historian at large

"Building the Revolution" - if you must

2012-01-18T12:40:00.000-08:00

I went down to the Royal Academy this afternoon to visit the "Building the Revolution exhibition, on modernist architecture in the Soviet Union, 1915-1935.

I was not sure what to expect to be honest, but I thought it showed up a few contradictions and hypocrisies that i found interesting.

The exhibition itself was a bit of a curate's egg - some of the headline acts were impressive, other aspects much less so. Though I am not particularly a fan of his work, Le Corbusier's buildings in Russia - the Tsentrosoyuz in Moscow and the Gosprom building in Kharkhov (above) - were of interest, not least because of their soaring ambition.

Certainly, as the architecture geeks and pseuds will tell you - this period in the early years of the USSR was pretty much the only one when the artistic avant garde became (briefly) state policy. The result was a flowering of modernist, functionalist architecture - all swirling concrete, geometric shapes, flat rooves and banded windows - which produced a few buildings of genuine interest.

The problem with this is that the material on display in the exhibition is rather thin. Aside from the headline acts, many of the items shown are fundamentally ugly, lumpen, concrete monstrosities, mostly by architects you have never heard of and whose work you will have little desire to encounter again.

Even the accompanying contemporary photographs by Richard Pare do little to add to the appeal. They are photographically interesting, of course, and beautifully composed images, but they are essentially of the sort of grim, rain-stained, post-industrial townscapes that are sadly so common across the former Soviet Union. It is a world that has few redeeming features.

Beyond that, the third strand of the display is the collection of constructivist art and sketches spirited out of the USSR in the 1920s. Whilst the story of the collection's provenance is certainly interesting, the sketches themselves are not. The catalog claims that they "probe the boundaries between painting and architecture". Sadly, they do little but show up their authors' artistic shortcomings.

So, a rather meagre diet, really, even for the enthusiast. Indeed, one suspects that were it not for the rose-tinted, unthinking Soviet-nostalgia amongst the western liberal elite, such architecture would have been largely and rightly forgotten.

What I found most interesting, however, was that the commentary on the exhibition insisted on viewing the architecture completely in isolation from the brutal political climate in which it was spawned.

The catalog and captions spoke breezily about the Izvestia building in Moscow, for instance, without mentioning Izvestia's dark role as one of the primary propaganda mouthpieces of the Soviet state. It also features a housing project in Ekaterinburg, which was intended for the families of serving Cheka secret policemen - Stalin's equivalent of the Gestapo. Even the architect who designed Lenin's mausoleum - Alexei Shchusev - was the same man who finished off the Lubyanka, the KGB's infamous headquarters in central Moscow.

Such dark, nefarious connections cannot simply be ignored or wished away. For all its modernistic flourishes, the Soviet Union was a brutal, murderous place, in many ways analagous to the Third Reich. We would all do well to remember that. Just as Albert Speer's buildings, or those of Werner March, or Ernst Sagebeil, are considered to be 'tainted' by the connection to the Third Reich, so too should these constructions be tainted by their connection to Lenin and Stalin.

Indeed, by way of an exercise, it is interesting to substitute Nazi-era buildings and architects for those on display in the Royal Academy and then gauge our own response. The idea of an Albert Speer retrospective gracing those venerable halls, for instance, is vaguely horrifying - yet somehow one showcasing Soviet architects is considered acceptable. Well, not to me.

History Books of the Year for 2011

2011-12-20T11:50:00.001-08:00

For those of your struggling to find the last few Christmas gifts - here is a short list of my favourite History Books of 2011...

Anna Reid - Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941-44.

Max Hastings - All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945

Ian Kershaw - The End: Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945

Rodric Braithwaite - Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89

Robert Gerwarth - Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

Norman Davies - Vanished Kingdoms

All good - all very much worth reading, and giving..

Happy Christmas

"Very Well - Semi-detached"

2011-12-13T01:37:00.000-08:00

Big news of this week has been the European summit and PM David Cameron's use of a veto to scupper a proposed treaty aiming for greater fiscal union to save the Euro. All sides on this are posturing and playing politics - Milliband is especially shameless - yet, it strikes me that we should perhaps all save our breath for the moment. We will only know if the plans are successful - in that they save the Euro - in six months, or a year. So all we have at the moment, it seems to me, is political knockabout.

Yet, there are important practical and ideological aspects to what has been done here. The practical aspect is to ease the economic crisis in the Eurozone - solve the sovereign debt problems of the Greeks and others - and breathe life back into the Euro. This is all well and good - and a goal in which Britian can heartily collaborate - not least because 50% of British exports go to the EU. So, an economically healthy EU is good for Britain.

But, it is the ideological aspect that causes Britain its problems. This ideological aspect is the idea of an ever-closer union, encompassing not only a free trade area (which Britain originally signed up to), but monetary and now fiscal union - and by implication an ever-closer de-facto political union, under German hegemony. This is something to which Britain cannot - and should not - ever agree.

Taking the long view - historically speaking - Britain's political position regarding Europe has always mirrored her geographical position - semi-detached. A position summarised by Churchill when he said "We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not compromised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed."

Broadly, Britain's historical position regarding Europe can be summed up in geo-political terms, as one of preserving balance. Britain's interests and ambitions were well-served by simply seeking to preserve a balance of powers on the European continent, not allowing any one power to achieve a dominant position, whilst preserving opportunities for trade. As soon as any one power becomes too dominant - Napoleon and Hitler are the best examples - then Britain acts to restore balance. Aside from this over-riding concern, however, Britain has traditionally stood apart from European squabbles, seeing her natural constituency beyond Europe's shores - in the colonies, the Empire, the Commonwealth or the Anglophone sphere...

This is why last week's summit veto was so important - for it marked the point at which the pragmatic business of economic union gave way to the more ideological one of political union. It may well be that the French and Germans did not want Britain in the club - mindful perhaps of Britain's more pragmatic instincts - and so deliberately forced Cameron into using his veto. It may be that Cameron did not negotiate as deftly as he might have done. Whatever the case, however, the moves that Europe signalled last week are not most certainly not in Britain's national interest.

Only time will tell is the economic aspect of the plan - that of saving the Euro - will succeed. Germany's unwillingness to allow devaluation rather handicaps the chances of recovery and has contributed to the mess that is now to be solved. Yet that recovery is important to Britain.

The political aspect meanwhile, whilst most certainly of profound significance, is not in Britain's interests. Mr Cameron did the right thing by remaining outside it.

Nazi Silly Season

2011-11-29T08:06:00.000-08:00

It seems a sort of Hitler-silly-season has descended upon us in recent weeks.

Last week, we had the rather frivolous story of Hitler’s bedsheets coming up for auction.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2065162/Hitlers-bed-linen-embroidered-swastika-eagle-initials-goes-sale.html
All well and good, you might say, – and after all the bedlinen was duly monogrammed and festooned with swastikas, so is still of (at least passing) historical interest – but did the story really warrant the coverage that it received? I think not.

Then, last weekend, I was dismayed to read another nonsense story about Hitler in the newspapers, this time attempting to breathe life into the hoary old tale of his having visited the UK in the years before the First World War. We have long had the myth of his having visited Liverpool – which was put out after the war by his half-brother and sister-in-law (who did live in Liverpool), in a cynical attempt to flog an otherwise uninteresting memoir. But now, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3961409/Hitlers-visit-to-London.html the story has sadly been resurrected, apparently on the back of a BBC TV documentary, and further gloss is being added to the mythology. It is claimed that the future Führer visited London, went to see Tower Bridge and even “enjoyed a pint” down the local pub.

Now, as far as I know, there never was any proof that Hitler ever visited Liverpool (beyond the cynical, desperate reminiscences of his estranged former half-sister-in-law), yet now it seems he not only visited Liverpool, but also London, and he even went about to see the sights. Perhaps he even did some watercolours? I’d love to see the proof of all these fevered imaginings, but I would bet my next royalty cheque that there isn’t any.

All this Hitler-themed poppycock comes hard on the heels of another attempted resurrection, this time of perhaps the greatest myth of all in the Hitler canon – the suggestion that he escaped Berlin and lived out his days in Argentina. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050137/Did-Hitler-Eva-Braun-flee-Berlin-die-old-age-Argentina.html (believe it or not, the Daily Mail is actually the most respectable ‘source’ for this report – apart from that it is wackos all the way down)
The reason that this crazy story resurfaced is that it has recently appeared in a book, which astonishingly manages to incorporate almost every Third Reich mystery and conspiracy theory into one bizarre and none-too-believable tale.

Of course, this sort of codswallop is all over the internet. But then, the “World Weird Web” is chock-full of Holocaust deniers, Flat-Earthers and those that refuse to believe that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9-11. Just because they all subscribe to a nonsense theory – doesn’t make it true. And, as before, there is not a shred of credible proof to back up such fanciful imaginings. Trust me, I have had the misfortune to read it…

So, all you hacks, part-time hobby historians and conspiracy theorists, let’s give Hitler a rest for a while, shall we? Serious study of the Third Reich and its Führer is all well and good – but crud such as this is in danger not only of giving us all a bad name, but also of leading an already credulous public even further up the garden path.

Fuhrerbau in Munich

2011-06-22T08:35:00.001-07:00

Been a while - busy busy...

Anyway - just back from the inaugural "Historical Trips" tour - all a tremendous success.

Just a quick post here to mention one of the sites that we visited - a rather impromptu visit in fact, as it was not in the original itinerary - the Fuehrerbau in Munich.

Completed in 1937 from plans drawn up by Hitler's first 'court architect' Paul Ludwig Troost (who died in 1934), the building served as Hitler's office when he was in Munich and was the location for the famed Munich Conference of September 1938, where Czechoslovakia was dismembered and the principle of collective security died a death...

Interestingly, the building also stood cheek-by-jowl with one of the 'Honour Temples' in which the Nazi 'martyrs' of 1923 were laid to rest. Naturally, that building - as the very centrepiece of Nazi martyrology was demolished, and only its concrete foundations remain. But the neighbouring Fuehrerbau was permitted to remain after the war, primarily as it served the occupying US Army as a administrative building. It now is home to the Munich School of Music.

Thanks to such vicissitudes, the interior of the building is largely untouched. And it is a spectacular example of totalitarian architecture, not only with its coffered, neo-classical ceiling (right), but also its extensive use of Hitler's favourite red marble (left).

I did half-heartedly try to find Hitler's office - which was supposedly on the southern end of the building on the first floor. However, all I found there were the students' toilets... Who said the Germans didn't have a sense of humour?

Of Fascists and Islamofascists

2011-03-08T01:05:00.001-08:00

In November 1923, Adolf Hitler tried to bring down the German state. In his famous 'Beer Hall Putsch', he and his followers marched through Munich in a re-run of Mussolini's 'March on Rome' of the previous year, which had brought the latter to power in Italy.

Hitler, however, failed. Faced down by the massed ranks of the Bavarian police, he and his men were mown down in a narrow Munich street. 16 of their number were killed and Hitler himself escaped with a dislocated shoulder. He was later arrested and charged with high treason.

He stood trial in February of the following year. Amidst a blaze of publicity, Hitler exploited the opportunity to promote his ideas from the dock. The authorities were lenient; sympathetic to Hitler's motives, if not his methods. Though found guilty, he was sentenced to 5 years 'fortress confinement' - a gentler form of imprisonment with no hard labour and comfortable cells. Moreover, of this 5 years, Hitler served less than 9 months, being pardoned and released in later December 1924.

This leniency towards the right was commonplace in Germany at this time. Anton Arco-Valley, for instance, had murdered the Bavarian premier Kurt Eisner in Munich in broad daylight in 1919, yet was praised by the prosecutor at his trial, who stated that: "If the whole of German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm, we could face the future with confidence." Arco-Valley was initially condemned to death, before the judge reduced the sentence to 5 years, which again was served in 'fortress confinement'.

Another example was the Munich chief-of-police Ernst Pohner, who protected right-wing criminals and covered up right-wing crimes in the early 1920s. When asked if there were extremist death squads operating in and around the city, he famously relplied "Yes, but too few of them."

Germany's toleration of its extreme right in the 1920s may have been political grandstanding, but it would nonetheless have profound consequences. Within less than a decade of his trial, Hitler would be appointed Chancellor of Germany; The Third Reich, World War Two and the Holocaust followed.

Today - rather than fascists - we are assailed by a new enemy within - Islamofascists - who are just as bigoted, just as misguided, and just as contemptuous of our laws and traditions as Hitler and his cohorts were. Like the Nazis, theirs is a totalitarian ideology which will brook no compromise, views tolerance as weakness, and fetishises martyrdom.

But how do we respond to this challenge? Do we learn the lessons of history? Do we stand up for what we believe in? Face the threat robustly, confident in ourselves? Steadfast in defence of our traditions?

Sadly no. As the preposterously lenient sentence in the trial of Emdadur Choudhury demonstrates - this is a battle that the west seems to be hell-bent on losing. Having hamstrung ourselves with so much empty talk of 'rights', 'respect' and 'tolerance', we are clearly unable even to identify the threat posed to our civilisation, much less engage it.

After his failed putsch, Hitler vowed to use democratic means to destroy German democracy - to undermine it from within, using freedom of speech, pluralism and tolerance to weaken and finally destroy those same noble concepts. Our modern foes are utilising the same tactics, exploiting human rights, freedom of speech and tolerance, in an attempt to destroy our system and our way of life from within... The question is: How should we respond?

Third Reich Tour "Controversy"

2011-01-16T05:06:00.000-08:00

There has been alot of talk in the ether-world this week about the Third Reich tour "The Face of Evil: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - see http://www.historicaltrips.com/ - that I am launching with two colleagues in the summer.

It all kicked off with a fairly ludicrous and irresponsible piece in the Sunday Times last weekend, which suggested that the tour was a "Hitler Holiday" and a "perverse pilgrimage". Other commentators have picked up on their lead this week, to describe the tour as "tawdry" and "indelicate".

By way of a response:

Don't believe everything you read online or in the papers: Both the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday ran items on this last weekend - yet surprisingly it was the Mail that did so with restraint and maturity, reporting it as a travel story, rather than a 'news controversy' angle that the Sunday Times adopted, falling back on all the hoary old stereotypes and customary hyperbolic nonsense.

Most of the other footage that has done the rounds of the internet this week has (sadly) fed off the Sunday Times' 'controversy' angle, in many cases getting increasingly wrong and increasingly ludicrous as it went. One online report stated that we promised to take our guests to "the lakeside villa" (so far, so good) "where Hitler planned the construction of Sachsenhausen concentration camp". If, as I suspect, they are referring to Wannsee - then this was where the Holocaust was planned, and Hitler was not actually at the meeting - indeed, so far as I know, never set foot in the place.

It is hard to imagine a more spectacular case of chinese whispers - or history more egregiously mangled by ill-informed, lazy journalists. So, if you want to read the truth of the trip - go to our website - http://www.historicaltrips.com/

Tim Snyder's "Bloodlands"

2010-10-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

The second review is for Tim Snyder's excellent new book "Bloodlands" . This review was first published in the BBC History Magazine in October 2010.

There are many studies available that document the most brutal chapters of 20th Century history. The Holocaust is well-covered in both scholarly and popular volumes, and even lesser-known subjects, such as the Soviet ‘Great Terror’, the Warsaw Risings and the post-war expulsions of the Germans, have all found their own champions in print.

Yet, to date, nobody has sought to place all these grim examples of man’s inhumanity to man into a single all-encompassing narrative. That is the task that Yale historian Timothy Snyder set for himself with his new book “Bloodlands”.

