Paul Willer
Refugee from Nazi Germany taken in by Clement Attlee
PAUL WILLER, who has died aged 94, came to Britain in 1939 with his mother and younger brother as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
They had been sponsored by the leader of the Labour opposition, Clement Attlee and his wife Violet, and 10-year-old Paul stayed with the Attlees for four months before the outbreak of war.
Attlee never spoke about his good deed, which only came to light in 2018 when the 90-year-old Willer revealed it in a newspaper interview.
“It was a remarkable kindness,” Willer told The Guardian. “Attlee was a modest man. He did not try and glorify himself in any way. He did it for the right reasons.”
Paul Willer was born in 1928 in Würzburg, Bavaria, to parents who were both doctors. His mother, Franziska, was from an assimilated Jewish family.
In 1933, shortly after the birth of his brother, Peter, their father Johannes, a Christian, left their mother for another woman and declared himself a Nazi sympathiser.
Paul’s mother took her sons to live with her parents in a flat provided by the University of Würzburg, where her father was a professor. When the family was thrown out of the flat, they moved to a hotel in Freiburg.
After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Franziska Willer looked into escaping from Germany but was warned that because her sons were “half Aryan” they might not qualify for the Kindertransport scheme.
Desperate, she wrote to her brother Otto in London, who contacted the Rev William Hewett, the rector of Stanmore, where the Attlees were regular churchgoers. They agreed to take in Paul, while another churchgoing family agreed to take in Franziska and Peter.
After his arrival in April 1939, Willer found it difficult to communicate with the Attlees because he spoke no English. Attlee’s daughter Felicity became the family’s translator because she and Paul had both learnt basic Latin at school.
Though he had to get used to having daily cold baths like the male Attlees, Paul remembered his time with the family with great affection: “Mr Attlee was very kind to all of us children and used to play with us in the garden and encourage us to get to know the different plants.”
He recalled how at breakfast, Attlee would entertain them by holding out a coin and challenging them to guess which monarch’s head was on it: “Whoever gave the correct answer was allowed to keep the coin.”
“He was a genuine man and good father figure,” Willer said: “I of course had no idea I was staying in the house of a famous personality or Member of Parliament.”
After four months Paul was sent to Mourne Grange, a prep school in Northern Ireland, which he claimed to have enjoyed, although the school had no electricity and he was caned by the headmaster for pronouncing the Latin word “audire” with a German rolled “r”.
For his secondary education, Paul was sent to Red Hill School in East Sutton, Kent. After leaving school he moved to Cardiff to work as a draughtsman and later sales rep in a zip factory, taking a qualification in mechanical engineering. He eventually became a sales director at a textiles company and settled in Hertfordshire, before retiring to a village in Gloucestershire.
Much later in life Paul Willer met a half-brother (his father’s son from his second marriage) for the first time and discovered that his father had committed suicide in 1964.
Clement Attlee’s living family only found out about the former prime minister’s act of kindness in 2018 and in November that year Willer was delighted to meet Attlee’s granddaughter Jo Roundell Greene at an event in Parliament.
Paul Willer married his wife Vivienne in 1956 and they had three daughters.
Paul Willer, born 1928, died May 20 2022