How England learnt about the German mass murder of the Jews and why it gets much more attention now than in 1945

President Biden

@POTUS

United States government official

I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.

6:23 PM · Dec 2, 2022

77 years after the Second World War it is still the most newsworthy subject in the world.

'There was never any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews. That an estimated 6 million of them were put to death during the Second World War was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end. The handful of survivors, whether in the displaced persons’ camps or in their countries of origin, paid implicit witness to the number of dead. Of 126,000 Jews removed from Austria, 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, where there had been 140,000 Jews before the war, 110,000 were deported—of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, of 76,000 (mostly foreign-born) Jews who were deported during the years 1940-44, less than 3 percent survived. Further east, the figures were even worse: of Poland’s pre-war population of over 3 million Jews, fully 97.5 percent were exterminated. In Germany itself, in May 1945, there remained just 21,450 of the country’s 600,000 Jews.'

I quote Tony Judt in the epilogue to his Postwar (2005), a book I recommend highly, even though I dislike his left-wing politics. 

In it he said that recognition of the Holocaust is what Heine called baptism in 1825, 'the European entry ticket' and was required from countries like Poland and Romania before they were admitted to the EU.

The theme of Postwar is "the withering away of the 'master narratives' of European history": Christianity, national greatness or Marxism. Two hundred years after the French Revolution, the "cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close" he wrote, but the book is a monument to the ideology that has replaced the others: the ideology of anti-racism, non-discrimination and equality of opportunity.

EU membership corrupted England very much

 If you doubt me, read this.

Quotations

 

Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura. (Leisure without books is death, or the burial of a living man.) 

Seneca

Dear boy, you can do anything when you have style. 

Sir Hardy Amies, the tailor. 

Beginning and end

The wildest hope of a healthy person is to get back to his first Christmas party, and be shy enough to be happy. 

G.K Chesterton

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. 

C.S. Lewis

I had been reading Tales from the Iliad. Now, in boyish fancy, I watched the likes of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses pass in triumph with aged Priam, proud even in defeat. I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice (1987), p. 56

 

Existence of God QED

Atheism requires a bigger leap of faith than theism. 

The cosmological argument for the existence of God is the strongest argument and is best expressed in the musical The Sound of Music:

"Nothing came from nothing.

Nothing ever could."

I just came across this clever remark on Twitter, by somebody called Glen Scrivener:

"Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Atheists believe in the virgin birth of the universe. Choose your miracle." 

Dr Johnson, an Anglican Tory saint

Dr. Johnson said that there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money.

Christopher Hollis said this was the most un-Christian remark imaginable. Hollis was the kind of Conservative politician I like, but I am coming round to siding with Dr Johnson.

The Telephone Palace, with the House of the People on the horizon

 

From Mark Galeotti's review in The Times of Owen Matthew's book, Overreach

'The invasion also took the military by surprise: this was a war that was not planned by the professionals in the general staff, but brainstormed by Putin’s circle of spooks and yes-men, and foisted on the soldiers at the last minute. Decades of thinking about how to wage a modern war, libraries of dense theoretical literature, the hard-won lessons of past conflicts and massive exercises were all ignored. So too were all the indications that Ukraine was not the frail fake-state of Putin’s imagination governed by a drug-addicted clown and ready to welcome invaders as liberators.

From 'The case for mass migration is built on lies', Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2021

My laptop is full of open tabs. I've posted quotations here on my blog from a few articles, to serve me as an index. This article is here.

'Now that we have restricted freedom of movement from the EU, what is happening? Wages are rising rapidly. Average earnings are going up 8 per cent annually, and in trades such as transport or construction by 20 per cent. While this has much to do with the effect of workers returning from furlough, these are still astonishing figures.

'The Labour Party, the main architect of unrestricted immigration, ties itself up in knots over whether to back a £15 minimum wage, deaf to the irony that most companies would kill to find someone willing to work for less than twenty quid an hour right now. If this was a lab experiment, and to some degree it is, the conclusion would be clear. Turning off the flow of workers increases salaries.

