WW2 Competitions

|   2 August 2010

Competition result – July

What is the name of this monastery, the site of a famous WW2 battle?

That was the question subscribers were asked in July. And it proved a good deal easier than the question we posed the previous month, since lots of people gave the correct answer – Monte Cassino. The three lucky winners, drawn at random from the list of people who gave the right answer are: Mr Stewart of County Tyrone, Mr Rassell of Colchester and Mr Givens of West Boldon. Each will shortly receive a signed, hardback copy of ‘World War Two: Behind Closed Doors’ together with a DVD of the accompanying six part television documentary series.

In the foreground of the picture is the Polish graveyard at Monte Cassino. It’s an intensely moving place to visit, not only because so many Polish soldiers died to capture Monte Cassino, but because a large number of these Poles came from an area of Poland that Churchill had agreed would become Soviet territory at the end of the war (and is part of Belarus and Ukraine today).

I remember that just after this photo was taken a group of Poles arrived to hold a memorial service in the cemetery. It was a very emotional affair and many tears were shed.

After it was over I saw a couple of younger Poles looking in a puzzled way at the gravestones. When I asked them what it was that troubled them, one said, pointing to the place of birth of the dead soldier which was written on the gravestone: ‘Many of these Poles don’t appear to have been born in Poland.’

This, of course, was because they had been born in territory that had been Polish before WW2, but was no longer Polish in 1945 – and this young Pole did not know the history. It was a powerful reminder of how boundaries and memories can change. And of how small countries can be at the mercy of superpowers…

PS There is now a new competition in the Members’ Zone. This one is harder, I think, and requires you to know which hideous henchman of Stalin’s was also obsessed with  football.

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WW2 Relevance

|   29 July 2010

Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps

Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria.

I was recently asked  what I thought was the single greatest confusion in the public consciousness about the Nazis and their policy of oppression.

Not, I admit, a question that I am often asked. But, as it happened, it was one for which I had a ready answer, because I have thought for a long time that a huge amount of confusion is caused because of the difference between a Nazi concentration camp (in German ‘Konzentrationslager’) and a Nazi death camp (in German ‘Vernichtungslager’).

I remember that when I first visited Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria – some twenty years ago now – I overheard an English tourist remark that she thought it ‘terrible, since Dachau opened in 1933, that people didn’t stop the Nazis murdering Jews in the camp from that very moment’. And then, only a couple of years ago, a high school student I met at the Holocaust museum in Washington asked me: ‘since concentration camps appeared in Germany almost from the moment Hitler came to power, why hadn’t the Holocaust been stopped right there and then!’

It’s a profound misunderstanding, of course, to think that a ‘concentration camp’ and an ‘extermination camp’ were the same. Concentration camps like Dachau were indeed established in Germany very early on during Hitler’s rule, but they were not built to kill the Jews. Whilst some Jews were sent there, as were Gypsies and other at risk categories in the Nazi state, these camps were primarily established to imprison the Nazis’ political opponents and the majority of inmates were released after a stay of anything from a few months to a few years.  Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling – torture and other forms of mistreatment were commonplace – and a number of people were killed, with the SS sometimes pretending they died whilst ‘trying to escape’ – but this was not the norm. These concentration camps were conceived not as extermination centres but as places of oppression. As such the Nazis wanted people to know that they existed. The concentration camp of Buchenwald, for example, was built on a hillside, directly overlooking the city of Weimar.

Extermination camps, on the other hand, only came into existence during the war and were all situated in Nazi occupied Poland. Places like Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were in remote areas and only had one purpose – the murder of the Jews. 99% of people who arrived at these camps were dead within a few hours.

Part of the confusion about the two types of camp is caused because the biggest camp of all – Auschwitz – was both a concentration and an extermination camp. It opened in 1940 as an even nastier version of a pre-war concentration camp (Rudolph Hoess, the SS commandant had trained at Dachau) and then subsequently developed into a place of extermination as well.

