WW2 Anniversary

|   9 April 2012

What would the British have done?

It’s not hard to understand why the British feel so proud about their role in the Second World War. The undeniable truth is that this country, led by Winston Churchill, held out against the Germans in 1940 and thus prevented the Nazi domination of Western Europe.

And, of course, by thwarting the Germans the British never had to endure Nazi occupation and so didn’t have to discover just how many people in this land would have collaborated with the enemy. It’s this, I’ve always felt, that contributes to an underlying sense in the British national consciousness – most often unspoken – that ‘we were better than they were’ (and the ‘they’ usually – again normally unsaid – means the French).

But were we? Because something that happened seventy years ago this month ought to give us pause.

In April 1942 three Jews were deported from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The Nazi occupiers had requested that the Channel Islands authorities co-operate in the persecution of the Jews and co-operate they most certainly did. The previous year, 1941, officials in the Channel Islands had called for all Jews to come forward and be registered – something that was the beginning of their suffering. Jewish businesses were compulsorily sold and at least one Jew on Jersey, Victor Emmanuel, ended up committing suicide.

The police on Guernsey – who wore the traditional uniform of the British ‘bobby’ – ordered three Jews, Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld and Therese Steiner to report for deportation from the island on 21 April. Therese Steiner, brought before Sergeant Ernest Plevin of the Guernsey police, burst into tears and told him that she would never see him again.

She was right. Once in France all three of the women from Guernsey were caught up in further Jewish deportations and transported to Auschwitz. None of them survived the war.

Whilst the authorities on the Channel Islands didn’t know for sure what would happen to the Jews that were deported, they certainly knew how much the Nazis hated the Jews and that those Jews sent from Guernsey were almost certain to experience further suffering away from the island.

Is what happened on the Channel Islands any indicator of what might have happened here on the British mainland if the Nazis had occupied this country? Well, I’ve been on holiday to both Jersey and Guernsey with my family and can certainly say these islands appear more British than anything else…

And remember the words of a British intelligence report from August 1945: ‘When the Germans proposed to put their anti-Jewish measures into force, no protest whatever was raised by any of the Guernsey officials and they hastened to give the Germans every assistance.’

WW2History.com News

|   30 March 2012

WW2History will soon be free!

Soon the lock is coming off…

From the start of May – the second anniversary of the launch of the site – WW2History.com will become a free resource that anyone can access.

This means that we will no longer be taking any subscriptions from today, before the site itself goes free on Tuesday 1 May.

This is a big step forward for the site and I decided to take it only after a lot of thought. I’ve been very pleased with the success of WW2History.com as a subscription site – with several thousand subscriptions taken out. On this basis the site would, within the next few years, have paid back the cost of making it and be delivering a future of profit.

So why should I turn my back on that financially attractive future? Well, because these are times of austerity in the educational world, and having discussed the situation with school and university teachers I came to the conclusion that the site could never reach many of those who wanted it most if we carried on as we are.

That’s why I came to the decision I did. I’ll always be incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported the site during this subscription period.

WW2 Anniversary

|   24 March 2012

Foreigners to Auschwitz

Auschwitz

Seventy years ago this week an event of enormous significance took place. The first Jews from outside Poland were deported to Auschwitz.

It’s significant not just because these Jews were from another European country – the first of many – but because of the deal under which they were sent. It was a shocking arrangement – one which reminds us that the Holocaust was far more than a solely ‘German’ crime.

These Jews came from the neighbouring country of Slovakia, and were only deported to Auschwitz after high level meetings between the Germans and the Slovaks the previous month. In February 1942 the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vojtech Tuka had met with Major Dieter Wisliceny of the SS. After further reflection in Berlin, a deal was finally done whereby the Slovaks agreed to pay the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew deported. But on condition that the Germans guaranteed that these Jews would ‘never come back’. That way the Slovaks knew that they could steal the property of the Jews with impunity.

Silvia Vesela, then a young Jewish women, remembers how non-Jewish Slovaks turned on her. ‘I thought about it several times,’ she says. ‘Human material is very bendable. You can do anything with it. When money and life are involved, you seldom meet a person that is willing to sacrifice for you. It hurt, it really hurt when I, for example, saw my schoolmate shouting with her fist raised, ‘It serves you right!’ Since that time I do not expect anything of people.’

Silvia Vesela was transported with thousands of other Slovak Jews to Auschwitz 70 years ago.

Today, as well as their suffering, let’s also remember the negotiations which sent them there. And a deal which meant that a European state, Slovakia, ‘paid’ to have its Jews taken away.

WW2 Relevance

|   10 March 2012

Goebbels and persuasion

I think a lot, as regular readers of this blog might know, about why we believe what we believe.

Why do we hold the opinions we do? Is it because of our education, the influence of our peers, our parents, our life experience – or some deep needs within us? I know this is also a subject that all of the great manipulators of human behaviour have also obsessed about – people like Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist.

