Philip Rubenstein
Nazi War Criminals in the UK
Summary
A fascinating and chilling history of Nazi war criminals in the United Kingdom from 1940 to the present.
Philip Rubenstein
Philip Rubenstein was director of the Parliamentary War Crimes Group, which, in the mid-to-late 1980s, campaigned to bring Nazi war criminals living in the UK to justice. Philip was also the founder-director of the Holocaust Educational Trust and played a role in getting the study of the Shoah onto the national school’s curriculum in the UK. These days, he works with family businesses, advising on governance and continuity from one generation to the next.
Well, I think enormously important. It’s not my field and and there are others who’ve got far more expertise in this area than I have. But when stories of the Shoah are told properly and thoroughly and truthfully through mass media, they have enormous impact. And again, you know, it started, as I said, with with Meryl Streep and James Woods in “Holocaust.” I mean, I remember watching it at the time, I remember cringing and even as a kid at the time, watching it, but it had the most enormous impact and we shouldn’t forget that.
In the UK I think the reality is that these things often come down to political pressure. Where there is political pressure to take action, governments will often get behind and do something about it. And where there isn’t, there’s usually too many things on their plate for them to do other things. And so I think one of the reasons why there’s been relatively little interest in some nasty Rwanda ex-generals living in London, is that there’s been insufficient pressure.