From Peter Hitchens' Roger Scruton lecture delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 24th October 2022

[The lecture is here. I completely agree with most of what Peter Hitchens says here (and elsewhere). I especially agree that Margaret Thatcher was not a conservative (unlike him I thought so in her time), excepting for the famous Section 28 which prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities and which was a dead letter. And, a small thing, creating three hereditary peerages, two of which she awarded to men without heirs. Tony Blair was a modern liberal rather than a socialist, but though socialism is a terrible, authoritarian and misguided ideology, that has been shown not to work, the worst thing about socialists is that they are also liberals.]

'The great institutional buildings of London and Oxford are still standing after many decades of turmoil. In many cases they are in better condition than they have ever enjoyed.

'But they lie. Here in Oxford, the kingdom of thought and learning which used to lie in the small damp triangle between the Cherwell and the Thames, is not at all the same place as it once was. The commercial imperative roars ever more loudly for its money. The Egalitarian siege tightens, more total and inevitable than anything the Cromwellians ever managed. And as these things happen, Oxford’s role as a home for independent thought will shrivel.

Alastair Crooke on 'Europe’s Eerie Silence'

Putin is entirely to blame, legally and morally, for the invasion of Ukraine. It is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. 

I don't necessarily think America wanted to humiliate him and I don't think (some do) that the State Department wanted to provoke a war, but this was what they did. 

I think, as with the outbreak of the two world wars, it was bad diplomacy on all sides that led us here.

As AJP Taylor said of Hitler, Putin is a rational, though no doubt a wicked statesman. 

Quotations

“Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world”

Logan Pearsall Smith


"The historian's task is to complicate, not to clarify. He strives to celebrate the diversity of manners, the opacity of things, the variety of species. He is barred, thereby, from making a frontal assault on his topic. Like the pilgrim, the historian is obligated to approach his subject obliquely. He must circumambulate the spot several times before making even the most fleeting contact. His method, like that of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is that of the digression.

Quotations

'At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the front window of the In & Out – the Naval and Military Club, then in Piccadilly. Exploding, it knocked everyone off their feet, including the barman Robbins, and trashed the Long Bar. But in the silence that followed came the unwavering request of senior member Commander Vaughan Williams: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.’'

The new religion

I saw many years ago that the anti-discrimination ideology that dominates the West was a religion, before I ever heard or saw the idea expressed but now the idea is pretty commonplace - it could hardly not be since it is explains what would otherwise be inexplicable. 

Here is an interesting essay on the subject by one James M. Patterson.

Looking him up quickly I find this news item:

'Author James Patterson said in a statement, "I apologize for saying white male writers having trouble finding work is a form of racism."'

Dream of the Magi, 1120-30 Cathedral of Saint-Lazare, Autun, France

 

500,000 have died in 2 years in Ethiopian war, almost 400,000 in 7 years in Yemeni war (an illegal invasion by the Saudis)

Since the start of the conflict in Ethiopia in November 2020, it is said that over 500,000 have died in the fighting or from famine and lack of health care, tens of thousands have been sexually assaulted; and well over 2 million have been displaced.

Wikipedia thinks that the numbers killed in the Ukrainian war are somewhere between 33,000 and 8,000 but I have seen 100,000 mentioned. Death figures in general are much exaggerated, but not always. US General Milley on November 10 estimated that over 100,000 had died or been injured on each side. The Kremlin’s highest publicly disclosed figure of war dead has been 5,937. The Ukrainian side's highest is 11,000

Yet we hear nothing of the Ethiopian war or of the horrors for which our ally Saudi Arabia is to blame fighting Shias both in her unjust war in Yemen and at home.

In February, the war in Yemen had killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes.

The socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Joe Biden defeated for the Democratic nomination, on Tuesday night withdrew his bill to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen, because he learnt that Mr Biden would veto it.

Facebook posts from 2014 and 2012

I can't stop wasting time on Facebook. Reviewing my reviews, I see I gave Samuel Beckett's 'Malone Dies' one star and Enid Blyton's 'Castle of Adventure' five. I suppose this is probably right.