Snyder concentrates his attentions on the very epicentre of those horrors – the ‘Bloodlands’ of the title – the territories between Germany and Russia comprising mainly of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, which bore the brunt of the killing in the mid 20th Century. It was there, he suggests, that the two most murderous totalitarian regimes of the time competed, co-operated and overlapped through twenty of the darkest years of human history. Consequently, it was there that as many as 14 million lives were lost: not through military action, but through deliberate state policy – starvation, execution, maltreatment and gassing.

Snyder is an excellent guide through this man-made hell. A talented historian and storyteller, he expertly negotiates an extremely complex story, debunking myths, correcting misconceptions and providing context, analysis and human interest in equal measure, always with a sympathetic ear for the victims themselves.

His holistic approach is a novel one: modern scholarship and political convention prefer to view Nazi and Soviet crimes in isolation. It is also not uncontroversial, as there are vested interests who would seek to proclaim one or other episode as unique, or especially worthy of study.

Yet, as Snyder explains, the myriad victims of those events did not have the luxury of drawing such distinctions; they were often condemned to compare, most immediately when the two regimes worked in nefarious concert with each other, or when one totalitarian overlord was replaced by his rival. History demands that we, of later more blessed generations, do not shrink from such difficult comparisons. Snyder himself certainly does not, addressing the thorny issue in a thoughtful and thought-provoking final chapter.

If there are quibbles, they are minor. Though stylistically strong, Snyder’s text is dense, packed with information and nuggets of wisdom. It demands positive engagement from the reader. Moreover, there is a suspicion that the author has been a little too inclusive in his selection of events. His overarching argument would have been just as well made, for instance, without the addition of a chapter on the Stalinist anti-Semitic purges of the 1950s, which after all delivered only a handful of victims, and for all their distaste, sit rather incongruously alongside other, more murderous, chapters.

Yet, these are petty concerns. “Bloodlands” is an excellent, imaginative and authoritative book, which tells the grim story of the greatest human and demographic tragedy in European history with exemplary clarity. Snyder set out to give a human face to the many millions of victims of totalitarianism. He has succeeded admirably.

Adrian Weale's "SS - A New History"

2010-10-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Been a while away from here - busy launching my new book "Berlin at War" - so a couple of reviews to catch up with...

The first is for Adrian Weale's "The SS - A New History". This review was first published in the Financial Times.

Every writer – and every publisher – cherishes novelty. We all need a new angle, a new interpretation or new material. The word ‘new’, therefore, seems to be the sprinkling of gold dust that accompanies every publication.

So, too Adrian Weale’s new history of the SS. Given that the last large-scale studies of Himmler’s black-clad elite were published a generation or so ago, Weale has certainly timed his book well.

He has also chosen a subject that exerts an enduring if often ghoulish fascination. From its origins as a personal bodyguard to Hitler, the SS developed into the most loyal and ideologically committed organisation in the Third Reich. The very vanguard of Nazism, it was a movement whose authorship and complicity in some of the era’s most heinous crimes would earn it criminal status at the end of the war and the darkest of reputations.

Moreover – and curiously given the acres of print routinely devoted to the subject of Nazism and the Third Reich – there are still questions about the SS that remain to be addressed; such as how a select garde du corps morphed in wartime into a motley body of warriors nearly a million strong; or precisely how the vast economic empire of the SS – which handled everything from the fruit of its prisoners’ labours to the gold teeth of its Jewish victims – was integrated into the wider German economy. Overarching them all, of course, is the question that Weale poses for himself at the outset of his book - how the soldiers of the SS willingly participated in some of the most bestial operations in human history; the mass murder of men, women and children.

There should be much, then, for any new history of the SS to discuss. The organisation’s intellectual and political world, for instance, a curious mix of think-tanks and thugs, high-flown theory and murderous practice, would be worth some investigation.

Also, the new morality of the SS would surely merit a chapter. It was this, after all, that provided the pseudo-philosophical underpinning that enabled many SS men to do what they did. Liberated from ‘outmoded’ concepts such as pity or Christianity, they saw mankind sorted into a league-table of races with Aryans and Nordics at the top and Jews and Slavs consigned to the status of vermin. In their ruthless and murderous treatment of these latter categories, they viewed themselves as soldiers in a Darwinian, life-and-death struggle for racial superiority, through which they would forge the new Germany.

For all its potential, Weale’s book addresses few of these points, however. It is certainly well-constructed and well-paced, providing an easy-reading account of the salient points in the story. It also provides useful potted biographies of the main characters – Himmler and Heydrich – as well as those lesser-known villains such as Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl and Odilo Globocnik, and the solitary hero Kurt Gerstein, who infiltrated the SS solely to report to the outside world on its murderous activities. Yet, crucially, it offers little that is genuinely new.

Weale’s is a competent and engaging synthesis, but there is more to the story, and more is required if the adjective ‘new’ is to be appended to the book with any real justification.

Part of the problem is the author’s choice of sources. Lacking German, it appears, Weale is left with a rather restricted range of material with which to work. Unable to avail himself of the many academic studies and specific investigations that have appeared in recent years, therefore, he concentrates primarily on published, English-language volumes, which though sound, do not provide sufficient depth or variety.

As a result, though there is ample scope for a more thorough-going and thoughtful approach to the subject, Weale’s book is disappointingly pedestrian, telling most readers little that they didn’t already know. Though he tells his story well enough, Weale does not provide enough in the way of a novel approach, a new interpretation, or fresh insights. The ‘new’ history of the SS, it seems, still awaits its author.

2010-06-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

“Trautmann’s Journey”
by Catrine Clay
Yellow Jersey, £16.99, 340pp, index, notes, illustrations.

In a year in which Anglo-German footballing rivalry might well be rekindled in South Africa, it is perhaps timely that a new book should recall the remarkable contribution made to the English game by “Traut the Kraut” - Bert Trautmann. One of the most iconic figures of domestic post-war football, Trautmann is the only man ever to have been awarded both the Iron Cross and the OBE, and is most famous for breaking his neck in the 1956 FA Cup Final - and playing on.

Beyond these headlines, however, Catrine Clay’s new biography – “Trautmann’s Journey” – reveals a fascinating back-story. Born in humble circumstances in Bremen in 1923, Trautmann was tall, blond and athletic and excelled at sport. He joined the Hitler Youth, then the Paratroopers, spending three years on the Eastern Front in which he was briefly captured by the Soviets and even witnessed a massacre of Ukrainian Jews. Transferred to the west in 1944, he then fought in Normandy, Arnhem and in the Ardennes before literally stumbling into British captivity, where he was greeted with the words “Fancy a cup of tea, Fritz?” He would be one of only 90 of his unit of 1,000 to survive the war.

Yet, for all these experiences, Trautmann himself admits that his real education began when he reached English shores in the spring of 1945. Transferred into the POW camp system in the north-west, he worked as a driver and later in bomb disposal and was consistently surprised by the kindness, forgiveness and understanding demonstrated by the ordinary Britons with whom he came into contact.

His real passion was still football, however, and he played his first game in goal in 1946, immediately showing the determination and athleticism that had earned him numerous accolades and awards as a youth in the Third Reich. From there, his ascent was swift. Signed by St Helens Town and then Manchester City, he would soon be making the first of his two FA Cup Final appearances. None other than Bobby Charlton would refer to Trautmann as the best goalkeeper that he had ever played against.

“Trautmann’s Journey” is a remarkable story, well told. Only occasionally does Clay attempt to incorporate too much extraneous material into her account. In general, her narrative moves along briskly, ably combining the narrow focus of her subject’s life with the broad sweep of events. She also does well to tease out a number of salient themes, such as Trautmann’s sometimes difficult relationship with his parents and the significance – for all parties – of his decision to make his home in the UK.

Though it is not short of affection for its subject, Clay’s biography is no hagiography, however. Trautmann emerges as an often equivocal character; a sport-obsessed curmudgeon with a quick temper and an apparent inability to accept authority. Imprisoned by the Nazis for insubordination, he would also be classified by the British authorities as a category ‘C’ prisoner – a hardened Nazi – primarily because of his surly and uncooperative attitude in interview. Even time did not mellow him. In 1954, Trautmann was suspended for tangling with a referee, and in his very last game as a player, he was sent off for violent conduct.

For all his foibles, Trautmann enjoyed an illustrious career, being the first foreigner to be named Player of the Year and later being inducted into English Football’s Hall of Fame. As this book demonstrates, by his example and his efforts, he has been a tireless ambassador for Anglo-German relations. And if those two countries resume their rivalry in South Africa this summer, supporters of both sides should be united in raising a toast to his name.

© Roger Moorhouse 2010

Toby Thacker's biography of Goebbels reviewed...

2010-05-16T13:04:00.001-07:00

Goebbels – propaganda minister of the Third Reich – still fascinates. The diminutive genius behind the Nazi manipulation of the German masses, he is recognised as a key player in the establishment and maintenance of Hitler’s power. As such, he has already been the subject of a number of biographies; most recently by Ralf Georg Reuth from the early 1990s, so one has to ask whether we really need another study of the man.

Toby Thacker would argue that we do. Crucially, his new biography is the first to be written since the entire set of Goebbels’ diaries has been published. He was an enthusiastic diarist and wrote many volumes between 1923 and his demise in 1945. After the war, many of those diaries were considered lost, and only re-emerged from ex-Soviet archives in 1992. Now published in German, they encompass 30 volumes, the last of which appeared in 2006.

The picture that emerges from Thacker’s study conforms in many ways to the stereotype. It presents Goebbels as a powerhouse of a public speaker, with a sarcastic, razor-sharp wit, a man who, for all his intellect, seems occasionally to have had his brains in his scrotum. But there are important differences. Rather than a cynical opportunist eagerly leaping on the Nazi bandwagon, for instance, Thacker’s Goebbels is a man motivated by profoundly-held convictions – faith in Hitler, nationalism, anti-Semitism and his own brand of völkisch socialism.

Thacker’s reassessment is convincing and welcome. But though he tells us that Goebbels was generally reliable and candid in his diary – even recording his sexual liaisons in numerical code – it is hard for the reader to forget that his subject was one of the greatest dissemblers, manipulators and pedlars of lies in history. Seen in this light, Thacker’s reliance – arguably his over-reliance – on those diaries appears questionable.

Most importantly perhaps, Thacker’s subject never really comes to life. Goebbels was one of the most colourful and controversial of the senior Nazis; a genuine intellectual among a top echelon of cranks and imbeciles, he was also a depressive and a philanderer. He was a man who was loved and loathed by his contemporaries in equal measure and about whom commentators habitually resorted to adjectives such as ‘Mephistophelean’, ‘fanatical’, even ‘vile’. Yet, for all that, he comes across here as curiously two-dimensional, stripped almost of those traits and excesses that make him so fascinating.

The author is not helped by his rather pedestrian approach, in which even the highlights of the narrative – the ‘seizure of power’, or the ‘Total War’ speech, for instance – barely seem to merit any special emphasis or dramatic treatment. He has sought to be comprehensive, which is laudable, but he has done so at the expense of a more selective and imaginative assessment.
Thacker has produced a solid biography. Aside from occasional lapses, he writes well and his research and academic merit are undeniable. Importantly, he also offers the reader a number of important new contentions and insights. But, for all those positives, it is hard not to conclude that he would have benefited from a dash of his subject’s devilish imagination and diabolical flair.

2010-05-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to seeing "Katyn", Andrzej Wajda's film about the infamous massacre of Polish POWs by the Soviets in 1940 and the battle for truth that followed.

For those who know little about this subject, Katyn is perhaps the touchstone of modern Polish history. It is not so much the bare facts of the massacre of 22,000 of the nation's finest officers, intellectuals and aristocrats that serves to elevate the event to this status, rather the fact that the subject was strictly taboo under the Communist regime, and was only admitted by Moscow in 1990. Not only was a generation of Poles greivously wronged, therefore, they were also condemned to an embittered silence.

And, as if to add the most painful of ironies, it was whilst commemmorating the massacre that the Polish president and his entourage died in a plane crash in Belorussia last month. In remembering the massacre of the Polish elite, the Polish elite met its death. Therein, one is tempted to suggest, is Polish history in a nutshell.

Wajda's film is a complex affair. Beautifully shot, it follows the tribulations of a family directly affected by the massacre. Andrzej, an ambitious young Polish officer, is in a Soviet prison camp in 1939 waiting for transport to an unknown fate, when he is visited by his wife, who tries to persuade him to leave with her for Krakow. He refuses - citing the oath that he has made as an officer - and is duly deported to meet his destiny.

The film then jumps to 1943, when news of the massacre breaks with the Germans (who have discovered the mass graves) pinning the blame on the Soviets. Further jumps take us to 1945, when the incoming Soviet regime blames the massacre on the Germans and is brutal in maintaining their version of the truth.

In the middle of this battle for truth are the Polish families of the Katyn victims, whose reactions neatly encapsulate what one might call the Polish condition - on the one hand seeking pragmatically to swallow one's principles to work with the new regime, and on the other the romantic impulse to fight for what one knows to be right, even if it should mean hardship and death.

It is a complex film, full of nuance, oblique references and characters that seem to appear out of nowhere. To the non-Polish viewer, therefore, it might all seem rather bewildering - a reaction not helped by having to decypher subtitles. Yet, one must remember, perhaps, that Wajda is not making his film for the international audience, he is unashamedly directing it towards a domestic public, one for whom the references and asides are immediately recognisable and require no explanation. Even with my grounding in modern Polish history, occasionally I felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation, whose nuances and references I barely grasped.

For all that, however, this is well worth a watch. Visually, it is stunning, and the characters are (on the whole) well-developed and convincing. At the end - particularly after the final scenes in which the massacres are shown - one is rather emotionally drained. But it is worth it. Serious film-making should challenge and enlighten as much as it entertains, and "Katyn" does all of those things.

Red Army cemetery in Wroclaw

2010-05-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

I spent a very enjoyable few days in Wroclaw, Poland, last week. I was there to give a couple of lectures, but I took time out to visit the Soviet Cemetery in the south of the city. I went there on a whim; I had been to Wroclaw many times and had already seen most of the sights, but had never been to the Soviet Cemetery, which was laid out after the war for those that were killed in the siege of Breslau from February to May 1945.

After visiting the various wartime cemeteries in Normandy a few years ago, it struck me that one can tell alot from a war cemetery. Very few, of course, match up to the immaculate condition maintained in British & Commonwealth Cemeteries, but it is still an interesting exercise...

The first impression is pretty positive. The cemetery is laid out on the southern edge of the city, with two T-34s and a couple of artillery pieces as gate guardians. Aside from the inevitable rash of graffiti, the lawns were all pretty well maintained, though some of the headstones themselves were rather the worse for wear. There were around 2,000 of the estimated 6,000 Soviet casualties from the siege; the graves were mostly named and were grouped around a central monument.

There were a few notable items. The grave of Alexander Nazarov, for instance, is adorned with a polished metal facade (left) and, unusually, gives his life dates. The reason for this special treatment is that Nazarov had been awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union". Nazarov died on the 7 February 1945, a few weeks short of his 19th Birthday.

There is also a memorial plaque to Soviet Air Force General Ivan Polbin, who was shot down by flak fire outside Breslau on 11 February 1945. A veteran pilot and dive-bombing specialist, Polbin had fought at Khalkin-Gol in 1939, and at Stalingrad, where he was awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union". Commander of the 2nd Guards Bomber Aviation Corps, Polbin had flown over 150 missions. He was posthumouosly awarded his second Hero of the Soviet Union.

Considering the enormous political changes that have overtaken this part of the world in the seven or so decades since the end of the World War Two, one might have expected the Soviet cemetery in Wroclaw to be rather neglected and rather forlorn. After all, the inhabitants of the city in 1945 - the opponents of those Soviet soldiers - are long gone and have been replaced by Polish civilians. Even the regime that the Red Army imported - Soviet-style communism - has been gone for over 20 years. All of which leaves these sons of the Soviet Union washed up in a foreign land, seemingly neither liberators nor conquerors, rather a footnote to a complex history.