I made a particular study of the work of Goebbels, and still see the influence of his work all around me. I’m not saying that our politicians and their political consultants consciously ape Goebbels’ work – most probably know little about it – but the truths that Goebbels discovered are still clearly relevant.

In essence, Goebbels believed that the best way of influencing people was to entertain them – ‘above all don’t bore me’, was his instruction to those who worked for him. He also realized that it is much more effective to re-enforce people’s existing prejudices rather than to try and change their minds about anything. And when I see the work of political consultants, it’s obvious that many realize this central truth. They call it ‘speaking to the needs’ of the electorate.

The trouble is that, as Goebbels knew, it can also be effective to appeal to the worst imaginable ‘needs’ of the electorate – the ‘need’ to feel that the problems we face are someone else’s fault, the ‘need’ to get rich at the expense of others, the ‘need’ to jump queues in order to get what we want, the ‘need’ to think that we are superior to others… and so on.

That’s why a leader like Martin Luther King is so extraordinary in history. When a reporter asked him why he was against the war in Vietnam when so many powerful people were in favour of it, King replied: ‘Sir, I’m sorry, you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader… I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a moulder of consensus.’

How many leaders are like that? Not so many.

WW2 Competitions

|   1 March 2012

Winter Competition

Congratulations to Mr Barnetson of Moray in Scotland who was the first subscriber to WW2History.com picked from all those who gave the correct answer to our Winter Competition.

The question we posed was: After one [bombing] raid on Germany  the 8th Army Air Force suffered such bad losses – more than 70 planes were destroyed – that their daylight raids were temporarily suspended. What is the name of the German city the Americans were trying to attack when they encountered such powerful resistance?

Mr Barnetson, along with  other subscribers, correctly identified this particular city as Schweinfurt. A signed, hardback, first edition of Max Hasting’s brilliant ‘All Hell Let Loose’ will shortly be winging its way to him.

Our new competition has another hardback, signed first edition on offer – ‘Their Darkest Hour’ – my own book about the most extraordinary people from WW2 that I have met over the last twenty years.

WW2 Relevance

|   23 February 2012

Things Change

Filming in Red Square, Moscow, 1989.

An old colleague of mine was clearing out some junk and found this photo. It’s me in Red Square not long before Communism fell and the Soviet Union was disbanded.

I loathed the Soviet Union.  From the trivial reasons – the food was appalling and so was the service in hotels and just about everywhere else – to the important ones – this was a state that imprisoned people just for speaking their minds and preached ‘equality’ whilst the bosses lived in luxury. I’ve never seen a more ‘unequal’ society in my life.

But this photo is interesting to me not just because of the wild glasses I’m wearing – very fashionable at the time – nor because it shows me standing next to a film camera and we’ve only shot on video for the last twenty years, but because if captures a particular moment that I remember well.

There was no sense I felt at the time I was there – at the moment this photo was taken – that the whole structure of Soviet life would shortly collapse. Everything there still seemed so certain. And in that respect it represents my own experience of something that countless eye witnesses from WW2 have told me. That life can change in a moment. Life is fleeting and uncertain and yet we try and pretend that it is lengthy and fixed.

It’s like a famous Sufism. A king asks his wise men to boil down all of the wisdom in the world into two words. They work for years and years and eventually come up with what they think is the one eternal truth by which we all have to live. And the two words that express it are: Things change.

WW2 Anniversary

|   10 February 2012

Bombing Germany

German civilians living in cities like this were now legitimate targets for the British

Seventy years ago this month the British took a decision which, just before the war, they would have considered against International Law – they decided that German civilians were a legitimate target for RAF Bomber Command.

An Air Ministry directive of February 1942 authorised this new and terrible destruction: ‘The primary objective of your [ie British bomber] operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers.’ It was an instruction that would lead to the indiscriminate killing of women and children in attacks like the fire-bombing of Hamburg.

There isn’t space here to debate the morals or merits of this new development in British policy – one which was driven not by an ethical discussion but a practical one. The fact was that British bombers were too inaccurate to precision bomb military targets and so were now directed against cities instead.

I’m familiar with the arguments on both sides about the legitimacy of these attacks. I’ve met former bomber pilots, Germans who suffered at their hands and discussed all the relevant issues with expert academics in this field of study, like the brilliant Professor Tami Biddle. I know enough to know that the questions around the British decision are not simple ones. But, in essence, I guess what concerns me is the question of ‘proportionality’. If you feel under threat, is it OK to do anything to survive and beat the enemy? If we could only have destroyed Nazism by bombing every school and hospital and kindergarten in Germany and killing all their children would we have? But suppose we didn’t need to do that to survive, but by killing all their children we would shorten the war by six months and save thousands of our servicemen’s lives as a consequence. Should we have done that? Is there an equation here – say a thousand German children equal one British soldier?

That’s not so fanciful an argument. After all, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who took over RAF Bomber Command in spring 1942, said three years later at the height of the destruction of Germany: ‘I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.’

