Flames Across the World: Trollheart's Comprehensive History of World War II
 

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Introduction: Don’t mention the war!

I’m sure many of those who see this are thinking, what? Another account of the Second World War? Why? Aren’t there more than enough of them around already? And my answer is yes, yes there are, and some truly exceptional ones. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, or documentaries that tower above their fellows, such as The Nazis: A Warning From History and of course, the titan among titans, The World at War. But excellent as all these - and more - are in chronicling the events that changed the world from 1939 to 1945 (and indeed, before and after those dates) they do suffer from one small restriction.

Because of the very nature of books, TV documentaries or films, it’s virtually impossible to encompass an entire six-year global conflict into, at best, less than a thousand pages (usually a lot less) or thirty hours of television, as in the case of some of the multi-part documentaries, including those mentioned above. Time and space are factors which have to be considered, and so certain aspects of the war are either just glossed over, noted briefly or in some cases ignored altogether. Some books, or documentaries, focus on one viewpoint, phase or subject - a certain battle, strategy in general, famous figures, organisations like the SS and so on.
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In this journal, which, like most of mine I envisage running for several years, I intend to attempt to write the most inclusive, comprehensive, complete and detailed history of the Second World War that I can. I’ll be looking into every facet, every part of the war, from the people who were responsible for prosecuting it to the people who fought in it, on both sides. I’ll of course be going deeply into the various battles and campaigns, looking at the machinery of war, the advancements in technology such as radar and directed bombing, tactics employed by either side (the Battle for the North Atlantic, for instance, which saw for the first time merchant shipping targeted as policy and allowed the killing of civilians, or the hyperbolic accounts of Nazi fighter pilots shooting at enemy airmen who had ejected - were those based in any sort of truth?) and of course the human cost of the war.

I intend, for instance, to spend about a month researching and writing about the Gestapo, similar study going into the various forms of resistance - mostly French and Polish, but I’m sure there were others - the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans and the tactics employed by the British SOE - Special Operations Executive - the spies who went behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and would and did do anything to prevent their capture. The main figures in the Third Reich will be explored in detail, but so too the ones in the Allied forces, and while history is written by the winners, I will be doing my best to keep a neutral tone, not siding with either combatant, though of course some things, like concentration camps, like Japanese torture of prisoners of war, will be about as black and white as it can get, and where something needs to be rightly condemned, I will not shirk from that.
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And again you ask, sure, but why are you doing this? Well, I never write a journal, obviously, on any subject in which I am not interested - bar my ill-fated jazz journal, a step too far and a real mistake if ever there was one, and begun for very much the wrong reasons - so when I have a subject that I enjoy writing about, I tend to try to write about it. As a child, growing up, you had two choices in terms of comics - war or football. I mean, once you grew out of the funnies. There was, later on in my childhood, a slowly burgeoning trade in science fiction comics and of course there was always Marvel and DC, but in terms of “real” comics, it was football or war. I was never interested in football - not until about 1990 anyway - so for me the choice was clear.

In many ways, I was a child of the war. Not that I lived through it, but it was the war closest to home and closest in time to my youth. Vietnam began when I was about six I think, yet I recall almost nothing about it on Irish television - maybe because we were deeply mired in “The Troubles” and had no particular wish to see more war, even far from home - and the Korean War was, frankly, something we learned of through M*A*S*H, which I hated with a passion. Although Ireland was technically neutral during World War II, many Irishmen did join up to fight in the British Army or Air Force or Navy, and our own government made shady deals with high-ranking officials in the Nazi party, cleaving perhaps to the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This was, you must remember, less than twenty years since Ireland had become a Free State, and hatred against the English was still very much bubbling and simmering. If we could strike at the “old enemy”, we were ready to do so. Yes, we had equipped ourselves with the traditional long spoon in order to sup with him, but we had extended the invitation to the Devil, and to dinner he came. Possibly one understandable reason why some English still revile us.
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Dublin port was offered as a haven for U-Boats, unofficially of course, though this did not stop the Luftwaffe bombing an area of Dublin known as the North Strand - rumours were that it was an accident, that the aircraft went off-course and the pilot thought they were over England; how true that is I don’t know - a site we could still visit when I was a boy, and so in ways the mark of World War II was on Ireland, and on my youth, in a way no other war could hope to be. When we played as kids, we didn’t play cowboys and Indians, but soldiers, wearing toy helmets like the Tommies and Germans from World War II and using replica toy firearms like the Bren and Sten sub-machine gun, Mauser and Luger pistol, and the Enfield rifle.

The films, too, that we could see at such a tender age were pretty much restricted to comedy, westerns and war movies, and so we learned more about the Second World War (albeit the sanitised, Hollywood version) than about any other conflict, and were more interested in it. We dressed our Action Men in RAF uniforms or as Nazi generals, put them in half-tracks or carrying radio packs on their backs, and acted out the war all over again in plastic. Through our comics, our movies, our television and our toys, World War II was our constant companion, and when I grew older, though I lost some interest in it as I became enmeshed in the excitement of science fiction and later fantasy, I never really forgot about it. It was almost like my first love, and in later life I have returned to it.
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It is in fact enjoying quite a resurgence in popularity now, almost a renaissance, as one-sided films like The Longest Day or Patton: Blood and Guts are replaced by more balanced fare like Saving Private Ryan, Downfall and Enemy At the Gates. Of course, most narratives are still weighted heavily on the side of the-Germans-lost-we-won idea, but there is a growing desire, it seems, in Hollywood and on television, to not rewrite history, but to write it properly, to erase or at least blur the overly gung-ho productions of the previous century. With hard-hitting series like Das Boot, World on Fire, Band of Brothers and so on, the aim has been to show that war is Hell, no matter what side you’re on, and the lines blur and the good guys can not always be relied upon to behave as good guys should, while occasionally the traditional bad guys might surprise you, might even seem to be (gasp) human.

So here the intention is to take my own personal love of and interest in the Second World War and the renewed global appetite for it and write what I hope will be, over time, the definitive account of a conflict that left over seventy million people dead, caused six million innocent Jews to be exterminated by a madman at the head of a fascist dictatorship, and in the end led to the decline of one empire and the rise of two global superpowers who have been slogging it out ever since.

Japan and China were fighting years before 1939, you hack.

Not as part of World War II, which only officially began in 1939, you wannabe hack.

WW2 started when the white people mobilized yeah I know.

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Chapter I: A Storm is Coming…

The Treaty of Versailles - Reparations or Revenge?

You’ll find a lot of argument in historical and academic circles as to what was or were the main causes for World War II, and I wouldn’t square up against any of them, being the most amateur of students of history. However, when you look back at Hitler’s rise to power, it’s pretty clear that one of the things that drove German nationalist fervour and allowed them to be pushed into a state of war was the far from satisfactory conclusion of World War I, and the heavy price imposed upon the defeated nation by the Treaty of Versailles. And while nobody in their right mind is going to excuse the Nazis, you can see why they were able to use this as a springboard that launched them to power, and eventually into a war against most of the rest of the world.

It could not by any measure you care to use be termed a fair treaty. For one thing, Germany wasn’t even allowed attend negotiations as the details were worked out. For another, they were forced to sign it on pain of resumption of the war, and for a third, it basically set out to bankrupt the former power that had wrought so much destruction across the world, under the guise of ensuring Germany was so crippled and weakened that it would never rise again, at least, not on to any sort of military footing by which it would be able to threaten the peace.

A lot of this rings hollow. Are we supposed to believe that the British, Germans, Americans and Italians (and the Japanese) were all going to live in joyful harmony and peace once the big bad bogeyman was defeated? Or that each power didn’t intend to look after their own interests, taking land here, colonies there, industries and shoring up their own economies, battered by the cost of fighting the four-year war, with the proceeds of the reparations? And honestly, while it’s easy to be smart with hindsight, did they not see this coming? Of course Germany needed to be beaten down, but you put too much energy, too much effort, too much violence into such a beating and you’re in danger of your victim deciding he has nothing left to lose and fighting back with everything he has.

So before we begin our history, let’s look into the famous and hated (by Germany anyway) Treaty of Versailles.

In terms of territory, Germany would shrink by about 65,000 miles and lose about seven million of its citizens, as areas like Alsace-Lorraine were to be returned to France, Morsenet and Eupen-Malmady to Belgium and Germany would be forced to recognise the independence of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Not surprisingly, these two countries, previously under the control of Germany and Austria respectively, were the first Hitler set his sights on twenty years later. Their colonies in Africa, too, were divided up among the victorious powers.

The German Army was permitted a maximum of 100,000 men, the German Navy a tenth of that number, only allowed retain in total thirty-six vessels and forbidden from manufacturing or importing chemical weapons, armoured vehicles, tanks or aircraft. Conscription into the armed forces was scrapped, and Germany was banned from having an air force. The Rhineland, where Germany had built many forts and outposts, was to be demilitarised and the emplacements destroyed, their rebuilding forbidden. Allied forces would occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years, but if Germany had not engaged in any hostile action there would be staged withdrawals after five, ten and finally fifteen years.
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And that’s not all. Money money money, not too funny when you lose a war. Oh yes, to the victors, literally, go the spoils, and Germany had to hand over 20 billion gold Marks - about 100 billion US Dollars today - though by 1921 this had risen to a staggering 132 billion Marks, so in or around 600 billion dollars. However this was a figure levied on all the “Central Powers” (the Axis of World War I) and as the Allies knew that the other countries could not be expected to pay, the figure was actually 50 billion, directed at Germany.

It’s pretty obvious from reading about it that the French were the ones looking for the biggest slice of revenge, and therefore the ones pushing the harshest reparations, while Britain, after centuries of war with France, mistrusted their intentions and did not want them gaining a foothold in Europe to become the strongest power there. There wasn’t much in the treaty for Italy, which would lead to the rise of another dictator, who would in fact side with Hitler when he came to power. Despite President Woodrow Wilson’s claim that “At last the world knows that America is the saviour of the world” the Treaty was never ratified in the US, there being many objections, both by Catholic Irish Democrats and German Americans to the power it gave their hated enemy the British and the worry over the influence of the League of Nations, formed within the articles of the Treaty.
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Nevertheless, the Treaty was signed, though under huge protest and with no alternative by the Germans, and as a result the German economy collapsed as hyper-inflation took hold of the country. That it was able to not only get back on its feet but become the major power in Western Europe in ten short years is nothing short of remarkable; Germany had already begun to find ways around its prohibition to arm by using factories in other countries, especially Russia, and was slowly building back up its military strength as early as 1921.

Stabbed in the back?
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A popular accusation levelled at the German Weimar government, which took power from the military dictatorship of Paul Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorff in the German Revolution of 1918-1919 was the story that they had surrendered Germany without a fight in the end. This myth was seemingly begun by Ludendorff and later perpetuated by Hitler, who falsely claimed that Germany could have won World War I, but that a conspiracy of Jews, Communists, Marxists and other “enemies of the people” set about arranging strikes at arms factories so as to deprive the German army of its munitions, plotting with the enemy to surrender, and handing victory to the Allies. As German propaganda had been careful to put only the best spin on the war, this story was believed by most Germans, who felt their new socialist government had betrayed them.

These people became known in Germany as “the November Criminals”, and were held to account when Hitler rose to power. As one French diplomat prophetically remarked: “New borders will lead to new problems”.

