George Ridley (1886 – 1944) Member
of Parliament for Clay Cross, Derbyshire.
On May 19, 1943, George Ridley said in the House of Commons:"... we are in the presence of an altogether new and terrible situation, terrible because it has revealed the unbelievable capacity of modern man for sadistic cruelty, terrible because of the consequences of that cruelty to the victims, most of whom are charged with only one crime—the crime of being Jews. It is enough to contemplate for a moment the process of mass electrocution to realise what a chapter of horror is being written in our history. My plea to the Government is to recognise that those horrors impose upon us an inescapable responsibility, and we should endeavour to write a compensating chapter of magnificent deliverance in the same history."
David Grenfell (1881 – 1968) Member
of Parliament for Gower, Glamorgan.
Later in the same debate, David Grenfell said:What is the kind of problem with which we are faced? Germany is suffering and has been suffering for years from a kind of mania movement based on anti-Semitism, which is anti-Christian, and anti everything which is not' Nazi, looking for culprits in every corner of German society, and getting the Germans to hate the Jews. One hears in this House and sometimes in the country that Jews are a formidable branch of the human race and are out-numbering everybody else and usurping the ordinary man whether in London, Berlin or elsewhere. The contrary is the fact. The Jews are a very small proportion of the German Reich; they are less than one per cent. of the German Reich, and less than one per cent. of the population of this country. I have often asked myself and the German people in the days before the war, What is wrong with 99 Germans when they cannot look after one Jew? Why should 99 Englishmen be induced to hate one Jew? There is something wrong when they cannot order their joint lives so that everyone plays his proper part in society. There is a pernicious moral element at work in Europe, the effects of which are not confined to the atrocities now being committed there. We are witnessing the degeneration of Europe, not of the Jews, under the stress of this propaganda movement which is being directed against them. We have witnessed in Germany a return to the executioner's axe, freely employed upon political as well as racial opponents. We have seen in recent months the Germans resort to mass murder with deadly, lethal weapons and with electricity and gas—a terrible thing which makes decent-minded people despair of the humanity that is capable of condoning such happenings without expressing a deep sense of revolt and shame.