But I also believe there is another reason why so many people confuse these two types of camps. I often think that it is easier for some people to try and comprehend the horror of the Holocaust by imagining that Hitler and the Nazis always had a ‘blueprint’ for the mass murder of millions, and that they implemented a policy of mass murder from the very start of their rule in 1933. That way it is possible to dismiss the perpetrators as inhuman monsters. It makes the crime easier both to understand and – in a way – dismiss. Because since the perpetrators were so obviously evil and insane then something similar would be simple to spot if it was ever about to happen again.

The history wasn’t like that at all, of course. I’ve met many Germans who approved of concentration camps during the 1930s. They thought – mistakenly – that these camps were kind of tough ‘short sharp shock’ centres for ‘curing’ anti-social elements in society. But I certainly haven’t met many Germans who lived through this period who ‘approved’ of extermination camps.

But – via a long and winding road – one type of camp led to the other.

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WW2 Anniversary

|   22 July 2010

The Nazis and the Madagascar Plan

The Nazis had a plan to send the Jews here, to Madagascar.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most bizarre and potentially murderous Nazi ideas of them all – a plan to forcibly deport European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. It isn’t an event of 1940 – like the Fall of France, Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain – that you’ll see mentioned in the newspapers or on the TV news, but it’s certainly worth remembering all the same.

On 3 July 1940, Franz Rademacher of the German Foreign Ministry wrote a memo which suggested that ‘France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question’. The idea was that the Jews of Europe should be sent to live on Madagascar, supervised by an ‘SS Governor’. And this was clearly not some kind of relatively ‘benign’ way of ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish question’. The presence of the SS Governor clearly shows how the Jews were to be treated, and the alacrity with which Reinhard Heydrich – a crucial figure in the eventual ‘Final Solution’ – subsequently muscled in on Rademacher’s plan further demonstrates the murderous intent behind it.  This plan might have involved a different route to genocide than the gas chambers of the Holocaust, but it was still a route to genocide all the same.

The decision of the British not to make peace with the Germans in 1940 consigned the Madagascar plan to the dustbin – how could the mass sea transportation of the Jews be organized whilst the war was still being fought? But the Madagascar plan remains important for at least two reasons. The first is that it shows the limitless sense the Nazis possessed that they could accomplish anything. Yes, others (including the Polish government just before the war) had fantasised that Madagascar could be a place that European Jews could settle, but no one except the Nazis had imagined forcibly pushing the policy through on this scale and with this genocidal intent.

The Madagascar plan thus fitted into a Nazi pattern of thought. For one emotion that characterized many of the former Nazis I’ve met over the years was the immense and liberating sense of excitement they felt about belonging to the Nazi party. ‘It was a time when dreams could become a reality!’ one of them told me.

And the second reason that the Madagascar plan is important is that it demonstrates that the Nazis would have carried on trying to eliminate the Jews even if they had won the war and the world was subsequently at peace. In that respect I certainly agree with those historians who no longer see September 1939 as some sudden moment of violent radicalization in Nazi anti-Semitic policy, but instead point to the pogrom against the Jews in November 1938 – the so-called Kristallnacht – as showing that the Nazis were some way along a murderous road before the invasion of Poland. And the mere ending of the war would not have assuaged their blood lust.

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WW2 People

|   16 July 2010

Hitler and the unwanted gift.

The ‘Eagle’s nest’ – Hitler’s  tea-house perched on top of the Kehlstein mountain.

I was recently on a research trip to Germany and took a few hours out to visit the ‘Eagle’s nest’ – the tea house built on the top of the Kehlstein mountain overlooking Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria. Hitler loved this area and built his own home – the Berghof – lower down on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.

Martin Bormann, Hitler’s slavish, self-serving secretary, conceived the tea-house as a 50th birthday present for his Boss. And, without question, considerable engineering challenges had to be overcome in its construction. A road had to be cut alongside the steep slopes of the Kehlstein and, just below the tea-house, a tunnel was dug into the mountain and a lift constructed to take guests up the final few metres.

The tea-house was finished, ahead of schedule, in 1938 and then handed over to Hitler on his 50th birthday on 20 April 1939. Bormann often visited his creation atop the Kehlstein – as did Hitler’s girl friend Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. But what was a bit of an embarassment for Bormann was that the one person he wanted to impress – Adolf Hitler – didn’t seem to want to use the place at all. In fact, he visited the tea house only about a dozen times and never stayed for long.