My recipe for happiness: trust in God; good health; a sense of beauty; a passion for books; friends; enjoying your own company; not caring about material things; a good sense of humour; a quick mind; a sense of history; being in Romania; glorious spring weather.

Feminists rewrite prehistory

'What seems obvious to the general public — that prehistory was a bloody mess of invasions, migrations, battles and conflict — is not always a commonplace view among researchers. Worse, the idea that ancient peoples organised themselves among clear ethnic and tribal lines is also taboo. Obvious statements of common sense, such as the existence of patriarchy in the past, are constantly challenged and the general tone of academia is one of refutation: both of established theories and thinkers and of disagreeable parts of the past itself.

'Added to this is the ever-present fear that studies and results are being used by the wrong kind of people. In a 2019 journal article, entitled “Genetics, archaeology and the far-Right: An unholy trinity”, Susanne Hakenbeck expresses grave concern that recent genetics work on the early Bronze Age invasions of the Indo-European steppe are needlessly giving oxygen to dangerous ideas — namely that young men from one ethnic group might have migrated from the Pontic-Caspian grasslands and violently subdued their neighbours, passing on their paternal DNA at the expense of the native males. This narrative, fairly well-supported in the genetics literature, is for Hakenbeck deeply unpleasant and wrong:

Quotations

Writer Mary McCarthy said of writer Lillian Hellman ...'Every word she utters is a lie. Including 'and' and 'the.' Was reminded of this having just binge watched Meghan and Harry's 'truth'. Feel I am about to go into a diabetic coma. I won't go on...only to say her next book should be 'The Ladybird Book Of Re Writing History', My favourite bit was when Harry gave her an adoring look as she explained; 'I said....'Walk about? What on earth is a walk about?' It was very well done, fantastic PR and stomach churning.

The decline of Germany and Europe

From an article in the Financial Times, Tuesday 6 December.

'Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, has said Germany is a case study of a western state that made a “strategic bet” on globalisation and interdependence — and was now suffering the consequences.

'“It outsourced its security to the US, its export-led growth to China, and its energy needs to Russia,” she wrote in June. “It is now finding itself excruciatingly vulnerable in an early 21st century characterised by great power competition and an increasing weaponisation of interdependence by allies and adversaries alike.”

I wrote this one year ago

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is 37 and his Duchess turns out (it slipped out in the trial) to be 43, not 39 as she admits to. He has married his mother in more than one sense and his mother was a manipulative, self interested and ruthless woman. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron.

"To put it bluntly, he is a liar"

AJP Taylor, John Charmley, Hugh Trevor-Roper and other great historians rightly praised David Irving's industry and gift for research, but added, also rightly, caveats. 

Professor Charmley, one of my great heroes, said that he is not to be trusted without checking him. Often, of course, it isn't possible. 

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre as he became, said much the same.

I read extensive parts of his Churchill's War and learnt a lot, enjoyed it a lot, but one sees that one is being manipulated, to see Hitler in a good light or, in this case, his enemies in a bad one. 

I started reading about the libel case which Mr Irving brought and lost with a very open mind. That is to say, I was prejudiced against all three of the main historians in the case.

I suspect the historian whom he sued, Deborah Lipstadt, is a very annoying woman and a useless historian, if only judging by her outrage that Ernst Nolte considered Stalin as bad as Hitler. 

Sir Richard Evans, the expert witness whom she called and who was paid a cool quarter of a million for his two years of work, can also be very annoying, a histrionic progressive sometimes and wrong about lots of things about the National Socialists. Still one only need read a little of his book Lying About Hitler, the evidence he gave in the trial, to see that David Irving has sinned against the Holy Ghost by playing fast and loose with historical evidence for political purposes.

Or to read the defence counsel Richard Rampton, KC's closing speech.

I am not complaining about bias - Deborah Lipstadt and Sir Richard Evans are very biased indeed, as are Gibbon, Lord Macaulay, Tacitus and pretty much all historians - nor of inaccuracy. Everyone is inaccurate sometimes. I complain of distortion and trickery, of not being in good faith. 

