Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here"

It’s one of the classic historical counterfactuals, typically conjuring grim images of civilian resistance, underground defiance and guerrilla warfare evoked in dystopian narratives like Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle.

But for the historian Simon Schama, the question of a Nazi victory over the UK raises challenging questions about British exceptionalism, and the country’s national character and identity. Would Britain, like occupied Holland, ultimately have become complicit in the Holocaust? Would British Jews have faced the same horrific persecution?

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast to mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, Schama shared the conclusion he’s reached. Had the Nazis crossed the channel, he believes that “Britain would've had the same outcome” as other occupied countries in facilitating the extermination of its Jewish population.

“There’s no reason to suppose not,” Schama reflects. “Not that the British [were] particularly antisemitic… there’s plenty of antisemitism in Britain, but no worse than in Holland. But almost certainly no better.”

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Schama’s reflections are based on his April 2025 BBC documentary Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz, in which the historian retraces the social mechanisms that allowed the Holocaust to unfold not just in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, but in the decidedly ordinary streets and homes of Europe, across typical cities and villages, with the complicity of civil servants, police, and local bystanders.

“Holocaust through understatement”

For Schama, Britain’s vulnerability to compliance with the Holocaust wouldn’t stem from overt fascism, but in the steady efficiency of the country’s effective layers of bureaucracy. He believes that this, coupled with Brits’ national disposition, might have enabled mass atrocities to unfold under a veil of procedural detachment.

“I think [in Britain] it would’ve been a kind of, ‘Sorry, but the computer says no, you have to go on the train,’” he says. “…the Holocaust with gloves off. It’d have been Holocaust through understatement or something in Britain.”

His comments draw a further parallel with what happened in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Despite the country’s reputation for tolerance (Schama notes that “it was the one place in Europe where there’d never been a ghetto or an expulsion”), the Dutch administrative state became an efficient tool of Nazi extermination.

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“The Dutch are very, very good at bureaucratic compilation… There was an extraordinary thing called a dot map in Amsterdam… Each dot was 10 Jews, [it showed] exactly where every single Jew in Amsterdam lived.”

Such meticulous data allowed the Nazis to persecute the Jewish population with extreme accuracy. The Netherlands would go on to have one of the highest rates of Jewish deportation in western Europe.

Eventually, over 75 per cent of Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Would Britain have resisted?

Of course, some Dutch citizens did risk their lives to provide shelter for Jews, hiding and shielding them from Nazi persecution. Schama notes that up to 30,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands, and many of them survived.

However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Around 12,000 were arrested, many of whom "betrayed" Schama says, examining how the Nazis’ culture of fear encouraged the Dutch population to act out of self-preservation.

Britain, he suggests, could likely have followed the same pattern.

Ultimately, Schama warns that – even without a virulent tradition of antisemitism – Britain’s well-functioning bureaucracy and a culture of quiet deference, when wielded as a tool by an ideologically genocidal regime, could have made the country an accomplice to the Holocaust had the Nazis succeeded in invading.

“My family would’ve trusted essentially in even a pro-Nazi government to keep them from the worst,” says Schama. “But that wouldn’t have mattered,” he says. “That’s my pessimistic instinct.”