Yet, happily, the cemetery is in good shape; Wroclaw's scouts are evidently doing a sterling job in maintaining it. Perhaps this might become one of the touchstones of the new Russo-Polish rapprochement - it would be a fitting development for a city that has done so much to smooth the often difficult relationship with Germany. Here's hoping...

2010-04-12T03:38:00.000-07:00

“The Retreat – Hitler’s First Defeat”
Michael Jones

After tackling the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad, it is perhaps inevitable that Michael Jones should turn his attention to the third of that bloody trio, the battle for Moscow.

The Retreat follows the pattern of the other two books, giving very much the view of the soldier or civilian on the ground, with the occasional admixture of wider strategic or tactical matters. It’s a recipe that works rather well. Jones has scoured the published and unpublished sources for eye-witness accounts of the battle from both sides, and these he weaves together into a tight narrative which accentuates the frenzy of battle and the horror of the aftermath.

All the scenes that the reader would expect are rendered here in searing first-hand testimony: the Germans catching sight of the gleaming domes of the Kremlin through their field-glasses before being forced to retreat; the forward sentry found frozen solid by his relief; the corpse squashed flat by countless vehicles, the prisoners dying by the thousand. No quarter was offered in the Battle for Moscow, and none was expected. Few prisoners were taken.

On the whole, Jones’ approach works very well, giving the reader a discomfiting vision of the hideous nature of the war on the Eastern Front, both sides driven on by brutal ideologies and a cycle of revenge, and assailed by a ferocious Russian winter in which temperatures plummeted to -35ºC.

If there is a complaint with the book, it is that Jones might have benefited from a more sparing approach. The material that he has gleaned is certainly powerful, but it could be used to better effect if it were occasionally held back, if the ‘gasp-moments’ were fewer and further between. As every horror film director knows, you can only shock your audience a few times; and if you try to do it too often, you are at risk of them switching off altogether.

Jones occasionally falls into this trap; hurling quote after quote at the reader – Soviet after German – seemingly in the hope that something might strike a chord. The result is not only ‘horror-fatigue’ but also a lack of context and orientation, which might echo battlefield conditions, but does little to aid clarity or reader engagement. It might seem strange to criticise a historian for having too much excellent material, but that seems to be the case. One is reminded that deciding what to leave out is all part of the creative process.

That criticism aside, “The Retreat” is a fine piece of work, which shows the horror of the Moscow campaign in all its searing detail. If war is hell, Moscow must have been its most infernal chapter, and this book is a worthy guide.

© Roger Moorhouse 2010

The curious tale of Peter the Wild Boy

2010-03-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.

After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously,‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

In the spring of 1726, after briefly escaping back to the forest, Peter was brought to London where his tale had aroused particular interest. As in Hanover, he caused a sensation and his carefree nature provided an amusing antidote to the stultifying boredom and decorum of court life. He appealed especially to Caroline, Princess of Wales, who persuaded the king to allow Peter to move to her residence in the West End, where he was kept virtually as a pet. Though he insisted on sleeping on the floor, he was dressed carefully each morning in a tailor-made suit of green and red. He was also appointed a tutor, who had him baptised and taught him to bow and kiss the hands of the ladies at court.

Peter quickly became a celebrity. On one level, tales of his antics busied the London gazettes. Jonathan Swift, whose fictional ‘Yahoos’ Peter appeared to personify, noted sourly that ‘there is scarcely talk of anything else’. He was soon the ‘talk of the town’, his portrait graced the walls of the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace and an effigy of him was erected in a waxworks on the Strand. In 1727 a premature report of his death gave rise to a mocking epitaph in the British Journal. His resemblance to Swift’s fantastical characters had clearly not been missed:

Ye Yahoos mourn, for in this Place
Lies dead the Glory of your Race,
One, who from Adam had Descent,
Yet ne’er did what he might repent;
But liv’d, unblemish’d, to fifteen,
And yet, O strange, a Court had seen,
Was solely rul’d by Nature’s Laws,
And dy’d a Martyr in her Cause!
Now reign, ye Houynhnms, for Mankind,
Have no such Peter left behind,
None like the dear departed Youth,
Renown’d for Purity and Truth,
He was your Rival, and our Boast,
For ever, ever, ever lost!

But Peter could not to live up to the popular interest invested in him and a fickle public quickly abandoned him in favour of the next unfortunate. His academic progress also failed to match his earlier promise. He was declared ‘unable to receive instruction’, despite the attentions of ‘the ablest masters’. He could say nothing beyond his own name and a garbled form of ‘King George’. By 1728, his tutor had given up his efforts and Peter was retired to the country. A home was found for him on a farm near Northchurch in Hertfordshire and a generous crown pension of £35 per annum was supplied for his upkeep. The ‘talk of the town’ became a humble farm hand.

Though still only an adolescent, Peter faded into provincial obscurity and thereafter rarely troubled the gossip columns. He developed a taste for gin and loved music, reportedly swaying and clapping with glee and dancing until he was exhausted. But he never learned to speak and his lack of any sense of direction gave cause for concern. In 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion, he was arrested as a suspected Highlander and, six years later, he wandered as far as Norwich, where he was thought to be a Spanish subversive. As a result he was fitted with a heavy leather collar bearing the inscription: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, shall be paid for their trouble.’ He finally died, aged around 72, in 1785.

Though Peter’s life is remarkable enough, what is most astounding is the sheer scale of scientific and philosophical interest that his case aroused. While wits opined that the boy might be corrupted by the sybaritic life of London high society, others saw in him an ideal test case for the nascent sciences of anthropology and psychology.

To the thinkers of the Age of Reason, Peter represented a blank slate. As humanity in its ‘raw’ state, he was what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called ‘the noble savage’, man ‘unspoilt’ by society and civilisation. He was indeed a fascinating subject, but he provoked further, disquieting, enquiry. He was undoubtedly human but, lacking speech and socialisation, could he be classed as a man? Could he have a soul? Could he possess the power of thought?

Of the numerous thinkers and writers who addressed the subject, Daniel Defoe did so with the most clarity in his pamphlet Mere Nature Delineated, published in 1726. He described Peter as an ‘object of pity’ but cast doubt on the story of his origins, dismissing it as a ‘Fib’. On the issue of Peter’s soul, he was more charitable. Possessed of the gift of laughter and thought, Peter clearly had a soul, he wrote, but its powers did not yet act within him. He was, in sum, ‘in a state of Mere Nature … a ship without a Rudder’. And it was the task of his tutors to bring him to ‘the Use of his Reason’. He deferred the final verdict on Peter, therefore, until the results of his education became apparent. If he could receive instruction – if he could be taught to heed his soul – then he would become a man. And, what was more, he would be a lesson to us all, especially, wrote Defoe, ‘those who think nobody so wise as themselves’.

Defoe wrestled manfully with the uncomfortable question that Peter posed: what was it that divided ‘us’ from ‘them’, man from the animals? Different minds arrived at different conclusions. But the habitual tidier of nature Carl Linnaeus was typical. He reassured mankind by creating a separate species of ‘wild men’ or homo ferens. Peter was still clearly an outsider – one of ‘them’.

Peter’s example was later used in numerous theories of child development, socialisation and the role of language. Many thinkers dwelt on his inability to learn to speak. The philosopher James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), whose ideas anticipated some of Darwin’s, presented him as an illustration of his theory of the evolution of language in the human species. He saw Peter as evidence that ‘man was born mute, and that articulation is altogether … a habit acquired by custom and exercise’. To others, Peter was thought to demonstrate the existence of a ‘critical window’ in which language and other skills are developed in the child. Having missed the ‘window’, Peter could never learn such skills again. Hence the apparent failure of his esteemed tutors.

Other scientists concentrated on the role of ‘socialisation’ in child development. After a childhood supposedly devoid of parental care and nurture, Peter was considered to have developed a ‘mental indifference’ and a lack of empathy, reflection and memory. In common with other feral children, it was argued, he ‘lived solely to survive’, satisfying only his base desires for food and sleep. In other interpretations, Peter’s mental shortcomings were attributed primarily to his lack of language. Having never learned to speak, it was suggested, how could he comprehend his own ‘inner voice’? How could he order and make sense of his world? The result was that he was virtually unable to display higher mental functions. He was trapped in the mind of a toddler.

The 19th-century German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) then rather spoiled the intellectual party. Examining contemporary accounts, which suggested that Peter had been tonguetied (hence his inability to speak) and had webbed fingers on one hand (a common corollary to mental impairment), he concluded that ‘the Wild Boy’ was most probably mentally retarded. If this was the case, he argued, it would help to explain Peter’s peculiar origins – a point that had also bothered Defoe.

Rather than being a genuine ‘feral child’ then, Peter was most probably abandoned, possibly only weeks before his discovery. Most importantly, however, if he had been mentally disabled, then all the noble theories of development and socialisation which relied on his example were rendered lame. The ‘noble savage’ had been a simple charity case, worthy of pity certainly, but not philosophical enquiry.

Feral children have always aroused man’s fascination. But when Peter stumbled out of the forest in 1725 he encountered a world in intellectual ferment. Inspired by the Light of Reason and the Scientific Revolution, Europe’s new secular intelligentsia was examining the world anew after centuries of obscurantism and superstition. An army of frustrated empiricists, they submitted everything and everyone to rational investigation. To them, Peter was a godsend: ‘the very Creature which the learned World have … pretended to wish for’. They pamphleteered, polemicised and pontificated. But, like their subject, they were stumbling into the unknown, often lacking the words to pose the right questions and the knowledge to interpret their observations correctly. As a mute, Peter was unable to disabuse them of their wilder conjectures and his mystery only deepened, fuelling the debate and spurring the theorists. In a sense, the philosophers of the Age of Reason had met their match. They were faced with a man who did not make sense. But, for all their theories, it did not occur to them that he could not make sense – that there was no ‘sense’ to make. As Defoe had suggested, it is quite possible that they brought ‘an Ideot upon the Stage, and made a great Something out of Nothing’.

Whatever his ailments, Peter was not forgotten by the royal court. His keep was paid by the crown for nearly 60 years through three reigns and when he died a brass tablet was erected to his memory at royal expense. But Peter was no more loquacious in death than he had been in life. He was given a prime spot in the graveyard at Northchurch, close to the south porch, and his rough-hewn stone, now shaded by an unruly dog rose, reads simply: ‘Peter the Wild Boy – 1785’.

© Roger Moorhouse 2010

(This article was first published in "History Today" April, 2010.)

2010-03-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

An item in The Times today caught my eye. A commission of German historians has concluded that the death toll from the notorious bombing of Dresden on 13th February 1945 was no more than 25,000.

This is significant in a number of respects. Firstly, it puts to bed the long-running argument about the 'morality' of the bombing, which had in turn been fuelled by the assumption that as many as 200,000 civilians died in the city that night.

The moral outrage than many felt - in some cases genuinely, and in some cases with a rather more nefarious ulterior motive - was primarily a result of that disproportionate figure. If the assumption is now that 'only' 25,000 died that night, then it rather robs the dissenters of their case.

Secondly, it is highly likely that the original figure was shamlessly inflated by the Nazis themselves, most probably by simply adding a '0' to their own casualty estimate. They certainly had a track-record of doing this. A few weeks later, a massive daylight USAAF raid on Berlin caused huge destruction and large-scale loss of life - but the Nazi authorities claimed that fully 25,000 Berliners lost their lives that day. Given that Berlin was the best defended and best-prepared city in the whole of Europe, this figure is utterly implausible. No Allied raid - even during the "Battle of Berlin" of 1943 - came even close to such a total; with most registering hundreds of deaths, rarely even thousands.

Thirdly, it is worth mentioning that 25,000 deaths that night is still an enormous figure. As the above example demonstrates, air raid death figures rarely reached even four figures. So, even the 'downgraded' Dresden death-toll should still serve to remind us of the horror of the air war.
We should remember that the 25,000 deaths reaped in a single night (or couple of nights) at Dresden represents fully half of the British civilian death toll from air attack over 6 years of warfare...

Gedenkbuch Berlin

2010-01-12T01:13:00.000-08:00

In 1995, fifty years after the demise of Hitler’s Third Reich, a long-standing research enterprise finally bore fruit. As early as the 1960s, the idea of a memorial book for the Jews of Berlin had been mooted. Finally, following the collapse of the GDR in 1989, and the granting of access to the archival materials formerly in communist possession, the volume was published. The Gedenkbuch Berlins draws on the available documentary sources to list as many as possible of those Jews deported from the German capital between 1941 and 1945, who subsequently died at the hands of the Nazis. Each entry begins with the victim’s name in bold, followed by a date and place of birth, a date and destination of ‘evacuation’ and finally a date of death. The very first entry is that of Jutta Aal, who was born in November 1860 in Bavaria and was deported to Theresienstadt in the autumn of 1942. Already 81 years-old at the time of her deportation, Jutta survived the ghetto for barely two weeks.

From that entry, the victims proceed – around 40 per page – for nearly 1,400 pages. Entire extended families are listed; children alongside parents and grandparents, the great and the good alongside the unremarkable and unexceptional. Many are listed simply as ‘declared dead’; others bear the euphemism “verschollen”, literally meaning ‘vanished’. A few are listed as “schicksal unbekannt”, ‘fate unknown’. There are 6 pages of ‘Abraham’s, 11 pages of ‘Hirsch’s, 12 pages of ‘Levy’s and 13 pages of ‘Wolff’s. The total number of victims listed is 55,696. The final entry is that of Leo Zyzman from Berlin, who was only just 16 when he was sent to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. It is a deeply moving and fitting memorial to a community annihilated.

9th November - A Day that will live in History

2009-11-09T01:40:00.000-08:00

Today - 9th November - is a very important day. As you will have seen in your morning newspaper, it is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; perhaps the most important single event in our recent history. It was 20 years ago this evening, that East German border guards stood aside for the very first time, opened the gates and border crossings and allowed the East German people to simply walk through to the west. Momentous, you would think, and rightly so.

Yet, the 9th November has had a curious resonance through German history. Not only was it the day that the Wall fell, it was also a red-letter day for the Nazis, too. The 9th November was the day in 1923 that Hitler launched his attempted coup against the Weimar Republic - the so-called Beer-Hall Putsch - which ended with his imprisonment and the virtual collapse of his movement. In later years and during the Third Reich, the 9th November then became one of the most important dates in the Nazi calendar; a day of commemorations and of solemn ceremonies across the Reich, and especially in Munich (where the original Putsch had taken place), where the Nazi martyrs were honoured.

The 9th November 1938 was also the date of the famed Reich "Kristallnacht" - the state-sponsored pogrom against Jewish homes and businesses, by which Nazi anti-Semitism first showed its teeth. Around a hundred German jews were murdered and 30,000 or so were consigned to the concentration camps. In addition, hundreds of synagogues across Germany were destroyed or desecrated.

The following year, the 9th November brought yet more momentous events. On that day in 1939 - 70 years ago today - Georg Elser made his little-known attempt to rid the world of Adolf Hitler. His bomb - planted in the Burgerbraukeller in Munich - exploded barely 13 minutes after Hitler had given a speech there. In the aftermath, 8 lay dead and around 60 were injured. Had Hitler been standing at the lectern, he would most certainly have been killed, but the speech had been cut short.

Lastly, 9th November 1918 was the day on which the German Republic was proclaimed at the end of the First World War.

Of course, this is not all mere happenstance. There is a thread running through at least some of these events. Hitler chose the anniversary of the proclamation of the (to him) hated German Republic to launch his grasp for power. Then, during the Third Reich, the commemoration of that putsch then gave Georg Elser his opportunity to seek to do away with the German dictator. The other two events - Kristallnacht and the fall of the Wall in 1989 - are the only coincidences.