(Justice?) League of Nations

A new idea tried out by the Allies after the end of World War I was the League of Nations, which would later give birth to the United Nations. This was the first time a multi-national organisation has ever been set up which would promote world peace and stability, and mediate if necessary in national or global conflicts. The League would also concern itself with human rights, arms trading, labour disputes, equality and human and drug trafficking, among other aims. Established January 10 1920, it consisted of originally 42 member nations, though at its height counted 58. Among them were of course the victors of the war, the Allies France (Free France during the Second World War), Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia (as the USSR), Turkey, Finland, Poland, India, Argentina and many others across the world.

The League had no army of its own and so relied on a pre-NATO agreement that every member state would provide, if needed, armed forces to implement and enforce its mandates, resolutions and if necessary embargoes. Like the UN after it though, the League was fairly toothless most of the time, as it depended on the member nations agreeing and often they would, for various reasons, not do that. Also, some joined and left, left and joined, and there never seems to have been any real sense of cohesion about the whole organisation. Its attempt to disarm the world met with abject failure, which historically was just as well, as the Germans were arming up for World War II at the time, and the last thing any nation wanted to be doing in the shadow of that threat was reducing its armaments. The League watched wordlessly and helplessly, and ultimately impotently as Hitler prepared Germany for war, and eventually disbanded in 1945.
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One of the major stumbling blocks for the League of Nations was the refusal of the USA to join; being at the time one of the rising powers in the world, there wasn’t a lot could get done without the cooperation of the United States, and when it resisted or refused to support some stance or other taken by the League, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Then, as now, the world more or less revolved around America. Mind you, historian Samuel Flagg Bemis sees it another way, though it must be remembered he was an American. He claimed The League of Nations has been a disappointing failure.... It has been a failure, not because the United States did not join it; but because the great powers have been unwilling to apply sanctions except where it suited their individual national interests to do so, and because Democracy, on which the original concepts of the League rested for support, has collapsed over half the world

It’s certainly true that most nations were not prepared to go to war without a just cause or reason - that applied to them, rather than as part of the League. Such moves could be very detrimental to their own relationships with other countries, within and without the League of Nations - after the crisis had been dealt with. Much shuffling of feet and looking down at the ground when called upon, it seems, as Stanley Baldwin noted about the League’s efforts to prevent Italy invading Abyssinia: he noted that[I]"collective security had failed ultimately because of the reluctance of nearly all the nations in Europe to proceed to what I might call military sanctions ... The real reason, or the main reason, was that we discovered in the process of weeks that there was no country except the aggressor country which was ready for war ... f collective action is to be a reality and not merely a thing to be talked about, it means not only that every country is to be ready for war; but must be ready to go to war at once. That is a terrible thing, but it is an essential part of collective security.”

Personal spats led to certain counties withdrawing from the League - Japan in 1933 after the League voiced opposition to its occupation of Manchuria, Italy in 1937 after they had invaded Ethiopia - and others being kicked out, such as Russia when they invaded Finland, Spain two years later after the Spanish Civil War, and of course Germany in 1933, though in this case it was Hitler who withdrew. By the time the Second World War began in 1939 it was obvious that the League had failed in its main objective, which was to bring about a lasting peace in Europe and the world, and it was disbanded on April 18 1946. Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League and one of its greatest supporters, gave this speech at its closure:

Let us boldly state that aggression wherever it occurs and however it may be defended, is an international crime, that it is the duty of every peace-loving state to resent it and employ whatever force is necessary to crush it, that the machinery of the Charter, no less than the machinery of the Covenant, is sufficient for this purpose if properly used, and that every well-disposed citizen of every state should be ready to undergo any sacrifice in order to maintain peace ... I venture to impress upon my hearers that the great work of peace is resting not only on the narrow interests of our own nations, but even more on those great principles of right and wrong which nations, like individuals, depend.

The League is dead. Long live the United Nations.

The Men Who Sold the World: The Movers, Shakers, Givers and Takers of World War II

Part I: Deutschland Uber Alles

From Apathy to Apotheosis: The Making of a Monster
The Rise of Hitler and the Ensorcellment of Germany

Although there were many contributing factors to the war, and although Germany was ripe for revolution and revenge, it’s probably fair to say that, on the whole, the Second World War would never have broken out had it not been for its principal architect. Various science fiction stories have been written where someone goes back in time and kills Hitler, or the idea has merely been floated (“if you had a time machine and could go back to Germany in the 1930s would you kill Hitler?”) and it does seem likely that had he not been born, or had his life tended in other directions, the main impetus for what became the most massive global conflict in human history would not have been there, or if it had, nobody would have been willing to push it as he did.

So, while it may seem trite and cliched to say “without Hitler there would have been no World War II”, on balance it can be said to be the case. Which means that if we are to look for the reasons and the ideas that led to the war, we have to trace the life story of the man who would grow up resentful at his own government, ashamed of his country, and hungry for both power and a chance to set the scales straight, if not overload them on the side of his country.

But of course, one man cannot change history on his own, no matter how dedicated or insane he may be. Osama bin Laden could have done nothing without his Al Qaeda, Genghis Khan would have cut a pretty lonely and forlorn figure sweeping across the Mongolian Steppe on his own, and Vlad the Impaler? Well, he sure didn’t impale all those hundreds or thousands of victims by himself, now did he?

Just my typically oblique way of pointing out that even a demagogue like Hitler needed others to carry out his plans and execute (often literally) his orders, and as shown in, among others, History’s programme Hitler’s Circle of Evil, the man who would be ruler of the world made sure to surround himself not only with sycophants and like-minded killers, but men who were - in the context of the Reich - good at their jobs. Men without morals, scruples or the slightest shred of pity for their victims. Men who thought only of themselves and their Fuhrer. Men who pledged their undying loyalty to Hitler, even if almost all of them deserted him in the end. Men like Goebbels, Himmler, Goring and Bormann, Speer and Heydrich and Hess, all of whom helped, to one degree or another, bring about and prosecute the Second World War. We will be looking into their lives too as part of this feature.

But right now, it’s the top madman we’re checking out, to see how he grew from being a quiet, reticent boy into the man who would become forever synonymous with the word evil.

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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

I: A Loser From Linz

It’s always been mildly amusing to me that Hitler, the archetypal fascist who demanded all Germans be “pure-bred Aryans” was nothing of the sort. Born in Austria, not Germany, he did not come from any noble family, in fact his father, Alois Hitler (originally Heidler) was a bastard, only legitimised (how? Do not ask me: I assumed an illegitimate child was always so) in 1876 at the age of 39. Adolf was born on April 20 1889, the fourth of six children, three of which did not survive. He was the issue of his father’s third wife, and lived with also two of Alois’s children by his second.

After his father had failed as a farmer, moving around from Austria to Germany and back, Adolf lost his younger brother Edmund to measles in 1900, and from that point his attitude changed; from being a conscientious, likeable child he turned inwards, becoming moody and fractious and withdrawn, constantly picking fights with his father and his teachers. When Alois scorned his son’s dream of becoming an artist and sent him not to the classical school Adolf wished to attend, but a bog-standard secondary school, (he later claimed) he deliberately did poorly there, in order to force his father to give it up and let him go to the art school. This never happened, even when his father died in 1903 and his mother allowed him to leave the school.

A German nationalist from an early age, Hitler refused to recognise or pay homage to the Hapsburg Empire, which controlled Germany and Austria, among other countries, at the time, already using the greeting “Heil”. In 1907 he wandered to Vienna where he tried to enrol at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but was rejected on two occasions. His work was deemed “mediocre”, mostly in that he tended to draw or paint buildings but was unable to draw people, and it was suggested he instead apply to the Academy of Architecture, but as he had left school without finishing his term he did not have sufficient academic credits to allow this.

Perhaps the biggest blow to him in his young life was the sudden death of his mother, whom he had idolised, at the age of 47. Two years later, without her financial support he ran out of money and had to live in homeless shelters. While in Vienna he became what we would probably today call radicalised, as he listened to the hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and ravings of certain figures who we will now discuss.

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Karl Leuger (1844-1910)

Like many anti-Semites, Lueger was not above taking work from, and inspiration and patronage from a Jew, Dr. Igmaz Mandl, who was in fact his role model and advocate when he set up his lawyer’s practice in 1874. The fact that the man whom he would inspire to the greatest national and international hatreds and crimes against his people would mean that les than fifty years later Mandl would have been not only banned from practicing law, but would have been deported, killed or imprisoned, was never to be brought home to Lueger, as he died before Hitler came to power. A rabid Catholic who had no time for other religions and frowned on non-German speakers, he rose to become leader of the Unite Christian party and was elected mayor of Vienna no less than five times, four times of which he was thwarted by the emperor, Franz Josef, who did not like him and feared his revolutionary and anti-Semitic rhetoric, refusing to confirm him until finally his powerful party appealed to the Pope, who granted his mayorship (presumably over the protests of His Excellency) in 1897.

He proved a popular mayor, and indeed held the post (once confirmed) up until his death in 1910. He was credited with beautifying the city and improving its infrastructure, though his membership in the German National Party, which was notoriously anti-Semitic, seems to be where his views began to either change on, or harden against Jews. He courted the popular vote by raising “the Jewish Question”, a phrase which would return to haunt the Jews of Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s, and throw the shadow of the concentration camp across the continent, bringing the word holocaust, if not into our dictionaries then forever linked to the massacre of millions of innocents. An interesting parallel with Hitler’s later ideology, surely not coincidental, was that Lueger was very popular with Viennese women who, though they could not vote, were seen as the best method to indoctrinate their children into the party way of thinking, and also to influence their husbands how to cast their votes. He did not marry, and declared himself essentially married to Vienna, in a chilling future echo of how Hitler would characterise himself, despite being linked with one or two women during his life, one of whom he would marry just before committing suicide.

There is, however, evidence to suggest that either Hitler was chasing the wrong prey, or that he knew this, and cherry-picked the facts he wanted, the ones which were useful to him, from Lueger’s life. Historian William L. Shirer has gone on record to say that "his opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent, chivalrous, generous and tolerant man."[7] According to Amos Elon, "Lueger's anti-Semitism was of a homespun, flexible variety—one might almost say gemütlich. Asked to explain the fact that many of his friends were Jews, Lueger famously replied, 'I decide who is a Jew.' If Lueger did indeed use the prevalent hatred for and anger against Jews to further his own position, this tactic was ignored by the man who would later look to him as an inspiration and quote his policies in his most famous book.

Whether intentionally or not, Hitler was not the only one influenced by Lueger’s views to push towards the advance of fascism. In Austria, Ignaz Seipal, Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, all prominent politicians, would drive the country in a direction which would later serve Hitler’s need as he, at a single stroke, “liberated” Austria as one of his first pre-war acts.

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Georg Ritter Von Schönerer (1842-1921)

Another of the hypocrisies of Hitler’s logic is that a man who was born into wealth and influence, and who worked for some of the richest and most powerful Jews in Austria, the Rothschilds, should have such an effect on him and help him shape his worldview. Where is the “ordinary German (or Austrian I guess) man” here? Where is the poor, oppressed, disenfranchised and downtrodden son of Germany? Not in Georg Ritter von Schönerer, that’s for sure! His father knighted by the same emperor who four times refused to confirm Karl Lueger as mayor, Georg’s early manhood did parallel Hitler’s in a way, in that the defeat of Austria in the Austro-Prussian War disillusioned him and set him on a course of political radicalism, railing against both the Jews and the Catholics (at least, I guess, he could be said to be an equal opportunities bigot!) and clamouring for the absorption of Austria into the German Reich.

