The gatehouse at Auschwitz/Birkenau
Many congratulations to Carol Hitchcock of Bedfordshire who was the first person chosen at random from the subscribers to WW2History.com who got the correct answer to the competition for June.
This question proved to be the hardest yet set: The camp at Auschwitz/Birkenau was not originally intended to hold large numbers of Jews. Who did the Nazis first think would be sent there once it was completed? Read the rest of this entry
Soldiers of the Red Army were surrendering in droves.
Today is the 70th anniversary of one of the most dramatic meetings of the Twentieth Century.
Joseph Stalin arrived at Soviet Military headquarters on Frunze street in Moscow and confronted his generals about the desperate military situation – just one week after the Germans had launched their invasion. At Frunze street Stalin learnt that the Germans were about to capture Minsk, capital of Belarus, and that the whole front was in disaray. He lost his temper with General Zhukov and then stormed out of the meeting, pausing only to say ‘Lenin founded our state and now we’ve fxxked it up’.
Stalin then disappeared to his Dacha outside Moscow and wasn’t seen for 36 hours. Did he have some kind of breakdown? Historians still argue about Stalin’s mental state at this most crucial time. My own view, having studied the evidence, is that Stalin wasn’t faking it – he genuinely was close to losing his confidence as the leader of his country.
But what I think we should think about today – and something which is seldom mentioned in the context of what happened 70 years ago – is how even though Stalin was in a such a bad place mentally there was no plot to overthrow him. Molotov and the other Politburo members were too frightened, too traumatized by years of Stalin’s oppression and persecution that they dared not move against him.
It’s important in this context, I always think,to remember that whilst there were a number of attempts on Hitler’s life, there was not one on Stalin’s. And, significantly, Hitler – though a monster himself – did not persecute his colleagues as arbitraily as Stalin did.
The truth is that mindless terror directed against people who are working closely with you can help keep you in power in the tough times – at least it did in Stalin’s case.
Six weeks to get to Moscow?
Today is the 70th anniversary of the largest invasion in the history of the world. Just before dawn on 22 June 1941 over three million German soldiers and their allies pushed forward in three massive thrusts into the Soviet Union. Army Group North, commanded by Field Marshal Leeb, headed for the Baltic States and Leningrad; Army Group Centre, led by Field Marshal Bock, pushed straight into the Soviet Union on the Minsk/Smolensk/Vyazma axis; and Army Group South, under Field Marshal Rundstedt, advanced into the rich agricultural land of Ukraine. Read the rest of this entry
There was more than one Auschwitz camp.
This month’s competition question for WW2History.com subscribers is proving very interesting. Not because lots of people have got the answer correct so far but because of the reverse – no one who has entered the competition has got the correct answer yet.
This is the question:
The camp at Auschwitz/Birkenau was not originally intended to hold large numbers of Jews. Who did the Nazis first think would be sent there once it was completed?
And I’m not giving too much away when I say that the answer is not ‘Polish political prisoners’ which many people seem to think it is. Polish political prisoners were indeed the first people incarcerated at Auschwitz – but at Auschwitz main camp in 1940 not at Auschwitz/Birkenau, which was not in existence in 1940. The main camp was on the banks of the Sola river near the town of Auschwitz (as the Germans called the Polish town of Oswiecim) but the Nazis only decided to build this new camp, about a mile and a half away from the old one, the following year in 1941. Read the rest of this entry
Fighting through Normandy
Congratulations to Jodie Neville of the West Midlands who wins the competition for May. Hers was the first name taken at random from all of those WW2History.com subscribers who gave the correct answer to the question: Immediately after landing on the Normandy beaches the Allies had to fight their way through countryside which – largely because of the high hedges – hugely favoured the German defenders. This countryside had a special name, one derived from Norman French. What is it?
And the answer was ‘Bocage’. A word that became hateful to the Allied soldiers who had to battle through it.
This month, subscribers have the chance to win a signed hardback copy of my book on Auschwitz. Good luck!
