Keep Calm and Save Money

Those with robust faith in basic British values will find themselves vindicated yet again by the revelation that, even in the face of the Nazi menace, the British government remained staunch in its determination not to give hand-outs to unauthorised wogs. Some time after Churchill had personally won the war and liberated Auschwitz, the German government agreed to contribute a million pounds in compensation to those British nationals who had been undeservedly treated like Jews, Roma, moral degenerates or other lesser breeds. In their zeal for fair play, the British spent two years investigating the family background of a tortured and executed Allied agent in order to ensure that her daughter, who had a suspicious foreign-sounding name, was not an undeserving case. One Dutch Jew, who apparently thought that being a British subject meant he didn't need to show his papers, rejected a princely offer of £500 for the gassing of his family; the Foreign Office told him they would "make certain enquiries which may take a considerable time", which is Whitehall English for "your application has been put in the rubbish bin because you have hurt our itsy-bitsy feelings."

Oddly enough, the whole business has been kept secret for fifty years, despite the copious amounts of British buccaneering entrepreneurialism on display. Possibly it was thought that the story should not be told until a new generation required appropriate role models for keeping compensation out of the wrong hands. Then again, perhaps it was simply that not enough of the money found its way to the tax-dodging community for Her Majesty's Government to take real pride in its work.