So, 9th November, is a day which is central to modern German history - a day which commemorates both the best and the worst in Germany and the Germans.

Of Skulls, Suicides and Conspiracists

2009-10-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

I came to this one a bit late, I'm afraid, as I have been struggling to get my latest book finished.

Anyway... It seems Hitler is never far from the news. A couple of weeks ago the story broke that American researchers had undertaken DNA testing on the fragment of Hitler's skull - held by the Russian archives in Moscow - and had concluded that it could not belong to the German dictator as it belonged to a woman under the age of 40.

Well, blow me down.

An interesting footnote in history. In fact, this has been discussed before. When the Russian authorities put the skull on display in 2000, German historian Werner Maser said that it was not Hitler's, but was largely ignored. Indeed, when I was researching for my book "Killing Hitler", I looked into the circumstance of his death in some detail, and it struck me then that it was very strange that most informed witnesses and commentators conclude that Hitler shot himself in his right temple, yet the skull in Moscow is clearly of someone who has shot themselves through the mouth...

So, the skull fragment is not Hitler's. Big news. Or not... Given the chaos of Berlin in the spring of 1945 and the sheer number of bodies littering the streets - and even the Reich Chancellery Garden - it is hardly surprising that the skull that the NKVD men picked up was not the right one...

But this does not give the world's conspiracists free rein to spout preposterous and long-discredited theories that Hitler might have survived the battle for Berlin. He didn't. He died, by his own hand, on 30 April 1945 in his apartment in the Reich Chancellery Bunker. The precise identity of the mysterious Moscow skull doesn't change that fact...

Playing Politics with World War Two

2009-09-02T01:56:00.000-07:00

It seems that none of the major political players, gathered at Gdansk yesterday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two, could resist playing politics with the event.

Worst offender, predictably, was Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who demonstrated his nation's idiosyncratic grasp of 20th century history to full effect. He started by paying tribute to the "bravery and heroism" of the Polish people, soldiers and officers, who had been the first to "stand up to Nazism" in 1939.

So far, so uncontroversial, you might think - but think again. Aren't those the same Polish people and soldiers whose homeland was invaded by the Soviet Army on 17th September 1939 - two weeks after the Wehrmacht? The same Polish people and soldiers whom the Soviets deported in their thousands to Siberia, many of them never to return? And the same Polish officers who were murdered in cold blood by Putin's own former employers - the NKVD/KGB - and buried in the forests of Byelorussia?

As if that were not enough double-speak for one day - Putin went on. Before the assembled audience of worthies and the world's press, he condemned any collaboration with the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 as “morally unacceptable and politically and practically senseless, harmful and dangerous”. A reference, you might think, to the Nazi-Soviet Pact - even a veiled apology? No. Nothing of the sort. It is in fact a rather barbed and cynical reference to the Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934 - a rather cack-handed attempt to equate that defensive agreement with the cynical carve-up agreed between Hitler and Stalin five years later.

Given that the 'tone' had evidently been set, others followed suit. Polish President Kaczynski is never one to shirk an opinion, and he duly denounced the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 as "a stab in the back", and stated that the mass murder of Polish officers by the Soviets in 1940, at Katyn, must be treated as a war crime. He closed with a rousing "Glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all of the soldiers who fought in World War II against German Nazism, and against Bolshevik totalitarianism."

Polish Prime Minster Donald Tusk then joined in - referring to a Red Army cemetery close to his home. "Tens of thousands of young people lost their lives here", he said, "They gave their lives for liberation, but they didn't bring us freedom." He was right, of course, the arrival of the Soviet Army in 1945 certainly drove out the Nazis, but it also ushered in over 4 decades of communist rule. If he was listening, Putin would have been squirming.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was perhaps the least controversial of the three. She began by paying tribute to all those who died in a war "unleashed by Germany" and perhaps in a conscious echo of Willy Brandt in Warsaw in 1970, added that she "bowed before the victims".

Yet, Merkel too, had an axe to grind. Though she stated clearly that nothing could dilute Germany's "eternal historic responsibility" for the war, she nonetheless felt moved to remember the plight of the many millions of German refugees deported out of the historic eastern provinces after 1945. Given that they were deported from lands that were subsequently taken by Poland - and were displaced primarily by Poles - this reference was certainly not uncontroversial. This time, Kaczynski and Tusk would have been squirming.

Then she aimed a broadside at Putin, referring to Germany's good relations with her neighbours and Germany's ability to "confront" its history - an ability sadly lacking in Putin's Russia.

So, all in all, another reminder that recent history is never far below the surface in Europe. Little wonder perhaps that it was an American who famously proclaimed "The End of History" a few years ago - how very wrong he was.

On Memory, History and Human Experience

2009-07-28T05:05:00.000-07:00

The death, earlier this week, of Harry Patch, the last surviving British veteran on World War One, coming as it did so soon after the death of our other WW1 veteran Henry Allingham, set me thinking about the nature of memory and our links with the past.

Patch, of course, wrote (or had ghosted) a memoir - called "The Last Fighting Tommy" - which I confess I haven't read, but which I am sure details his experiences in the trenches. But I wonder how much he can really tell us about that most awful conflict, that we don't already know. Apart from being our last surviving 'Tommy', I thought, what can he really contribute? Surely his significance lies - to put it rather bluntly - purely in his longevity?

Well, whilst musing on this rather uncharitable thought, it occurred to me that it would not be long before we would be facing a similar situation with regard to veterans of the Second World War. After all, any 'fighting' veteran of that conflict would now be 80-years-old at the very least - well beyond the biblical allocation of "threescore years and ten". And, I well recall interviewing Lord Haig last year - about his experiences in the Italian campaign and then in Colditz - and he too passed away a couple of weeks ago at the ripe old age of 91. And, given that the Second World War it much more my patch - excuse the pun - how would I feel about seeing the last tommy of that conflict pass away?

Well, that rather alters things, for me. I have spent the last three years researching a book on the civilian experience of World War Two in the German capital, Berlin. In the process, I have interview many Berliners - civilian 'veterans' of the war - and have sought to record and contextualise their experiences. Many of them are still in rude health, a few quite astonishingly sprightly, and a few on my list sadly did not survive long enough for me to interview them.

But, the experience of interviewing them has demonstrated to me that the personal absolutely has a role to play in amongst even the most documented and investigated conflicts; personal accounts and anecdotes can always bring a fresh perspective, colour or context to even the most hackneyed and well-trodden narrative. Some purist historians are a little sniffy about this perceived 'personalisation of history' - the elevation of the personal above the political and empirical - but I think that if it is done correctly and responsibly, then it not only has a role to play in historiography, it is an absolutely essential ingredient of the narrative.

For this reason, as a historian, the death of the last British veteran of World War One, is something that we should all mourn. Our last personal, immediate contact to that, most brutal and seminally important of conflicts is now gone. I must now make a pact with myself to get hold of his memoir... Tempus fugit.

Russia - Is yesterday, tomorrow, today?

2009-07-22T01:56:00.000-07:00

After my visit to St. Petersburg last week, two news stories caught my eye. The first was the kidnap and murder of the Russian human rights activist Natalia Estimirova. Though Mr Medvedev wrings his hands in public, and expresses his 'outrage', it is barely conceivable that this heinous act did not have some element of state collaboration.

Rather less deadly, but no less worrying, was a piece in last week's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/13/russia-shuts-history-website

outlining the repressive and worryingly revisionist activities of the Russian state in attempting a rehabilitation of Stalin and Stalinism. Closing down websites and setting up FSB 'commissions' to look into historical matters are really not the way forward. Access to the archives - already severely limited for foreigners - will doubtless be cut still further. The Russian state, it seems, is intent on controlling history itself.

Human rights activists and freedom of speech are vitally necessary for the functioning of a modern democratic state. By seeking to curtail and eliminate both, Russia seems to be hell-bent on returning to the dark days of its own past. 20 years ago, the world revelled in the heady idealism of 1989 - in the liberation of Eastern Europe from the Soviet yoke. Suddenly, all that seems an awfully long time ago.

Twittering on liberty in Iran

2009-06-22T05:20:00.000-07:00

I have been fascinated this past week to see the role that the social networking site Twitter (and others) is currently playing in the crisis in Iran. It set me thinking about the wider influence of technology on our (political) lives, and how radically that influence has shifted over the last century.

Of course, it all began with the humble radio. Radio was skilfully turned into a political tool by the Nazis - it became one of the major props of the Nazi regime, under the expert and nefarious guidance of Josef Goebbels. There, a pliant media became the tame mouthpiece of the regime, but radio was by far its most influential aspect - penetrating homes through a seductive mixture of light entertainment, music and speechifying. And, of course, it should not be forgotten that it was serious crime in Nazi Germany to listen to 'foreign' broadcasters, such as the BBC.

At that time, of course, the technology was at such a stage in its development that it was readily turned to the service of the politicians and could not be turned to the purposes of subversion. That would slowly change. By the time that the communist regimes of eastern Europe fell in 1989, part of their problem was TV; technology had developed to such a level that broadcast media could no longer be 'controlled' quite so effectively, and this posed a serious challenge to the legitimacy of communism itself. The legitimacy of the communist regimes was primarily based on the sentiment that it had been the communists that had 'liberated' central and eastern Europe from fascism in 1945. This, along with the radical social and economic transformations of the early post-war years , was sufficient for most to lend the communists their (at least tacit) support.

However, by the 1970s and 1980s, the new generation was no longer so content with such arguments and began to demand more consumer goods and a better standard of living than that which they had grown up with. This in itself would probably have been manageable for the communists, were it not for the beamed images of consumer goods and wealth that could be picked up right across central Europe from the capitalist west. 'Why can't we have that too?' the East Germans, Czechs and Hungarians asked in their masses. The resulting erosion of popular legitimacy was to prove fatal for Communism as a whole. It wasn't really Ronald Reagan that killed Marx and Lenin, it was TV.

Fast forward to the early years of the 20th century and the explosion of digital media poses an almost insurmountable challenge to the remaining totalitarian and pseudo-totalitarian states of the modern world. Not for nothing is China obsessed with controlling Google and blocking out Twitter. These platforms - along with SMS messaging from mobile phones - put the advantage firmly in the hands of the people. Communication is no longer a top-down process, by which the regime preaches its 'line' and the people obey. Now it has to be a two-way process - a dialogue - and all the time, and worryingly for their rulers, the people are talking to, inspiring, and encouraging, each other. Ultimately, if the people do not like their goverments, they can easily turn these programs and technologies to the purposes of protest and revolution. State control of the media - once one of the central tenets of any self-respecting oppressive regime - is now very definitely a thing of the past, and the Ayatollahs and Party Secretaries need to wake up to the fact, fast.

It is ironic, of course, that things that are seen in the west largely as frivolous sites for bored teenagers to arrange 'social networking', could prove to be such a potent weapon in the service of democracy. Twittering, it seems, just might change the world.

Paul Ogorzow - the Nazi Serial Killer.

2009-06-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

In the autumn of 1940, Berlin was uneasy. The spectacular German victories, earlier that year, against France and Britain, had failed to ‘win’ the war, and the Nazi regime now spoke darkly of being in the ‘lull between two battles’. Labouring under the restrictions of the blackout and rationing, and enduring the horror of aerial bombing for the first time, Berliners viewed the approaching winter with considerable apprehension.

To make matters worse, it seemed that a new peril was stalking the night-time streets of the German capital. Over the previous few months, three women had been stabbed and two more assaulted in and around the eastern districts of Rummelsberg and Karlshorst. Then, in early October, the body of a young woman was discovered in the nearby suburb of Friedrichsfelde. The victim, a 20-year old mother of two, named Gerda Ditter, had been strangled and stabbed in the neck.

Soon, there were new victims. In November, a 30-year-old woman was beaten unconscious and thrown from a moving train in the south-east of Berlin, not far from the location of the previous attacks. Then, on the morning of December 4, two bodies were discovered. The first; that of 19-year-old Irmgard Frese, was found unconscious by the roadside, close to the railway lines in Karlshorst. She had suffered a fractured skull, and had been raped. The second; that of Elfriede Franke, a 26-year-old nurse, was found with fatal head injuries barely 500 metres away. She had been thrown from a moving train.

More corpses followed. 30-year-old Elisabeth Büngener was discovered on 22 December, with a fractured skull, close to the railway tracks at Rahnsdorf. A week later, the body of 46-year-old Getrud Siewert was found at Karlshorst. Like the others, she had a fractured skull and appeared to have been thrown from a train. A week after that, in early January 1941, the body of 28-year-old Hedwig Ebauer was found in similar circumstances near Wuhlheide. All three cases, the police concluded, fitted the profile of the previous attacks and the previous three murders. They were assumed to have been the work of the unknown assailant, who, police said, “threw his victims from moving trains” – the man already known to all Berlin as “the S-Bahn Murderer”.

With the German capital on tenterhooks, the killer became more sporadic in his attacks. It was to be fully five weeks after the last of the murderous spree that had filled December and early January before he struck again. However, on the night of 11 February, a woman’s body was found by the rail tracks near Rummelsburg; Johanna Voigt was 39, she had suffered horrific head injuries and had been thrown from a train.

The next – and final – victim came five months after that, in early July 1941, when the body of 35-year-old Frieda Koziol was discovered, with a fractured skull, in the same district of alleys and allotments where the first victim had been killed 10 months earlier.

That same week, however, the police got lucky. In their trawl of 5,000 railway employees, one name had kept on being mentioned. Paul Ogorzow was a 29-year old assistant signalman on the S-Bahn, who had aroused the suspicion of his colleagues because of his outspoken misogyny and his habit of jumping the perimeter fence and wandering off when on duty. Ogorzow – who had been questioned before – was arrested and questioned again: alibis were checked; forensic evidence was gathered and compared. Six days later, after an intense interrogation, he finally admitted to eight cases of murder, six cases of attempted murder and a further 31 cases of assault. The S-Bahn murderer had been caught.

Paul Ogorzow is one of history’s least-known serial killers. Apart from a single semi-fictionalised account in German, his crimes have never attracted the attention of criminologists, film-makers, journalists or historians. Yet, though the impulses that drove him were, it seems, purely sexual; his crimes nonetheless provide some important pointers, not only to the ideological prejudices of the age, but also to the very nature of everyday life in Hitler’s capital.

Given that the officers of Berlin’s serious crime unit – the Kriminalpolizei, or ‘Kripo’ – did finally get their man, it may seem churlish to criticise their investigation. But, when one considers that Ogorzow worked for the railways, was known to the police, and that fully four of his eight victims were found within a kilometre of his home, it seems astonishing that it took 10 months – and eight murders – before he was caught.

In mitigation, it should be pointed out that the Kripo faced a number of substantial obstacles in investigating Ogorzow’s crimes. The first was that Berlin’s political masters were unwilling to publicise the murders for fear of fostering panic and negative headlines, so only the bare essentials of each case were allowed into the public domain. A vital source of potential intelligence was thereby sacrificed.

More seriously, there was the blackout, whose restrictions had proved a boon for Berlin’s criminals and a nightmare for its policemen. The upsurge of crime during the blackout was so serious, indeed, that a special police unit was established to combat it. Ogorzow, too, exploited the darkness; stalking his victims and escaping with ease under cover of night. Indeed, even when he was challenged by Kripo officers on one occasion, he was able to abscond into the shadows.

The Kripo was also hindered by the sheer number of corpses that it had to process. Accidental deaths on the railways during the blackout were actually a shockingly common occurrence. In December 1940, for instance, as the Kripo investigation was getting under way, there were 28 deaths registered on the capital’s railways – almost one victim for every day of the month. The vast majority of these were directly attributed to the blackout, being caused by people unwittingly stepping off platforms in the darkness, or being hit by speeding trains whilst crossing unlit tracks and sidings.