The Blitz – a time of death and glory for Britain
In the spring of 1986 I was driving through the Loire valley, listening to an interview on Radio 4 with Enoch Powell, one of the most famous British politicians of the time. It was all predictable stuff until Powell was asked how he would like to be remembered. After giving one fairly anodyne response, Powell replied: ‘I should like to have been killed in the war.’
At the time I thought this was a bonkers answer. And not just bonkers, but potentially immensely hurtful to his close friends and family. But, curiously, the older I get the more sympathy I have with Enoch Powell’s response.
Is it legitimate to express ‘sympathy’ for Adolf Hitler?
This week the Danish film director Lars von Trier was banned from the Cannes film festival for confessing – tongue in cheek, one suspects – that he was a ‘Nazi’ and that he had ‘sympathy’ for Adolf Hitler.
Von Trier craves attention and loves to shock – that much is obvious not just from his previous history at Cannes, but also from earlier remarks at the same press conference at which he announced he was a Nazi, when he said that various attractive actresses had asked him to make a ‘Hot sex’ film as his next project. He is clearly a silly man.
But it is the reaction to his remarks about Hitler that is really intriguing. Suppose he had said that he was a ‘Communist’ and had ‘sympathy’ for Stalin – would he have been chucked out of the Cannes film festival? I suspect not.
The site for the new document centre, next to the building that housed Hitler’s office in Munich.
Hitler and Bin Laden, both mass murderers whilst alive, now have something in common whilst dead – nobody knows precisely where their bodies are. Bin Laden’s remains were chucked by the Americans into the ocean and Hitler’s charred bones were taken from Berlin by the Soviets and have remained hidden from view ever since. His skull was supposed to be in a Moscow secret museum, but even that is in doubt today.
Both the Americans and the Soviets clearly thought it vital to deny each of them a grave. As far as Hitler is concerned, as long as the Nazis ruled Germany, he most certainly wanted his grave to become a sacred place. As I told a BBC journalist this week, whilst Hitler did not believe in an afterlife in the sense of a heaven or hell, he did believe that he would live on here on earth, with pilgrims visiting his sarcophagus. As a result it was claimed by many in Munich after the war that any Hitler memorial – even museum – might become a ‘shrine’ – so none was ever built. As a result no proper place existed in the city for the public to visit in order to understand why and how Hitler and the Nazis came to call Munich home.
Charles De Gaulle
Congratulations to Mr George Cox of Devon, who has won April’s WW2History.com competition, as he was the first subscriber selected from those who correctly answered last month’s question.
The question was: De Gaulle was famous for his cryptic remarks. One of his strangest was when he was asked his reaction to the behaviour of one of France’s most famous heroes of WWI, who turned into one of the most infamous collaborators with the Nazis during the German occupation. This infamous collaborator did not die until 1951, yet De Gaulle said of him that he died ‘in 1926’. What was the name of this collaborator?
And the correct answer was: Marshal Pétain. In the years immediately after the First World War de Gaulle had hugely admired Pétain, the hero of the battle of Verdun, but then quarreled with him and subsequently preferred to think he had died rather than collaborated with the Nazis as head of the Vichy government.
A signed copy of Jonathan Fenby’s fine book on de Gaulle will shortly be on its way to Mr Cox.
The steppes near Stalingrad where Vladimir Kantovski fought.
I recently learnt that a close friend of mine has cancer. And instead of falling to pieces – like I fear I perhaps might at such news – he is brave and stoical. Why? Where does such courage come from?
I could never have predicted that he would be so brave – he never seemed a particularly courageous sort. But now that he is being tested he is reacting heroically. But then, thinking about it, I shouldn’t be surprised, because the bravest man I ever met was similarly mild mannered. He was called Vladimir Kantovski, and I met him a dozen years ago in his run down flat in the suburbs of Moscow. As a student he had protested at the arrest of his teacher in 1940 – an act which, unsurprisingly, meant that he was sent straight to a Gulag. When the Germans invaded the following year, fiercely patriotic as he was, Kantovski volunteered to serve in a ‘Penal Battalion’ on the front line.
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