"Survivor on the River Kwai" by Reg Twigg, an 'on the spot' review...

There is a moment in Reg Twigg's posthumously published memoir, where he makes a very valid point.

 "Don't read this in the cool comfort of your armchair" he wrote, "Read it in the hottest greenhouse in Kew or the Eden Project.  Feel your clothes cling to your body, see the print on the page blur and smudge with the sweat droplets from your chin and eyebrow ridges.  Don't spend minutes there, spend all day. Spend every day."

He is absolutely right.  You really can't appreciate what he went through working on the Burma Railway until you feel that tropical heat for yourself.  Now, I am very much an advocate of a "sense of place" in history; visiting locations can teach more than just reading about them from the comfort of your garret.  But, reading those words in the oppressive humidity and heat of Thailand whilst on holiday recently, was taking the "sense of place" to a whole new level.

Twigg was one of those fated to experience the British defeat at Singapore in 1942 and subsequently to endure three years incarceration and labour on the Thailand-Burma Railway, best known to the world through the 1957 David Lean film "Bridge on the River Kwai".  In fact, the film is an enormous red-herring; adapted from a novel of the same name, it tells a rather fantastical story which merely uses the fact of the bridge's building as its narrative backdrop.  If you want to know the real story of the Burma railway, don't start by watching the film.

You could do worse than to start by reading Reg Twigg's memoir.  Its certainly an engaging read, telling the story of Reg's early life in Leicester, joining the Army (Leicester Regiment) and witnessing the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese.  The majority of the book however, relates to his experiences on the Burma

The real Bridge over the "River Kwai"

"Death" Railway, the various camps, the characters that he met along the way, the Japanese guards, and - of course - the Bridge over the River Kwai and the infamous cutting at Hellfire Pass, some 40 miles away towards the Burmese border.

Twigg was very much a 'ducker and diver' and - by his own admission - a "cheeky chappy".  This naturally contributed to his survival, as he proved adept at finding a role for himself, foraging for food and getting by.  His is also a very human account, telling stories about the many fellow POWs he met and often ending with the sentiment "I hope he made it home".  For the record, some 12,000 Allied POWs did not "make it home" from the Death Railway, and around half of those were British.

As one might expect, Twigg's account has all the requisite horror stories - the endemic disease, the brutal maltreatment, the backbreaking labour and the stifling heat - but it also has a tremendous humanity about it.  For all the horror, the book has flashes of light and warmth and as such - I suspect - is a fitting tribute to its author, who died, aged 99, shortly before publication.

For the historians out there, the book is certainly enlightening as regards the treatment meted out to the prisoners, and the conditions in which they lived.  However, as one might expect, it is a somewhat myopic account, being primarily concerned with those grim conditions, and providing little sense of the grander scheme involved; the purpose of the railway or the geography of the region and the location of the various camps. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but I can't help feeling that the book could have been considerably improved by the provision of some wider explanatory context.

But that it a small quibble, "Survivor on the River Kwai" is an engaging and illuminating read and is a welcome addition to the selection of books on the subject of the Death Railway.  You don't have to visit Thailand to read it, of course, but the experience is all the more present and all the more pertinent if you do.


"Survivor on the River Kwai" is available here or you could do us all a favour and order it from your local bookshop - if you still have one... :-)

The Reichstag Fire - an end to the controversy...?

When the German parliament building in Berlin - the Reichstag - caught fire shortly after 9pm on the evening of 27th February 1933, it marked the beginning of a lengthy controversy. Already that same night, in the Reichstag building itself, Nazi authorities picked up a young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who had apparently been caught red-handed setting the fire.  Upon his arrest, it was said, he was asked why he had done it.  He answered: "Protest! Protest!"

Despite this apparently copper-bottomed case, many of the opponents of the Nazis - especially on the political left - were swiftly proclaiming the fire to be an archetypal 'false flag' operation; an arson attack carried out by the Nazis themselves, to be pinned onto their opponents.

This hypothesis had two primary foundations: the first was the so-called 'Oberfohren Memorandum' - a selection of circumstantial evidence collected at the time and later expanded and published as the "Brown Book", which pointed to the Nazis as the culprits.

