Part 2: Artist Refugees in Wales
This is the second in a three-part series of blog posts. See also part one.
In the early years after 1933, and possibly also immediately after March 1939, most refugees tried to settle near either established Jewish communities or refugee or diasporic communities. Those with political affiliations sought to live where other members of the same political parties or groupings had established themselves. For religious Jewish refugees, a synagogue and an active congregation were obviously important. This meant that many areas of Wales were considered less attractive than the large urban centres of England. Only a few prominent refugees resettled in Wales—many of them after the outbreak of the Second World War, when pressures in the urban centres became unbearable.
Fred Uhlman
This group included a number of artists, such as Fred Uhlman.1 Uhlman was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Stuttgart. He studied law in Freiburg, Munich, and Tübingen, and initially became a lawyer. Politically on the left, he was an active member of the Social Democratic Party and knew Kurt Schumacher. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, he immediately left for France, where he was unable to practise law and became an art dealer. His path to settling in the UK was less a desperate escape than the result of falling in love with a British woman: he met Diana Croft, daughter of Sir Henry Page Croft, 1st Baron Croft, in Spain and followed her to the UK in 1936. However, his family history was nevertheless very traumatic. Uhlman’s family did not manage to escape Nazi Germany; his parents perished in Terezín, and his sister is said to have ended her own life and that of her baby by throwing herself off a deportation train to Auschwitz. Uhlman settled in North London, working as an artist and as an author. He initially came to Wales as a wealthy Londoner seeking a second home in a quiet and remote location. After spending summers in rented houses, Fred and Diana Uhlman bought Beudy Newydd (New Barn) in the Croesor Valley in Gwynedd and renovated the property. The dramatic Welsh landscape, with its tiny villages and remote cottages, became a frequent subject of Uhlman’s paintings. However, it seems that Uhlman never became anything more than a visitor to Wales. Other refugee painters expressed a much stronger desire to integrate into Welsh society.

Josef Herman
Josef Herman, a Polish-born painter, was one of them. Herman fled the poverty and antisemitism of his native Poland in 1938 and settled in Belgium to escape oppression and to advance his career.2 When saying farewell at the station, his mother is reported to have urged him to never come back, a clear indication that she did not believe there was a chance of a successful career or life for her son in Poland. Herman developed as an artist in his new home; however, when Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, he fled to France. He was helped by an American woman with a car, getting away from the advancing German army with only the clothes on his back, including his black leather coat. On arriving at the port of Bordeaux, Josef overheard a group of Poles discussing a Greek ship at La Rochelle that was supposed to bring Polish refugees to Canada. He had no idea how he would get on board, but a friend helped him reach La Rochelle. There, the Polish Military Police mistook him for a member of the Polish Air Force on account of the aforementioned black leather coat. He was arrested for desertion and led, alongside thousands of Polish soldiers, onto the very ship he was searching for. However, this ship did not set sail to Canada but brought its Polish passengers to Britain.
The British Home Office was not pleased by the arrival of unexpected refugees like Josef, but return was clearly impossible, and as the Polish Army was based in Scotland and the Polish Consul in Glasgow, they sent him to live in Glasgow, where he arrived in the summer of 1940. There, he met the sculptor Benno Schotz, who told him that Josef’s friend from Warsaw, Jankel Adler, was also living in the city. Adler was an artist with interests in many fields and traditions who had been a friend of the well-known German artist Paul Klee. Josef settled into the artists’ community in Glasgow quickly, managing to find a studio and begin painting again soon after his arrival. In other respects, though, Josef’s integration proved a little more difficult. He spoke Yiddish, Polish, and French, but no English. However, he took English lessons and obviously learnt the language quickly. Josef started to exhibit within a year. His first show was in 1941 at James Connell and Sons in Glasgow.
In 1942, the Red Cross informed Josef that his entire family, who had been living in the notorious Warsaw Ghetto, had been murdered. Josef suffered a breakdown on receiving the news. His success as an artist nevertheless continued. He exhibited in Edinburgh, attracting the attention of a Scottish artist, Catriona MacLeod. After buying some of his works, she travelled to Glasgow to ask Josef whether she could become his pupil. Josef declined, saying that he did not take on students. But they obviously liked each other, as they started a relationship and were married later in the same year.