Eyewitnesses to the Babi Yar massacre

A friend tells me I should not write about the massacre of ninety freshly orphaned Jewish children in Belaya Tserkov on August 22, 1941 without mentioning the far greater numbers killed at the ravine at Babi Yar, starting on 29 September, by German kommandos led by the same man, Paul Blobel. 

Actually I did so already, in January 2020, here.

Here is a testimony by an eyewitness.

This conversation between two German generals in 1944 (about Babi Yar?) is interesting, from David Irving's site. (Note that, in the last sentence on the page, David Irving describes the Babi Yar massacre as a reprisal.)

Dr Johnson, an Anglican Tory saint

'Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.' Dr Johnson

Dr. Johnson also said that there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money. Christopher Hollis said this was the most un-Christian remark imaginable (Hollis was the kind of Conservative politician I like) but I am coming round to siding with Dr Johnson. He was being deliberately paradoxical but he was usually right. And a great saint.

'The Irish are a very fair people, sir. They never speak well of one another.' Dr Johnson's joke is true and applies to Romanians too.' Is it to do with being a peasant nation or were the Irish whom Johnson met Anglo-Irish like his friends Burke and Goldsmith?

I intend to read Benjamin Abelow's new book, 'How the West Brought War to Ukraine'

This review summarises his ideas.

I quote.

'.... the fact is that had one NATO-member leader – perhaps French President Emmanuel Macron – simply quashed the idea of Ukrainian membership the conflict might have been averted.

'Second, Russia cannot help but associate American involvement in the war with the threat of regime change; consider events this century in Kiev, Tbilisi, Bishkek – not to mention Baghdad, Tripoli, and a clear intent in Damascus – along with statements from members of the US Congress and the executive branch, and it is hardly fanciful to think of Moscow as the ultimate trophy, raising further the prospect of a pre-emptive response by Russia.

Quotations

"Covid and the Ukraine war have shaken our society’s very foundations. Dreams of The End of History after the end of the Cold War have been dashed. Politicians can no longer pretend that shocks can be absorbed simply by “going shopping” – as George W Bush put it, when he advised people to go on as normal in the wake of 9/11 – or by submitting to the elemental forces of change – as Tony Blair ordained. Instead we are plunged into a world of dark-age geopolitics, super-wicked problems, black swan events." Sherelle Jacobs 2 days ago in the Daily Telegraph

"It’s not about not believing. It’s about rejecting a god who looks like the ruling class." Gloria Steinem discussing her lack of religion in 2012. In fact, she had not kept up with the modern world that she helped shape. A god who looks like the ruling class is multi-faith, multicultural, feminist and enthusiastic about homosexuality and was so in 2012.

"In every class society that's ever existed, the ruling element does not rule nakedly. They always adorn their rule with myths, themes and symbols to justify their position at the apex of the social pyramid.“ Michael Parenti

The Eastern Front

Another book I have been reading is Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor. I am not as enthusiastic about it as the friend who recommended it, don't advise you to read it unless military history is your thing, but it's readable and the first part is interesting. I recommend that you read RHS Stolfi instead, but Stolfi's book Hitler: Beyond Good and Evil does not do narrative history, which is Beevor's métier.

Mr Beevor agrees with other historians that Hitler was psychologically very odd, and acted almost as if he subconsciously wanted to lose.

'Hitler in the Wolfsschanze used to gaze at the operations map showing the huge areas notionally controlled by his forces. For a visionary who had achieved total power in a country possessing the best-trained army in the world, the sight induced a sense of invincibility. This armchair strategist never possessed the qualities for true generalship, because he ignored practical problems. During the brief campaigns in Poland, Scandinavia, France and the Balkans, resupply had at times been difficult, but never an insuperable problem. In Russia, however, logistics would be as decisive a factor as firepower, manpower, mobility and morale. Hitler's fundamental irresponsibility - a psychologically interesting defiance of fate - had been to launch the most ambitious invasion in history while refusing to gear the German economy and industry for all-out war. In hindsight, it seems more like the act of a compulsive gambler, subconsciously striving to increase the odds. The horrific consequences for millions of people seemed only to strength his megalomania.'