The second was based on the principle of "Cui bono?" - 'who benefits?'.  Given that the Nazis clearly benefited enormously from the fire - in that by foreshadowing a communist rising it eased their passage of laws clamping down on the left in particular and on civil rights in general - it seemed plausible to suggest that they must have started it themselves.  This line was very popular outside Germany during the war, was presented at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and has long held currency.  Indeed, when Georg Elser attempted to assassinate Hitler in Munich in 1939, many on the left immediately branded the near miss as "a second Reichstag Fire" - that is, a attack orchestrated by the Nazis themselves for their own political benefit.

This controversy rumbled on through the post-war years, bursting into life occasionally as new 'documents' came to light and the German press interested itself once again.  In fact it almost became another mini 'Historikerstreit', except that, in this case, most of the serious historians tended to be on one side of the argument.

A recent book by Berlin historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff has now arguably put the story to bed for the last time. "Der Reichstagsbrand" (The Reichstag Fire) is only short, at about 160 pages, but provides a punchy, readable account of the case itself as well as its curious afterlife, and benefits from official documents released following German reunification in 1989.

Kellerhof is clear in his conclusions.  Van der Lubbe was the lone culprit, setting the fire himself, intending it to provide the spark for a communist rising against the Nazis. As he concludes, there is not a shred of evidence that the Nazis committed the crime, indeed it seems that Hitler initially feared that the fire would be a hindrance to him rather than a help, and it was Alfred Hugenberg, rather than Hitler, who first advocated clamping down on the Communists in response.

The case against the Nazis, Kellerhoff argues, is a confection of circumstantial evidence, misunderstandings, forgeries and politically motivated conspiracy theories, which merits little serious consideration.  The fact that the Nazis were the main beneficiaries from the crime - and Hitler's exploitation of the Fire was certainly a virtuoso performance - should not blind us to the fact that he and they were not the authors of it. Far from providing an explanation, 'Cui Bono', in this case, merely leads us down a blind alley of conspiracist nonsense, involving secret tunnels into the Reichstag, and a mystery team of SA arsonists, who were in turn bumped off during the Roehm Purge in 1934.

Most tellingly, I think, it seems that - in continuing to pin the crime on the Nazis - we are in danger of attributing far too much Machiavellian cunning to them and by extension to Hitler - and in so doing, we are guilty of a perverse mirror image of the totalitarian cult of personality.  If we assume that Hitler had all the strings in his hands in February 1933; that he and his minions were able to burn down a major public building in the German capital, pin the crime on an innocent communist, do away with the real culprits, and cover up the entire story - then surely we are ascribing talents to Hitler and the Nazis that were way beyond their real abilities.  A generation of Germans might have wished that Hitler really was possessed of such diabolical cunning as to be capable of such things, as it would - in part - absolve them of their complicity in following him, pied-piper-like, into the abyss.  But it is simply not plausible.

Van der Lubbe, it seems, really was guilty of setting the Reichstag fire himself, unaided.  Perhaps now, with the benefit of 8 decades of hindsight, we can all accept that to be the most likely conclusion to this story.

Pertti Ahonen's "Death at the Berlin Wall" - a review

“Death at the Berlin Wall”

by Pertti Ahonen

OUP, £60.00, 309pp, index, notes, bibliography.

Nostalgia for aspects of life in the GDR, it seems, it still current.  In modern Berlin one can buy any number of products that one graced East Berlin households; the Trabant has acquired cult status; even the humble Ampelmann – who stood guard at pedestrian crossings in the East – has become an icon. 

For all that apparently innocent “Ostalgia”, Pertti Ahonen’s new book Death at the Berlin Wall, is a powerful antidote.  Ahonen examines a selection of the 136 individuals killed at the wall in its 28-year lifespan; from its earliest victim, Günter Litfin, in August 1961, to its last, Chris Gueffroy, in February 1989, who was shot and killed just nine months before the Berlin Wall fell. 

Some of the stories that he relates are well-known; such as that of Peter Fechter, whose fatal shooting in the August of 1962 unleashed a wave of outrage in the west; or that of the Wall’s youngest victim; 11-year-old Jörg Hartmann, who was killed trying to escape to his father in the spring of 1966.  Others are much less prominent, at least in the west, such as the stories of the “socialist hero-victims”; border guards Peter Göring, Reinhold Huhn or Egon Schulz, who were killed in shootouts with West Berlin policemen or desperate would-be escapers. 

Aside from engagingly relating such episodes, Ahonen seeks to analyse the popular and official reactions to the deaths; the propaganda resulting from both sides and the effect that they had on the ongoing politics of the Cold War and the division of Germany. 

