Tyranny’s need of ‘ordinary people’

The Last Train: A Family History of the Final Solution By Peter Bradley

HarperNorth, £20 Reviewed by Daniel Snowman

THE FAMILY of (former Labour MP) Peter Bradley were of German-Jewish origins. His father, Fritz Brandes, was raised in Bamberg, incarcerated in Buchenwald following Kristallnacht and then, in May 1939, sent on a train to Holland and thence to Britain. A year later, Fritz was interned on the Isle of Man as an “enemy alien”, then taken to Canada before being released and sent as a British soldier — renamed “Fred Bradley” — to India to help protect the Raj.

Fred never talked much to his son about his background but

Peter grew up wanting to know more — and to find out about his grandparents, Salamon (“Sally”) and Bertha Brandes. They had been dispatched on a train going in the opposite direction: to Riga, from where they never reemerged. In November 1941, the Gestapo had deported to Nuremberg all Jews from, in and around Bamberg. And then Sally and

Bertha were transported eastward on the Sonderzug Da 32 — the “special”, and last, train to Riga, which

Peter Bradley was determined to investigate. He relates the story of a death camp built near Riga, the brutalities and murders committed there, and its subsequent destruction as the Nazis tried to erase evidence of their crimes.

In addition to his extensive reading and research, Bradley visited Riga in 2019 in a powerfully motivated yet ultimately unsuccessful attempt to rediscover the long-lost fate of his grandparents. His book is far more than simply a historical exploration. The early chapters are packed with reminders of the recurrent antisemitism that had blighted the lives of Jews across the centuries. Indeed, the late 19th century Germany of Bradley’s forbears was one of the few places and periods when the opportunity for a more “enlightened” life appeared to open up for middle-class Jews. Which makes their subsequent fate all the more appalling.

At times, the text feels overloaded with names, places and dates, but be sure to read it to the end as Bradley reflects on what he has described. It’s all too easy to dismiss the barbarities of Nazism as simply cruel and inhumane. Those who committed them, he argues (echoing Hannah Arendt and others), were mostly ordinary people who, in an era following war, national humiliation and economic collapse, felt they at last had a government that provided them with jobs, social services and national pride. This was “totalitarianism by popular consent”.

Would you and I have acted differently? True, Britain opened its doors to some of the desperate refugees from Nazism, and is doing so today for some fleeing from Ukraine. But, as Bradley’s father used to ask: if Hitler had persecuted only Gypsies, how many of us would have stuck our necks out to help them? As we face yet again a dangerously uncertain future, Bradley senses his grandparents, and all those buried with them, crying out for us to choose reason, justice and humanity.

Bradley was determined to investigate the ‘special’ train