The Kripo investigators, therefore, were not only hampered by the fact that their suspect was operating under cover of night, they also found it hard to sift accidental deaths on the railways, or even suicides, from those that might feasibly be considered as murders. The blackout, it seemed, was obstructing them at every turn.

In addition to such hindrances, of course, the Kripo also laboured under a number of prejudices and preconceptions; some broadly German in nature, others more specifically Nazi. The first of these was the inordinate amount of trust invested in anyone wearing a uniform and occupying an official or even semi-official position. This was to prove decisive. Although the victim of one of Ogorzow’s early assaults recalled that her assailant was wearing the overcoat of the German Railways, it does not seem to have occurred to the Kripo until much later that the murderer might actually be an employee of the rail network.

Instead, the Kripo investigators allowed the racial and political prejudices of the time to direct their assessment of who might, or might not, be a suspect. One officer, for instance, suggested that the assailant might be a Jew, explaining himself with the spurious contention that large numbers of Jews were then working on German Railways. Another speculated that the killer might be a British agent.

Others concluded – rather more plausibly – that their suspect might be a foreign labourer. Berlin in the autumn of 1940 was awash with foreign labourers, shipped in – usually against their will – to meet the manpower demands of the city’s industrial and commercial sectors. Not only were Italian, French and Polish labourers a common sight in the factories of the area, therefore, but at nearby Wuhlheide – where one of Ogorzow’s victims had been found – there was also an Arbeitserziehungslager; a concentration camp for foreign workers who had committed offences. It did not take an enormous leap of imagination for the Kripo to conclude that one of those countless labourers might be their culprit. As a result, foreign labourers’ camps were placed under a nightly curfew, requests for information were distributed, and extensive and time-consuming checks were made on the foreign personnel working for the railway.

Indeed, such was the Kripo’s ideological and racial myopia that even when Ogorzow was within their grasp, they seem to have been unable to consider him seriously as a suspect. Rather, he appears to have impressed them. Confident and coherent, he was described as “assiduous and industrious, happily married with two children.” A Nazi Party and SA member to boot, he ticked all their boxes as a solid, upstanding member of German society. As a result, the investigation against him was initially suspended.

Even Ogorzow’s confession betrayed a flavour of the twisted times in which he lived. Firstly, it appears that he had believed that he would be protected from prosecution by a childhood friend who held an officer’s rank in the SS. More sinister still, Ogorzow even claimed that his murderous behaviour had only begun following an unconventional treatment for gonorrhoea carried out on him by a Jewish doctor. Such crude attempts to chime with the zeitgeist, however, cut little ice with the Kripo or with the prosecutors of the Nazi court. Ogorzow was described at his trial as “a killer of a completely cold and calculating nature, who ruthlessly exploited the blackout to satisfy his depraved sexual urges.” No mention was made, by the way, of the bungled Kripo investigation.

By the end of the very same month in which he had committed his last murder, Paul Ogorzow had been tried, convicted and executed by guillotine in Plötzensee prison. Justice, it seemed, had been done. With hindsight, however, it is not hard to conclude that justice might have been done a lot sooner had Hitler’s policemen not been hampered by the exigencies of war, and so grievously blinkered by the prejudices of the Nazi ‘world-view’.

(This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine)

1989 - It began in Poland

2009-06-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

Last week The Times carried a supplement devoted to the Polish role in spearheading the protest against communist rule in eastern Europe.

It was, the paper reminded us, on June 4th 1989 that the ruling communist party held elections in Poland, in which they had (foolishly) agreed to allow some representation of the Solidarity-led opposition. Predictably, in every constituency in which it was permitted to field a candidate, Solidarity won, forcing the ruling communists (both in Warsaw and in Moscow) to radically rethink their concept of the one-party state. Lech Walesa (pictured above) had forced the first breach in the Iron Curtain.

Of course, for most of us, the fall of communism is synonymous with the dramatic events in Berlin five months later, when the Berlin Wall fell and thereby seemed to usher in a winter in which each and every one of the communist regimes of eastern Europe (with the exception of Albania) collapsed, to be succeeded by the often painful, but no less euphoric, transition to liberal democracy - a transition that, for some, is still going on.

This year sees the 20th anniversary of those momentous events - events that changed the face of Europe, brought the Cold War to an end, and finally drew a line under the post-war division of Europe. It is absolutely right and proper that those events should be celebrated, commemorated and generally shouted from the roof-tops. In the cynical, anodyne age in which we find ourselves, 1989 should be a lesson in the vital importance of politics, and in the power of people to change their world for the better.

Yet, in remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall, let us not forget where it was that the liberation of eastern Europe began - Poland. It was in Poland that Solidarity had provided the first home-grown political challenge to communism, and it was in Poland that the first chink in the communists' armour appeared.

Zaczelo sie w Polsce - It began in Poland

Germans are proud again - and a good thing too.

2009-05-21T03:29:00.000-07:00

So, the Daily Mail tells us that the Germans are no longer ashamed of themselves and are now proud of their country.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1184220/Just-dont-mention-Hitler-Young-Germans-learn-fall-love-country-again.html

Even since I lived in Germany in the mid 1990s, I have always been stunned by the capacity of the German people - even those born long after the war and with no personal reason for guilt - to readily assume the burdens of earlier generations. Of course, it was drilled into them, at school and elsewhere - that overwhelming sense of collective guilt - they were presented with the Holocaust, with German war crimes, German blockheadedness and German cruelty at every turn. Not only domestically, also internationally, the Germans were constantly reminded of the crimes of their forefathers - with the Daily Mail, unsurprisingly, in the vanguard.

Unsurprising, therefore, that - for all its achievements - Germany never wrapped itself in the flag, or proclaimed a simple pride in itself. What nation in the world could have resisted such an onslaught?

Of course, it is right and proper that the German people should be reminded of their own history and of the bestial crimes committed by their forebears, but when it gets to the point that this sense of guilt transcends the generations and turns into an ongoing national sense of shame - then it has gone too far.

Thankfully, as this new survey seems to show - the German people have now shed their hair shirt. They have troops in Afghanistan, they are a full and vital member of the EU, and they are lobbying to join the UN Security Council.

There are many reasons for this. On the simplest level, the passage of time has healed many a national would, and for most of the younger generation the Third Reich is (as for the rest of us) nothing more than a fascinating period of history. But there are other reasons. Reunification, for one thing, removed one of the longest post-war political hangovers. As did the end of the Cold War. It was an unusual, but heartening, sight to see young Germans enthusiastically waving theit national flag at the World Cup in 2006.

In short, Germany has achieved what social scientists call "normalisation".

About time, too.

Christa Schroeder - "He Was My Chief"

2009-05-13T00:23:00.001-07:00

I received my advance copy of Christa Schroeder's memoir: He Was My Chief, yesterday. Its a fascinating book.

Schroeder was the most senior of Hitler's four secretaries. She had been with him from before 1933 and stayed right up to the grim end in the bunker in Berlin in 1945, and was one of the very few Germans who had the opportunity to observe Hitler close up and to chart his physical decline over the war years. As a result, she is one of the best eye-witnesses of the period, and her memoir is full of fascinating anecdotes and observations.

It was first published in Germany in the 1980s, but for some reason no English-language edition was produced until the current one. Frontline books, therefore, are to be congratulated on a real coup. I am sure that the book will be a great success.

http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/?product_id=1895

http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-My-Chief-Secretary/dp/1848325363/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242199878&sr=8-1

A 'Piece of Paper' ....

2009-05-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting outing this week, to the Imperial War Museum, to take a look at the original 'piece of paper' waved by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from a meeting with Hitler in the autumn of 1938.

I had been asked to answer a reader's query for the BBC History Magazine about the 'piece of paper', and although I could easily have written the answer from the comfort of my desk, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see a genuine historic artefact, so I arranged to visit the Museum's archive so that I could view the document in person.

It did not disappoint. A single sheet of paper, with a government crest embossed at its head, it contains some 120 words or so, neatly typed in three paragraphs, which outline the importance of Anglo-German relations, the common resolve of both Chamberlain and Hitler that their two nations should "never go to war with one another again", and the intention that all future disagreements were to be settled by negotiation. Beneath the text, were two signatures, both now turning rather brown.

The first is Hitler's, distinctive with its anomalous vertical lines and a surname that seems to tail off to the bottom-right hand corner of the page. Interestingly, the text is still of a good size. It would deteriorate to a tiny scrawl as Hitler's myopia progressed later in the war. The second signature, that of Chamberlain, is altogether more conventional. Beneath the two, to the left side, there is a hand-written date 'September 30, 1938'.

Curiously, the document was sent direct to the Imperial War Museum in January 1940 - thereby avoiding the usual fate of all government documents, which are filed internally and then sent to the National Archive at Kew, only to be made public after 30 years. It seems that this special treatment came about because the significance of the document was immediately apparent. By January 1940, of course, Britain was once again at war with Germany, and Chamberlain's much-vaunted accord with Hitler was very much a dead letter. The note that accompanied the 'piece of paper' to the Museum alluded to this awareness, stating that whilst the document “seemed of the highest significance then … its implications are now ironical.”

The 'piece of paper' was then put on display, and remained on view until the early 1990s, when fears about its apparent deterioration caused it to be replaced by a facsimile copy. The original was then consigned to a temperature-controlled strong room within the Museum's archive.

I can't say there was any particular 'frisson' about holding the item, but it was still very exciting to have a document in my hands that was once the focus of such tremendous hope, and then of so much disappointment and despair. It also made me rather sorry that the age of such momentous papers and letters has now passed, to be replaced by the more erasable and transient medium of the email. It is highly doubtful if our descendants - 70 years from now - will see the original documentation from the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, or of Afghanistan, or indeed of many of the seminal events of our time. And that makes me rather sad - not only because the historical record will be lacking, but also because no-one will have the opportunity to hold those documents, study the signatures and enjoy the moment.

Hooray for England and St George.

2009-04-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

I spent a very enjoyable afternoon, yesterday, lying in the bright spring sunshine at RAF Halton, whilst the children of Buckinghamshire cubs and scouts attended a service for St George's Day.

There has been much guff about St George's Day this year - and rightly so - many seeking to reclaim the flag from the extremists of the BNP, others calling for a rather more fervent and heartfelt celebration of our national day, more in line with those marked by the Scots, the Welsh and, of course, the Irish.

I can only add my voice to that chorus. It struck me yesterday that we spend so long nowadays, teaching our kids all sorts of multi-cultural, politically-correct stuff about Diwali and Ramadan and Chinese New Year, that we neglect (I hesitate to say "deliberately" - but the suspicion is there) to teach the basics of who 'we' are. After all, isn't identity all the more important when we are living in a multi-cultural world?

For that reason, I selflessly passed up an afternoon of arduous gardening to drag the kids along to the St George's Day parade and service. Hooray for England and St George!

Interview with Adolf Burger, an Auschwitz survivor and a veteran of the largest forgery operation in history - Operation Bernhard.

2009-03-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

I was given the opportunity to interview Adolf Burger, last week, during his visit to London. Burger survived Auschwitz before being transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1944. There, he was involved in Operation Bernhard - the top secret plan to forge millions of pounds worth of sterling and US dollars.

The 91-year old was in the capital last week to publicise the English edition of his memoir: The Devil's Workshop, and to visit the Bank of England, where he was presented with one of the very notes that he forged over 60 years ago.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5805195.ece

In my interview - which is transcribed below - I began by asking Mr Burger his reasons for writing the book:

Adolf Burger I have written quite a few books; the first one appeared in August 1945 in Prague, it was very thin, with only six photos that I had taken myself after the liberation in Ebensee. Then, later, I was working as a journalist and had collected over 200 documents and photos on this subject from across Europe, so I decided to write this book. When one reads a book, I think one must also see the images and documents from the time. Otherwise, if one reads, and one doesn’t see the pictures and documents then one does not believe that it is true.

Roger Moorhouse So was the book written, in some way, as proof of your story?

AB No. I don’t have to prove anything. I wanted to show people what the Nazis were capable of, and what the [Slovak fascist] Hlinka Guard was capable of. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I have achieved.

RM You were arrested and sent to Auschwitz in May 1942. Can you briefly describe how you came to Auschwitz, what you did there and what the conditions were like?

AB I was arrested because I was printing forged baptismal certificates for Slovak Jews. The Gestapo then arrested me, and my wife, and we were first sent to Zilina, where about 1,000 Jews were held. Then we were put into a train by the Hlinka Guard and were taken to the German border, where we were handed over to the SS. We ended our journey at Auschwitz.

RM And you had no idea, no suspicion, of what might happen to you there?

AB No, of course not. No-one knew. They didn’t even know about it in Switzerland. My brother in Israel managed to get them to send me a certificate granting me emigration to Israel, and the Swiss sent it to Birkenau! So the organisation in Switzerland didn’t even know what Auschwitz and Birkenau was. No-one did.

RM How was it then that you came to leave Birkenau?

AB Birkenau was hell. I worked on the ramp there, and had seen every day how 3,000 people would arrive by train and would disappear into the gas chambers.
But one day at roll call, they called out six names – all typographers. They had a card index of the prisoners and so they knew what we had done before arriving in the camp. So, then I had to go and see the camp commandant, an SS-Sturmbannführer. He confirmed my name and that I had been a typographer, and then told me that I would travel to Berlin as a free man and work in a library. All lies. So, the next day, they called the six names again, six printers, and we were put into quarantine for four weeks as they were so afraid of typhus. After that, six SS officers came down from Berlin, from the Sicherheitsdienst, and they accompanied us to the train – but it was not a freight car, it was a passenger train – and they took us to Berlin and then to Sachsenhausen.

RM So, from your time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, you knew full-well what was going on there. And then you were sent to Sachsenhausen. Was that not some sort of miracle for you?

AB No. I didn’t see it as a miracle at all. People were moved around the camps – transferred here and there all the time. And I didn’t believe them anyway – they said I would go as a free man, and would work in Berlin in a library; it was all lies. I arrived in Sachsenhausen and was put into blocks 18 and 19 [the forgery workshops] – all separated off with barbed wire, windows whitewashed, top secret, no-one knew what went on in there. The other 100,000 prisoners in Sachsenhausen were not allowed to even set eyes on us. When we went to the shower block on Sundays, for example, the whole camp was shut down – strict curfew, everybody confined to barracks – no prisoners, no SS-men, nobody was allowed to see us. And if anyone did see us they would be shot.

RM So, your two blocks were completely isolated within the camp, but did you nonetheless hear about what was going on elsewhere – outside in the camp itself, or the general progress of the war?

AB We had a radio in our two blocks, so we listened to the radio in the evening – the news, reports from the front and so on – but we were completely cut off from the camp, we did not even see the faces of the other prisoners, so we heard nothing from them.

RM What were conditions like for you in the camp?

AB I always said I was a dead man on holiday – a dead man on holiday. We never believed that we would get out of there. But in the block we had everything – food, white sheets on the beds – each one of us had his own bed; not like in Birkenau, where six of us slept under a single lice-ridden blanket. Also, the SS guards never shouted at us, I used to play table-tennis with them.
But we knew that we were dead men on holiday. We knew that there was no way out when we knew a secret such as this – that the Nazis were printing millions in forgeries – and we were sealed away inside a concentration camp, where no-one could see us. We knew that we would not get out alive.

RM And what was your role within the forgery operation?

AB I was a printer, and I printed £132 million!

RM And what did you think about your work there?

AB I didn’t think. I was in a concentration camp and I was ordered to do it. Print the money, so I printed it. If I hadn’t done it they would have shot me. We had no “feelings”, we didn’t think about it.