His insights are fascinating.  One is astonished, for instance, by the breath-taking cynicism and mendacity of the GDR’s politicians in their attempts to discredit those who would flee the ‘socialist paradise’, yet the story that Ahonen tells is one which is much more nuanced than the simple one that might be told by a latter-day Cold-Warrior.

Rather Ahonen places the undoubted horrors that unfolded in the Wall’s shadow into a much wider context of developing procedures for policing such an unprecedented physical division, as well as question of the west’s recognition of the GDR itself.  He also suggests that the reactions to the deaths – on both sides of the divide – were as much an expression of the needs of domestic consensus and identity-building as they were the products of simple propaganda and ‘news-management’.  In many ways, he suggests, the Berlin Wall was not only a political icon and the most visible symbol of the division of Europe, it also became a highly sensitive barometer of Cold War tensions.

Ahonen provides an admirable combination of narrative and historical analysis, which skimps neither on the human stories at the book’s heart, nor on the forensic and painstaking research that serves to contextualise them.  It helps, of course, that Ahonen is a gifted writer, who is able to combine those elements into a highly readable, coherent and compelling account, but it is especially heartening to see an academic historian giving free rein to his writing and indulging in some good old-fashioned storytelling. 

Yet, aside from these necessary nuances and complexities, it is the sheer inhuman contempt that the GDR had for its would-be escapers that sticks most vividly in the reader’s mind.  Those wounded would be denied prompt medical attention, those killed could be anonymously cremated as “scientific material”, and those family members left behind would be intimidated, spied upon and persecuted.  The case of Michael-Horst Schmidt is one of the most shocking.  Shot and wounded in an escape attempt in 1984, the 20-year-old was dead on arrival at hospital 3 hours later, by which time the East German authorities were already beginning to weave a web of lies and obfuscations to blacken their victim’s name and shamelessly exculpate themselves.  It is stories such as these that should make Ahonen’s excellent book required reading for all those who still hanker for the ‘certainties’ of life in the GDR.

[This review first appeared in "History Today" in January 2012]

© Roger Moorhouse 2011

"Eva Braun: Life with Hitler" by Heike Görtemaker - a review

Albert Speer is said to have once opined that generations of future historians would be “disappointed” by Eva Braun.  Hitler’s wife, he implied, was a nobody: someone who – for all her proximity to great events – had exerted no influence, for good or ill, upon them.

I was reminded of this comment when I finally got around to reading Beate Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun last week: “Eva Braun: Life with Hitler”, which was first published a couple of years ago.  Görtemaker touted her biography as the first serious study of Braun’s short life (she died aged 33) and in this respect she is absolutely correct.  Previous studies by Angela Lambert and US journalist Nerin Gun cannot boast the integrity and the rigorous approach of Görtemaker’s.  So, in that respect, the book is most certainly to be welcomed.

The book tells the story of Braun’s life well: her rise from middle-class Munich shop girl to Hitler’s mistress, her attempted suicides, her shadowy role as the ‘lady of the house’ at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden and her sordid death at Hitler’s side in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin in 1945.  Görtemaker appears as an assiduous researcher, who is evidently keen to submit existing accounts and persistent myths to vital, critical scrutiny.

However, the book makes some rather grander claims: most notably that Braun was not the passive, “see no evil – hear no evil” character that history has thus-far perceived.  This is an interesting suggestion, and Görtemaker does well to analyse the various memoir accounts of those in Hitler’s entourage – such as his secretary Christa Schroeder and his architect Albert Speer – in trying to prove this point.  Many of those accounts, like Speer’s, are patently self-serving, dissembling and self-exculpatory – not least in claiming that life in the Third Reich’s inner circle was an interminable round of boring vegetarian lunches where no political matters were ever discussed.  

Yet, though the point about self-serving memoirs is well-made, Görtemaker fails to convince with her wider point about Braun’s possible knowledge of and involvement in Nazi politics.  Essentially, though it is well-written and engaging, the book is feeding off scraps.  Due to Hitler’s order at the end of his life that all his personal correspondence was to be destroyed, the evidential base for Görtemaker’s study is extremely thin.  Consequently, she is forced to rely far too much on speculation and guesswork, and as a result the book reads – at times – like a retreaded brief history of the Third Reich with a somewhat unconvincing ‘Eva Braun twist’.

