Hitler

Saturday

Kate Maltby

The photo of the young Queen playing Nazi is an important historical document. It should shock us

What can a image from 1933 ever really tell us? In July 1933, Der Stürmer, the Nazi newspaper, published a cover image of a gaping Jewish mouth, the picture of avarice, swallowing kings, admirals, bankers, film stars, greedy for world-control. Hitler had come to power in January of that year and immediately stepped up repression of Jews – it was well reported in the UK. Jews outside Germany decided to hit back and organise a boycott of German goods – Edward VIII could have read about this under the Daily Express headline ‘Judea declares war on Germany’. This allowed the Nazis to further intensify their anti-semitism. So, in that July edition of Der Stürmer, a long panegyric to the

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

A beginner’s guide to Euroscepticism

As a long-time Eurosceptic, I should be happy about the Johnny-Come-Latelys now swelling the sceptic ranks. Following Euro-institutions’ wicked treatment of Greece, many European liberals have finally realised that Brussels might not be the hotbed of liberalism, internationalism and bunny rabbits they thought it was. So, bit by bit, they’re becoming the thing they once looked down upon, the thing they once forcefielded their dinner parties against: Eurosceptics. But I’m not feeling very welcoming to these latter-day doubters, currently live-tweeting their Euro-existential angst and clogging their newspaper columns with tortured questions about whether the EU really is a ‘great achievement of enlightened internationalism’. (Answer: no, you donuts.) For two reasons.

Thursday

Lewis Jones

The raffish toff with a winning Formula

Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers, by social historians, and by lawyers, whom one imagines perusing it with nods, frowns and the occasional wince. Mosley is a barrister of Gray’s Inn, and it was as a lawyer that, with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he came to dominate motor racing. Their association began in 1964, when Mosley was a pupil in Lord Hailsham’s chambers and Ecclestone was the country’s top used-car dealer, said to be able to value an entire showroom at a glance. Ten years later, when they had both made the transition from driving to

Thursday

James Delingpole

Pet rescue

I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south of France, we had a bonding moment almost Brokeback Mountain-esque in its bromantic intensity. Roberts had hired an expensive speedboat for the day (as Andrew Roberts would) and we’d left very little time to get it back to harbour and avoid being stung for a massive surcharge. Problem was, the seas had got very rough and our anchor was stuck fast. We manoeuvred the boat this way and that to no avail. There was nothing for it. Someone would have to dive down to free it. It wasn’t easy. The

Tuesday

Lee Pollock

The BBC’s latest Churchill documentary is an outrageous hatchet job

Churchill: When Britain Said No BBC2 The 50th anniversary earlier this year of the death of Winston Churchill produced an international wave of commemoration. Churchill remains among the most widely admired – and most regularly quoted – political figures of the past century, especially in America. While Churchill’s role in history will be legitimately analyzed for centuries, there is a class of Churchill-bashers (‘revisionists’) for whom the adulation of the last few months (and decades) cannot pass without a spirited answer. And where better to do this than on Britain’s state-owned broadcaster. The revisionists’ first salvo was Jeremy Paxman’s programme (‘all the dockworkers hated Churchill’) on the January 1965 state

Tuesday

Steerpike

Sandi Toksvig makes Hitler jibe about Nigel Farage

Sandi Toksvig disclosed last month that she has given up her role on Radio 4’s The News Quiz in order to focus on launching the Women’s Equality Party. Appearing at the Hay Festival, Toksvig spoke about her reasons for wanting to start the new political party, which aims to ensure women are treated equally to men. In doing so, she also launched a series of jokes about today’s politicians, claiming that the current political system is ‘beyond broken’. She said that Labour’s pink bus had ‘[Emmeline] Pankhurst spinning in her grave’ while today’s government makes the coalition seem like the ‘good old days’ to many. While Toksvig is clearly no longer

Thursday

Clare Mulley

The beginning of the end

Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium foil more usually dropped from planes to jam enemy radar signals. The following morning a wave of Junkers dropping magnesium flares led the German Christmas Day onslaught, soon answered by American P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with machine guns. On the ground, following reports of appalling atrocities, the battle was

Thursday

Robert Philpot

Children of Gomorrah

In the early hours of 25 July 1943, nearly 800 RAF Halifaxes and Lancasters launched a 50-minute bombing raid on the Third Reich’s second largest city, Hamburg. The pilots used the neo-Gothic spire of St Nikolai’s church in the city’s historic heart as a landmark and killed 1,500 people. Three nights later, just after midnight, the bombers returned. What was to follow was immeasurably worse. The RAF’s target was the city’s overcrowded working-class districts, Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfelde, to which many of those who had lost their homes in the previous bombardment had fled. Unusually warm weather and heavy loads of incendiaries combined to create a hurricane-like firestorm. In the