RM In the film that is based on your memoir, The Counterfeiters, there are a number of scenes where there is conflict between the prisoners about the morality of forging money for the Nazis. What was the reality?

AB It’s just a film. There were no discussions of morality. We were in a concentration camp – we were scarcely in a position to sabotage anything. Sure you could sabotage, if you wanted to get killed! Jacobson [one of the prisoners] tried to delay the dollar production, but he managed for only 4 weeks, then [SS-Sturmbannführer] Kruger came and said ‘make the dollars within 3 weeks or we will have you shot’, and that was the end of it. Two weeks later, we had made the dollar. You have to understand that we were in a concentration camp – we had one foot already in the grave.

RM Can you describe some of the characters within the forger group – Smolianoff for example?

AB Smolianoff was my best friend. He was a professional forger, the only professional forger in the group, by the way. He had already been imprisoned for four years for forging. And he wanted to prove to Kruger that we could do it.

RM Can you also describe SS-Sturmbannführer Kruger, who headed the operation?

AB He was an SS officer. He wanted the job to be done, nothing else.

RM After the war, some of the forgers from your group testified for Kruger at his trial. How do you explain that?

AB Some of them. The German prisoners. The German prisoners said that he was a good man. They didn’t invite me to the court. In the two trials in which I participated, the defendants got life. If they had asked me I would have told them that he was a murderer, that he had six people shot. Of course, he let us play cards and table tennis, but that was all only in his interest, so that the printing machines would run and that the job would be done.

RM You survived both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen. Did you have a particular survival-strategy, or was it just pure chance?

AB No. You could not have any sort of strategy in those places. It was impossible. What saved me was that I was needed as a typographer, and then that the Nazis decided to move everything – the machinery and the personnel – to Austria at the end of the war, where I was then liberated by the Americans, who arrived so quickly that the Nazis all ran away. The thing [that saved me] was that I was a printer. If I had not been a printer then I would never have got out of Auschwitz-Birkenau and I would not have survived.

RM What would you say – as a survivor of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen – to those who still deny that the Holocaust took place?

AB They are fascists. They are Nazis. Could be an Englishman, an American, whatever, but if they say that then they are Nazis. That ideology is a Nazi ideology.

RM When you think back on that terrible time, is there one particular memory, person or image that springs to mind first of all?

AB No. Every day was the same. From the day that I was arrested, nothing was better or worse, it was always the same. Always the SS behind me, the ever-present threat of being shot, you had to work – that was my existence.

Adolf Burger's memoir The Devil's Workshop is published by Frontline Books.

http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/?product_id=1828

... and there is a Radio 4 programme about the subject, called The Counterfeiter's Tale, to the broadcast at 11.00 a.m., on 13th March, 2009.

Of White Horses and Horsesh*t...

2009-02-27T04:32:00.000-08:00

I know I'm a bit late coming to this one, but its been bothering me a bit recently.

It seems the authorities have seen fit to commission a 50 metre statue of a white horse (as shown here) to adorn the Kent countryside and the south-eastern approaches to London. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7880889.stm

Now, I am a big fan of public art and statues in our public spaces. They can help to anchor our sense of identity, telling the world (and ourselves) who we think we are, where we think we have come from, what we think is important. In this capacity, public art can be hugely beneficial to society at large, but it can also betray our shortcomings, our misconceptions and our folly.

Sadly, this Kentish white horse falls into the latter category.

There are any number of reasons to criticise it. Firstly - like much modern art - it is spectacularly uninspiring; and seems to seek to make up for its lack of any interesting, or inspirational features merely by being gigantic - a preposterous 49 metres high.

Secondly, it is utterly devoid of any content or deeper significance. Various talking heads (including the sculpter no doubt) have waffled on about how central horses are to our culture and that a horse is even the symbol of Kent. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The symbol of Kent is the Invicta - a prancing horse - with all the vitality, strength and vigour that that implies. This sad supine nag, in comparison - appears to be fit for little but the glue factory.

This echoing emptyness at the heart of the project, is - I think - the main problem, and it is this that speaks volumes about modern Britain. This Kentish horse is a bizarre hybrid - the product of arrogance mated with cowardice, bombast married to fear. It is the product of a ruling liberal elite that - like an ancient potentate or megalomaniacal dictator - wants to paint its name in the sky, celebrate itself for all to see. And yet, for all its bold impulses, that same liberal elite does not know what it actually stands for, and is afraid to do anything that might be considered in any way divisive, exclusive or controversial.

So, the end result is that they choose something that is so anodyne, so utterly devoid of any meaning or significance that it cannot possibly offend anyone. Its the application of the 'lowest-common-denominator' to our public art, and its a sad indictment of where we are as a nation. it screams that we have forgotten who we are, forgotten what we stand for and forgotten what is dear to us.

Those visitors and tourists approaching London through the beautiful Kent countryside will, I reckon, not be impressed by the Horse - rather their impression of its significance will probably be similar to the vista that will greet them - a horse's arse.

"Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past" by Neil Gregor

2009-02-16T02:58:00.001-08:00

"Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past" by Neil Gregor

The Third Reich hangs over Nuremberg like a bad smell. Not only did the city play host to the annual Nazi Party rallies of the 1930s, and the post-war trials of senior Nazis, it was also chosen as the venue for the publication of the ‘Nuremberg Race Laws’ of 1935; the legislation which began the persecution of German Jewry and prepared the way for the Holocaust. Even modern-day Nuremberg – a vibrant, democratic city – finds it hard to escape Hitler’s toxic embrace. Many of the old Nazi sites, for instance, remain to this day; too grandiose to be of use, too expensive to demolish.

For all its Nazi associations, however, Nuremberg’s experience of World War Two was actually rather typical for a middle-ranking German city. This combination of factors has led historian Neil Gregor to take Nuremberg as a case study to examine the complex way in which post-war German society has dealt with the fraught issues of memory, victimhood and guilt. The result, Haunted City, is a fascinating glimpse into the dark recesses of the German psyche.

Examining the period up to 1968, Gregor contends that for the first decade or so after 1945, the wounds and divisions within German society were so fresh and so raw, that only a vague, emollient culture of shared victimhood was possible. Before they could think about what they had done to others, it seems, Germans had first to tend their own wounds. As a result, German ‘memory culture’ initially had a rather self-pitying, narcissistic flavour; tending to concentrate much more on Germany’s own suffering – embracing civilian and military deaths, for instance, and bemoaning the fate of expellees, refugees and POWs, whilst marginalising all those ‘genuine’ victims of Nazism, such as Jews, communists and forced labourers.

Gregor brilliantly illustrates his point with the example of a bell-tower erected in Nuremberg in the 1950s to the memory of the city’s civilian dead of World War Two. In all the wrangling over the precise wording and design of the monument, it seems no-one saw fit to question the fact that the tower was built using stones from the city’s synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. A less sensitive approach to the public commemoration of the war would be hard to imagine.

Thankfully, matters did improve. By the early 1960s, a new memory culture was beginning to challenge the old; offering engagement and dialogue where once had been avoidance and an uneasy silence. Though by no means uncontested, this change was a result of many factors, amongst them the generational shift, the ongoing social liberalisation and the re-emergence of civil society in Germany. With the firm establishment of a mature, pluralist democracy, it seems, the opinion formers of Nuremberg were able to move on from the tactical amnesia of ‘German victimhood’ towards a more self-critical – even confrontational – attitude towards their recent past. In time, therefore, public exhibitions on the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto would take their place alongside the traditional commemorations, such as the “Day of National Mourning”.

The study is brought to a close with a rather illuminating episode. In the late 1960s, the right-wing, neo-nationalist NPD was becoming a regular feature in Nuremberg politics; making deliberate, symbolic use of the city’s Nazi sites. In 1967, however, after angry demonstrations from trade unionists, students and victims of fascism, the party was denied the right to use the city’s main congress hall for a local election rally. Nuremberg, which had once been so synonymous with the Nazis, had succeeded in driving out Nazism’s ideological descendants.

In his conclusions, Gregor is admirably fair. The early narcissistic phase, he suggests – far from being malevolent or born of mean-spiritedness – was actually an important part of the healing process; providing a soothing common identity to bridge the divisions of a deeply fractured society. Similarly, he argues that the later critical engagement with the past was symptomatic of post-war German society’s recovering health.

In describing these developments, Gregor is a thoughtful and surefooted guide, relying on solid archival research, marshalling his facts well and remaining cogent in his arguments. As a respected and award-winning academic, he makes few concessions in his writing for the lay reader, yet he manages – occasional lapses notwithstanding – to present his sometimes challenging subject matter in a style that should appeal beyond his core audience.

Haunted City is not always an easy read, therefore, but it is nonetheless an important book. It investigates the difficult process of acknowledging and remembering the suffering of the past – that endured by one’s own people and that inflicted on others – and offers vital insights into the complex function of ‘public memory’, and the ways in which new narratives and new identities are forged. It should serve as a useful guide to the still-ticklish problems faced by those modern societies that are making the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy.

"Hitler's Private Library" by Timothy Ryback

2009-02-05T08:59:00.001-08:00

"Hitler's Private Library"
by Timothy Ryback

of books and men ...

I was most interested by this publication. So much so that I actively (and vainly) tried to secure a review for it (I usually let the lit eds suggest titles to me)...

It is a curious subject, and it is one which is based on two ideas. The first is the strange fascination that anyone conscious of history would have in reading or handling one of Adolf Hitler's own books. I have had a similar experience in the National Archives in London, where I have handled original documents signed by Winston Churchill (a scrawled and interlinked WSC, if you are interested). One gets a tremendous buzz from it, I can tell you.

In Ryback's example, he is not above milking this particular thrill. He speaks repeatedly about Hitler's marginal notes, lines and exclamation marks, and most spectacularly, he claims that in one instance, he opened one of Hitler's books and a black, inch-long mustache hair fell out into his lap. This, however, though momentarily thrilling, is a bit of a one-trick-pony - it needs something more substantial to make the book work.

He finds his second raison d'écrire in the more cerebral - and indeed more tenuous - idea that one can read something into the individual by looking at his library. There are some problems with this. For one thing, marginalia can betray alot of things, but do they make the man? I think not and would indeed be horrified if someone - decades hence - tried to draw conclusions about me by looking at the volumes and marginal notes from my library. For another, Ryback only had access to a fraction of the estimated 16,000 books that Hitler was said to have owned - his conclusions surely can only be similarly fragmentary.

Yet, those caveats aside, Ryback's book is interesting. It is clearly meticulously researched and is well written. He ranges chronologically, taking a single volume of the library on which to hang each chapter, and through which to relate each episode of Hitler's life. He makes a number of enlightening diversions, and draws conclusions that are sensible and interesting, though hardly earth-shattering.

Hitler - Ryback tells us - was a voracious reader, often consuming a book a night. Moreover, he concludes that Hitler was not someone who allowed books to influence him unduly - rather, he took from his reading those facts and arguments that served to bolster and complement his existing opinions and prejudices. A good point perhaps, but hardly revolutionary, hardly rewriting history. And, if one recalls that most teachers and social workers read The Guardian and most former Brigadiers take The Daily Telegraph, one might concede that this is actually a more common failing than many of us would care to admit.

"Hitler's Private Library" is an engaging read, therefore, but it is based on some pretty thin foundations; both philosophically and materially. Ryback has done well to spin a book out of that meagre fare, but he sadly struggles to say much of any value or insight in the process.

The Road to Hell

2009-01-29T01:13:00.000-08:00

"And all the roads jam up with credit
But there's nothing you can do
It's all just bits of paper
Flying away from you
...
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road to hell"

Chris Rea called it right - way back in 1989.

Now we are told that the recession will hit the UK harder than other developed countries. I am sure Gordon and his crowd will react with concerned faces, and repeat their mantra that - under 'prudent' Gordon's guidance - we are best placed to get out of this predicament. We just need to restore consumer confidence, get everyone spending again, and all will be well.

Now, I don't claim to understand economics - I not sure even those that claim to understand economics actually understand economics, but that's another story - but I have a problem with the logic of this 'rescue plan'. After all, wasn't it excessive credit and wanton spending that got us into this mess? So, now they are telling us that the banks should start lending again and that we should spend our way out of trouble??

If you'll forgive the rather tenuous historical link, this sounds to me a bit like Hitler's exhortations to the German to 'fight on' until the 'final victory' is secured. The thoughtful Germans amongst them might have reasoned that it was the fighting that had got them into the mess they were in - fighting on was surely NOT what was required.

Anyhow. It strikes me that it should come as no surprise that the UK will suffer more than most - after all, for the last decade or so, the two major props of the British economy have been 'financial services' and conspicuous consumer consumption. We don't really "make" anything any more, as the brutal logic of the marketplace holds that Chinese peasants and Indian child labourers can make whatever it is cheaper, so its not economically viable for us to bother. So, if those two pillars of the British economy are removed - the first hideously discredited, the second finally shown up for its utter unsustainability - then there is precious little left.

And yet - our esteemed leaders are urging us simply to carry on as if the financial world had not just imploded, and everything will be fine. "Imagine its 2007, Britons, and all will be well again."

I beg to differ. I think this should be a watershed. We need to appreciate - once and for all - that our socio-economic system cannot be predicated on some spurious notion of perpetual growth; that the 'global market' is not infallible, that the earth's resources are most-definitely finite, and that the economic model that we have lived with in Britain for the last decade at least has been thoroughly discredited. More of the same, and we really will be on the Road to Hell.

I don't know how it is to be done - but, Capitalism itself needs to be reinvented.

"Valkyrie" - A Historian's Review

2009-01-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

"Valkyrie", Tom Cruise, History vs Entertainment...

Well, the drama surrounding the film has finally come to an end. We can stop speculating, the media can stop their petty sniping, and the talking heads can stop their carping - the film is out and we can all go and see it and make our own minds up.

I have to say it was with some trepidation that I walked into a press screening of "Valkyrie" last week. Though I dearly wanted the film to be good, I was prepared for it to be less than that.

Yet, as I watched, I kept waiting for the moment when my historian's sensibilities would be mortally offended; when I would see history being traduced for the sake of 'entertainment', when I would involuntarily 'tut', shake my head disappointedly and make for the door. Except it didn't come...

From a strict historian's point of view, at least, the film has little to complain about. The story has not been slaughtered on the altar of cinema, sacrificed to dumbed-down film-making... Whisper it quietly - but historically-speaking - "Valkyrie" is pretty good.

Sure, there are some mistakes - the SS HQ in the film was preposterous, what's wrong with Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, anyway!? - and it was Schlabrendorff who retrieved the brandy-bottle bomb, not Tresckow - and there was some inevitable straigtening of the complex narrative for the sake of simplicity - but overall, there was really nothing much for this historian to get upset about.

Surprisingly, though, the film's shortcomings lay rather in the story-telling, the characterisation and the suspense - indeed, in the very things that most people would have assumed would have been the strong suits from a team such as Tom Cruise and director Bryan Singer.

In my opinion, Stauffenberg's character was far too one-dimensional, without much explanation of the development of his 'treason' or his motives for it. His vacillating co-conspirators were much better portrayed - mostly by a cohort of British actors; Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy - but they sadly could not infect Cruise with any of their depth, nuance or characterisation.

Also, the film sagged a bit in the middle sections - not only in the run up to the attempt, but also in the rather overlong period thereafter, which was (understandably perhaps) squeezed for every bit of dramatic tension, but fundamentally failed to deliver. Stauffenberg's 'love interest', too - the exquisite Carice van Houten as Nina - was rather a cul-de-sac, a side-story tagged on perhaps to dilute the overwhelming whiff of cordite, treachery and testosterone.