This is a shame, but is perhaps inevitable given the lack of available material.  Despite the book’s shortcomings, this is still the best and most serious biography of Eva Braun that is available.  Yet, that said, it is hard to disagree with Speer’s alleged comment – Eva Braun does appear as a disappointment to history.

© Roger Moorhouse 2013

On UKIP (and Seasick Steve)...

On BBC Breakfast News this morning, blues musician 'Seasick Steve' was interviewed.  A rough and ready elaborately-bearded, and undoubtedly talented American guitarist, Seasick Steve had slept rough and made his own guitars before getting a big break in 2006 on a British music programme.  He has since gone on to considerable commercial and critical success.  In the interview, the presenter gave the somewhat obvious analysis that Seasick Steve's success was due, in large part, to the fact that he came at a time of manufactured pop-bands and sleek, all-pervasive marketing.  He was, put simply, a whiff of authenticity in a world of clones.

Half an hour earlier, another interview on the programme was far less cozy.  Paul Nuttall (MEP), Deputy Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) was on to discuss his party's impressive showing in the English local elections, where they were set fair to upset all the major parties.  He was given a rather bumpy ride, with the sort of hostile questioning that representatives of the major parties rarely encounter.

UKIP is a peculiar phenomenon, which the political and media elite are keen to dismiss simply as a good old fashioned protest vote; the kind of mid-term slap down from the voters that is traditionally expected in the local elections, a chance for the voting public to hurl their virtual tomatoes at their politicians without any fear of serious consequences (except for local government).  Another BBC commentator even described UKIP as 'plebeian' - bringing to mind Bertolt Brecht's line that "the people had forfeited the confidence of the government" so the government should "dissolve the people and elect another".

But, such arrogant complacency is very misplaced.  I would argue that UKIP is far more than just a reflexive public protest.  Though its origins lie in a rejection of the EU, and this issue undoubtedly still forms a core of its support, it seems to have grown into a much more profound revolt against the Westminster political elite and the supposed 'liberal consensus' that they espouse.  It is as much a rejection of the 'smooth operators' of Westminster: the expensively educated Camerons and Osbornes and Milibands, as it is a rejection of the identikit policies that they appear to represent: EU orthodoxy, gay marriage, 'diversity' and all the rest.  UKIP is in many ways a revolt against political correctness itself.  And Westminster needs to take note, not just hide behind the old cliches and slogans, and hope that it will go away.

So - to return to 'Seasick Steve' - stretching the analogy somewhat, UKIP might be seen as the 'Seasick Steve' of British politics: a popular rejection of the bland, the manufactured and all that which is perceived as false and mendacious in Westminster.  But, as such, it must be prepared for a rough ride both from the media and from its political rivals.  Break the mold in music and you will be hailed as a visionary, but break the mold in politics and you risk being cast as a dangerous heretic.

"Hitler's Hangman" by Robert Gerwarth, a review

“Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich” by Robert Gerwarth,

Yale UP, £20.00, 336pp,

It is peculiar that Reinhard Heydrich has not been the subject of a few more serious-minded biographies.  After all, as the architect of the SS-state and the master-planner of the Holocaust, he offers a unique perspective on the inner workings of the Third Reich, whilst as an individual he displays the sort of nefarious, Mephistophelean character traits that would have many historians salivating. 

Yet, despite his high profile in the historical record, Reinhard Heydrich has until now only rarely attracted the attentions of serious English-language biographers.  Robert Gerwarth’s book is something of a rarity therefore.

It is certainly worth the wait.  Gerwarth ably tracks the stages of Heydrich’s life; from his early years in Halle, through his aborted naval career, to his fateful meeting with his later wife – and convinced Nazi – Lina von Osten.  It was Lina who evidently turned the, until then, rather unpolitical Heydrich into the prize Nazi specimen that he would later become; allying his cold, calculating nature with a political and racial ideology within which he could achieve his ambitions. 

Once installed in Himmler’s security apparatus, from 1931, Heydrich would be the driving force in the emergence of the SS, constantly expanding its remit and espousing a perpetual radicalisation of Nazism.  He was ever vigilant, seeking out new enemies – real or imagined – to be confronted and destroyed.  Not so much a safe pair of hands, rather a radical and utterly uncompromising administrator, Heydrich quickly emerged as the coming man of Nazi Germany. 

