Arandora Star – The “Nominal Rolls”

Diverging information about the names of the survivors and victims of the sinking of the Arandora Star and the corresponding figures have repeatedly caused confusion. Alfonso Pacitti, a descendant of Italian deportees, has now compiled names and brief information on 1,614 men who took part in this ill-fated voyage from various sources in a long period of voluntary work, comparing and checking the information. In November 2025, he published the resulting lists of names of the four groups on the ship on his website “Arandora Star 1940 Manifest.”

According to this current state of research, 743 men were victims of the torpedoes. As for the 470 Germans and Austrians, 150 of whom perished at sea, false information provided by the British government must be rejected: Ronald Cross[3] Minutes from House of Commons, July 9, 1940, retrieved Aug 20, 2023., British Minister of Shipping, hastened to assure members of the House of Commons on July 9, 1940 (the day before the departure of the Dunera) “that all Germans on board were Nazi sympathizers and that none of them came to this country as refugees. None had category ‘B’ or ‘C’ status or were recognized as friendly aliens.” Thus, Churchill’s government washed its hands of the matter.

However, the facts tell a different story. Of the 470 Germans and Austrians, at least 79 victims of the sinking and more than 75 survivors were proven to be Jewish refugees or had to flee Germany to escape political persecution by the Nazis.

A prime example of this is the former communist Reichstag deputy Karl Olbrysch, who, like his wife Charlotte, was labeled a Nazi with an “A” and thus became a victim of the Nazis under British “care.” On the Arandora Star, he had shared a cabin with Olbrysch an two of his comrades, reported Ludwig Baruch[4] “Ludwig Baruch - Diary Excerpts” in Dunera News No. 39 (June 1997), page 8, accessed on May 20, 2024. . The Jewish communist from Hamburg and Dunera Boy was also deliberately misclassified as “A.” Numerous other examples were well known to the British authorities simply because they had adopted the defamatory name suffix “Israel” for Jews from the Nazi Reich’s identity cards into their own files.

Such systematic false and offensive classifications reflected “at least the state of opinion of the social class from which King’s Counsels were drawn,” noted Eric Koch[5] Quoted from Eric Koch, “Deemed Suspect. A Wartime Blunder,” Toronto 1980, pp. 9/10., who was deported to Canada. Koch also asked: ”Why were some thirteen thousand ‘friendly enemy aliens’ in Category C not stamped as ‘refugees from Nazi oppression’? Who were they? Why was a sizeable number of genuine refugees in Category A?”

This makes it clear that many of the British tribunals’ classifications were anti-Semitic in nature or aimed at putting communists, social democrats, trade unionists, representatives of emigrant groups, etc. behind bars in order to exclude these Nazi oppomnents from public life.

Website

From November 1939 to January 1940, British “tribunals” classified 66,000 foreigners. 569 were categorized as Nazis and fascists with an ‘A’ and were to be interned immediately. Suspicious persons were given a “B” classification; they were restricted in their movements and were not allowed to own bicycles or cameras. More than 64,000 were exempted from internment with a “C” classification. However, only 51,200 were designated as “refugees from Nazi oppression.”

As is now known, many Jews and proven opponents of the Nazis with “A” or “B” classifications were placed on the same level as their tormentors and released for imprisonment and later deportation overseas.

At St Peter’s Italian Church in London, this memorial relief and a list of names commemorate the Italian victims. Photo: Wikipedia, Martin Addison (CC BY-SA 2.0). Photo above: Blue Star Line org.

Italians aboard Arandora Star