The ‘Kehlsteinhaus’, the tea house atop the Kehlstein (or the ‘Eagle’s nest’ as we know it in the English language) is thus a prime example of the difficulty of buying presents for a dictator. What do you give a megalomanic tyrant who already can have pretty much anything he wants?

Bormann’s mistake was in extrapolating out from a few particulars a general view about Hitler’s personality. Yes, Hitler liked the mountains, yes, he liked taking tea, but that didn’t mean he would like a tea-house on top of an Alp.

Hitler’s affection for the Obersalzberg was actually a sign of his deeply provincial and bourgeois taste. Lots of people like walking in the mountains and taking tea – but they don’t want a wacko building like the Kehlsteinhaus which you can only reach by car and lift and makes you feel a bit weird when you are in it.

Then, I got to thinking when I was in the Kehlsteinhaus myself, this place is somehow too conventionally megalomanical for Hitler. He would have seen it as too obvious a statement of power – a bit too ‘Mad King Ludwig’ of Bavaria. And – ultimately – Hitler was much, much stranger and less predictable than that.


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WW2History.com News

|   12 July 2010

The Timeline

The interactive WW2History.com Timeline

I just got back from a meeting with the brilliant Phil Draper of Sunday Publishing who has been working with me on making WW2History.com for 18 months now (though it seems like most of our lives!) We were going through all of the analytics showing how many people access what on the site – in essence learning what’s popular and what isn’t.

One thing was really surprising to me. Which was that whilst a number of the videos (like D Day and the Holocaust ones) were popular, as were quite a few of the expert interviews, what hasn’t been used as much as I thought it would is the interactive Timeline which is accessible from the homepage (click on the middle box on the non-subscriber homepage, or on the toolbar above marked ‘Interactive Timeline’)

I thought this surprising since I think it is a really interesting device. (Though I know from my time commissioning TV history programmes that just because I find something interesting it doesn’t necessarily mean other people will as well….) So I put in a plea here for the Timeline, and I also want to explain why I think it reveals things about this history in a useful way.

In essence, what I like about this device is that it shows two things that I think we often forget about this history. The first is that there were brief, intense periods of the war that were much more important, historically speaking, than all the rest. And second, that during these intense moments there was a great deal of interconnectivity across the various geographical fronts in the war – much more, I believe, than many people think.

Take the example above, of December 1941. I think what the Timeline clearly shows is how enormously significant this one month was:  on the Eastern front because of the battle of Moscow, in the Far East – obviously – because of Pearl Harbour – and in the context of the development of the Holocaust because Hitler announced that month to Nazi leaders that the Jews were to be annihilated.

In a way, all of these things are interconnected. Stalin would never have launched an offensive in December 1941 if he hadn’t have known that the Japanese were not going to invade Siberia but attack the Western powers instead, and Hitler wouldn’t have made the exact speech he did about the Holocaust if he had not thought that the entry of the USA had brought about the ‘world war’ which he had ‘prophesied’ would lead to the ‘extermination of the Jews.’ Now, I don’t want to make too much of this. I think the Nazis, for instance, were on the path to the ‘Final Solution’ without Pearl Harbour. But events occurred in the exact way they did because of this interconnectedness and you see that clearly on the Timeline.

Anyway, forgive the special pleading. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and people don’t find the timeline as interesting as I do, but maybe you haven’t tried it out yet, which is why I’m writing this….

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WW2 People

|   9 July 2010

Stalin – the watchful monster.

Joseph Stalin – the quiet tyrant.

I’ve just finished a long essay – more than 5,000 words – on Joseph Stalin for the Key Leaders section of the site. And writing it made me think once again of the people I’ve met who directly encountered Stalin, and of how their recollections were never quite what I expected.