More future echoes of Hitler when Schönerer’s party only accepted true Germans, forbade any sort of association of its members with Jews, and only allowed marriages if both could prove to be of true Aryan descent. In chilling addition, Schönerer was called Fuhrer by his followers, who saluted him with the phrase “Heil”! Schönerer laid the groundwork for a battle against the Jews, claiming that if they (Germans) did not kick the Jews out they would be ousted themselves. In a mini-foreshadowing of Kristallnacht, the night of rampant violence and murder that saw hundreds of Jewish properties burned or wrecked and many dead and injured in 1939, Schönerer ransacked the offices of a Jewish newspaper and assaulted its staff, in 1888, while a few hundred miles to the west Jack the Ripper was stalking the streets of London’s East End. Two dark presences, indeed, cloaking the emergence of a third, far worse, each spreading evil in their own way, one under cover of darkness and subterfuge, the other openly, and with general approval.

Interestingly, given that both were later favourites of Hitler, Schönerer and Lueger were rivals, the latter taking the chance to fill the power vacuum left behind when the former was imprisoned after the raid on the Jewish newspaper.

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Martin Luther (1483-1546)

(Here, I’m just going to transcribe my account of the father of Protestantism from my History of Ireland journal, as I see no need to rewrite it in full. It may not all be relevant to this journal, but bear with me, as Luther is very much a minor player in the makeup of Adolf Hitler, but needs to be mentioned nonetheless.)

There can be no argument that in the time before, and even during the Renaissance, the Catholic Church was not only a major world power, almost the major world power, a huge player in politics, maker and breaker of kings, and the agency that called for retribution against the heathen with the Crusades, but one of the most corrupt organisations in the world. Successive popes set themselves up as kings, emperors or warlords (or all three), keeping standing armies and enriching their own coffers, more concerned with material wealth than spiritual salvation, while their priests and bishops preached exactly the opposite message to the faithful from the pulpits every Sunday.

A young German monk named Martin Luther had been watching all this misuse of power for some time, but the final straw for him came in 1516, when the Pope at the time, Leo X, sent an envoy to Germany to sell indulgences in order to finance the rebuilding of the church of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Indulgences were, essentially, get-out-of-jail-free cards for Christians, though scrub out the word free. For a payment, large or small depending on the sin to be expunged, penitents could purchase a letter signed by Leo which would then allow a soul held in Purgatory (transient state between Heaven and Hell) to be released into Heaven. Basically you were paying for the soul of your mother, father, child, wife, whoever, who had died, to be sprung from Limbo.

The phrase “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs” so enraged Luther that he wrote to the Pope, decrying the practice of indulgences, and asking, quite reasonably really, why a man so incredibly wealthy as Leo X, reckoned at the time to be one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest, had to rely on the contributions of the poor to rebuild a church when he had the money to do so out of his own pocket? Instead of answering this accusation, the Pope decided to brand Luther a heretic and excommunicated him, in the same way as he would deal with England’s upstart king a decade later.

But Luther would not be so easily silenced. He saw the rot in the Catholic Church, most especially at its venerated head, and the disrespect that the man supposedly chosen by God as His agent on Earth paid to the office, and he and his followers broke with Rome, splintering into their own religion, which though still Christian would be rabidly opposed to Catholicism. It was, of course, called Protestantism.

I’m not entirely clear what Hitler learned or used from his readings about Luther, whether it was merely a case of discrediting the Catholic Church, speaking truth to power and showing that absolute power corrupts absolutely (how very ironic if he should have taken that tack!) or whether he wanted to show how a poor - and most importantly, German - monk could rise to challenge the established order and essentially win, as even today the Christian Church is divided along deeply sectarian lines.

It’s also possible that he learned from Luther’s example how relatively easy it is to spread and disseminate a new idea, a radical idea. While arming Germany for another war, claiming the Fatherland was the pinnacle of human achievement and even anti-Semitism could hardly, in the context of history, be called radical, handing over power to one man, essentially abolishing the government and creating a dictatorship in a previously nominally democratic country surely was, and perhaps here is where Hitler learned the lesson already taken on board by Luther: get people angry enough - either against a real or imagined enemy - and you can take complete control of them. They will follow you to the ends of the earth, even if the final destination is a maelstrom of fire and destruction.

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Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927)

Sure, there are many coincidences in history, and particularly in World War II, but it’s still interesting that he would be influenced favourably (in his view) by a man who a) was British (born, if actually lived most of his life in Germany) and b) possessed the same surname as the Prime Minister who virtually inadvertently helped him to power by refusing to believe Hitler would lie, that he wanted war, and that his word was worth about as much as, as the Americans say so charmingly, a plugged nickel. But Chamberlain (this one, not Neville) has been described as “Hitler’s John the Baptist” and so it is incumbent upon us to investigate him.

So let’s do that now.

Again born into power and influence, Chamberlain was the son of Rear-Admiral William Charles, but was a sickly child and sent to foreign climes for his health, starting in France and moving on to Spain and Italy. Influenced by people like Otto Kuntze and Carl Vogt, he became interested both in German culture and the idea of anti-Semitism, disowning England as having no place in his life, and even siding with the Irish in 1881 by describing the tyrannical land lords who oppressed the Irish peasantry (and whose intractability and naked greed had led indirectly to the Great Famine of 1848) as “blood sucking Jews”, even though they were Irish Protestants, and no more Jewish than I am. Although he had been a scientist - in particular a botanist - Chamberlain denied much science, theorising, for instance, that all the planets and heavenly bodies were covered by ice, and rejecting Darwinism (another dichotomy, as Hitler accepted and espoused Darwin’s theories and thinking) and the theory of evolution.

Richard Wagner (who we will be also looking into) seems to have been one of the biggest influences on Chamberlain’s life, his music causing him to change from speaking French (he detested everything about England, including the language) and start using the German tongue exclusively. In addition, he met a German woman, Anna Horst, whom he married, and his English upper class family’s objection to his marrying beneath his class only widened the divide between their country and what he now considered his; his failure to succeed in playing the stock market while living with her in Paris in 1883 further solidified his hatred of capitalism. You have to wonder, had he been successful would he had been so critical of the system? Becoming an author, he embraced the idea of “blood and soil”, the German racist idea of purity, and read Nietsczhe (again, we’ll look into him; we have to really) as well as writing of his joy that the emperor Friedrich III was dead, succeeded by his anti-Semite son, WIllem II, later to become Kasier Wilhelm.

Where he and Hitler may have diverged was that Chamberlain longed for and believed in an idealised, mythic view of a Germany that had never existed, basically one out of story books and fairy tales, and mythologised in Wagner’s music, much of which was based on Teutonic fables and sagas, while Hitler actually looked to history, to the great German kings and emperors of the past, wishing to emulate them. Chamberlain’s association with Wagner’s wife, Cosima, whom she came to consider as her surrogate son, did nothing to stem his anti-Semitic views, in fact it strengthened them considerably. Despite her patronage, though, Chamberlain could never escape from the reality that he was not German born, and so overcompensated by trying to make himself as German as he possibly could. To some extent, this could be said of Hitler too, though it seems after he rose to power his Austrian origins were conveniently fudged over and forgotten, though of course by then Austria was part of the Reich anyway.

Another divergence seems to come when Chamberlain discovered Hinduism and the “Aryan gods” (aryan literally “the light ones”), quickly concluding these were German, and adopting one of their symbols, the swastika; whereas Hitler would conveniently (to my knowledge anyway) discount Indians and blacks as inferior races of no value, Chamberlain believed there was much to learn from the Hindu gods, and the ancient caste system practiced by Hinduism, which “kept social inferiors firmly locked into their place” and fused humanity and nature, denying the hold of materialism. Right. Tell that to the Nazis as they were loading up half-tracks full of stolen artworks and jewels!

Chamberlain declared his preference for a dictatorship when he visited Bosnia and Herzegovina, under the control of the Austrian Empire, in 1891, believing dictatorship was the perfect equation of Wagner’s philosophy, “absolute monarch = happy people!” Not quite what the French thought, my friend, a century before this, and see how that worked out! His anti-Semitism growing like a cancer, and spreading like one, he had this cheery note about his house: However, we shall have to move soon anyway, for our house having been sold to a Jew ... it will soon be impossible for decent people to live in it ... Already the house being almost quite full of Jews, we have to live in a state of continual warfare with the vermin which is a constant and invariable follower of this chosen people even in the most well-to-do classes.

Interestingly, as Chamberlain moaned about the Boer War, with “whites killing whites as the great Yellow Danger” arose in the east, Cosima Wagner agreed thus: "This extermination of one of the most excellent Germanic races is so horrible that I know of nothing I have experienced which is comparable to it.” Well, her countrymen would soon change that, wouldn’t they? More confusion about what exactly was an Aryan, as Chamberlain included Celts, Slavs, Greeks, Latins and even some North Africans, whereas later Hitler and the Nazi party would define Aryan as German or Austrian, or German-born only. Bloody Nazis couldn’t even get straight who exactly they hated. Russians and French were out of the Aryan club though, polluted by foreign influences, while Jesus Christ was given a pass, as he could - according to our friendly neighbourhood anti-Semite Wagnerian, not be a Jew. He published all this nonsense as the century turned, in his Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, or to give it its less wordy English name, The Foundations, a supposed history of the world, glorifying, not surprisingly, Germans and the Aryan race, and crediting them with every advance humanity has made.

Not to forget women, Chamberlain had no time for feminism, and preferred submissive women and believed they should know their place at the feet of their husbands and masters. He also claimed all the great writers, poets and artists as Ayan, including Shakespeare, Goethe, Da Vinci, Dante, Rembrandt, Homer and Martin Luther. Building on the writings of the French philosopher Arthur de Gobin****e, sorry Gobineau, he tasked the Jew with all the world’s wars, going all the way back to the Punic Wars in 146 BC and praising “Aryan Rome” for destroying (eventually) “Semitic Carthage”; blaming the Jews for their manipulation and control of the world’s financial institutions, and declared that the Jew wanted to “put his foot upon the neck of all nations of the world and be lord and possessor of all the earth.” This of course would be another of his ideas Hitler would take to heart, or at least use in his prosecution both of ethnic cleansing and the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question thirty years later.

Jewish conspiracies abounded in Chamberlain's writings, including the idea that the Jew wanted to enslave all other races and be the master race (sound familiar?), that they had invented the Catholic Church as a “front” for Judaism, and that they had also invented both democracy and capitalism - both of which he despised - as well as, oddly, socialism, though this last was seen to be merely a diversionary tactic to funnel attention away from the damage wrought by Jewish financiers. Oh yes, and they had founded China as well. He even went further than Wagner, who believed Jews could gain redemption by converting to Christianity; Chamberlain was having none of this. For him, the solution to the Jewish question was simple and final, very final: all Jews everywhere must be utterly annihilated. No wonder Hitler loved reading his crap.

Nevertheless, it seems, to quote Louis in Interview With the Vampire, Chamberlain did not even have the courage of his convictions, as he did not actually advocate genocide against the Jews, but left the solution up to his reader, thereby abrogating responsibility for the coming Holocaust. It was in fact an admirer of his, building on his theories, who pushed the “Jewish Question” to what would have been seen by anti-Semitists as its logical conclusion. Josef Reimer propounded in his Ein Pangermanisches Deutschland (A Pan-Germanic Germany) in 1905 that Germany should invade and annex Russia, categorising the population into three separate classes - ethnic Germans, those capable of being “Germanised” and the hopeless cases, including Slavs and of course Jews, who were to be exterminated. Rather chillingly, much of this would come to pass before another four decades had passed.

