Alexander Ratcliffe
Alexander Ratcliffe (1888 - January 1947) was a Scottish Protestant extremist and an anti-jewish pamphleteer.
He organized the Scottish Protestant League in 1920 and found minor political success on the local level. Later his group was renamed the British Protestant League. He was the main writer for The Protestant Advocate a paper started in 1922 which became the Protestant Vanguard in the early 1930s and ended as The Vanguard in 1947.[2]
He had ties to the American Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and formed a similar organization on a much smaller scale called the Knights of Kaledonia Klan.
In the 1930s Ratcliffe began to be attracted toward fascism and in August 1939 (some say April 1939) visited central Europe and National Socialist Germany. Upon his return to Scotland he began writing pro-German articles during the war years. The Home Secretary ignored Ratcliffe and his paper stating that taking any action would give him undeserved national attention.[3] In March 1943 Alexander Ratcliffe is believed to be one of the very first people to question the propaganda claims of mass killings of jews in Germany.[4]
After the death of Hitler, Ratcliffe wrote a final article praising the great man titled "The Passing of Hitler!".[5] Ratcliffe's attraction to Hitler was still seen through a religious prism, claiming Hitler--although born a Roman Catholic--was a warrior against the Papacy.[6]
Pamphlets
- Evolution: Hell with the Lid Off! (1928) 14 pages
- The Horrible Lives of the Popes of Rome (1929) 15 pages
- Rome, Marriage and Divorce!: A Warning Against Mixed Marriages and an Exposure of Roman Catholic Hypocrisy (1929) 14 pages
- Liguori, the Filthy!: A Daring Exposure of Rome's Most Immoral of Theologians (1931) 16 pages
- Why this War Came!
- Mr. Churchill on Trial (1941)
- The Truth about Religion in Germany (1942)
- The Truth about the jews (1943) 19 pages
- The Truth about Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church (1943) 20 pages
- The Truth about Democracy! An exposure (1944)
- The Truth about the War! (1944)
Notes
- ↑ Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain, by Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn, page 203
- ↑ ''Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain, by Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn, page 197
- ↑ Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain, by Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn, page 208
- ↑ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, by Anthony Julius, page 308
- ↑ Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain, by Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn, page 200
- ↑ Fascist Scotland, by Gavin Bowd