Was the Second World War inevitable, once Hitler came to power?

I have just read for the third time AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War and I highly recommend it. It was, however, published in 1961 and so is very out of date. We know much more now.

He wrote:

"Danzig was the most justified of German grievances: a city of an exclusively German population which manifestly wished to return to the Reich and which Hitler himself restrained only with difficulty. The solution too seemed peculiarly easy. Halifax never wearied of suggesting that Danzig should return to German sovereignty, with safeguards for Polish trade.

"Hitler wanted this also. The destruction of Poland had been no part of his original project. On the contrary, he had wished to solve the question of Danzig so that Germany and Poland could remain on good terms. Was Polish obstinacy then the only thing, which stood between Europe and a peaceful outcome? By no means. Previously Danzig might have been settled without implying any upheaval in international relations. Now it had become a symbol of Polish independence and, with the Anglo-Polish alliance, of British independence as well. Hitler no longer wished merely to fulfill German national aspirations or to satisfy the inhabitants of Danzig. He aimed to show that he had imposed his will on the British and on the Poles. All parties aimed at a settlement by negotiations, but only after victory in a war of nerves.

"...Many however believe that Hitler was a modern Attila, loving destruction for its own sake and therefore bent on war without thought of policy. There is no arguing with such dogmas. Hitler was an extraordinary man; and they may well be true. But his policy is capable of rational explanations; and it is on this policy is built. The escape into irrationality is no doubt easier. The blame for war can be put on Hitler's Nihilism instead of on the faults and failures of European statesmen - faults and failures which their public shared. However, human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness."

The view of Hitler as a nihilist bent on war is now the standard view, as it was when Taylor wrote his very shocking book. It may be accurate, but war against whom?

A good place to see a summary of recent historical judgements is the site of Lawrence Rees, who made the really wonderful TV programme The Nazis: A Warning from History.

He interviewed many famous historians about the war and on this page discusses why it broke out. 

He quotes Sir Richard Evans 

“We know now through documentation that has become available over the last few years that he intended there to be a general European war really absolutely from the outset. He’s telling people in private in 1932, 1933, when he’s coming to power, that he’s going to have a general war.”

Sir Ian Kershaw and Adam Tooze agree.

Hitler did want a big war, but he certainly didn’t want war with England. Every historian accepts that. 

He wanted a war with the USSR. 

A greater historian than Evans, Maurice Cowling, said the clever thing to have done was to have arranged things so that the British Empire stayed out of his war with Stalin. Had France done the same very much suffering could have been saved.

Instead England and France fumbled their way into the war that Baldwin and Chamberlain had intended to avoid.

Lawrence Rees quotes Adam Tooze saying Hitler went to war

“because he’s convinced, in my view, that the world Jewish conspiracy has taken on a whole new ominous character, and this starts in the summer of 1938, I think, fundamentally with the Evian Conference in which America becomes involved in European affairs around the issue of the organised emigration of eastern European Jews”.

So by 1939 Hitler had come to believe that “the real centre of the world Jewish conspiracy is Washington and Wall Street and Hollywood, and that, of course, fundamentally shifts your assessment of the strategic picture, because behind Britain and France, as in the First World War, ultimately stands the force, the full force, of the American armaments economy.”

This is very interesting. It ties in with what Chamberlain said to the US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, according to what he told James Forrestal, US Secretary of the Navy on December 27th, 1945 as recorded in Forrestal's diary. The two played golf that day.

'I asked him [Kennedy] about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain's position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy's view: that Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt's [William C. Bullitt, then ambassador to France] urging Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a case of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn't fight, Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversation with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain's backside. Kennedy's response always was that putting iron up his backside did no good unless the British had some iron with which to fight, and they did not. . . .'

Yet it still seems clear to me that clever diplomacy by Poland and England could have meant Germany going to war with Soviet Russia and not with Poland, England and France. 