By this time, the name of Josef Herman had become well known to art critics and gallery owners. He moved to London and held his first solo exhibition at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery on King Street. Life in wartime London became increasingly difficult for the then pregnant Catriona, as she was unable to sleep because of the frequent air raids. The couple started to look for an escape from city life, and found Ystradgynlais in South Wales. Initially, the couple rented the former top-floor ballroom of the Pen-y-Bont Inn, which served them as both studio and living quarters. A photograph taken there shows Josef and Catriona having tea on an ironing board while sitting on the end of their bed.
Josef later described arriving in the village as the beginning of a new phase in his artistic development. He started working with charcoal and pastels, and by 1946 he had made about a hundred pastel drawings, a number of which were selected for another exhibition in London. In 1946 he started painting in oil again and the couple bought a derelict lemonade factory and converted it into a studio and a home.3 In his autobiographical notes, Herman tells a story of easy integration and a friendly welcome: ‘A day later I was addressed as Joe, and soon I was nick-named Joe-bach.’4 (Joe-bach is a term of endearment in Welsh and means ‘little Joe’ in English.) Herman stayed in Ystradgynlais for eleven years, painting and drawing the local landscape and numerous depictions of the local miners. The latter works were chosen for exhibition at the Wales Pavilion during the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Heinz Koppel
Like Herman, Heinz Koppel was not well established as an artist when he arrived in the UK. Born in Berlin in 1919, Koppel was a young man when he moved to Wales. Heinz’s father Joachim Koppel was one of the industrialists who was attracted to establish a business in Wales by the Special Areas Act. Joachim founded Aero Zip, a successful manufacturing business with international contacts. Joachim had originally relocated his company and his family from Berlin to Czechoslovakia soon after 1933. As Heinz was not doing well at school, his father encouraged him and his older brother Kurt to move to London, where Heinz studied with expressionist painter Martin Bloch, a German–Jewish refugee artist who had also fled to the UK. In 1938 Joachim realized he needed to relocate again, and he considered either Antwerp or London for a new base. In the end, British government support played an important part in the decision-making process, and the Treforest Estate was chosen as the best location to establish a factory, which went on to supply zips to the British Forces during the war.
While studying with Bloch, Heinz met the Welsh artist Cedric Morris, who encouraged him to move to Dowlais, near Merthyr Tydfil, in 1944 to teach at the Dowlais Settlement School. Founded by the sculptor John Dennithorne, Dowlais was a progressive school which aimed to educate local people by providing classes for unemployed workers in a wide range of subjects, from English literature to carpentry, while offering help with practical problems such as housing. By the 1940s, the local organizers of the Settlement School had decided to form a group for local artists and supporters, which became the Merthyr Arts Society. Its aim was to establish a studio and employ a full-time artist-in-residence who would spearhead a local artistic movement. Heinz was known to several of the artists who had been involved in the establishment of the Settlement School over the years and was brought to Dowlais to be the artist-in residence. He taught art to both children and adults, thereby supporting the idea of expanding art education for working-class people. The goal was for the poor and unemployed to be able to escape the humdrum of their repetitive and restrictive lives and create their own art.5 There are still some local people who remember either watching Heinz paint in his studio or attending his classes. His widow Pip described Heinz as eccentric, but also an approachable person who was attentive to his pupils: ‘He was interested to see what people who came to paint chose to paint. He painted them and they painted what they found.’6