Nigel Jones

The devil’s devoted disciple

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children, in the Berlin bunker, the ‘little doctor’ is still a byword for the black arts of political spin and politicians regularly accuse each other of telling fibs ‘worthy of Goebbels’. The Nazi specialist Peter Longerich, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers a compelling chronicle not because he writes with sparkle —

Monday

Ed West

Don’t get angry at Katie Hopkins if you don’t support policies that could save migrants

The latest issue of The Spectator carries an interesting piece by James Bartholomew on ‘virtue signalling’, the bane of social media and political debate; that is, people expressing how ruddy good they are by telling the world how much they hate bad things like Ukip and the Daily Mail. He writes: ‘It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Be different, be original: that’s what makes a popular politician

I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like being a political leader. I find this difficult because I would be so utterly ill suited to the role. I’m too lazy, too disorganised and too undisciplined to be remotely credible at it. But the area in which I would fail most completely would be in the projection of a suitable image. Not only would I be incapable of saying the right things at the right time; I don’t have the appearance or bearing or dress sense to convey calm, self-confidence and authority. I suppose you could say much the same of Adolf Hitler were it not for his gift

Ed West Ed West

Convince a generation that Ukip resemble the Nazis and you can make them do anything

There was something genuinely frightening about the disturbance aimed at Nigel Farage and his family this weekend; what’s scary is that there seem to be so many people in our country who think a man having lunch with his family is a legitimate target for such a stunt because of his views. If you’re prepared to do that in front of people’s kids, you can likely do anything. Their self-justification was telling; as one protester put it, Farage was a target because he ‘othered’ people. In my experience people who use the word othered are quite quick to ‘other’ anyone who disagrees with them. Likewise when another one of the

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

The madness of Nazism laid bare

‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno Ganz, who not so much portrays Hitler as becomes him in Bernd Eichinger’s 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), spits the Führer’s nihilist venom so convincingly that the fundamental insanity of Nazism is at once laid bare, even to his closest collaborators. The madness of Nazism is now merely Hitler himself, and when on 30 April Ganz/Hitler, entombed in the Führerbunker, shoots himself, the film’s tension is at once gone. What follows is just rats fleeing the hole; and the rest, as it were, is silence. But it was not. VE

Monday

Tom Slater

If we want to tackle anti-Semitism we must challenge hate speech, not censor it

One month on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, free speech is still under attack. The outpouring of public revulsion at the bloody silencing of ‘blasphemous’ cartoonists after the attack was inspiring. It was a visceral display of support for the right to speak one’s mind – as crudely, offensively and blasphemously as one chooses – that has been absent for some time. But deep-rooted ambivalences have remained – and now these look to be exploited by policymakers looking to institute blasphemy laws of their own. When it comes to cracking down on aberrant ideas, Europe has long been leading the way. Restrictions on hate speech are in place across Europe.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem review: too clever by half

Big event. A new play from Sir Tom. And he tackles one of philosophy’s oldest and crunchiest issues, which varsity thinkers call ‘the hard problem’. How is it that a wrinkled three-pound blancmange sitting at the top of the spinal cord can generate abstract thoughts of almost limitless complexity? In real life Sir Tom is said to have such a flair for philosophical chitchat that he can fire off searching observations about Descartes, mind-body dualism, the nature of immateriality, being and non-being, the ‘cogito’ and so on, until those around him have slithered into a coma. Which is not rude of them. It’s perfectly acceptable to pass out during an

Thursday

Hugh Cecil

Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments . After war broke out in September 1939, Resistance fighters from France and other occupied

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Shirley Williams: Saving my mother from the scriptwriters

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of

Thursday

Ian Thomson

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the Marx Brothers’ first undisputed film masterpiece, Animal Crackers (1930), while Groucho wanted only to quote from ‘The Waste Land’; however, the men agreed that they shared a love of cats and fine cigars. Winston Churchill was another who admired the Marxes and their deliciously mad repartee. During an air attack on London in May 1941

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

That’s another year gone and, against the odds, I’m still here

A fruity voice on the train’s announcement system said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you have all your belongings, family members and what have you with you when alighting from the train. We are now arriving in the naughty little station of Newton Abbot.’ This carriage was empty. The Teign estuary sparkled in the Sunday morning sunshine. The line from Totnes in Devon to Paddington is a lovely journey at any time of the year across the farms and pastures green of Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire. Always I have good intentions to read, but usually I rest my chin on the heel of my palm and look out of

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

The Nazi origins of the Vienna Phil’s New Year’s Day concert

It may be the last water-cooler moment in world television. On the first morning of the year, at 11.15 Central European Time, in a place that considers itself the epicentre of Europe, a group of men in formal dress mount the Musikvereinssaal stage in Vienna to perform a ritual that passes for culture and tradition. It is, of course, neither. The music is strictly bar-room, written by members of the Strauss family as social foreplay for the soldiery and serving classes in low taverns. Like most forms of dirty dancing, the music rose vertically from barroom to ballroom and was soon performed as encores by symphonic orchestras to dowager purrs