Poland, in fact, had the chance to go to war with Communist Russia as Germany’s ally. Poland declined, not from sympathy for Russia but from refusal to make the small concessions for which Hitler asked over Danzig and the Polish Corridor. 

The Polish Foreign Minister Beck thought that Poland was powerful enough to defy Germany and Russia. This is an incomprehensible delusion, as Taylor points out.

England then gave her guarantee to Poland and Germany prepared for war against Poland, a war in which Hitler did not expect England and France to join.

Had Germany and Russia fought it out, while England armed to the teeth and stayed out, as Lloyd George wanted, and had France done the same, would Germany or the Russians have won?

Nobody can say. It depends on how the two sides fought. It depends on the decisions of Stalin and Hitler. 

It might well have been the Russians.

But either way would have been better than what did happen. The British Empire might have survived for decades. Japan would not have attacked it. France might not have fallen. Half of Europe might have remained at peace.

Himmler's Report to the Fuhrer on fighting against gangs, presented to Hitler on 29 December 1942, proves Hitler knew of the mass murder of Jews

 

I don't remember hearing about this document, which Himmler presented to Hitler on 29 December 1942.

The "Report to the Führer on fighting against gangs" Nr. 51., which covered the period from August to November 1942 and which referred only to a part of the occupied Soviet area, (southern Russia, Ukraine and the district of Bialystok); included the following numbers concerning persons imprisoned or executed:

1. Bandits

a) Established number of deaths after combat 1,337
b) Prisoners executed immediately 737
c) Prisoners executed after lengthy thorough interrogation 7,828

2. Gang helpers and suspects

a) Arrested 16,553
b) Executed 14,257
c) Jews executed 363,211

The left and right agree about Ukraine

People who admire Putin, back his invasion of Ukraine or think him a standard-bearer for Christianity are horribly mistaken, but mistaken too are people who see wars simply as crimes, rather than the continuation of diplomacy by other means.

"Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine'. It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA."

Noam Chomsky. (I absolutely hate to agree with a crazily left-wing figure who once praised Pol Pot's 'noble experiment', but here he is right.) 

Was a lie by a Romanian the reason the Second World War broke out? The curious Tilea Incident.

Viorel Tilea came from an old noble family in Turda in Transylvania, was a cousin of Ion Ratiu, and in 1919 attended the Paris Peace Conference as private secretary to Iuliu Maniu.

From 1938 to 1940 he was the Romanian Minister in London, was close to the  Focus Group (previously the Anti-Nazi Council) of which Churchill was the leading figure, and changed the course of world history.

On March 16 and 17 1939, two days after the Germans marched into Prague he told the British Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that Germany had issued an ‘ultimatum’ to his government.

Bucharest was astonished and denied there had been an ultimatum, but Tilea stuck to his story.

Robert Boothby, who had been Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, boasted a few days later over lunch with his mistress Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of Harold, that he had ‘entirely invented’ the story.

Boothby said he had called on the Romanian legation to obtain a visa, met Tilea who had had mentioned that Germany was asking Romania to concentrate more on agriculture, and he had persuaded Tilea to tell the Foreign Office that this was an ‘ultimatum.’  

Boothby had then sold the story to the newspapers.

“According to a German intercept, Tilea admitted to another Balkan diplomat that his instructions had only been to talk of an ‘economic ultimatum’; he had ‘made the utmost possible use of his instructions.’ Whatever the background, he shortly retired a wealthy man; he purchased a farm and maintained a monastic silence until his death. The Foreign Office took note that among Tilea’s effects in January 1941 was a pound of solid gold.” (From David Irving's Churchill's War - please bear in mind that Irving is a very gifted researcher but an admirer of Hitler and not to be trusted very far without checking him. I have not been able to check him.)

The consequence was that Chamberlain decided to give guarantees to Romania and Poland.

This meant that British foreign policy was in effect outsourced to the triumvirate-dictatorship in Warsaw. 

