Monday 10th January 2022

Dear Rev. Welby,

On behalf of the organisation Jews for Justice I am writing to express our concern at your recent comments that it is somehow immoral to take a personal decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

I will not lecture you on the principles of bodily sovereignty and Christian inclusiveness, but I will alert you to the lessons of Nazi Germany.

The current ‘othering’ of the unvaccinated precisely reflects the ‘othering’ of Jews in 1930s Germany.

I speak not of the Holocaust but of the events that preceded the Holocaust.

The German parliament abolished the constitution on 23rd March 1933, allowing Adolf Hitler to take complete control. Two years later the Nuremberg Laws excluded Jews from citizenship and introduced a ‘citizenship certificate’ for the rest of the population in order to ensure their compliance to the regime.

On 23rd March 2020 the British Prime Minister overrode the (unwritten) constitution and placed the entire country under house arrest without precedent. A little less than two years later the introduction of mandatory vaccinations for health workers and vaccine passports for the public at large will exclude the unvaccinated from the full rights of citizenship and ensure the compliance of anyone who does possess such a passport with the diktats of the regime.

National Socialism in Germany subjugated the rights of individual citizens to the collective will of the state; exactly the same is now happening here in Britain.

It is impossible to deny the parallel between the first two years of the Nazi regime in Germany and the last two years in Britain.

Furthermore – although public hostility to Jews in Nazi Germany was evident from the beginning of the regime in 1933 – Jews were not sent to concentration camps in any large numbers until 1938, nor enclosed in ghettos until 1939, nor forced to wear yellow identifying badges until 1941; and it was not until that same year of 1941 that concentration camps became extermination camps.

So it was not evident in the mid-1930s where hostility to Jews in Germany would eventually lead. But we know what happened, and it is our duty to ensure that we learn the lessons of history.

The function of our organisation Jews for Justice is to use our unique position as British Jews to warn the public at large how history is in danger of repeating itself. This is our sacred duty to our ancestors who died in the Holocaust.

In Nazi Germany, the confinement of Jews within ghettos and their ‘evacuation’ to concentration camps was justified by the regime on grounds of public health, in particular the threat of typhus. The very same ‘public health’ justification is being used today to restrict the civil liberties of those who choose not to be vaccinated.

People in public life such as yourself who stir up hostility to the unvaccinated are no different from those Nazis who stirred up hostility to the Jews in 1930s Germany. If you cannot see the parallel it is because you are closing your eyes deliberately.

You will also be aware that the German churches were conspicuous in their failure to speak out against the crimes of National Socialism. You are repeating that mistake.

Finally, we are appalled that you should recently have compared the silence of politicians on the subject of ‘climate change’ – a hypothetical future threat, based entirely on modelling – to the silence of politicians on what was happening in Germany in the 1930s, yet have yourself been totally silent about an actual, global attack on human rights, which threatens the immediate destruction of liberal democracy in Britain and around the world.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Barr
(on behalf of Jews for Justice)