On the whole, "Valkyrie" is a solid 3 stars; its worth a watch, and is good entertainment, but maybe not quite good enough to silence the critics. It is also surprising, perhaps, to conclude that history was not the primary casualty of this particular assassination attempt, rather it was the film-makers art that proved to be the weakest link ... the malfunctioning fuse ... the oak table leg...

By the way - if you want some further reading on this subject, I would suggest, my book, "Killing Hitler" -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Hitler-Third-Against-Fuhrer/dp/1844133222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226484998&sr=1-1

And the new book by my friend and colleague, Nigel Jones, "Countdown to Valkyrie" -

http://pen-and-sword.co.uk/?product_id=1674

"Defiance" - a historian's review

2009-01-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

"Defiance" - "Our revenge is to live"

I had the honour of attending the European Premiere of "Defiance" last night in London's Leicester Square.

Daniel Craig's new film casts him as a fugitive Jew in 1941-42 in the forests of Byelorussia - the eldest of the famed Bielski brothers.

Alongside Tuvia Bielski (Craig), are the sullen and combative Jus (Liev Schreiber), the wide-eyed Asoel (Jamie Bell) and the young Aron (George MacKay). The four brothers leave their village after their family farm is ransacked and their parents are murdered by Byelorussian auxiliaries of the Nazis. Fleeing to the nearby forest, they embark on an odyssey in which many hundreds of Jews would be saved from the grim fate that Hitler had in store for them. It is, quite simply, one of the most remarkable stories of the Holocaust.

Hollywood has an uneasy relationship with history. Of course, historical dramas such as this make up much of its primary material, and the magic words "based on a true story", bestow instant kudos on many a film. Yet, the needs of the film-maker - clear moral messages, simple narratives, defined heroes and villains - are not always congruent with the complex and often messy and confusing realities of history.

One of my most common gripes with Hollywood representations of history, therefore, is that many film-makers feel that they need to dumb down to reach their audience, what you might call "lowest-common denominator film making". In the process, complex narratives are simplified beyond all recognition, characters are rendered two-dimensional, and foreign accents and (worst of all) subtitles are avoided like the plague. In such examples History - far from being the inspiration and the guiding light - becomes a whore to be used, abused and discarded when inconvenient.

I am delighted to say that "Defiance" does NOT fall into this category.

Though I have seen online that the film has come in for some occasionally vicious criticism - primarily from the afficionados of "whizz-Bang" film-making - for its supposed lack of 'action', I thought the film supremely well made. It was well-paced, well-told, and well-acted. Daniel Craig, sure, is a bit of a brooding one-trick-pony, but he played the lead tolerably well. Liev Schreiber, on the other hand, was a revelation, bringing just the right amount of menace and cussedness to his role as the bloodthirsty Jus.

Also, the predicament of the Bielskis was well drawn. Stuck between the horror of the Nazis and the equally repugnant (and anti-Semitic) forces of the Soviet partisan movement, the Bielskis were truly stuck between a murderous rock and an at best indifferent hard place.

In this regard, there is a whiff of historical controversy about the film - surrounding the alleged complicity of the Bielskis in the massacre of Polish peasants at Naliboki. This subject, naturally, is not dealt with in the film. Moreover, one criticism would be that the whole issue of the difficult relationship between the Bielskis and the local peasantry was rather skated over, being dealt with in one scene and not revisited. In fact, the Bielskis were almost entirely dependant on the local peasants for their food, and did not stop short of terrorising them - and even murdering them - into compliance.

Beyond that complaint - the film ticked all the necessary boxes. The cinematography, for example, was excellent. The opening scene where the grainy contemporary footage segued into grainy movie footage, and then into colour was inspired. And the later segment where the Jewish wedding of Asael was juxtaposed with Jus's attack on a German patrol was brilliantly handled.

Most of all however, I applaud the 'feel' of the film. I doesn't manipulate emotions with too much soaring score, and most importantly it does not baby the viewer. Germans speak German, Poles speak Polish, Russians speak Russian. That is how it was - there are subtitles - get over it. Moreover, though Craig's linguistic abilities were a little suspect, those of the remainder of the cast were excellent - especially Schreiber - and one has to consider that the two leads were required to speak Polish and Russian in many scenes. When one bears this in mind, the speech coaches employed on the movie deserve Oscars of their own.

All in all - 4 stars out of 5 - and the best WW2 film that I have seen since "The Pianist". If the forthcoming "Valkyrie" is anywhere near as good, I shall be delighted and a little surprised.

"Valkyrie" - Tom Cruise

2008-11-12T01:33:00.000-08:00

I notice that the release date of "Valkyrie" has been postponed again. It will now air in the UK on 30 January 2009 - ironically the very date that Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 (but that's probably deliberate).

Its a little frustrating that the film has been shunted around the schedules so much. It was initially earmarked for a summer 2008 release, then it was shifted to February '09, then brought forward to December 26th. Now, back to the end of January.

This is not only frustrating for those of us who are keen to see the film, it is doubly irritating for anyone trying to suf the wave of interest and media attention that will inevitably accompany the film. In many cases, articles have been written, books are being released, TV programmes are to be aired. All these things have been solidly scheduled, and yet the film itself - the centrepiece of the effort - is jumping around the calendar. All very annoying.

That said, I think I am one of the comparatively few "in the business" who are actually looking forward to the film. Of course, it could be a stinker... Cruise's recent track record is not great, and its a subject that needs to be sensitively handled if it is to head off the barrage of criticism that seems inevitable.

The 'scientology sideshow' in Germany did not help matters, of course, but the Germans are always going to be highly sensitive about a subject which is so central to their self-image - let's face it, the Stauffenberg story is the ONLY positive that modern Germany can take from the Third Reich and World War Two - its no surprise therefore that they might be a bit prissy about it being dramatized and potentially mangled by Hollywood machine that has precious little interest in historical accuracy.

I must say that this is one of the aspects that worries me - historical accuracy. It won't worry the average cinema-goer of course, but I (as a historical anorak) really will be looking at the medals, and the uniforms, and checking that the story is correctly told. A glance at the publicity photo above does not inspire confidence - where, for instance, are Stauffenberg's medals and awards - Iron Cross (First Class), Wound Badge in Gold, German Cross in Gold - all of which would have been worn on his tunic? If anything is amiss in the film proper, my viewing experience - for one - will be rather marred.

But I think that beyond such legitimate concerns, there's also been a bit of a media whispering campaign about the film - alot of negativity. Only this last weekend, a tiny column in the Sunday Telegraph (I think) noted that clips of Tom Cruise's supposedly dreadful German accent were causing much hilarity on youtube. Well, I looked and I couldn't find them. And also, I read that the production team made a decision that no German accents were to be used on the film - except of course for those German actors, such as Christian Berkel, who would be using their natural accent. It just strikes me that there is almost a desire - probably directed towards Cruise himself, rather than the subject matter - that the film should not succeed.

So, I say - let's be positive. Cruise and Bryan Singer are proven filmmakers, the cast is good, the story is a cracker, and the trailers that I have seen on the web have been excellent.

Moreover, for all of us involved in some way with the story, it can only be of benefit that the story of Stauffenberg is better known, especially amongst a traditionally non-book-buying public. It can only be beneficial too, that the media's attention - generally eschewing history of late - will be firmly fixed on this subject.

So, bring it on. "Valkyrie", Tom Cruise, your public awaits you.

The Reich’s Last Gamble

2008-10-07T04:37:00.000-07:00

"The Reich's Last Gamble" by George Forty, Cassell & Co.,

The German Ardennes campaign of December 1944 – the famed “Battle of the Bulge” – still exerts a powerful fascination on military historians. It was of profound significance in both military and strategic terms. As Germany’s final major offensive of World War Two, it was devised, at worst, to stall the Anglo-American advance in the west. At best, it was to force a separate peace that would split the Alliance and allow Germany to concentrate on its primary ideological enemy – the Soviet Union. In the event, it did neither.
On paper, the Ardennes Offensive bore the mark of genius. It was envisaged as a swift mechanised advance north-west, through the Ardennes forest, with the main objective of seizing the Allied supply depot at Antwerp. The Ardennes was an inspired choice. A region of bleak wooded uplands scored by narrow and sinuous valleys, it was considered to be wholly unsuited to the requirements of modern warfare, despite being the scene of Rundstedt’s decisive breakthrough in 1940. Accordingly, it was only lightly defended by untried and recuperating US troops.
In the vanguard of the attack were two elite units. One, the Kampfgruppe Peiper, formed a rapid armoured spearhead aiming to seize the strategically vital bridges over the Meuse. It would later carry out the Malmédy massacre of 86 captured American soldiers. The other, the 150th SS Brigade, was commanded by the infamous Otto Skorzeny; liberator of Mussolini and ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’. Largely English speaking and equipped with looted US uniforms and equipment, its task was to sow panic and confusion behind Allied lines. These two were followed by the troops of 5th Panzer, 6th SS Panzer and the 7th Army.
Yet, despite the ingenious planning, the Ardennes Offensive failed. By Christmas, after barely ten days fighting, it had stalled. Starved of ammunition and fuel and lacking air support, German troops failed to achieve the breakthrough necessary for a repeat of the Blitzkrieg of 1940. Antwerp was never reached. The enemy had been underestimated. Allied lines had buckled but held. After the initial shock, the Americans had recovered their nerve, and their legendary defence of the key points of St. Vith and Bastogne would contribute to what Churchill termed “the greatest American victory of the European War”. Germany lost 120,000 men and over 600 tanks. But more importantly, she also lost the ability to wrest back the military initiative. Her army had been disembowelled on the Eastern Front, but the Ardennes delivered the coup de grâce. Hitler had gambled and lost.
George Forty is well placed to write about such matters. He is a veteran of Korea, Aden and Borneo and director of the excellent Tank Museum at Bovington in Dorset. He has also written on almost all aspects of armoured combat in World War Two. This book is commendably thorough and well-researched, and combines memoir accounts and military reports with some skill. It has excellent illustrations, numerous clear maps and informative appendices. It amply demonstrates the author’s excellent knowledge of his subject. And yet, something is lacking.
There are some minor irritations. Forty bases his account primarily on American memoir sources and would benefit from a more balanced use of German accounts. He also shares the military’s eternal fondness for acronyms, but he leaves many of them unglossed, leaving the reader to guess their meaning. OKW and GOC are OK, but any suggestions for POL and ETO?
But there are also deeper failings. Considering the excellent subject material – all daring, death and derring-do – the narrative is curiously flat and unengaging, too “text-book like”. It is a good example of traditional military history writing: earnest and thorough, but rather too sober to carry any wide appeal. In contrast to more recent publications of the genre, Forty’s soldiers do not come alive on the page. They do not elicit sympathy or disgust. One does not cry for them, laugh with them or feel their pain. This may seem petty, but such things draw the reader in and seduce him into turning the next page. They spell the difference between a good book and a bestseller. Forty’s work is admirable as far as it goes, but military history writing has moved onto a higher plane in recent years. And one has to conclude that Forty has not moved with it.

Nelson, Victory and War

2008-08-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

I was in Portsmouth, yesterday, with the family, and spent a fascinating day at the historic dockyard, looking at HMS Warrior, HMS Victory and the Mary Rose.

Whilst on the deck of the Victory - standing on the very spot where Nelson caught his fatal musket ball - I was just telling my son (8) about the circumstances of the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon, and all that, when my daughter (6) piped up in a small but strangely adamant voice...

"Why do we have wars anyway?" she said, "everyone shooting at each other - What's the point of them?"

I thought for a moment about explaining the concept of balances of power and hegemonies, but then had to concede that her argument was actually much more convincing than mine.

1-nil to the innocence and optimism of youth.

Alfred Naujocks -

2008-07-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

The Man who Started the Second World War : the mystery of Alfred Naujocks

At 8.00 on the evening of 31 August 1939, a team of six SS agents stormed a radio station in the German town of Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border. They were led by Alfred Naujocks: a Sturmbannführer in the SS, and an agent of the SS intelligence corps; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He and his men fired a few shots and handcuffed the startled station personnel. One of them then broadcast a stirring speech in Polish, full of anti-German rhetoric, calling on the Poles to rise up against their historic enemy: ‘The hour of freedom has arrived’, he concluded, ‘Long Live Poland!’ Outside, meanwhile, a truckload of concentration camp inmates had been delivered. Drugged but alive, they were dressed in Polish uniforms, strategically arranged around the site, and then machine-gunned. The world awoke to the astonishing news that Poland had launched an unprovoked attack on Hitler’s Germany, and that German forces were ‘returning fire’. The Second World War had begun.

Just over five years later, as the war that Naujocks had started ground on to its gruesome conclusion, Naujocks decided to end his part in it. On 19th October 1944, he surrendered to troops of the 102nd American Cavalry Reconnaissance Group close to the front line near Wirtzfeld on the German-Belgian border. He gave his name as Alfred Bonsen, made no attempt to resist and immediately asked to be taken to a commanding officer. He carried a kit bag containing a change of clothes, a large sum of money in three currencies and a letter addressed to an official in the Foreign Office in London.

The GIs had little idea of the mysterious individual’s true identity. But at the local US headquarters, he confessed that he was travelling under false papers. His real name, he said, was Alfred Naujocks and he was acting as an emissary of the Austrian Resistance.
Under interrogation he revealed his life story. Born in 1911 in Kiel, the son of a salesman, he joined the Nazi Party in the turbulent 1920s, briefly studied at university, developed a talent for brawling, and had his nose flattened by a Communist wielding an iron bar. In 1931 he joined the SS, and was soon serving as adjutant to the high-flying Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst.

His record was indeed grimly impressive. As well as Gleiwitz, he had been involved in a host of top-secret operations. In 1935, he had tracked down and murdered a radio operator from an anti- Nazi group the ‘Black Front’ who was broadcasting anti-German propaganda from Czechoslovakia. In November 1939 he had carried out the kidnapping of two British secret agents in neutral Holland, Major Richard Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne-Best - the famous “Venlo Incident” - which had led to the unravelling of MI6’s entire western European network. He had developed an ingenious plan to ruin the British economy by swamping the UK with forged £5 banknotes. He had served in the administration of occupied Belgium, headed a brutal suppression of the Danish resistance and helped establish the notorious “Salon Kitty”, a high-class brothel in Berlin, patronised by blackmailable visiting VIPs, whose rooms were bugged, and whose ‘madame’ was an SD agent.

To those in the know, therefore, Naujocks was one of the most prominent SD agents. He was an ‘intellectual gangster’; the archetypal amoral Nazi ruffian. He was a confidante of Heydrich, and was party to the inner workings of the SS empire. What was he doing defecting to the Allies in the autumn of 1944?

As befitted someone of his importance, Naujocks was spirited to Britain after his arrest. He passed through the notorious ‘London Cage’: a holding centre for German prisoners, and on to Camp 020; a special unit where enemy agents were ‘turned’. At each stage he was interrogated. Again and again, he told his story. He portrayed himself as the victim of his cold and pathological superiors. His career in the SD was presented as a series of increasingly acrimonious clashes with Heydrich. He would balk at assignments, he said, only to be branded a coward and severely reprimanded. Even when he successfully carried out a mission, he would be berated for some minor misdemeanour. Heydrich, he said, was a vindictive and sadistic master, who was waiting for a chance to ‘wring his neck’.

The relationship deteriorated still further as war approached. Naujocks claimed to have refused to carry out an assassination. Again, he was branded a coward. Even Gleiwitz brought him few plaudits, as he was accused of losing his nerve and botching the mission. Heydrich was victimising him, he thought, because he knew too much – not least about Heydrich’s own nocturnal visits to “Salon Kitty”.

Naujocks claimed that he decided to leave the SD in the autumn of 1939. He felt that he had been repeatedly passed over for promotion and wanted to try his luck in the Luftwaffe. However, when Heydrich heard of the plan he scuppered it. He would veto four further requests from Naujocks to be released from his service.

