Response and Demise
The NL came under increasing scrutiny after Kristallnacht, particularly for the violence of Ramsay, William Joyce and A. K. Chesterton in their anti-Semitic speeches. Others such as Elwin Wright, who until 1937 was secretary of the Anglo-German Fellowship called for the shooting of Jews whilst Commander E. H. Cole condemned the House of Commons as being full of "bastardised Jewish swine". Such extremist language worked against the NL however as its speakers were seen by the public at large as quite mad and so their pro-appeasement arguments were ignored.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War two leading members, T. Victor-Rowe and Oliver Gilbert, were interned and the NL largely went into abeyance with members joining other, more public anti-war groups. The League had officially disbanded as soon as war was declared although it continued to meet secretly at Gilbert's house until his arrest in late September 1939. Two of its members, Joyce and Margaret Bothamley, left Britain for Nazi Germany after the outbreak of war. Given the association of the NL with Nazism BUF organiser Alexander Raven Thomson even suggested a plan for Mosley to publicly denounce the League as traitors in an attempt to present a more patriotic image although Defence Regulation 18B came into force before this could be attempted.
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“The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.”
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