The 43 Group.

The group were made up from Jewish former servicemen, forty three of them in fact, hence their name. They united together after World War II, to fight against Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts on to the streets of East London.

Many of the senior members of the British Union of Fascists, including their leader Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, had been interned during the fall of France in May 1940.

The fear of invasion and of fifth columnists led the Churchill government to intern the union's leadership without trial in Holloway prison under Regulation 18B.

Most of them remained for the rest of the war, though Mosley was released on health grounds in 1943.

Yet immediately after the war, the Mosleyite movement, renamed The British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, started up its hate campaign all over again, blaming the war on the Jews and choosing the route of their demonstrations through Jewish areas.

What is amazing, is that even after World War II, when Belsen and Auschwitz had been liberated and newsreel had shown the world the scale of atrocities committed against Europe's Jews, Mosley could still find hundreds of supporters in the East End for his campaign of racial hatred and anti-Semitism.

Mosley tried to dress up his post-war campaign as merely being in favour of European unity - "Europe: A Nation!" was his favoured battle-cry - but, in fact, his thuggish, street-corner orators were simultaneously shouting: "Not enough Jews were burned at Belsen!"

This time, however, the Jews, led by The 43 Group, co-ordinated a fight-back just as aggressive and unrelenting.

Though the post-war Fascist movement never reached the size of the pre-war Blackshirts, the East End Jews knew that Hitler's National Socialist movement had also started small.

The lack of organised resistance on the Continent had led to the Holocaust, the results of which had been witnessed by many British servicemen who were at the liberation of Dachau and Belsen.

The 43 Group - so-called because of the number of ex-servicemen who turned up to the founding meeting at the Jewish centre Maccabi House in South Hampstead in the spring of 1946 - regularly broke the law in their struggle, and their veterans are proud to have done so.

Their philosophy, instilled into them after six years in the Services, was simple: attack all Fascists.

Armed with clubs, razors, bricks, knuckledusters, broken bottles, knives and everything except guns and bombs, The 43 Group tracked down Fascist meetings to quash them.

Battles were fought in Walthamstow, West Green, Victoria Park, Shoreditch, Hackney, Whitestone Park, Kilburn, Maida Vale, Tottenham and once as far as Brighton, where the Fascists marched only 20 yards before being set upon by a well-organised The 43 Group ambush led by Commander Barry Langford, thanks to a spy in the Mosleyite camp.

"We're not here to kill," a former The 43 Group veteran recalls, being told on that occasion: "We're here to maim."

The biggest and most regular clashes came in Ridley Road - nicknamed Yiddley Road by the Fascists - in Dalston where the Metropolitan Police had to try to keep the peace during 1947-48.

The 43 Group taught its members unarmed combat, boxing and how to avoid knife thrusts and razor slashing.

Many wore cricket boxes so they wouldn't be kneed in the crotch by police, hundreds of whom were drafted in to Dalston to keep order.

It was only in April 1950, with the Mosley threat defeated, that The 43 Group disbanded.

A Rage In Dalston is on Radio 4 on Saturday 19th April at 8pm

The programme is a fine tribute to the small but committed group of Britons who took direct - if undeniably illegal - action against the bacillus of anti-Semitism.

It is a chilling thought, but there can be no doubt that would have been plenty of people willing to operate the gas chambers in this country.