Really, was he right?

WW2 People

|   29 January 2012

Flying into Stalingrad

The ruins of Stalingrad

Imagine the scene. It’s December 1942 and you are a German officer who has just recovered from sickness, when you are told to report to your commanding General. He tells you that you are to be flown into the besieged German held area around Stalingrad where your comrades in the Sixth Army are currently awaiting capture at the hands of the Red Army.

At one level there is no point in you flying into Stalingrad – as an individual you can’t sway the fate of the battle one way or the other. But you are ordered on this assignment because you are scheduled to serve with the Sixth Army, and not to send you would be to admit to the Germans trapped in Stalingrad that their colleagues have given up on them.

So you fly into Stalingrad in early January 1943 and less than a month later you are captured by the Red Army. You then endure twelve years of imprisonment in the Soviet Union before finally being allowed back to Germany in 1955.

How would you feel?

Well, a former Colonel in the German Army I met some years ago – called Guenther von Below – suffered exactly this fate. And he said that he had no ‘problem’ about being ordered back into Stalingrad. ‘A soldier goes to war knowing that he may fall,’ he remarked stoically.

I was re-reading the transcript of our interview with Colonel Below last week, whilst working on my new book and TV series, both of which deal with some of these issues, and it made me think once again about the nature of heroism. Why could von Below have no doubts about his actions, never – as far as I know – show weakness. Is it training? Is it genetic inheritance? Is it education or parenting? Is it the times and circumstances of history? Is it all of these things mixed together?

WW2 Anniversary

|   17 January 2012

Misunderstanding Wannsee

The Wannsee conference was held here at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee.

Seventy years ago this month – on 20 January 1942 to be precise – one of the most infamous meetings of WW2, indeed of the 20th century, was held on the shores of the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.   And, as I know from the many times that I have been asked about Wannsee, large numbers of people still think this was the moment that the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ was decided upon.

It wasn’t. And the reasons why this mistake is often made are interesting.

The fact is that the fifteen senior Nazi functionaries who attended the Wannsee conference were second tier figures in the Nazi state. Goering wasn’t there, Himmler wasn’t there, crucially Hitler wasn’t there. Mind you, it wasn’t surprising, of course, that Hitler wasn’t there. He hated committee meetings of any kind. As a result the German cabinet hadn’t met since 1938.

Wannsee was held to decide on a whole series of potentially contentious issues which had arisen because elsewhere much more important decisions about the fate of the Jews had already been taken. These decisions were important – like what was the exact definition of a ‘Jew’ – but they were not fundamental. Much more important to the history of the Nazis so-called ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish ‘problem’ were the discussions that Hitler held with Himmler in December 1941 and the conversations Hitler had with other senior Nazi figures immediately after Pearl Harbour.

So why do people need to think that Wannsee was the moment the extermination of the Jews was decided upon by the Nazis? Well, because I think there is a natural human desire to want to believe that the most appalling crime in history was decided upon at a definite moment. It lends certainty to our understanding. Trouble is, the decision making process of the ‘Final Solution’ was not like that. Yes, of course, Hitler was ultimately responsible, but the process was piecemeal and cumulative. In a word – it’s ‘complicated’.

WW2 Anniversary

|   7 January 2012

Humiliation in Singapore

The WW2 guns of Singapore point south.

I was in Singapore this week – which was an education in itself as one witnesses first hand how many of the Asian economies seem to be outstripping debt struck Europe.

But I was also seeing first hand the sight of what, seventy years ago, Winston Churchill called ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.’ On 15 February 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival gave up Singapore to the Japanese. More than 60,000 British and other Commonwealth and Empire troops surrendered to an Imperial Army force of around 35,000.

The prime reason for the disaster was the incompetence of the British leadership in Singapore – particularly that of the inept Percival – but complacency born of racism also played a part. The British simply couldn’t believe that the Japanese were capable of advancing through the Malayan jungle to the north of Singapore – but they did. In addition, the Asian theater of war had been depleted of many resources because the direct threat to immediate British interests – and, indeed, to the territory of Great Britain – came from Nazi Germany. And Japan, after all, was on the other side of the world.  The British plan had always been that a strong naval force would act as the prime deterrent to Japanese aggression, rather than extensive land forces. But here too, British arrogance would prove costly. On 10 December 1941 two huge British battleships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, were sunk by Japanese planes, largely because the British government – headed by Churchill, of course – had allowed them to sail in these waters without adequate air support.

As I walked through Singapore this week and saw the immense riches and drive of this small island nation, I thought of the ignorance in Europe and America today amongst many people about the vast economic strides that have been made – and will continue to be made in the future – in Asia. Of course, the warlike intentions of nations like Japan are no more. But the complacency the British had about the military capability of the Japanese 70 years ago is still reflected, I feel, in the complacency many people in the West feel about the economic potentiality of the East.