Heinz married fellow refugee artist Renate Fischl in 1949. Fischl, also known as Pip Koppel, was born in Dresden and had studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. Cedric Morris had recommended that she visit Heinz in Dowlais, and they met in December 1948. Two months later, they got married. Heinz painted magnificent portraits of his children, but the surrounding countryside of South Wales was also an important subject of his art, even before he moved to Dowlais. He was interested in psychoanalysis, and his paintings show mystical influences, often bordering on the fantastic. His murdered mother and the Nazi past also served as a motif in a series of paintings. Heinz stayed in Dowlais for twelve years. In 1956 he was one of the founding members of the 56 Group Wales/Grŵp 56 Cymru, which was formed by artists living and working in Wales to promote modern art and show the world that Welsh art was not, as often assumed, conservative and lacking modern influences. The group felt that the selection of works for exhibition was often dominated by judges who were not based in Wales, and that most art critics never ventured beyond London. Prior to 1956, Wales had no private galleries. The group was also keen to promote Welsh art internationally. Heinz’s paintings were included in the 56 Group-dominated show in Washington DC in 1965 and an exhibition dedicated to the group in Dublin in 1968. Their efforts were not appreciated by everyone. Welsh artist Kyffin Williams called members of the group ‘English carpetbaggers’ who had not found success in London and had therefore come to Wales, to the detriment of real Welsh-born artists like himself.7
Somewhat ironically, 1956 was also the year in which Heinz and his family left Dowlais and moved to London, then Liverpool, where he continued to work as an art teacher. During this time, his work began to be regularly exhibited in London galleries. However, Wales clearly remained very important to Heinz. In 1969, the family bought a farm in Cwmerfyn, near Aberystwyth, and moved there permanently in 1974. Heinz had become disillusioned with teaching, believing it to be a futile endeavour. Instead, he now worked on his farm while remaining active as an artist. His later work included experimentation with various materials, such as fibreglass and resin.
Heinz died suddenly aged only 61 on 1 December 1980. Some of Heinz and Pip’s children and grandchildren have become Welsh speakers and still live in Ceredigion. His son, Gideon Koppel, is a film-maker and the director of Sleep Furiously, a documentary set in Cwmerfyn and focusing on the landscape and population changes of this small farming community in mid Wales. The film was influenced by Gideon’s conversations with the Austrian writer and film director Peter Handke, and tells a story of endings and new beginnings which can be connected to his family’s history as well as life in Wales. The first exhibition of Heinz’s works in Germany was held between August 2009 and January 2010, nearly thirty years after his death, at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. German critics compared his early work with Max Liebermann’s and his late work with Francis Bacon’s, and spoke about its fragmentary strangeness. Inevitably, however, the newspaper reviews of the exhibition focused on his biography and the fate of his murdered mother.
As we have seen here, artists were a notable group in the composition of German-speaking refugees in Wales, making a significant and lasting contribution to both cultural and community life in the country.
Featured image: Mt. Cnicht, Croesor Valley, Wales. Photo by James Moulding. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 licence.
- Rachel Dickson, ‘Fred Uhlman in Wales: The Making of an Anglo-German Welshman’, in Nicola Baird (ed.), Fred Uhlman (London, 2018), 87–101. [↩]
- See Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Art and Life of Josef Herman (London, 2009). [↩]
- Josef Herman, Related Twilights: Notes from an Artist’s Diary (Bridgend, 2002), 83. [↩]
- See Gerhard Oertel, ‘Trade Union Activity of German Refugees during the Second World War in the Forestry of North Wales: Recollections of Personal Experiences’, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 14/3 (1995), 257–64. [↩]
- See Chana Schütz and Hermann Simon, Heinz Koppel: Ein Künstler zwischen Berlin und Wales (Berlin, 2009). [↩]
- Interview with Pip Koppel, Episode 3, Framing Wales, BBC Two (25 Aug. 2011). [↩]
- David Moore, A Taste of the Avant-Garde: 56 Group Wales, 56 Years (Brecon, 2012), 54. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Andrea Hammel (October 31, 2025). Rethinking Transnational and Devolved (Hi)stories: German-Speaking Refugees from National Socialism in Wales. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved November 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/152m2

It’s fascinating to see how individuals not only navigated their personal traumas but also contributed significantly to the cultural landscape of Wales. Their stories remind us of the resilience of the human spirit and the vital role that art plays in bridging communities.