I suppose, given that Stalin was responsible for the death of millions and had triumphed in the brutal stab-in-the-back (and stab-in-the-front) world of Soviet politics,  I had imagined he would be an obviously terrifying figure to meet. But, though he undoubtably did often strike terror into the hearts of people called into his presence, he didn’t use obvious methods to dominate people. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, Stalin was not bombastic. Stalin rarely launched into lengthy monologues and he seldom screamed at people. Instead, he looked at them.

‘Stalin watched people’s eyes when he was speaking,’ says Stepan Mikoyan, who met Stalin a number of times. ‘And if you didn’t look him straight in the eye, he might well suspect that you were deceiving him. And he’d be capable of taking the most unpleasant steps… He was very suspicious. That was his main character trait… He was a very unprincipled man… He could betray and deceive if he thought it was necessary. And that’s why he expected the same behaviour from others… anyone could turn out to be a traitor.’

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 July 2010

Who WAS this man?

This month’s competition proved much harder than I thought it would. But congratulations to Mr Pichardie who correctly identified this US Marine General as Lemeul Shepherd Junior. A signed copy of Michael Burleigh’s ‘Moral Combat’ is on its way to you.

Shepherd had one of the toughest wars of any battlefield General and deserves to be much better known. He was a Marine commander during the brutal and unforgiving ‘island hopping’ campaign in the Pacific. These were deadly offensives – as viewers of Sky’s ‘The Pacific’ will know. Shepherd commanded units on Guadalcanal, Guam and then, as a two star Brigadier General leading the 6th Marine Division, on Okinawa. The photo above captures a pensive Brigadier General Shepherd on Okinawa.

I’ve interviewed both American and Japanese veterans who fought on Okinawa and their stories tell of a hell on earth. One US Marine revealed that not only did his unit habitually refuse to take Japanese prisoners – shooting any who tried to surrender – but that they were taught to believe that the Japanese were an ‘inhuman race’. And battle fatigue as they fought this ‘inhuman’ enemy was so intense that he recalled that he had spent one night hallucinating that he was fighting the Japanese only to discover in the morning that ‘there were no Japanese there’.

As for soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army, they were ordered to conduct a defence of the island of Okinawa that they knew would almost certainly lead to their deaths. Instead of trying to prevent the Americans from landing on the island, they retreated island into carefully prepared defensive shelters. Here they planned to show their bravery by giving up their lives for their Emperor. You can listen to one Japanese soldier who fought on Okinawa, Hajime Kondo, in the Testimony section of the site. He talks revealingly of the reasons why he thought he ought to kill himself on Okinawa – and why he survived.

In the  video on the site about ‘island hopping‘ you can also here Kondo reveal that the last word he heard spoken by American soldiers before they died was often ‘Mother.’ Kondo thought that curious, since the last word that Japanese soldiers uttered when they died could also be ‘Mother’. (This was something confirmed to me by a Kamikaze pilot – who was cheated of death off Okinawa only because his plane was shot down as he neared his target. He said that the Kamikaze pilots had discussed amongst themselves what their last word should be, spoken as they smashed themselves into a million pieces against the deck of an Allied warship; and everyone said that they would say the word ‘mother’. But he had a problem, his mother had died when he was young, and so he felt he could not say ‘mother’ as he killed himself, so he decided to say the name of a Geisha he loved instead.)

The war on the eastern front in the Soviet Union was truly horrendous, but there was a special, intense kind of nastiness to the war in the Pacific. And that was the war in which history placed Lemeul Shepherd Junior.

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WW2 Anniversary

|   23 June 2010

The curse of hindsight

The Kremlin – where Stalin trembled in 1940.

Seventy years ago this month, in his office in the Kremlin in Moscow, Joseph Stalin listened to a radio report of the German occupation of Paris. As he learnt of the Wehrmacht’s triumph, he turned almost in despair to his comrades and complained about the performance of the French army, saying: ‘Couldn’t they have have put up any resistance at all?’

The German success in France was a disaster for Stalin. The core foundation of his foreign policy – the belief that the Germans would become embroiled in a war of attrition in the fields of Flanders,  just as they had in the First World War – was now shattered. Stalin had thought, back in August 1939, that he was being extremely clever in negotiating the Nazi/Soviet pact which kept the Soviets out of the fighting, and yet now he had to rethink his policy completely – and from a position of weakness.