His career was correspondingly stellar.  Already Himmler’s deputy, he headed the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from 1939, thereby uniting all branches of the Nazi police and security network under his control.  Later, in 1941, he was appointed to head the politically sensitive and economically vital ‘Protectorate’ of Bohemia and Moravia.  Most infamously, perhaps, he assumed supervisory responsibility for the ongoing Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference at the start of 1942.  Only his death at a Czech assassin’s hand the following summer stopped his seemingly inexorable rise. 

Gerwarth tells this complex tale with considerable aplomb.  He writes with real verve, pacing his account well and providing the perfect mix of narrative and analysis.  Pleasingly, he is not shy of indulging in a few dramatic flourishes when the material and the circumstances allow, making this a history book that one can genuinely read almost in a single sitting.  Moreover, he is surefooted and admirably clear on the historical framework, not least in explaining the murky and complex inter-relationships within the Nazi police state, and delineating the twisted course of the genocide against the Jews. 

The Heydrich that emerges from this account is a more rounded individual from the earlier, sometimes rather breathless, biographies.  He is revealed here as a human being; a single-minded, paranoid, psychopathic human being, but a human being nonetheless.  Interestingly – in a state that prized physical and racial perfection – Heydrich was the only one of the senior personnel who came anywhere close to matching the taxing ideals, despite a persistent rumour of his part-Jewish blood.  Tall, blond, aquiline, he was an accomplished sportsman (he fenced at national level), a gifted violinist and a trained pilot.  A man of deeds rather than theories, he was an ascetic and workaholic and he played the Byzantine world of Third Reich politics like a chess grandmaster.  He was as close to a “Nazi Renaissance man” as it was possible to get.

Robert Gerwarth set out to remedy the lack of a scholarly biography of Reinhard Heydrich – one of the most pivotal and influential figures in the history of the Third Reich.  He has succeeded admirably, producing a work that is as authoritative as it is enjoyable, and in the process setting a new standard by which subsequent biographies of Hitler’s ‘Blond Beast’ will surely be measured.  

Link to Gerwarth's "Hitler's Hangman"

This review first appeared in "History Today" in July 2012

The Rosenstrasse Protest - Myth and Reality

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Rosenstrasse Protest - one of the most fascinating and poignant episodes in the grim history of the Holocaust.

On this day in 1943, the Nazis rounded up the remaining 8,000 or so Jews who were living legally in the German capital.  In the so-called "Fabrik Aktion", or 'Factory Action', the unfortunate victims were intercepted as they arrived for work in Berlin's myriad factories.  Rounded up and put into trucks, they were processed and transported to various holding centres around the city - including a former music hall - to await deportation.

In the days that followed, some 6,000 of those Berlin Jews were duly deported to Auschwitz and a most uncertain fate.  Yet, curiously, one group of prisoners was spared.  The 1,700 that were taken to the Jewish community building on Rosenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte were not deported.  They were held there, in horrific conditions, as their wives and families gathered on the pavement outside, chanting, protesting and demanding the return of their menfolk.   In due course, after around 5 days, the captives were released.  Even the 25 that had been 'mistakenly' deported to Auschwitz-Monowitz were returned.

So much is clear.  The controversy arises with the interpretation that has subsequently been applied to these events.  Some - quite understandably - have sought to make a causal connection between the facts of the families' protest and the prisoners' release: suggesting that the prisoners were released because their families had protested against their deportation.  If only it were that easy.

The truth - as ever - is rather more complex and rather less romantic.  The protests at Rosenstrasse were certainly brave; the women present there risked their own lives for those of their loved ones and took part in one of the very few examples of popular mass protest against the Third Reich.

Yet, I would argue that there is no causal link between the actions of the families and the release of their menfolk.  The prisoners were primarily those Jews in mixed marriages - the women outside, therefore, were Aryan (in Nazi eyes).  These prisoners, therefore, belonged to a liminal category and had already been selected out of the main body of prisoners - hence their incarceration together at Rosenstrasse.  There is every likelihood that these Jews would have been deported in due course, but it appears that they were not scheduled for deportation in March 1943.  Regardless of the brave actions of their womenfolk, therefore, it seems that they would have walked free in any case.

Rosenstrasse, then, was most certainly a heroic, romantic episode, but it is not quite the heroic, romantic episode that some think it was.

If you are interested in reading more on this - I can recommend my book "Berlin at War" :-)