WW2 Relevance

|   9 February 2011

How nice are Doctors?

How easily can Doctors be corrupted?

We’ve just added onto the site for subscribers the testimony of Ken Yuasa who was a military doctor serving in the Japanese Imperial Army in China during the war. He describes in horrifying detail the medical experiments which Japanese doctors conducted on innocent Chinese civilians. He witnessed, for example, two Chinese men being shot and then operated on – without any anaesthetic – in an attempt to take out the bullets under ‘field conditions’.

But the corruption of doctors didn’t just occur in Japan during WW2. In the Soviet Union and Germany doctors also threw away any compassionate principles they may have possessed and did the bidding of their masters. And they not only ‘followed orders’ – in many cases they relished the new opportunities for ‘research’ that these totalitarian regimes offered. At Auschwitz, for instance, Dr Mengele pursued his own research into genetics by torturing children, and Dr Clauberg performed hideous experiments on women in order to develop new methods of sterilization.

And what’s important to understand is that few of these doctors showed any signs of their capacity to commit these crimes before the opportunity was offered to them. Almost certainly, if the regimes concerned had not given them the chance to do these things then they would have remained ‘normal’ doctors.

As I wrote in ‘Their Darkest Hour’, ‘we like to think that doctors are somehow different from the rest of us; that they are selflessly devoted to our care; that the Hippocratic oath they swore ‘not to harm anyone’ actually means something. But what the history of doctors like Ken Yuasa demonstrates is how easily large numbers of them in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union were corrupted.’

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 February 2011

January Competition result

D Day

Many congratulations to Shanice Jackson of Lancashire who has won the January subscribers’ competition. She was the first WW2History.com subscriber picked at random from those who gave the correct answer to last month’s question. She correctly identified Caen as the city which the Allies failed to take on the first day of the invasion in June 1944.

She wins a signed paperback copy of Antony Beevor’s brilliant ‘D Day: The Battle for Normandy’ which will shortly be winging its way to her. I remember Antony Beevor telling me that he thought Normandy had been the ‘martyr for France’ in 1944 – by which he meant, of course, that Normandy had suffered more than any other region. And having met British and American troops who fought their way through the high hedges of Normandy, step by bloody step, I most certainly agree with his judgment.

Good luck to all subscribers with this month’s competition – which is quite a tricky one I think. The prize is a signed, paperback copy of Richard Overy’s terrific ‘The Road to War’.

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WW2 People

|   19 January 2011

Hitler and aging

Our journey

It was my birthday this week – which is not a cause for wild jubilation once you are over forty five in my experience, and, unfortunately, I am most certainly over forty five.

But it got me thinking about how our understanding changes as we age. And that in turn made me think about the research I am doing on Hitler at the minute. Hitler was terrified that he might die before his ambitions could be accomplished. And that fear increased exponentially as he aged. Indeed, one of the reasons why he rushed into war was a fear that he might not be fit enough in years to come to lead Germany. He was also a terrible hypochondriac, constantly thinking that an upset stomach was the first sign of cancer. Because he thought he was sent by ‘providence’ to rule Germany, he no doubt was furious that ‘providence’ had not made him immortal.

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WW2 Relevance

|   12 January 2011

Violent rhetoric and physical violence

Tucson, Arizona

There is a relationship between violent political rhetoric and physical violence. Anyone who has studied the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis is aware of that. Which is why I’m puzzled, in the light of the debate going on in America at the minute after the tragic shootings in Arizona, that this basic – obvious – relationship is somehow in doubt.

I guess what is really being disputed are the facts of this particular case. Sarah Palin and her ‘tea party’ colleagues dispute that their rhetoric influenced the killer who murdered six people at Democratic Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords’ political meeting in Tucson last weekend. They might be right – they might be wrong. We don’t know yet.

But there is surely no doubt that a recent previous attack on Congresswoman Giffords’ office in Tucson, perpetrated just hours after the vote on health reform, was politically motivated. Nor is there any doubt about the violent gun-related rhetoric Sarah Palin uses to conduct her politics. She, for example, proselytizes a motto she says she gained from her father: ‘don’t retreat, reload’; and she published a list of districts she wanted to unseat Democrats from with the targeted area highlighted under a telescopic gunsight – this list of districts included that of Congresswoman Giffords, who is today fighting for her life after the shooting. (The idea, pushed by one of Palin’s aides after the shooting in Arizona that these were not gunsights but ‘surveyor’s symbols’ would be laughable if this were not so serious.)

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WW2 People

|   5 January 2011

Hitler and Munich

Munich – the ‘capital’ of the Nazi movement.

We’ve just added a long essay on Adolf Hitler to the ‘Key Leaders’ section for subscribers. And writing it reminded me of the long association that Adolf Hitler had with one city – Munich.

For Hitler, Munich was the most wonderful spot on earth. His joy at moving to Munich just before the First World War is plain to see in the pages of Mein Kampf and Munich was to be the birthplace of the Nazi party in the years immediately after the end of WWI.

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WW2 Competitions

|   3 January 2011

December Competition result

Many congratulations to Louise Morgan of Perthsire in Scotland who was the first person randomly selected from all those subscribers to WW2History.com who correctly answered last month’s competition. A signed, paperback copy of Ian Kershaw’s ‘Fateful Decisions’ together with a DVD of ‘WW2 Behind Closed Doors’ will shortly be winging their way to her.

The question we posed was: ‘Hitler held a number of meetings with European leaders in 1940. After one such meeting in October 1940, Hitler remarked that he would ‘prefer to have three or four teeth taken out’ than go through the experience again. Which European leader caused this reaction in Hitler?