When Chamberlain visited Britain in 1900, he was even more disillusioned with the land of his birth than he had been while away from it, accusing the Jews of having control of everything, abhorring the practice of raising “common folk” into the peerage and thus polluting (whatever remained of) the noble blood of England, and laying much of the blame for England’s, in his eyes, negative transformation at the feet of the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, whom he vilified as “that Jew”, though Disraeli, while born into the Jewish faith, had become an Anglican from age twelve. Chamberlain’s racist and anti-Semitic and expansionist views brought him to the attention of Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom he became great friends, and whose ideas must have been shaped, at least in part, by Chamberlain’s views when Germany went to war just over a decade later. By the time World War I began though, and perhaps frustrated at being rejected from the German Army (he was 58 and in very poor health, partially paralysed: what did he expect?) Chamberlain declared that the Reich must "for the next hundred years or more" strengthen all things German and carry out "the determined extermination of the un-German", believing that a German victory - which he fully expected - was the only possibility Britain had of being saved from the Jewish-controlled mire it had sunk into.

A man who seemed to want to have everything both ways, he advocated a return to his imagined “Merry old England” idea in Germany, an agrarian society where people worked happily while at the same time wishing Germany to become a huge industrial power and to exist under an iron dictatorship, having no time for democracy and believing, as already mentioned, it to have been an invention of the Jews. He despised the idea of a republic and wanted a monarchy to remain in control, though a militarist one answering to the army. He did not create, but helped get started, the “stab-in-the-back” legend/lie upon which so much of Hitler and the Nazi party’s self-justification for World War II would be based, by claiming there was a cadre of traitors within Germany, the “inner enemy” (which under Hitler would be referred to as “fifth column”) who were either Jews or were working with Jews to bring about the end of the war and Germany’s defeat and surrender.

And as is ever the case, evil attracts evil, and the dark circle closes, the ravenous and insatiable Ouroboros chewing on its own tail…

Shattered by Germany’s unthinkable, to him, defeat in the First World War, and increasingly paralysed (and unhinged), mostly confined to his bed, Chamberlain watched with interest the rise and progress through the ranks of an Austrian politician who had come to his notice. In 1923 Chamberlain and Hitler met, and later Chamberlain joined the Nazi party, becoming one of Hitler’s biggest supporters and endorsers. The admiration was mutual; Hitler proclaimed The Foundations as “the gospel of the National Socialist Movement”, while Chamberlain had this to say about der Fuhrer:

Because he [Hitler] is no mere phrasemonger, but consistently pursues his thought to an end and draws his conclusions from it, he recognizes and proclaims that one cannot simultaneously embrace Jesus and those that crucified him. That is the splendid thing about Hitler—his courage! ... In this respect he reminds one of Luther. And whence come the courage of these two men? It derives from the holy seriousness each has for the cause! Hitler utters no word he does not mean in earnest; his speeches contain no padding or vague, provisional statements ... but the result of this is that he is decried as a visionary dreamer. People consider Hitler a dreamer whose head is full of impossible schemes and yet a renowned and original historian called him "the most creative mind since Bismarck in the area of statecraft." I believe ... we are all inclined to view those things as impractical that we do not already see accomplished before us. He, for example, finds it impossible to share our conviction about the pernicious, even murderous influence of Jewry on the German Volk and not to take action; if one sees the danger, then steps must be taken against it with utter dispatch. I daresay everyone recognizes this, but nobody risks speaking out; nobody ventures to extract the consequences of his thoughts for his actions; nobody except Hitler. ... This man has worked like a divine blessing, cheering hearts, opening men's eyes to clearly seen goals, enlivening their spirits, kindling their capacity for love and for indignation, hardening their courage and resoluteness. Yet we still need him badly: May God who sent him to us preserve him for many years as a "blessing for the German Fatherland!


Even when Hitler was imprisoned (yeah) as a result of the failure of the 1923 Munich Putsch, Chamberlain did not lose faith in him, and campaigned vigorously for his pardon and release. In the event, Hitler served only seven months of what was supposed to be a two year sentence before being freed into an atmosphere of general disinterest. Houston Stewart Chamberlain died in 1927, having made, among others, Hitler and an impressionable Josef Goebbels fans, and the former was present at his funeral.

Five years later, as Nazism began its inexorable rise to power, a worried Carl Von Ossietzky, journalist wrote "Today there is a strong smell of blood in the air. Literary anti-Semitism forges the moral weapon for murder. Sturdy and honest lads will take care of the rest."

It wouldn’t take long for that prediction to come true.

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Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

There’s surely no need for me to write as exhaustive an account on this man as I have on the last; everyone must know who Darwin was, and have a basic idea of his achievements. Hitler, however, seems to have taken some inspiration from his work, presumably the idea of the “survival of the fittest”, and conveniently ignored (not for the first or last time) anything that did not fit in with his worldview. Darwin, for instance, was vehemently opposed to slavery, whereas Hitler wanted to make slaves of anyone considered inferior to the German/Aryan race; Darwin believed all races were or should be equal, Hitler despised other races as being racially weak and subordinate to his own, even considering Slavs and Jews as sub-human. Darwin was mostly an atheist, or at least agnostic, while Hitler at least seemed to believe in the Christian God, though probably concurring with Chamberlain that Jesus could not possibly have been a Jew.

The idea of man originating in Africa would have been abhorrent to Hitler, who believed the true progenitors of the human race to have been Aryan Germans, not black Africans, but he would have agreed with the idea of selective breeding, though where Darwin simply proposed it as something creatures were subject to, Hitler planned to put his own process into place, deliberately eradicating certain “unwelcome” or “unwholesome” or “impure” genes and traits, in an effort to create a race of ubermensch, as postulated by Nietzsche.

Speaking of whom…

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

It appears, to some degree, that Hitler may not be at fault for having taken certain concepts from the writings of the German philosopher, as, though Nietzsche himself was certainly not an anti-Semite nor indeed a fascist, on his death in 1900 his sister Elisbeth, who became the curator of her work, and was herself a prominent German nationalist, rewrote and couched his writing in terms that appealed to and seemed to support the position of the Nazi party, leading to Nietzsche’s work being, for a while, erroneously associated with fascism and Nazism. Hitler would quote from Nietzsche’s works in Mein Kampf, but it seems to be debated how much he actually read of the philosopher’s writings, how much he understood it and how much he agreed with it, versus how much he was able to - like Nietzsche’s unscrupulous sister - twist and mould to his own ends.

In particular, of course, the idea that appealed to him was Nietzsche’s concept of ubermensch, or the overman, though Hitler seems to have taken this far more literally than the philosopher intended, believing that the German people would be, and were, the ubermensch, above all (Deutschland, after all, Uber Alles) and that lesser, inferior races could be considered to be untermensch, or undermen - a concept it appears was not considered in Also Spake Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche discussed the idea. But even if he had to strip away everything else about the concept, in order that it be of use to him, the very kernel lying at the centre of ubermensch could be subverted and wrangled into an idea that there were to be, and according to Hitler’s twisted philosophy, already were, superior beings on the Earth, that they would naturally rise to be the rulers of the world, and that they were, of course, German.

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Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

Though it would be in no way fair to lump Le Bon in with radical fascists and anti-semitists such as Chamberlain and Lueger, as he seemed to have no inclinations in that direction, nor did he write to support such a position, his theory of the hive-mind that operates when a group of individuals gather and a crowd is formed, shortly thereafter becoming a single entity that acts on its own, spurred on usually by the loudest or most forceful or charismatic voices within it (those who shout “Are we going to take this?” etc or the first one to hurl a bottle, brick or stone) and therefore robbing each person of his own individuality was used by Hitler and the Nazis, perhaps in ways Le Bon had not anticipated, expected or intended. When you know you can control or manipulate a crowd by simply appealing to, or engendering, or waiting for this hive mind to emerge, it’s surely easy to make the crowd do what you want. They can riot, at your direction, or support you, or attack a certain object, agree or disagree with something you want them to agree or disagree with. Knowing how to control the crowd is a powerful weapon, and most people won’t even know they’re being used.

How many of us have considered, in the aftermath of a riot, march, football match, gig or other crowd event, how or why we did the things we did? On a far less violent level, what makes us all sing the lyrics to a song when the singer points the microphone out into the crowd? Or follow his or her directions like puppets? When a protest leader shouts “what do we want?” why do we always respond to a question he or she already has the answer to? Answer would seem to be that it’s not us answering, or singing, or dancing like monkeys: it’s the hive mind which is controlling the crowd.

Hitler wasn’t the only one to use this knowledge: his predecessor and fellow fascist dictator Benito Mussolini did it in Italy, and Lenin wielded the power in Russia to overthrow the Tsarist regime of Nicholas Alexander II.

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

Possibly because his hero, Richard Wagner, and indeed Nietzsche both read him, Hitler seems to have been influenced by this German philosopher, even though Schopenhauer claimed that Hitler’s belief in the supremacy of the white man was incorrect, as there was no such thing as a white race.

I may here express my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into the strange world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white.

In addition, like Darwin he was fiercely against slavery, had great sympathy for the black races and though he believed the white man superior other than to the Egyptians and Hindus, he seems to have thought this was just how it was, and not that the white man had any great claim to or right to overlordship of the earth.

Ah yes. But then he says this: [Judaism] is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. It amounts to this that the κύριος ['Lord'], who has created the world, desires to be worshipped and adored; and so above all he is jealous, is envious of his colleagues, of all the other gods; if sacrifices are made to them he is furious and his Jews have a bad time ... It is most deplorable that this religion has become the basis of the prevailing religion of Europe; for it is a religion without any metaphysical tendency. While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.

So Hitler must have loved that. Also his views on women, who, he claimed, were by nature meant to obey, and were directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted. He is in fact referred to as the biggest misogynist in Western philosophy. His views on heredity, breeding and eugenics must have hit home too: With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles.

Right. And if my aunt had wheels she'd be a wagon.

II: Fortunate Son: Hitler Goes to War and Comes of Age

“You will hear much more about me later. Just wait until my time comes.” - Adolf Hitler, 1915

“A peace that last more than twenty-five years is harmful to a nation; peoples, like individuals, sometimes need regenerating through a little blood-letting” - Adolf Hitler, 1942

Running out of money after the death of his mother, Adolf Hitler scrimped and scraped by until he received the last part of his late father’s estate in 1913, and bade farewell - with some contempt and no regrets - to Vienna. He travelled across the border to Germany, settling in Munich where, at the outbreak of World War I, he eagerly signed up for military service. Previous to this he had been conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army but found unfit for service. Returning from Salzburg to Munich, he joined the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16, also known as the List Regiment, after its first commander. Far from being in a crack troop however, as he would no doubt have preferred and perhaps even expected, the young Hitler was recruited into a regiment whose purpose can only fairly be described as “cannon fodder”. With no trained men in the unit, a mere seven weeks training and the regiment being a reserve into the bargain, Hitler and his comrades were essentially sent to the Front to die.

Perhaps ironically, given how many innocents he was to order imprisoned when in power, as they left the barracks in Munich on October 12 1914, the first French soldiers the recruits encountered were prisoners taken at the beginning of the war. Though he might like to have thought so, the sun did not shine on Hitler’s first exodus to war - it rained all day and he was miserable - and they boarded a train to take them to the Front. This was the first time Hitler would see the majestic River Rhine, and it had a powerful effect on him, as did the adoration and congratulations of the people in every town through which the train passed.

