The Telegraph | Feb 12, 2012

By Jonathan Freedland

In 1940, Yale University gave 125 children of Oxford academics refuge from the Nazis. Jonathan Freedland reveals how leaders of the eugenics movement may have planned to repopulate a devastated Britain with a ‘superior’ breed of human.

At first glance, it is an utterly benign and heart-warming story, a tale of child-rescue and salvation, of friendship across the ocean at a time of war. And for those involved, especially the children sheltered from Hitler’s bombs by one of America’s most prestigious universities, it was no more complicated than that: an act of altruistic, life-saving generosity. And yet this story might have a twist, a suspicion that somewhere behind this deed of great kindness lurked a darker motive.

The story – which forms the backdrop of my new novel, Pantheon, published under the pseudonym Sam Bourne – begins in the mid-summer of 1940, with Britain isolated and alone against the Nazi menace. The nations of Europe had fallen in succession to the Germans, with the Low Countries and France conquered a matter of weeks earlier. with the Low Countries and France conquered a matter of weeks earlier. To an extent that is barely appreciated now, Britons felt they were near-certain to be next, that it was only a matter of time before there were Nazi jackboots on British streets.

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