Because Poland would not accept an alliance with Bolshevik Russia, Britain had chosen Poland over Russia. Indeed Lord Halifax told the cabinet that Poland was stronger militarily than the USSR.

How differently things might have been had Poland accepted Hitler’s offer of an alliance. In return for the free city of Danzig being incorporated in the Reich and allowing an extraterritorial railway and road across the Polish Corridor, Germany held out the lure of territorial gains in the Ukraine and Belorussia, something very attractive to Poland, even though around 17% of Poland's population were Ukrainian or Belarussian already.

Hitler seemingly was prepared to forget the grievances of Germans in Poland for the sake of a useful ally, as he was those of Germans in the South Tyrol for the sake of Mussolini.

Footnote. Boothby was a curious, flamboyant and not an admirable figure. In the 1960s the notorious East End gangsters the Kray Twins forced boys to let him bugger them.

Vive la difference!

I recall years ago someone wrote to the Times to say that, after reading an article about how to avoid sexual stereotyping when it came to presents for children, he brought his young daughter some building bricks and these were a huge success. So much so that she took them to bed saying to each in turn 'Goodnight, brick'.

Herr Beans

During the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938 Winston Churchill used to refer to Herr Beans, this being the way he pronounced Czech President Benes' name.

Sic Transit Lady Susan Hussey

Lady Susan Hussey

I have decided not to follow British news and keep away from the news altogether, except for Romanian news. But Romanian news is like food without salt. 

I definitely have tried to keep away from the furore about Lady Susan Hussey, the late Queen's lady in waiting, friend and confidante, sacked for racism because she asked a British West Indian lady in African dress, several times, where she was from. I decided the BBC would be more insufferable than ever on this theme and have gone over to Al Jazeera, a much better news source.

However, I feel like quoting the comment of the inestimable Petronella Wyatt in "The Spectator", who says: "Susan Hussey has no prejudices at all. She spent much of her life married to a man called Marmaduke, who had one leg."

And since I am on the subject, I shall add how horribly Lady Susan has been treated by the King. 

Put not your trust in princes.

Sic Transit Efunroye Tinubu

According to the Times, on this day in 1887 there died, aged about 82, Madam Tinubu, a west African slave trader who owned 360 personal slaves. After defying British suppression of the slave trade, in 1856 she was exiled from Lagos. There are statues to her, including one in Tinubu Square, Lagos. Last year there were calls for an official annual holiday to honour her.

The old girl was quite a character and her Wikipedia entry is worth reading. 

It was Africans who enslaved Africans and sold them to white men but a lot of slaves were bought by Muslim Arabs, like the Omani Tipu Tip or Tipoo Tip, an Arab who dominated the trade in Zanzibar. Arabs, of course, did more slave trading than Christians, partly because they carried on the trade from time immemorial. They concentrated on girl slaves for concubinage and usually or often castrated their male slaves (why?) 

I bought this modern reprint of his biography in Zanzibar. The preface apologised about it's using outmoded vocabulary and ideas. The new edition did change the spelling of his name to Tipu. 

How they fear the past.

'For neo-cons it is always 1938': reading and thinking about Munich

As I mentioned, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in July 1936 told Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill,

"I am not going to get this country into a war with anybody for the League of Nations or anybody else or for anything else. There is one danger, of course, which has probably been in all your minds—supposing the Russians and Germans got fighting and the French went in as the allies of Russia owing to that appalling pact they made; you would not feel you were obliged to go and help France, would you? If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”

In April and May 1938 Baldwin's successor Neville Chamberlain strongly pressed the French Prime Minister to renounce the French-Czechoslovak alliance, without success.

 

Chamberlain, like Baldwin, was not concerned about Czechoslovakia, a country whose fate did not affect British interests, but about France. 

British military experts were almost unanimous that Germany would defeat France in a war unless Britain intervened. A Europe dominated by Germany and a German occupied Normandy was a great threat to British interests.

As Chamberlain said, and as everyone else knew, there was nothing Britain could do to help Czechoslovakia if Germany decided to destroy her. 

But France was bound by her alliance with Czechoslovakia. 