Typically, and as he would do for the rest of his life, as they entered war-torn Belgium Hitler only saw the structural damage, taking into and considering of no account the suffering of the people: [We] crossed into Belgium at 10 p.m. As we left Aachen, we were given an enthusiastic send off by thousands of people, and much the same thing happened throughout our journey. At 9 a.m., we arrived at Liège. The railway station was badly damaged. The traffic was tremendous. Army transport only, of course. At midnight, we arrived at Louvain. The whole town is a heap of rubble. Perhaps also ironically, and presumably due to shortages rather than as any mark of disrespect, the regiment were transported to Brussels in cattle cars.

One thing that emerged very clearly in Hitler’s mind during his first weeks in combat was the way propaganda could be used to the advantage of the one spreading it, and none of it had to be true. Caricatures of English and Scottish soldiers, deemed to be cowardly and mercenary, not committed to the fight and ready to run at the first opportunity, showed themselves to be devastatingly untruthful when Hitler and his regiment first came face to face with the real thing. Despite the fact that the propaganda had fooled them into a false sense of security, Hitler could see that you could basically say anything you wanted with it, and people would believe it if it was what they wanted to hear.

Hitler volunteered for messenger duty, taking dispatches from place to place across the battlefield, and soon gained a reputation for bravery and reliability, though it was wondered why he put himself at risk, not being German born. However perhaps he was playing the odds, as when the company engaged the English on their first day in combat, they lost over a third of their number. After the battle Hitler was promoted from infantryman to corporal, and recommended for the Iron Cross. Despite his undoubted bravery - or, if you prefer, which I do, fanaticism - the newly-promoted corporal did not endear himself to his comrades, refusing to join in with, and in fact berating their complaints about their treatment, the general strategy and even the need for the war. He was unshakeable in his belief in their commanders and Germany’s destiny as victors, and had many arguments with others who did not feel the same way. This naturally isolated and alienated him from the larger part of his fellow soldiers, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as he was at heart a loner, an insular, morose, taciturn kind of man who rarely smiled or joked.

Nevertheless, taking into account that many of the stories about Hitler in the First World War are either unreliable or possibly apocryphal, or at best impossible to corroborate, he is said to have won his first of two Iron Crosses for having rescued an officer under fire and carrying him back to the trenches, although that officer is said to have been dead by the time he got him back. Still, as a single bullet could easily have ended Hitler’s life there and then, and conceivably have written a new time line for us, the future leader of the Thousand Year Reich would look back to his incident many times, recounting it as proof that Providence (as he called it) had great plans for him, and would not allow him to die on the battlefield. Given that there were several attempts on his life later, it’s easy to see why he would believe some supernatural agency was working on his behalf to keep him alive. As they say, the Devil looks after his own.

Indeed, only a short time later, at the forest Wytschaete, when four divisional commanders needed space in their tent, Hitler and his comrades stepped out to allow them room. A moment later a French grenade hit the tent, killing most of those inside. Once again, the little corporal had had a close brush with death, and had come out intact.

Not at all surprising to find that, just as the German press were mocking and demeaning the fighting attributes and courage of the British Tommy, the English papers were doing the same, as this extract published in the Times, written by its special correspondent, crowed: . “Everywhere I hear the same story. The German foot soldier cannot shoot, he will not stop to fight. When attacked he runs away: he fires over his shoulder as he runs, or throws down his arms and surrenders.” Well, who ever expected the Press to be unbiased, eh?

As the dreary November weather drew in, 1914 preparing to shudder and shiver its way out and usher in an equally bleak and more savage year, both sides of the conflict realised proper fighting was next to impossible. The heavy rain had turned the ground into mucky, swampy, treacherous terrain in which no kind of advance could be considered, and thick dark fog obscured all but a few metres in front. Now began the cruellest phase of the Great War, the hated trench warfare, as men on either side dug deep wide emplacements in the soggy ground and prepared to wait out the winter in the most uncomfortable and least healthy conditions. They say waiting is the worst part, and while this was certainly not true - how many men, shivering and cursing in those mud-filled trenches in which they passed their days and nights feared in their hearts the order to go over the top, the order to attack? - it must have been akin to Hell on Earth. With poor food, little sleep and disease running rampant through the trenches, many must have wondered why they were there, suffering as they did, and dreaming of home.

Not Corporal Adolf Hitler, EK2 (Iron Cross 2nd Class) though. Far from being repulsed by death he seemed attracted to it. One of his comrades, Hans Mend, tells of an incident where he came across Hitler standing staring at two dead soldiers on whom the grass had, as he said, already begun growing. Oblivious to the fact that he was a target, standing out in the open, Hitler was lost in his own world, and did not seem to relish the interruption of his friend. He was not like a man contemplating his own mortality or the futility of war, but more like a scientist studying an interesting specimen. Hitler had already acquired a reputation for strangeness among the men, and this was only exacerbated as Christmas came around. Unlike the others, who delighted in singing Christmas carols and receiving Christmas packages from home, Hitler was not interested. He received no package, nor did he want one, and had no desire to see the contents of those of other soldiers, who tried to share theirs with him only to be gruffly rebuffed.

With the war temporarily stalled - as the English might say, rain stopped play! - Hitler had plenty of time, when he wasn’t running messages to headquarters, dodging enemy shells and sniper fire, to read the mountain of racist rhetoric and propaganda that spewed forth from the pages of the German newspapers, and to file away for future reference how people could be made to believe anything if the terms were couched cleverly enough. The reports no doubt also would have made a war fanatic like him itch to be back in the thick of it, but even Adolf Hitler couldn’t control the weather, and he just had to stay put. For those who, like me, believed the story of the English/German Christmas Truce, which has long been told, retold, acted and re-enacted in film and books, to be a fiction, here’s a first-hand account from Mend.

At 3 o’clock on the morning of 26 December, we were moving forward in the trenches. Everything was frozen hard. prepared myself to be met by heavy fire. But imagine my astonishment when not a shot came. The men we relieved told us that they had been exchanging things with the English, which seemed crazy to us. As proof, I found a few English cigarettes in my dugout, which tasted very good.21 Shortly after dawn Englishmen appeared and ‘waved to us, to which our people replied’. More men emerged from the trenches; the Germans carried a Christmas tree, which they lit in no-man’s-land. ‘Everyone [now] moved freely out of the trenches and it would have been unthinkable to have fired a shot. What had seemed crazy a few hours before, I was now able to see with my own eyes.’ Bavarians and Englishmen ‘until now the fiercest of enemies shook hands, spoke to one another and exchanged things’. One came up to me straight away, pressed my hand and passed me a few cigarettes; another gave me a diary, a third signed his name on a field postcard, a fourth wrote his address in my notebook . . . One Englishman played a German comrade’s mouth organ; others danced, others again were immensely proud to put on a German helmet...I will never forget this sight for the rest of my life . . . Christmas 1914 will be unforgettable to me.

There is, however, no mention of the famous football match between the two enemies, so that may be made up, but then again, Mend says that this period of truce lasted almost a week, so it could have happened. I just have not, as yet, found any proof of one taking place. Needless to say, one soldier was not impressed and did not take part in the festivities, and a Christmas-hating, English-hating, war-loving, frustrated Hitler fumed as his comrades, in his eyes, degraded themselves by fraternising with the enemy and treating them as human beings, not vermin to be wiped out to the last man. As 1915 began its slow, cold trudge across the blasted fields of Flanders though, and reality, for him, re-established itself, with clear lines now once again redrawn between friend and foe, Hitler adopted a dog, a fox terrier that had come from the English lines, whom he called, with astonishing originality, Foxl and whom he grew to love, if the man could ever be said to have loved anyone or anything. With astonishing lack of knowledge of dogs (perhaps it wasn’t known at this time) he relates how he would feed chocolate to Foxl; chocolate is toxic to dogs.

The arrival of new recruits to the regiment gave Hitler a chance to expound on his political views, and many an argument was had between him and those who did not hold his radical racist and anti-semitist views. In a chilling presentiment of the future, after one particularly heated debate it was prophesied - jokingly - that Hitler would be chancellor after the next election. It would take another twenty years, but many a truth in jest… Again foreshadowing the future, though hardly a unique order in war, especially one that was currently being lost, Hitler’s regiment was told it must “hold to the last man”, orders that would echo across the war-torn and bloodied streets of Stalingrad a quarter of a century later, issued by the man who now took the orders and swore to obey them. I suppose in a twisted way, in retrospect you can see why he expected and would brook no surrender at Stalingrad; if he, as a mere soldier, was prepared to obey orders and die if necessary rather than capitulate to the enemy, why should his troops feel, or be allowed to do any differently? To Hitler surrender was unthinkable, both when he was in the trenches of World War One and when he was commanding his armies as the Russians closed in on Berlin in 1945. He probably would have shot himself or gone out in a suicidal blaze of glory rather than surrender. He carried this through, in the end, to the last.

His surly and taciturn nature, and his aversion to French women (whom he no doubt believed impure and just waiting to taint his bloodline) earned Hitler the name among his comrades of “woman hater”, but his anti-Semitism was mirrored among the men. Jews, though serving in the army, were universally believed to be shirking their duties, volunteering, engineering or even bribing their way into “cushy” jobs; the reality was far from this. Even a specially commissioned investigation by Heinrich Class, which had already decided in advance that Jews were serving in disproportionately smaller numbers than “true” German and set out to prove this, drew inescapable conclusions that told the reverse story, and was quietly hushed up, after a protracted media campaign, rather than admit the truth. But racism among the soldiers was not confined to Jews; they ridiculed the “black savages” - Indian and other Caribbean troops who fought on the English side, “drunken” Irishmen and Scotsmen whom they derided as women due to the kilts they wore into battle.

When the List Regiment were ordered to the slaughterhouse that was The Somme on October 2 1916, Hitler found the terrain far different to any he had encountered in other battles, such as Fromelles a few months before. He still had to jump from shell-crater to shell-crater in order to make his way, but the muck here was unlike anything he had experienced up to that. Indeed, back at Fromelles and Fournes the weather had made battle impossible, as each side dug in and awaited the departure of the rain and for the ground to be traversable. But the Somme was a constant, perpetual, almost living thing, the battle never stopping, never pausing, men being cut down on every side, artillery firing, rain slanting down and soaking to the skin, mud sucking like quicksand as the feet tried to move, dead left where they fell. There was no pause, no let-up, and again to use the old English cricket term, rain did not stop play. Orders were given, countermanded, conflicted, confused, and things got so dangerous that as many as six runners would be sent out with the same message, in the hope that at least one would get through.

Even the war-mad and fanatical Hitler must have lost some of his enthusiasm in this atmosphere of despair, death and debacle. No hot food for a week, dysentery running rampant through the trenches, his regiment shrinking day by day as more men were killed, it was his comrade Brandmayer who put it into words: “The arena in the west no longer concerned the waging of war, but the inhuman extermination of a young generation. After a week we already imagined ourselves to be living in the burning and bottomless pit of hell.” Worse was to come.

A massive offensive by the English took place on October 7, involving some of the worst and most desperate fighting of the battle. Hitler, however, would miss it, to his great chagrin. His legendary luck finally running out on October 5, he was wounded when a shell landed in the crater he had jumped into and, over his protestations, was evacuated to Berlin. Though he was delighted to be back in his Fatherland, this joy soon faded as he took in the general atmosphere around Berlin and Munich, blaming the mood of depression and defeatism, as he would everything for the rest of his miserable life, on the Jews.

