a refugee in 1938 and set up home there until 1946. Although from a friendly country, Beuer was placed under continuous surveillance and was interned, together with five of his compatriots, in 1940–41. The article uses this case to challenge previous interpretations of MI5’s role in spying on communist refugees from Central Europe. It does so by taking a model developed by German political scientist Matthias Lemke for analysing the widely varying levels of threat to democracy posed by exceptional security measures taken by liberal states in closely defined time-frames and applying this to Second World War Britain. Far from pursuing a linear strategy based on anti-communist prejudice alone, MI5 was obliged, inadvertently, to muddle along in its policy towards Beuer and other communist refugees, assimilating unexpected triggers, shifting legal-bureaucratic frameworks, changes in wartime alliances and public opinion, and instances of ministerial action and inaction. The paradoxical result of this was to inject a certain amount of (unforeseen) pragmatism into MI5’s handling of ‘suspect’ refugees, while at the same time undermining its belief that covert fact-finding alone was enough to establish who was and who was not a threat. The article concludes that the self-doubts and unease within the British security state, which are often attributed to intelligence failings and spy scandals in the early Cold War period, had deeper roots in the Second World War era.