(France also had treaties of friendship, but not alliances, with Romania and Poland.) 

As British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax stated at a Cabinet meeting in March 1938, "Whether we liked or not, we had to admit the plain fact that we could not afford to see France overrun."

So it was not a desire to prevent Germany from undoing the 1919 settlement that concerned the British government, but a clear-eyed assessment of British interests. 

A similar attitude made Attlee's government Cold Warriors in the late 1940s. They saw in Communist Russia another National Socialist Germany. I don't think Stalin was, in fact, a threat to Italy, France or other democratic countries but it is easy to understand why the post-war British Labour Government thought so. 

Greek Communists, rather than Moscow, insisted on fighting the Greek civil war.

Whether or not the view that preserving the balance of power in Europe was essential to protecting British interests was right, and I have many doubts, it was logical and had guided British foreign policy since the 18th century.

By contrast, does the Russian invasion of Ukraine directly affect Britain? 

No, you say, but  Boris Johnson modelled himself on Churchill, not Baldwin or Chamberlain. 

However, Churchill was worried about German mastery of Europe directly threatening Britain and the British Empire, certainly not by concern for the inviolability of Czechoslovakian borders. 

He was not a Wilsonian idealist. Very far from it, he believed in power, not morality, in foreign and colonial policy, and had campaigned for years against any concessions to the natives in India. 

The Liberal Unionist Chamberlain, on the other hand, argued for the old Liberal principle of non-interference in other countries, like John Bright and Richard Cobden had done over the Crimean war and as the Labour Party had over Churchill's desire to intervene in the Russian civil war.

The French Premier Daladier took the same line as Churchill when he told the British in a late April 1938 meeting that Hitler's real aim was to eventually secure 

"a domination of the Continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble..... Today, it is the turn of Czechoslovakia. Tomorrow, it will be of Poland and Roumania. When Germany has obtained the oil and wheat she needs, she will turn on the West. Certainly we must multiply our efforts to avoid war. But that will not be obtained unless Great Britain and France stick together, intervening in Prague for new concessions [to the Sudeten Germans] but declaring at the same time that they will safeguard the independence of Czechoslovakia. If, on the contrary, the Western Powers capitulate again, they will only precipitate the war they wish to avoid."

Was he right or were Baldwin and Chamberlain,  who thought Hitler wanted to attack Bolshevik Russia?

I'd say the latter. 

Redrawing German boundaries and acquiring living space in the East were surely Hitler’s objects, not marching into Paris.

In any case, France and Britain both pressed Prague to agree to concessions to the Sudeten Germans, to save France embarrassment. 

Yet in the end, despite arguing for war previously, Daladier made it clear that France would not go to war for Czechoslovakia, whatever Britain did. 

Britain, however, had tried to prevent a German invasion of Czechoslovakia, because of France's commitment to Czechoslovakia. Britain had sent Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia to see if boundary changes could be made and had guaranteed the borders of Czecho-Slovakia as they were redrawn after the Sudetenland was given to Germany. 

This was an unprecedented commitment to a country in Central Europe and one which Chamberlain and Halifax immediately regretted. It was a moment that let the future in: Nato, its extension the Baltic States and now the Ukrainian war.

In the spring of 1939, Germany marched into Bohemia and Moravia, an opportunistic response to thedisintegration of Czecho-Slovakia rather than part of  a plan. Chamberlain, in response to this and the false assertion by the Romanian Minister in London that Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Romania, issued guarantees to Poland and Romania to deter further aggression. 

This was Chamberlain's hope, at least. Halifax had decided when the Germans took Prague that Hitler had Napoleonic ambitions and that another world war was inevitable.

Hitler,  far from being deterred, within an hour of hearing of the British guarantees asked his generals to draw up plans for an invasion of Poland. 

This is how wars begin, in a muddle. 

A muddle has led to the present war in the Ukraine.

In diplomacy and war everything is a muddle, always. Then myths are made by journalists and politicians and lazy and narrow-minded historians harden the myths into accepted fact.