“Clearly there was dire misery everywhere. The big city was suffering from hunger. Discontent was great. In various soldiers’ homes the tone was like that in the hospital. It gave you the impression that these scoundrels were intentionally frequenting such places in order to spread their views. But much, much worse were conditions in Munich itself! The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk. I was amazed at this plethora of warriors of the chosen people and could not help but compare them with their rare representatives at the Front. As regards economic life, things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had become really ‘indispensable.’ The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the peoples’ pores”

On his return to his regiment (having been originally assigned to a different one but pleading or demanding to be sent back to the List) Hitler was not slow to denounce the traitors and slackers, the Jews and the Communists promoting munitions strikes back home, and so leaving him and his comrades without the necessary weapons to defend themselves. This time his speeches and rhetoric struck home, and people listened, and Hitler no doubt learned a valuable lesson about the timing of political speeches; at a time when people are hungry, railing against striking bakers or the unfair price of bread will be received with much more enthusiasm than it will when bellies are full, so to speak.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 must have been a strange dichotomy for Hitler. On the one hand, he would have been enraged to see the monarchy subverted and replaced by a rabble of Communist Reds, proving his claim that Russia would soon be overwhelmed by Communism (as it was). On the other hand, the troubles at home weakened the Russian fighting forces and soon they would be impelled to leave the war altogether, thus surely heralding good news for Germany. The entrance of the United States into the war was a setback for Germany, but in reality didn’t change the outcome, as they joined the fight too late to make much impact. What did make an impact, undoubtedly, was the appearance for the first time ever of armoured vehicles, huge machines of steel that could crawl over terrain men could not hope to negotiate, that were mostly impervious to small-arms fire and which surely struck terror into the hearts of those who saw them for the first time, including Hitler, who quickly also recognised the important part they would play, not only in this war, but in the one he would start and prosecute twenty years later.

“Our first orders for the production of tanks were issued in 1917. If we’d had 400 tanks in the summer of 1918 we’d have won the world war. It was our misfortune that the leadership at that time did not correctly recognize the significance of technical weapons . . . That the need for tanks and defences against them was not recognized by us was the ground of our downfall.”

Tanks were of course the mainstay of the lightning war, or Blitzkrieg, which won Hitler so much ground so early and allowed him to have most of Europe under his heel by 1940, a mere twelve months after declaring war. Nobody had anticipated the speed of the German attack in 1939, Hitler’s Panzers faster and more agile than the lumbering English tanks, able to drive through forest and across fields virtually unopposed, and it was the Panzers too, though phantom ones, that der Fuhrer would believe were to come to his eleventh hour rescue as Berlin fell.

In August 1918 the List Regiment moved to Alsace, which was a period of relaxation for the troops, though it was here that an unscrupulous person (whom he would no doubt later claim was a Jew, though no records of such seem to exist), after trying to buy Hitler’s dog and being rebuffed - “He offered me two hundred marks. I told him it could be two hundred thousand and you wouldn’t get him!” - abducted Foxl, causing the future leader of the Third Reich much anguish and also much anger. After they were moved to Laon, Hitler, having taken a dispatch to headquarters, came back raging against the disparity there, where men had plenty to eat and drink and lived in comfort; he snarled that they should all be thrown into the trenches. Hardly tallies with his own lifestyle as commander-in-chief later, when he would consume pastries and tea in comfort while his men fought and died in the snow of the Eastern Front. Apparently the lesson learned here was not that all men should be equal, but that as soon as possible he should join the ones who considered themselves the elite, and rise above the ordinary soldier.

In July of 1918, as the war began to enter its final months and German forces were steadily pushed back, Hitler and the List Regiment experienced bombardment from the air for the first time. Although dogfights had been duelled out between German and Allied pilots ever since aircraft entered the theatre of the war, to the men on the ground they had been at best spotters directing the artillery, at worst an annoyance, making noise as they buzzed overhead. But now they were strafing the German positions, taking down barrage balloons and dropping bombs - literally: one man holding a bomb in his hand over the side of the plane while the pilot flew, and dropping it where it could do most damage - and the enemy aircraft were suddenly a new threat the Germans had to face. I don’t know if the German fighters were doing this too, but one can only expect they would copy such a tactic, unless they believed it “ungentlemanly conduct” perhaps.

Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross First Class on August 4 1918, though the circumstances under which this happened have become so lost in rumour, Nazi folklore and propaganda and confusion that it is impossible to say why he earned the medal, except that he had, according to all reports, displayed exceptional bravery and a heedless disregard for his own life while delivering important messages. Perhaps it was a way of bolstering what must have been flagging German morale at the time. In any event, Hitler’s biographers and propagandists - most notably, of course, Goebbels - made as much of the incident as they could, recounting unlikely and increasingly bizarre and hard to believe stories relating to Hitler capturing a whole French troop by himself. Uh, yeah.

Again his guardian angel (or more likely devil) deserted him when on October 13 he was one of the victims of a mustard gas attack, went partially blind and had to be evacuated to a field hospital in Stettin, where his eyes slowly recovered and sight returned. As he lamented his faith, he had a sudden attack of self-recrimination, and there and then, having learned of Germany’s defeat and the armistice, he decided to enter politics after the war.

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Hermann Goering (1893 - 1946)

“Hermann will be either a great man or a great criminal” - Fanny Goering

I: King of the Castle

In much the same way as we tend to see King Henry VIII as a fat, corpulent, sullen figure in paintings while he was, in his prime, a fine figure of a man (well let’s be honest: even an ugly king is going to be doing very well to have eight separate wives, isn’t he?) our picture of Hermann Goring tends to be coloured by the fat, smirking and preening aristocratic officer World War II made him, and he often represents some of the worst excesses of the Reich, not in terms of genocide (though he surely had a hand in that too) but in terms of I suppose you might say decadence. On the face of it, Goring seems an unlikely fit for the Nazis, who had fooled themselves into believing they were the best of mankind, despite many physical and mental shortcomings. He was, for a start, the son of an aristocrat. Hitler hated the nobility from the beginning, seeing them as part of a corrupt and morally bankrupt system of class superiority that kept the working man down. He himself had no high breeding to speak of, nor indeed had his other henchmen, but Goring’s ancestry can be traced back to a hated tax collector appointed by the Prussian King in the seventeenth century, a reviled functionary of the monarchy whom Hitler would surely have despised as much as any Jew (or whom he may have inferred was of that hated race).
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Heinrich Goering, his father, was the son of a judge, and had been the Reich Minister of Namibia, then called German West Africa, though his mother, Heinrich’s second wife, at least was a peasant, believed variously to have been a barmaid from Munich or a Bavarian peasant girl, twenty years younger than her husband. Hermann was her fourth child, second son, and he was born a large child at twelve pounds, but also a lonely one. Left in the care of his relatives while his mother went to join his father and the rest of their children in his new posting at Haiti, he became solitary and sullen, and fought when his mother returned after some years to take him from what he believed was, or had come to regard as his rightful and natural home. He developed an early interest in the military, and 'His childhood play was devoted almost exclusively to waging war, leading his small army of youngsters and toy cannons against imaginary enemies of Kaiser und Vaterland [Emperor and Fatherland]. If there was any question about his leadership ... he would bash their heads together and let them know" damn quick" who was boss. For, if his beautiful uniforms and his father's position of authority were not enough to establish [Hermann's] right of dominance over his companions, his ready use of force settled any doubts on that score”.
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To his delight, his godfather (and lover to his mother) the family friend Dr. Hermann Epenstein (for whom it is speculated, though not confirmed, Goering was named) purchased an old German castle, Burg Veldenstein, and invited the Goerings to come live with him in a purpose-built house there, allowing young Hermann to live out the fantasy of being some baron or duke, and giving him the undeserved air of being an aristocrat. A lack of any sort of discipline in his formative years, from a mother who probably was more interested in carrying on with her lover and hoping not to be found out and a father whose health was deteriorating after so long spent in Africa and just wanted peace and quiet led to Hermann becoming a bully and full of himself. Sure he could do anything without any fear of reprisal, this must have prepared him well for the lavish lifestyle he would later lead while second-in-command to Hitler, and given him an overconfidence in his own abilities that nobody - then, or later - was willing or brave enough to dispute.
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From an early age Hermann was indoctrinated with the hatred of Jews, even though Dr. Epensein, his godfather and quite possibly his actual father, was of Jewish descent. His time at public school was when this anti-semitism burgeoned and festered within him, to the point that he trained his dog to bark at anyone suspected of being Jewish. There was also a link in his own family tree, going back to the fifteenth century, which showed one of his ancestors had come from a Jewish family, a Swiss moneylender called Eberling, who had converted from Judaism to Christianity. The truth about his genealogy was brought home bitterly to him when he wrote an essay about someone he admired - Epenstein - and his headmaster took him to task angrily telling him no German boy should write favourably about a Jew! Whether Hermann had at that time any inkling as to the possibility of the doctor being his father is unknown, but the rebuke must have been a crushing blow to his almost hero-worship of, as it were, the man in the high castle. Worse was to come, when his faux pas was disseminated through the school and he had to wear a sign saying “My godfather is a Jew” for the day, getting beaten up by the older boys. It was the last day he spent at the school.

Unable to control him, unsure what to do with him, Hermann’s parents decided to enrol him in the Prussian Cadet Academy. As the boy had expressed a desire to be “a soldier, and nothing else” this seemed a satisfactory and equitable solution. In 1904 Hermann began his training, and took to the uniforms, drills, rigid unquestioning discipline and camaraderie like a duck to water. He did so well that five years later he was able to graduate to the senior academy with a commendation from his teachers, and totally immersed himself in military life, all but eschewing his own family for his new one, somewhat as the man who would one day be his glorious leader would do in the trenches of Flanders ten years later. For both men, the army (or in Hermann’s case, so far anyway the academy and later the air force) became their home, and neither wished for any other. Graduating among the top students, he was tipped for success in a military career, and his father, delighted at the change in the boy and in his achievements, sent him off to Italy on holiday, where he began his love affair with art, viewing all the Old Masters and taking in museums and galleries as he gloried in his new status.

On his return he found that things had soured between his father and their nominal landlord, Epenstein angered at Heinrich Goering’s accusations (all true, so it would seem) of his infidelity with his wife. Having already moved on to a twenty-something new mistress and no longer bothered with Fanny (or perhaps we should waggishly say, bothered with another fanny!) the doctor left Veldenstein and, without his financial support, the Goerings were unable to stay there, and moved into an apartment in Munich. In 1913 Heinrich died and a year later, just as Adolf Hitler was enlisting as a dispatch runner, World War I about to break over Europe, Hermann signed up for the infantry.
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Here he met a man who was to become his lifelong friend and help inspire an interest in flying which would stay with him for the rest of his life. Bruno Loerzer had been accepted into the flying corps and whether it was revisionist history or wishful thinking, Goering mentions the circumstances of his friend’s attraction to and induction into the flying corps as similar to his own; in fact, he may have been using this to mythologise himself later on, as Hitler and his biographers would. When the war began, Goering was still in the infantry and acquitted himself well, emulating his future fuhrer and earning himself the distinction of being awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. However, less than two months into the war he was stricken with a severe bout of rheumatoid arthritis and had to be invalided out.