Gradually Naujocks began to be affected by the strained relations with Heydrich. In the summer of 1940, he told his interrogators, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was grudgingly granted extended sick-leave. In January 1941, he was summoned to Berlin and arrested. Charged with corruption, he was stripped of his rank and ordered to join the Waffen-SS. He was then sent to the Russian front as a simple soldier, narrowly avoiding assignment to a ‘punishment battalion’. He was under no illusions – Heydrich, he thought, was trying to kill him. Yet he survived. And after six months, during which he was wounded four times, he was invalided out with shrapnel injuries, a double duodenal ulcer and jaundice. He returned to Berlin and was formally discharged in July 1942.

After Heydrich’s assassination that summer, Naujocks claimed to have been able to “breathe again”. He took a desk-job in the German administration in Brussels, and settled into a comfortable routine, enjoying the perks of an occupying functionary with a Belgian mistress. He was still approached by former SD associates requesting that he carry out secret missions – to the Balkans, Italy, Denmark. But he would resist, claiming ill-health, and, if pressed, accept on condition that he be permitted to return to Brussels upon completion. His enthusiasm for the Nazi regime had disappeared, he told his interrogators. He was merely going through the motions.

In the spring of 1944, he claimed to have encountered a resistance organisation called the Free Austria Movement. Contact had been made through a ‘like-minded’ old friend from Kiel, who was in the Austrian SS administration, and after a series of meetings, Naujocks agreed to act as an emissary. It was in this guise that he was apprehended at the front.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the British refused to believe Naujocks’s story. They seem to have swiftly rejected the idea that he was working for the SD to compromise the Austrian Resistance. But they still had little time for him. They described him as a “goldmine of information” and praised his “truthfulness and frankness”. They noted admiringly that he had never asked to ‘cut a deal’ and that he was fully prepared to bear the consequences of his actions. But they could not accept his claimed attack of conscience. They depicted him in the most uncompromising of terms. He was “a killer without hate and without shame”, “a callous murderer” who was “capable of any underhand activity” and was trying “to pose as the innocent dupe of vile masters”. His defection, they considered, was totally disingenuous: probably an attempt to “secure better terms for himself”. At best, he was a coward, trying to save his skin. At worst, they feared, he was engaged in “another diabolical plot”. One report concluded starkly that “this man should most certainly be put to death”.

Indeed, when they had finished with him, this was what the British had in mind. On 31 August 1945, he was transferred to the American zone in Germany to stand trial as a war criminal. Soon after, however, he escaped, and though his depositions were read out at Nuremberg, their author was on the run. Recaptured in the late 1940s, he was touted for trial. But, for all his nefarious deeds, he only ever faced charges brought by the Danish government. And, after serving just three years, he disappeared into post-war obscurity. He died of cancer in Hamburg in 1960.

The British may have been right about much of Naujocks’s story. He was, after all, a habitual and professional liar. He was also utterly unscrupulous and untroubled by morality or conscience. “Capable of anything” claimed one former SS comrade. A man who “would sell his own mother” according to another. His history alone dictated that he couldn’t be trusted.
So Naujocks was once again condemned as a coward, even a traitor. But it might be that he was a more complex case than the British imagined. His link to the Austrian Resistance was certainly an invention, as, it seems, was his claimed nervous breakdown. And he had clearly put a positive gloss on his SD career. But, with the benefit of 60-years of hindsight, much of the remainder of his story bears the ring of truth. Heydrich was indeed capricious and vindictive and other sources have confirmed that his relationship with Naujocks had irretrievably broken down. Naujocks did then serve on the Eastern Front and returned as an invalid. Thereafter, jaded and disillusioned from his experiences, it may well be that he sought to disappear into the Belgian occupation authorities, and, at the first opportunity, to surrender himself to the Allies. His defection was an act of brazen self-preservation, but it was a defection none the less. And, what is more, it would have taken some degree of conviction, if not bravery, to carry it out. Reading the British interrogations reports, it sometimes appears that Naujocks would have earned himself more respect from his captors if he had fought on to the last stand in Berlin.
This is not an attempt at a whitewash or rehabilitation – that would be crass – Alfred Naujocks was a self-confessed murderer, kidnapper and thief. Rather it is an attempt to ‘close the book’ on one of the most mysterious and indeed infamous characters of the Third Reich. In most published sources, Naujocks appears as a shadowy cat’s paw of Heydrich, cropping up at Gleiwitz, Venlo and elsewhere with often bloody consequences. He has become an almost mythical figure whilst the man behind the myth has remained virtually unknown. Whatever one’s conclusions about his case, one thing is clear – the curious story of Alfred Naujocks deserves to be aired.

Roger Moorhouse 2008

"Hitler the Comedian"

2008-07-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

Curious this story...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/2185507/Adolf-Hitler-told-bad-jokes-about-Nazi-friends.html

I am not sure what to think of it. Would it be newsworthy if it transpired that Churchill or Roosevelt told jokes about members of their entourage? I think not. One would almost expect it of them - after all they are remembered as rounded human beings...

There, I think, is the heart of the curiosity. The fact that Hitler told bad jokes rather reminds us that he, too, was human; he had a sense of humour, he liked to laugh.

And this doesn't fit with the monster that we know had millions murdered and started the most costly and destructive war in history. Surely, that same man, that monster, can't have told jokes about Goring's underpants?

Well, this goes to the heart of a problem that I've wrestled with for some time. For many of us, to present Hitler as a one-dimensional monster - a carpet-biting, foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid, ranting, lunatic - perversely presents a rather comforting image. It makes him not one of US, but something else, a breed apart. Therefore, we don't have to think any more deeply about what motivated Hitler, what moved him, what impulses drove him - because they were all patently perverse and depraved.

This may be comforting, but it is a cop out. If we want to understand Hitler, we have to understand him as a human being, with human emotions. This, I think, is where the film Downfall was so brilliant, because it presented Hitler - arguably for the first time - as a rounded human being; polite, avuncular even, to his secretaries, fond of apple cake, but also desperate, and fearful.

This was closer to the real Hitler. If you need your monsters to be one-dimensional, then fine, be surprised that Hitler told bad jokes. However, I would argue that the monster is made all the more terrifying, all the more potent, if one reminds oneself that he was, after all, human - just like you and me.

“Endgame 1945:” by David Stafford

2008-07-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

Wars rarely end cleanly and World War Two was certainly no exception. Though the guns fell silent, animosities remained and suffering continued. In the aftermath, refugees and wounded had to be cared for and basic services restored, all against a background of political uncertainty and economic devastation. This difficult period – what one might call the ‘birth pangs of peace’ – is the subject of David Stafford’s new book “Endgame 1945”.

Stafford covers the short – but tumultuous – 3-month period from Hitler’s birthday in late April to the opening of the Potsdam conference in July 1945. Using memoirs, diaries and interviews, he structures his narrative around the accounts of a handful of Allied veterans, leavening the dominant military focus by the addition of other characters, such as a frustrated aid worker, an ambitious war correspondent and a German heiress.

In this way, Stafford brings a vital human element to the familiar political and military story of the end of World War Two. He illustrates well the vicissitudes of morale in those difficult months; the hopes and fears, the futility and the optimism.

For the military, of course, life was still largely one of boredom and hardship punctuated by the excitement of combat and the often-numbing horror of the aftermath - what one writer aptly called the “ghastly brotherhood of war”. Yet Stafford also relates wider concerns; a genuine fear of the SS, for instance, as well as widespread consternation that the Germans fought on when their cause was so patently lost.

Civilian concerns were rather different and naturally centred on the well-being of loved ones, and the very real worries about the humanitarian disaster looming in the aftermath of the war.

In essence, therefore, “Endgame 1945” is a series of engaging set pieces, with short digressions, detours and vignettes to provide context and backstory. Despite the obvious peril of this approach, the book never feels disjointed, however, largely through the excellence and persuasiveness of Stafford’s writing. Stafford frames and guides the narrative well; allowing his ‘voices’ the space to develop, yet never permitting them to dominate.

By way of complaint, Stafford’s is quite a specific view. To be fair, he makes no claims to comprehensiveness, preferring a pointillist approach, yet, with only a couple of exceptions, he has confined his ‘voices’ to those of Western Allied soldiers. This lends immediacy and a degree of familiarity to his narrative, of course, but provides a rather distorted picture. The Eastern Front, for instance, is ignored entirely, as are the Poles, who fought in every theatre in Europe. The Germans, meanwhile, are generally objectified; seen as enemy soldiers to be feared or civilians to be pitied or despised. Only one German ‘voice’ is permitted to present the viewpoint of the defeated.

This rather one-dimensional approach is disappointing. However, if one can see past that, “Endgame 1945” is an engaging and illuminating read. Stafford’s focus may be narrow, but he has nonetheless ably combined the personal with the political; the micro with the macro, and has produced a most readable account.

"Dunkirk - Fight to the Last Man"

2008-06-23T03:38:00.000-07:00

“Dunkirk – Fight to the Last Man”
by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

Sometimes the British defy all rational explanation. A humiliating rout and ignominious evacuation from the beaches, Dunkirk ranks as one of most grievous losses ever suffered by British forces – and yet it is celebrated as a moral victory. Dunkirk meant not only the loss of 11,000 dead and a further 41,000 soldiers taken prisoner, but also spelt the expulsion of the British Army from mainland Europe for three long years. But, for all that, Dunkirk has entered the public consciousness and has become a byword for a peculiarly British trait - the dogged refusal to surrender and the will to triumph in the face of adversity.

For most, Dunkirk is all about the 800 “little ships” – the makeshift flotilla from the Channel ports that lifted around 330,000 British soldiers from the beaches of northern France. Yet, as Sebag-Montefiore demonstrates, this conventional understanding actually ignores a vital aspect of the operation – and one which is actually much more appropriate to the true meaning of the famed “Dunkirk Spirit”.

“Dunkirk – Fight to the Last Man” takes as its main focus, not the brilliantly improvised evacuation from the beaches, but rather the heroic rearguard action fought by units holding the perimeter of the Dunkirk pocket; units which in many cases were sacrificed to allow their colleagues to escape. It was an action that would result in no fewer than 8 awards of the Victoria Cross.

The book also casts its net wider and incorporates other interesting angles, such as the acrimonious deterioration of the Anglo-French Alliance and much of the background to the French campaign itself. Included in the latter category are two curious tales that are well worthy of an airing. Firstly, Sebag-Montefiore explores the contact between Hans Oster of the German Abwehr and the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin through which vital intelligence about the forthcoming French campaign was passed to the Allies. Secondly, he relates the little-known Mechelen Incident, whereby German invasion plans fell into Allied hands in January 1940 after a German pilot crash landed in Belgium having lost his way in fog. In retrospect, armed with this wealth of information, it is hard to see how the Allies could have been caught cold when the Germans finally attacked on 10 May.

Sebag-Montefiore is at his best with ‘set pieces’ such as the massacres at Wormhout, Vinkt and Le Paradis, or his description of the capture of Eban Emael or the Mechelen Incident. He writes crisply and the series of small-scale actions are related with considerable verve, but he appears to shy away from offering a wider context or thoroughgoing analysis of the events that he is describing. For example, he gives only a cursory explanation of one of the key mysteries of the campaign – Hitler’s decision to halt at Dunkirk, rather than press his advantage. Stranger still, he even avoids offering a concluding chapter in which wider issues such as the creation and significance of the “Dunkirk Myth” might have been discussed.

“Dunkirk” is a fine book. It is immaculately researched, well written, and has much in the way of pathos and human interest, but it is hard not to conclude that the definitive volume on this subject still awaits its author.

© Roger Moorhouse

“The Berlin Wall" by Frederick Taylor

2008-06-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Another review from the archive - this time ...

“The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989”
by Frederick Taylor

The Berlin Wall defined an era. The symbol par excellence of the Cold War, it was 93 miles long and 13 feet high; its western side was a colourful blaze of graffiti and scrawled slogans, its eastern side a deadly network of barbed-wire, searchlights, watch-towers and attack dogs. This grim concrete edifice scarred the former German capital for a generation, separating the erstwhile occupation zones of east and west, but also dividing communities, families and loved ones.

Given its centrality to German, as well as world history in the mid-20th century, the Berlin Wall is ripe for a biography of its own, and Taylor’s book fills that role well. Taylor is sure-footed on the historical framework and capably illustrates the futility and the tragedy of the episode. His pen portraits of the main protagonists; politicians, escapees and student activists, are engaging and his explanation of the wider political machinations surrounding the wall is sound.

Taylor is at his best describing the many escape attempts. One of the first ‘martyrs’, for example, was Peter Fechter, shot and left to bleed to death in the shadow of the Wall in 1962. The last was Chris Gueffroy, shot in the chest whilst attempting to escape the GDR, only 10 months before the GDR itself met its end. Taylor also tells the moving story of Conrad Schumann, the young East German border guard famously photographed leaping over the barbed-wire in the first days of the Wall’s existence. After settling down to an unremarkable life in the west, Schumann committed suicide in 1998, apparently unable to cope with his reputation as an ‘iconic traitor’.

Taylor relates these stories well, but there is something slightly dissatisfying about his book. The accomplished style of his previous effort, Dresden, seems to have morphed into a curious staccato delivery, with an admixture of occasional folksy lapses. There is also a lack of engagement; Berlin’s ‘soul’ is absent.

More seriously, the book doesn’t appear to know quite what it is supposed to be. It contains too many digressions and too much extraneous material. Its first mention of its subject, for instance, comes only after a 130-page jaunt through German history. This may be because the book is seeking to broaden its appeal and somehow pose as a primer to the history of the GDR or the Cold War. Sadly, it is neither, and the result is simply that it becomes overlong and tends to lose its narrative head of steam.

This is a worthy contribution from a capable writer. But – given the iconic status of the Berlin Wall, and its resonance for a generation – it is hard to conclude that it represents the last word on its fascinating subject.

AK47 - The Story of the People's Gun

2008-06-10T01:33:00.000-07:00

AK47 - The Story of the People's Gun, by Michael Hodges.

I was inspired to buy this after firing the iconic weapon on a visit to Budapest. Unlike the book, the gun did not disappoint.

Michael Hodges is evidently a talented writer, but the concept of this book has obviously flummoxed him. It is a difficult concept, admittedly. The AK47 is an icon, a powerful political symbol and, of course, a weapon. But the task of combining these aspects into a readable and illuminating narrative has eluded Hodges. What he has produced is merely a mish-mash of stories with the gun as their (loose) theme, with little broader context and no overarching 'thread' at all.

There is a book to be written about this most iconic of weapons, but sadly this is not it.

Welcome

2008-06-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

"well, well, well, here we are"

Welcome to my blog - 'historian at large'

I decided to set this up on a whim, and in a fit of vanity...

I hope to use it to air my views and vent my spleen on issues and events related to history, especially those in my area of specialism - World War Two in Europe, Nazi Germany and Central Europe.

I also aim to post a few of my old book reviews on here, to stimulate and inform (with luck)

About me -

I am 39 and a professional freelance historian, living in the UK. I was the co-author of "Microcosm" - the history of the Polish city of Wroclaw (the former German "Breslau")

... and am the author of "Killing Hitler" (2006) - the first thorough-going study of the various attempts to kill Adolf Hitler. "Killing Hitler" is already in (I think) eight languages and the Spanish edition "Matar a Hitler" will be published later this week.

I am a regular commentator and book reviewer for the national and specialist press and have appeared a number of times on national television and radio. They keep inviting me back, so I imagine they must think I am vaguely presentable...

If you want to get in touch, please do. If you have any queries or requests, I will do my best to help out if I can.

In the meantime, check back regularly, and have a look at my books on Amazon... ;-)

R