In the wake of the German conquest of France, Stalin practiced his own version of obsequious appeasement. Deliveries of raw materials to the Nazis increased, and Stalin went out of his way over the following months to try and assure Hitler that he was a loyal chum of the Fascists. It was the behaviour of a terrified man – and reached a low point on 13 April 1941 when Stalin hugged Colonel Hans Krebs of the German embassy at Moscow railway station. ‘We will be your friends!’ said Stalin emotionally. ‘Whatever will come!’ Krebs was clearly not impressed by this display of weakness from the Soviet leader. ‘It can’t be ruled out,’ Krebs subsequently wrote to a friend, his letter dripping with contempt, ‘that Stalin was under the influence of alcohol.’

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WW2 Anniversary

|   16 June 2010

Germans in Paris

Seventy years ago today, German soldiers celebrated in Paris. They had achieved what many had thought impossible – they had captured the French capital. And it was only to be a matter of days before total victory in France was theirs.

But what recent research has conclusively demonstrated is just how much of a risk this campaign was for Adolf Hitler. The popular perception is that Hitler’s ‘craziest’ gamble was his decision to invade the Soviet Union. But in a number of respects he took more risks with the invasion of France. Certainly, many of his Generals thought he was almost insane for deciding to move on the West, whilst subsequently supporting his decision to attack the Soviets.

The fact that the Germans won so swiftly seventy years ago has blinded many people to the enormity of the chance they took. It’s a myth, for example, that German soldiers gained victory because they possessed a greater number of armoured vehicles than the Allies. In fact, the French and British had more tanks than they did. Nor did the Germans use revolutionary ‘Blitzkreig’ tactics – their attack on France, as military historian Professor Robert Citino reveals in his interview for this site, was much more reminiscent of the ‘armoured raids’ practiced by the Prussians in the previous century.

No, the Germans won because their troops were better led than the Allies they faced, and because Hitler had authorized one of the most immense gambles in the whole of military history. He had decided that the main German attack would not come through Belgium and the Low countries, as the Allies had anticipated, but through the forest of Ardennes to the east. The plan was that Army Group A would cross through this less than ideal terrain and then make a swift dash to the coast in order to trap the bulk of French and British forces north of them.  But this was, as Professor Adam Tooze told me, a gamble so huge that ‘the Germans fully understand that if this plan fails they’ve lost the war’.

All of which makes me think more and more about the personality of Adolf Hitler. What kind of man gambles the entire future of his nation on one single moment? On a plan that could so easily have gone wrong. Because if the Allies had detected the Germans as they crossed through the Ardennes, then they could have easily destroyed them from the air. German tanks simply had no room to maneouvre in the forest.

One explanation as to why Hitler made this decision is, of course, that he was immensely excited by risk. As he told Goering as the war started, ‘I’ve always gone for broke’. In which case, was the defeat of Germany inevitable, even as German soldiers sipped congnac in the street cafes of the Champs Elysees, seventy years ago today? Because a compulsive gambler like Hitler would never have been satsified with one big win, but would always have taken a gamble too far….

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WW2History.com News

|   11 June 2010

WELCOME AMERICA!

WW2History.com has just gone live in the United States of America.

And since we have so many fine American historians on the site, and since all of my last documentary series were made in co-production with various American colleagues and friends, it’s a moment that I especially want to mark.

One small way of recognizing this significant day in the brief history of WW2History.com is to feature an American in our monthly competition. This month, subscribers to WW2History.com are asked to name this American marine.

Not as famous or Nimitz or Patton, he did still play an important part in key battles in WW2 and went on to become Commandant of the Marine Corps. The first three correct answers naming this tough Marine, taken at random from the correct suggestions made, will win a signed hardback copy of Michael Burleigh’s brilliant new book – ‘Moral Combat – a history of World War II’. But remember, you need to be a subscriber to the site to enter the competition and you can only do so via the form available in the Members’ Zone of the site, accessible via the subscription homepage.

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