II: One Day to Fly…

Goering’s aviation career began in probably a way he would have not considered optimum, but it did present a solution to the problem of his arthritis. Visiting him in hospital, Loezer offered him the chance to be his observer, which would mean he could keep the wrappings on his feet and would not need to use his legs to pilot the aircraft. This suited Goering perfectly, and he trained at the flight training school with his friend. However when it came time for him to join the flying corps his commanding officer refused to give permission (unsure why) so Goering went there anyway. He could have faced court-martial for this flagrant breach of orders, but as ever, Dr. Epenstein stepped in to speak for him, declaring him unfit for trench warfare and recommending his enrolment in the Darmstadt aviation facility.
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Being a pilot - even one in training - must have appealed to Goering, as traditionally aviators were seen as a cut above the common foot-soldier, the “knights of the sky”, and Goering had from an early age believed himself superior to his fellows. However life was not all roses in the Darmstadt, as Goering had to learn to photograph and also calculate distances and angles, the main role of a pilot at the onset of World War I being as an observer to direct artillery fire. Nevertheless, at the end of August he was ready for the front lines, and reported for duty with Loezer. When the Crown Prince Wilhelm became interested in aircraft, he regularly spoke and invited to the palace the young fliers, and in effect became a sort of patron for them throughout the war, further bolstering Goering’s overinflated image of his own importance. Not that in some ways he could not be said to have deserved it, being awarded an Iron Cross First Class (three years before Hitler attained his own) for a daring bombing raid conducted over Verdun, which destroyed an important gun turret.
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It’s interesting, as a side note, to read about the infancy of fighter aircraft, which were generally looked on as a kind of novelty in the First World War by the derisive army. Used initially, as explained above, as reconnaissance and spotter planes to help artillery zero in, and as patrols, they graduated to being bombers, but there was no sophistication involved; the bombs were dropped by hand over the side of the aircraft. There was no targeting mechanism, nothing like radar, and it would be pure luck if one hit anything. Men would also fire guns from the aircraft, but these would not be mounted on the plane. Such technology was nowhere near ready to even be thought of yet. The propeller of the aircraft would always pose a problem so firing had to be carried out to the rear and sides by the observer. One enterprising lieutenant did try to affix a machine gun to his plane, but to his dismay it was far too heavy for his light nimble aircraft.

Kudos must then be given to the pilots and observers in these flimsy little flying machines, going up to face enemy fire (from the ground - the Allies were as handicapped as regards armament as the Germans were) with nothing more than a pistol or a rifle, or a hand-dropped bomb, took extreme courage and nerves of steel. Of course, later in the war the problem of fixed machine guns would be solved and the world would have its first proper fighter aircraft - on both sides - but in the initial stages, it really was almost a farce. You can imagine (though I highly doubt this happened) two pilots, each trying to hold the aircraft steady while the observers fired at each other! Hardly the duelling knights of the air, eh?
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The breakthrough came in 1915, and probably somewhat to Goering’s chagrin was not the result of German but Dutch ingenuity. Anthony Fokker had worked out how to use an interrupter gear to prevent the machine-gun firing whenever the propeller blades were directly in front of it. Due to this innovation, the pilot himself could now fire a mounted machine-gun and the need for observers began to decline as the German Air Force took delivery of more and more single-seat aircraft. Anxious of course to be an actual pilot, and recognising that his former role was disappearing quickly, Goering applied to train as a pilot and excelled at it. It would be several months however before he could chalk up his first confirmed kill, as 1915 drew to a close.

During the Battle of Verdun Goering flew first fighters and then bombers, gaining not only experience but praise as a highly skilled pilot. He ferried officers to their destinations, made reconnaissance and observation flights, and also engaged with the enemy, scoring his first few kills, though some of these may have been doubtful as no actual impact of the enemy fighter was ever recorded. Again, the weather would intrude though, as just as Hitler and the List Regiment were unable (as were their adversaries) to fight in the muck of Flanders during winter, rain kept Goering’s squadron grounded; aircraft were of course at that time open, which is to say, there was no covering on the cockpit, and any pilot trying to fly in bad weather would risk his life, possibly blinded by the freezing wind, battered by the rain or even perhaps plucked from the cockpit if the wind was strong enough. Suffice to say, that until cockpits were enclosed there was no flying in bad weather.
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In addition to medals like the Iron Cross and Knight’s Cross, Goering also earned the Ehrenbecker, or Goblet of Honour, which was something I think akin to an Academy Award, presented to pilots for bravery and accomplishment. As 1915 gave way to 1916 his friend and comrade Loezer was wounded and invalided out; surely not, but at the same time you would wonder if Goering didn’t take a tiny bit of selfish pleasure or revenge in this, as Loezer had been assigned to the Fokker monoplane, which both he and Goering greatly admired and which was far more nimble and manoeuvrable than their own more clunky Albatrosses, seven months before Goering was, and has as a result managed to rack up two more enemy kills. Once again, it seems the devil stepped in to save one of the men who would so plague the world in later life, when he and his co-pilot were saved from death even though an artillery shell blew the engine - including the propeller - right off the aircraft!

While recuperating on leave, Goering was invited to his godfather’s castle, Mautendorf, where he was reunited with his mother - with him Epenstein’s new young wife who wished to make peace - and also found love when he met Marianne Mauser. He asked for her hand in marriage, but due to his lack of lands Goering was not the sort of prospect her father was looking for in a suitor, though he grudgingly agreed to a secret engagement. His hope and belief was that the kind of work Goering was engaged in was dangerous enough that the war would probably take him, and so he would never get to marry his daughter.

Goering, however, would not only survive the war but come out of it a flying ace and a legendary folk hero, which would have fit in well with his ambitions and his rock-solid belief in himself, bordering often on arrogance. In May 1917 he was appointed squadron leader, having claimed at this point seven enemy kills, however by then British flight engineers had superceded their German counterparts, and the new aircraft rolling off the assembly lines - famous names like Sopwith Pup, SE5 and Spad - were far superior to the ageing Albatrosses flown by the German Air Force. That was, however, about to change.

Wasn't his father also involved in the genocide in Namibia?

Quite probably, though the book I read didn't specifically mention that. Like father like son, huh?

It’s always a little hard to take anything anyone says about themselves in a positive light at face value, and you’d have to wonder at the almost superhero-like account Goering gives here of one of his squadron’s hardest (and in real terms, least believable) dogfights, but if nothing else it’s entertaining, so here it is reproduced in full from Peter Kilduff’s fine Herman Goering - Fighter Ace: The World War I Career of Germany’s Most Infamous Airman:

'Again it is a clear June day in the year 1917, not even a small cloud in the heavens. In the early morning hours, I gathered my officers and pilots about me and impressed on them all of the regulations about flying and fighting as a formation. Then I assigned each one his place in the formation and gave the final orders. I believed the new Staffel to have been sufficiently trained and I firmly decided to lead them into battle this day and .. . let them show proof of it. 'Soon after take-off the formation was assembled and we set out in the direction of the frontlines. In order to fly and fight in a more mobile way, I had the Staffel separated into two flights of five units each. I led the lower one and the upper one had to stay closely above us and follow. In the sector from Lens to Lille a relative calmness prevailed. From time to time a lone artillery spotter aeroplane moved about with great effort far behind its own lines. We flew on and on northward towarj our chief objective, the Wytschaete Salient. 'When we arrived at Ypres, we were at 5,000 metres altitude. A marvellous view of Flanders was spread out below us.

In the distant background gleamed the coast of France, stretched along the sea; we could clearly recognise Dunkerque and Boulogne; we knew that in the pale mist at the end of the horizon were the chalk cliffs of the British Isles. Below us lay Ypres and the enemy positions, which were situated around the heavily shelled city in a salient opening to the west. To the north the Flanders coast stretched on from Ostende to the mouth of the Schelde river. The Schelde itself glistened in the sunshine on to Holland. From 5,000 metres the eye took in a view of this piece of the earth, above which arched the sky in light blue. 'But danger also lurked here and we had to ... examine everything carefully. A sudden flash in the sun could betray us or the enemy. Despite having dark-green lenses in our goggles it was difficult to make out objects in the blinding flood of sunlight ... Just then I recognized that six enemy fighter aircraft were above us and ... flying with us. Blue-white-red cockades clearly shone on their silver-grey wings. Yet they did not attack us, as we were too many for them; they simply followed at an ominously close distance. For the present, we .. . could do nothing other than be careful.
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Then I sighted more opponents. A formation of enemy Spad single-seaters approached from the rear left, another of [Sopwith] Triplanes from ahead on the left, both still some kilometres away, but heading towards us. At this moment, coming from in front of us, there suddenly appeared a squadron of British Sopwith [Pup biplane] single-seat fighters. Now they had to be dealt with. If I were to attack them, I would immediately have the six Nieuports soaring over us and down on our necks and a few minutes later both of the other enemy formations would be rushing toward us, as well . If I were to avoid them, then I must abandon the frontlines altogether, and the airspace would be free for the Englishman; he could do whatever he wanted over our lines. 'I decided to attack immediately, no matter what the cost. Now everyone had to show what he could do and what he was good for. There was no longer any thought of retreat; we had started a fight against a force four times greater than ours, now we battled desperately for our survival. This is how I wished to put the Staffel to the test. The aerial battle was upon us.

I gave the signal to attack - nosed over steeply with my machine - and charged into the Sopwiths. Immediately, they dispersed and the field of combat went downwards. There was wild firing all around me. From all sides you could see smoke trails of one's own and enemy incendiary bullets; tracer ammunition flew past me. Machines turned wildly, reared up, dived down, and looped. The enemy had now thrown himself into the battle in full strength; we duelled against thirty to forty enemy single-seaters. The greatest danger was [that we would] ram into each other. I sat behind a Sopwith that tried to elude my field of fire by desperately twisting and turning. I pushed him down ever lower as we came ever closer to enemy territory. I believed I would surely shoot him down, as he had taken some hard hits, when a furious hail of machine-gun fire opened up behind me. As I looked around, I saw only cockades; three opponents were on my neck, firing everything they had at me. Once again, with a short thrust, I tried to finish off the badly shot-up opponent ahead of me. It was too late. Smack after smack the shots from behil1ct. hit my machine. Metal fragments flew all around, the radiator was shot through; from a hole as big as a fist I was sprayed in the face by a heavy stream of hot water. Despite all that, I pulled the machine about and upwards and fired off a stream of bullets at the first fellow I saw. Surprised, he went into a spin. I caught up with the next opponent and went at him desperately, for I had to fight my way back across the lines. He also ceased fighting. It was a decisive moment. My engine, which was no longer receiving water from the radiator, quit and with that any further fighting by me was over. 'In a glide I passed over the lines and our positions. Close behind them I had to make a forced landing in a meadow.
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The landing proved to be a smooth one, and the machine stayed upright. Now I sawall of the damage. My worthy bird had received twenty hits, some of them very close to my body. I looked around me apprehensively; what had happened to my Staffel? There was a noise above me and shortly thereafter one of my pilots landed in the same meadow. His machine looked pretty bad too; various parts were shot to pieces. Another two pilots also had to make forced landings with shot-up machines. But the pilots were safe and sound. The Staffel had prevailed in the toughest battle. Despite its numerical superiority, the enemy had quit the field of battle. Everything had been observed from down below and we reaped our rewards of recognition. Far more important for me, however, was the feeling that I could depend on my Staffel. During this violent Flanders battle the Staffel had delivered on what it had promised on one fine June day - to fight and to be victorious.