The answer, as Louise and many others correctly identified, was General Franco, the dictator of Spain.

This month’s question is, I think, a difficult one – but the prize is certainly worth the effort, a signed, paperback copy of Antony Beevor’s epic ‘D Day – the battle for Normandy’.

And a Happy New Year to you all!

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WW2 People

|   29 December 2010

Siberians – tough people

Snow – the great leveler

When I was out walking through the snow in the Chiltern Hills outside of London the other day, with the cold air penetrating through my thick clothes, I remembered the toughest man I have ever met.

He was a Siberian, called Vasily Borisov. And exactly sixty nine years ago today he was fighting the Germans outside Moscow. And when I met him in 2006, when he was well into his eighties, he seemed every bit as strong as he must have been during the war. His hand shake almost crushed my fingers and his big, slab-like face exuded health and energy.

He was part of a Siberian division that had been sent to defend the Soviet capital in December 1941. ‘During the counter-attacks [against the Germans],’ he said, ‘there was man to man fighting. We had to fight the Germans in the trenches. And the fitter ones survived and the weaker ones died… We had bayonets on our rifles and I was very strong – I could pierce him [the German soldier] with a bayonet and throw him out of the trench… It’s the same as piercing a loaf of bread.’

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WW2 Relevance

|   22 December 2010

The Fragility around us.

Wells-next-the-sea, Norfolk. A two day drive from London

Last Saturday I left London to drive with my family to my in-laws’ cottage in north Norfolk, at the lovely sea-side village of Wells-next-the-sea.

Not exactly earth shattering news, I know. Except that this trip, which normally takes about three hours, actually took us the best part of two days. As we left, late on Saturday morning, heavy snow began to fall. Now, I have been fortunate enough to visit northern Norway and central Siberia, so I can tell you that this snowfall was scarcely spectacular. But it was sufficient to destroy crucial parts of the infrastructure of London. We reached the first service station on the M1 motorway, still within the M25, the orbital motorway around London, after over three hours driving – a journey of little more than a dozen miles.

At the service station cars were stuck in the snow or trying desperately to re-join the virtually static motorway as night fell. Inside the service station there were long queues for food and – scarcely believable I know – I thought I detected signs of panic buying. We ended up having to stay at the hotel at the service station before carrying on next day in conditions which were little better.

I mention all this because it was evidence, in front of my eyes, of the absolute fragility of our society, even our lives – something which countless veterans of the Second World War have told me about, and which is almost impossible to believe when everything seems stable. ‘Honestly, you can’t credit it, today,’ one Hungarian Jewish deportee to Auschwitz told me, ‘but one moment everything seemed safe and comfortable and the next it was as if we had entered Hell. We were shoved into a temporary ghetto, appallingly mistreated and then crammed onto a train to Auschwitz. It was so sudden. It didn’t seem possible that it was happening….’

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WW2 Anniversary

|   14 December 2010

Roosevelt and the art of timing.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt

This Friday, 17th December, is the 70th anniversary of one of the most important speeches ever made by a democratic leader. On this day in 1940 President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the American people his idea of ‘Lend Lease’.

Instead of selling the British what they needed to carry on the fight against the Nazis, Roosevelt said the Americans would ‘lend’ what was required. The folksy analogy Roosevelt used in the speech was that of a good citizen lending a length of hose to his neighbour when his house was on fire. After the fire was put out the hose could be returned, and if it was damaged then the good citizen could later be recompensed with a replacement hose bought by a grateful neighbour.

It was a wholly misleading comparison, of course. Because the British were clearly going to use the equipment the Americans gave them under ‘Lend Lease’ and Roosevelt knew they didn’t have the money to replace it. But nonetheless, Roosevelt’s speech caught the imagination of many Americans – as always FDR knew the right buttons to press. In this case he was locking into the American ‘frontier spirit’ of neighbourliness in adversity.

But for me almost the most significant aspect of this remarkable speech is the timing. Roosevelt had been careful during the Presidential election of 1940 not to give the impression that he was taking America to war. He was standing for an unprecedented third term as President and he knew that any hint of full scale military support for Britain would be dangerous to his chances. So he waited until after his re-election and then carefully announced this opaque ‘Lend Lease’ policy which appealed to the best in the American character.

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WW2 Relevance

|   6 December 2010

Why bother knowing this history?

The coastline of what was East Prussia and is now Poland.

A friend said to me the other day, after a convivial evening: ‘What is it with you? Why spend your time on World War Two and Nazis? Why don’t you move on to something useful!’

‘Well,’ I replied. ‘Because I think it is useful thinking about this history. I’ve certainly altered my views about life as a result.’

‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘Name one way you’ve changed as a result of studying all this stuff from the past.’

And so I told him about a German I met some years ago who had spent the early part of 1945 waiting for the Red Army to enter his village on the coastline of East Prussia (now part of Poland). He was still at school, and yet had been drafted into the local defence unit. But when the Soviets arrived his resistance didn’t last long and they managed to capture him.

I’d been wanting to interview him about his experiences as a fanatical teenage Nazi – and he had some fascinating insights into all that – but it turned out that his personal history after the fall of Nazism was even more intriguing. Because immediately after being captured by the Red Army, he said the ‘scales had instantly fallen from his eyes’ and he had realized the evil of Nazism and the purity of Communism. So he’d joined the Party and risen to become the Communist Mayor of his local town – now a fanatical Marxist. But just a few years before I met him, East Germany had been re-united with West Germany and the Communists had gone. At which point, he said, he had experienced another sudden epiphany. Now he realized that Communism was tragically flawed and that Capitalism was the answer. As a result, when I met him, he was one of the richest businessmen in town.

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