Hitler

Israel would not have been born when it was – 1948 – without Hitler’s genocidal war on European Jewry. Dispossessed Jews had to be provided with a home. In the rush to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, safeguarding Arab nationalism was not the most pressing concern. Israel’s foundation thus marked a turning point in the fortunes of the world more grievous than anyone could have anticipated. Most European nations supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when President Nasser of Egypt moved his troops into Sinai on the Israeli border and, as part of a violent pan-Arabist ideology, vowed to eliminate Jews (and Christians). While Nasser seemed

What is art for? How can it, should it, relate to the political framework of its time? How far can it shade into ‘propaganda of the imagination’? These are some of the questions threading through Andy Friend’s compelling account of the first decade of the Artists International Association, or AIA, a vital but under-explored British movement welding art and politics against the growing threat of international fascism.  The story opens in 1933 in the candlelit rooms of Misha Black above Seven Dials, Covent Garden, where a dozen impecunious jobbing artists met to discuss a sensational report from the Soviet Union. This was that thousands of Russian artists were regularly employed

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording the dreams of her fellow citizens. ‘I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had, as it were, dictated,’ she wrote. Citing a dictum of a Nazi official that in Hitler’s Germany no one has a private life except while asleep, the material she collected demonstrated how dreams ‘as minutely as a seismograph’

‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In order to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese, the British, Americans, Soviets, French and Chinese had indeed all worked closely together. But in his meticulous, scholarly and highly enjoyable history of the second world war, Tim Bouverie makes plain just what this entailed: a collaboration that was both deep and rivalrous, riven by secret deals, prejudice, changing loyalties and betrayals, conducted by people who at different times admired, feared and despised one another, while in public most often remaining models of civility. All the great set pieces are here –

Whenever a new study of the Nazi regime appears, it is taken as a given that after Adolf Hitler seized power and became dictator of Germany in 1933 an egalitarian society emerged, very different to previous decadent, backward-looking generations. In this modern era, it is assumed, the concerns of the Kaiser and the German elite were at best ignored and at worst made another target of the Führer’s purges. In 1933, Wilhelm called Hitler a ‘torchbearer with unparalleled force of conviction and self-sacrifice’ It’s a tempting summation, but an over-simplistic one. As a biographer of the Duke of Windsor, I drew on documents that suggested that Hitler was in fact

Wagner’s Ring is an ambitious cycle of four operas relating world history from Primal Swirl to End of Days. It took 26 years to write, takes 15 hours to perform, a double-size orchestra to play and a specially built opera house to stage. Michael Downes, the director of music at St Andrews University, places the fons et origo of the epic in Wagner’s frustration as a kapellmeister, when he wrote, unsolicited, to his boss the King of Saxony, proposing a total revamp of the royal music scene. No reply was forthcoming. A second proposal was also blanked. Furious, Wagner flung himself into the Dresden uprising of 1848, financing the manufacture

In June 1933, the 24-year-old Martha Dodd, the daughter of the newly appointed American ambassador to Berlin, arrived in the German capital with her parents and older brother. She knew little and cared less about politics. To her, Adolf Hitler, who had just seized supreme power in Germany, was merely ‘a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin’.            To all her friends in Berlin, Martha would show odd bits of information from her father’s office The Berlin in which the Dodds found themselves was a ferment of intrigue, uncertainty, plots, counterplots, sudden disappearances and febrile gaiety. Three months earlier, the Reichstag had burned down and a state of emergency had

You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing ships hundreds of miles apart and playing havoc with communications. That’s not to mention enemy action by submarine, air attack and large surface raiders such as the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. Some 4.5 million tons of aid were delivered at the expense of 119 ships and 2,763 lives lost.  Was it worth it? Opinion at the

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career. By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career. Claud was a mostly loyal child of the

When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country lauded for its conservation of natural resources that is rated freer and happier than the United States. He recalls feeling liberated and unfettered as he hiked in cloud forests with his brothers, seeing monkeys, sloths and spectacular birds. One day, a local friend led the boys on a mysterious quest to view something special; after walking for three hours through a maze of paths, they arrived at a cascade hiding a cave, where they could gaze out at the green world through curtains of falling water. Trump’s ‘big lie’ over

‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question:   ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless war to perpetual peace, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s suggestion that war was not natural to our species. In 1940 she wrote: War is just an invention known to the majority of human societies, by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honour or acquire loot or wives or

‘We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime… Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.’ These words were spoken by Winston Churchill in a BBC radio broadcast to the nation from Chequers on the evening of 22 June 1941. Churchill detested Stalin – but he needed him to destroy Hitler That morning, Operation Barbarossa had begun, with Hitler’s armed forces launching the biggest invasion in modern history into the heart of a country whose very existence Churchill detested: the Soviet Union. This cataclysmic invasion by the Nazi regime, however, created an ally the British leader had never envisioned. For the

The hall was before me like a gigantic shell, packed with thousands and thousands of people. Even the arena was densely crowded. More than 5,600 tickets had been sold. Cyril Bertram Mills started his circus career accompanying his father to European horse fairs in the 1920s. The two of them were soon familiar faces on the German circus scene, travelling between shows to recruit acts for London. The Munich Circus was a particular draw; but sometimes they hired out their circular wooden building to other local acts. The opening quote of this review comes from Adolf Hitler. Mills was at first dismissive of the Munich Nazi party leader, pointing out

Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’. Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said

Islands always intrigue, hovering on the horizons of our imaginations – seen, according to your lights, as territories to be taken, ancient redoubts, repositories of secrets, even loci of lands of youth. Where there are no islands, we often imagine them – Plato’s Atlantis, the Celts’ Avalon, the Irish Hy-Brasil, Zeno’s Friseland, Columbus’s Antillia – and occasionally find them, like Terra Australis Incognita, postulated long before Europeans made landfall. Orkney was a trading station long before London, and Iona was the epicentre of Celtic Christianity Britain was once itself an imagined island – or rather islands plurally, called by Pliny Britanniae, one archipelago among others in the great geographer’s speculative