Background
The original handbook, or 'Informationsheft GB' covered geography, economics, political system, government, legal system, administration, military, education system, important museums, press and radio, religion, parties, immigrants, freemasons, Jews, police apparatus and secret service. The 'Black Book' as it is known in the Tabloid Press was a later appendage and consisted of 104 pages of names listed in alphabetical order. 'Fahndungsliste' translates into 'wanted list', 'sonderfahndungsliste into 'especially wanted list' or 'most wanted list'.
Beside each name was the number of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) to which the person was to be handed over. Churchill was to be placed into the custody of Amt VI (Foreign Military Intelligence), but the vast majority of the people listed in the Black Book would be placed into the custody of Amt IV (Gestapo). The book had several notable mistakes, such as people who had already died (Sigmund Freud) or moved away (Paul Robeson), and omissions (such as George Bernard Shaw, one of the few English language writers whose works were published and performed in Nazi Germany).
A print run produced 20,000 books but the warehouse in which they were stored was destroyed in a bombing raid and only two originals are known to survive (one in the Imperial War Museum in London). On learning of the book, Rebecca West is said to have sent a telegram to Noël Coward saying "My dear - the people we should have been seen dead with."
The list was similar to earlier lists prepared by SS like the Special Prosecution Book-Poland (German: Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen). It was an list of enemies of the Reich list prepared before the war by members of the German fifth column in cooperation with German Intelligence. The 61,000 people on this list were targets of Einsatzgruppen during Operation Tannenberg and Intelligenzaktion, actions of elimination of Polish intelligentsia and the upper classes in occupied Poland between 1939 and 1941.
Read more about this topic: The Black Book
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