Peter Morley (filmmaker)

Peter Morley, OBE (26 June 1924 – 23 June 2016) was a German-born British television producer and documentary filmmaker. As a nine-year-old child, he fled Nazi Germany with his elder siblings and moved to England, where he lived until his death. He made several documentaries about the Holocaust, winning several awards, both in England and abroad.

Born Peter Meyer to Jewish parents, Alice and Willy Meyer, a wholesaler and exporter in Germany, he fled the Nazis in 1933 at the age of nine with his brother Tommy and his sister Anne-Marie Meyer () (future Registrar of the Warburg Institute and literary executor of Arnaldo Momigliano). His parents had already decided the family should leave Germany, but when Adolf Hitler was made chancellor of Germany, plans were put into action. His parents learned that the Landschulheim Herrlingen, a progressive, co-educational school in Ulm was moving to England and he and his siblings were accepted.

Arriving in England, he and his siblings attended the Bunce Court School in Otterden, Kent. His first documentary film was about the school. Anna Essinger, a German educator, founded Bunce Court after she realised that the Nazis had turned Germany into a hostile environment for educating children. Moving quickly and discreetly, she relocated her boarding school in the south of Germany, along with its 66 mostly Jewish pupils, to safety in England. The school became Morley's home until 1941 and his first film was a documentary about Bunce Court.

When his brother volunteered for military service, as a "stateless enemy alien", he was made to change his last name, in case of capture by Germans. His brother arbitrarily picked the name "Morley" and Peter followed suit. The Morley brothers fought with the 8th Hussars, a British tank division, toward the end of the war. Morley became a naturalised British citizen in June 1947.

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