Right. Sounds fanciful at best. An enemy force FOUR TIMES the size of Goering’s and they not only beat them off, shot some of them down, but ALL survived? Pull the other one, kamerad, it’s got bells on! Still, there seems to be a general consensus that, despite what he became, Goering was feted as a pilot in the First World War, and, like Hitler, acquitted himself well in the conflict, however much we might wish to think differently. It was the job of the Nazis to rewrite history; it certainly is not mine, and grudgingly though I may give it, I’ll afford credit where it is due, even to men who later became monsters.

I must however remark on the huge difference in attitudes between the two wars, at least among airmen. Goering speaks of an English (actually Australian, but flying for the Royal Flying Corps) pilot he duelled with, eventually overcame and forced down. When the Englishman (sic) was taken prisoner, Goering spoke to him and they conversed about their dogfight, each congratulating the other on his skill. Knights of the air, indeed! By the time Hitler came to power such “gentlemanly conduct”, such “sporting behaviour” was long gone, even if the speed and power of the aircraft now made it far more likely that the loser was going to die in a ball of flame rather than just be forced down. World War I may have been, in essence, more brutal and savage than its later cousin, but in terms of air warfare and the conduct attending same, it could be said to have been the last “civilised war”. Hitler and the Nazis were not interested in recognising the valour of the opponent; to them, they were an inferior enemy, worthy of nothing more than death or capture. Airmen taken prisoner in World War I were treated well, and officers afforded much honour; in World War II everyone was treated the same.
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If the writing is his, and not embellished by later biographers and Nazi revisionists, I must compliment Goering on his prose. It’s quite elegant, as you can see from any of the extracts published above, almost more like poetry or literature than mere reports or accounts. Some very descriptive passages whcih would not be out of place in a novel. However we must not forget that he was not only a Nazi, but one of those in high command, a confidante and friend of Hitler, and like all at least high-ranking Nazis, a rabid anti-semite. This is shown by his slur against one of his own officers in 1917, Lt. Willy Rosenstein, necessitating that officer’s demand he rescind the slur, and on Goering’s refusal to do so, Rosenstein’s request, which was granted, to be transferred. The thing is, reading about his air combat stories you can’t avoid a little grudging respect for the man, but always lurking behind Goering the World War One fighter ace, the hero of many dogfights, is the shadow of Goering the Nazi, Goering the cruel, anti-semite, the luster after power, the trampler on the careers, feelings, property and even lives of others, and Goering who, in the end, proved Goering the coward, taking his own life rather than face the hangman’s noose.

Further evidence not only of the man’s duplicity, but of the typical entitled officer’s attitude to money is seen when he attempted to claim back expenses incurred on his trip back to Mauterndorf in January. He erroneously - falsely, a blatant lie - described the fortress home of his uncle as a health resort, when it was no such thing, and surely had more than enough funds of his own for the trip, not to mention that his uncle was hardly likely to charge him for staying there. Just mean and greedy, two traits which would become apparent as part of his psychological makeup as he grew older and, becoming more powerful and in more authority, more dangerous. There exists, interestingly, no record of his receiving reimbursements, so it doesn’t look as if his little ploy worked.

In February Goering’s squadron moved to Marcke in Belgium, establishing its headquarters at the seized castle of Baron Jean de Bethune and Goering, in command, was once again lord of the manor, though this time it was not someone else’s. Well, it was, but he did not have to share it with anyone, as he had done in Mauterndorf with his uncle and his mother. Goering did not have everything his own way though. Having tried everything he could to secure Germany’s highest military honour, the Pour le Merite, he was pipped by Loerzer, who was awarded it a day after he, Goering, had had a Knight’s Cross of the Military Karl Friedrich Merit Order pinned on his chest. Twenty kills were required for the Pour le Merite and Goering was lagging behind his friend (and rival) by three, then fate intervened and he contracted severe tonsillar abscess, so severe that he was at one point in danger of dying as the abscess cut off his breathing, but once again the Devil was on the case and he survived to return to his squadron. It’s believed that this may have been the first time he was given morphine, something he would end up with an addiction to in later life.

A few days after returning he had to give up the comforts of Castle Marckebecke and move with his squadron to an airfield outside of Douai, not far from where another WWI ace, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was stationed with his squadron. He would not be there for long, as he would be shot down and killed within a month, no doubt souring the morale of a German Air Force whose military was already losing the war, the end clearly in sight. At the end of May, Goering was finally awarded the coveted Pour le Merite, which he had yearned for over the last year or more, though it was now three months later than Loerzer had achieved the honour. Nonetheless, as Goering had yet, at this point, to rack up twenty kills - he was stuck on eighteen - some backhand bureaucracy must have been taking place, with his friends in high places speaking for him. It would in fact be another month before Goering reached the requisite number of victories.

Goering’s personal prestige was further swollen (and no doubt again due to backroom deals) when he replaced Wilhelm Reinhard, Richthofen’s successor, as leader of the Red Baron’s squadron. He soon had competition though, in the shape of the late Red Baron’s brother, Lothar, who, when Goering took leave, assumed command of the squadron his famous sibling had founded and led. Back at Mauterndorf, Goering spent more time with Epenstein than with his fiancee, as her father could see how the war was going to end, and believing his daughter’s prospects poor if she married a defeated fighter ace, laid plans to end the relationship between Marianne and Goering. When he returned to retake command of his squadron - Richthofen having been injured and invalided out - he too could see that the end was in sight.
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And yet, for all that, the famous stories of the “knights of the air”, the unspoken chivalry and gentlemanly conduct between enemy fliers do seem to have some basis in truth, as this account from a Danish pilot, Niels Paulli Krause, who was flying with a French squadron and who tangled with Goering reveals:

'One day I was alone on a long mission with my machine and I had taken some photographs when in the distance I could make out a German aeroplane returning from the French lines. As we had to cross paths, I was eager to know who this lone wolf might be. My opponent had also seen me and was heading toward me. We probed a little, circling each another at a great distance. I really had little desire for this circular angling while I was on the way home, but my opponent abruptly began the fight and forced me to respond. We flew around one another, coming ever closer, without finding a clear target. Then suddenly the German machine made a tight turn, almost into a loop, and in an instant its machine gun was trained on me. 'It all happened so suddenly that I was totally unable to respond. All that ran through my head was that [the pilot] must be some great opponent. Then once again the enemy aeroplane made such an incredible and for that time almost impossible manoeuvre that I knew my opponent was ... Goring. 'Every great flyer has ... special tactics. Thus, only Goring could fly like that.
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As for me, I fought like I had never fought before ... And yet I clearly recognised that my opponent was better than I. This was no mere cat-and-mouse game, but a battle with a flying genius against whom it was impossible for me to prevail. I do not know how long we circled each other and strained our bracing wires. Linen tatters in my wings showed that I had been hit many times. But the decisive shot had not yet struck. 'Then, in the midst of " . [my gaining the advantage j, my machine gun jammed. I pounded with my fists against the red-hot gun breech, to no avail. I tugged at the ammunition belt, to no avail. My only thought was: "It is all over!" My opponent seemed perplexed that, suddenly, I was no longer shooting at him. He circled around me, noticed me hammering away at the machine gun and understood that I was no longer able to fight. Then suddenly .. . he flew quite close to me, put his hand to his flying helmet in a military salute, and turned toward the German lines .. . '

Were this an account given by Goering we could take it with probably a tablespoonful of salt, as he was, as we have learned already, given to embellishment, especially if it helped him to shine. Although whether an action such as this - letting an enemy pilot escape when he had him right where he wanted him - would be lauded or frowned upon is another matter. But this is not the account of the victor but the vanquished, and there is no percentage for the man to have recounted how he ended up at Goering’s mercy, and the only reason he survived was because the German ace allowed him to. So we must take it at face value, and allow that Goering did in fact at times respect his enemy, if that enemy had earned that respect.

Though perhaps it was expected of the pilots, a sort of gentleman’s code. Conrad Hoster, a retired wartime pilot, explained the agreed procedure: 'In order to make the expression "force down [an aeroplane]" understandable one must mention that aerial combats on the ,t\Testem Front were settled with a certain Ritterlichkeit [chivalry]. The vanquished or wounded adversary was spared the moment he gave up all resistance and sought his salvation in an involuntary landing. Such a moment always occurred when ... totally unexpected, the German pilot made a deft manoeuvre that put him right on his opponent's neck and he had the enemy aeroplane directly in his machine gun's stream of fire. In this situation the opponent knew that the German had only to press the firing button on his guns and in a few seconds his own crate would be fired on and at least his fuel tank would be set on fire or he would be hit. In this circumstance, therefore, the opponent gave up resistance and acquiesced to the victor that he would have to land, i.e., to be "forced down" to the ground at a minimum behind [the victor's] lines”

That, however, is not what Krause maintains happened in his encounter with Goering, which has to lead us to believe that Goering again did as he liked, what he thought was appropriate for the situation, and made his own rules. Again, though Hoster casts doubt on the veracity of the story, he does admit there is no reason for the Dane to have either embellished the story or even told it and had it published, as he was already a decorated war hero and in 1930, when the report was printed, the Nazis were on the rise, with war less than a decade away. Perhaps, having fought through the Great War, he was unwilling to see the world fall into the same trap again, and was trying to show, hoped, that the Germans were trustworthy, not barbarians, not the kind of people who would force another global conflict. On all fronts, of course, he was wrong there, but it may go some way towards explaining his motives. This is, of course, only my opinion, and quite likely wrong.

In October, as Goering was again in Berlin checking out the newest fighter aircraft, the war was already winding down, dragging painfully towards its inevitable conclusion, defeat for Germany and ignominy and humiliating surrender waiting in the wings. This did not stop him partying, but his flying days were drawing to a close. On November 19 1918 he disbanded the squadron, thanking the men for their service and promising their exploits would go down in German history. A short time later he was forced to call off his engagement to Marianne Mauser. His last words, given in December 1918 at a meeting of new officers association, held a dark warning and prediction for the future:

'For four long years, we officers did our duty on the ground, at sea and in the air, and risked our lives for our Fatherland. Now we come home and what do some people do to us? They spit on us and want to take our honour away from us. And I will tell you this: the real [German] people are not responsible for this [conduct]. Each and every one of them was a comrade, irrespective of social standing, for f(;lUr long, difficult years of war. It is not the real people who are to blame; rather, it is the ones who incited them, who stabbed our glorious army in the back and who wanted nothing more than to enrich themselves at the expense of the real people. And for that reason I urge everyone here today to [nurture] the deepest and most abiding hatred against these criminals [who are] against the German people. The day will come - that I know and I ask that you believe it - when these gentlemen are finished and driven out of our Germany. Prepare yourselves, arm yourselves and work toward that day ..

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That day, to the world’s sorrow, would not be long in coming.

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While war is full of uncertainty, one thing is clear: it is never black and white. No matter how just and right the cause may be, no matter how noble the fight may appear, there's no such thing as the naive concept of good guys and bad guys. Very often, in order to achieve their objectives, those on what is seen as the “right side” or “the side of good” are forced to make hard decisions, take actions they would rather not, wrestle with their conscience and sacrifice for the greater good. Nobody ever won a war easily, not even a small one like the Falklands, or that time Cork declared its independence from Ireland (we crushed them, but a lot of brave Dublin lads gave their lives for the cause of liberty) – war by its very nature is a struggle, and even in the most one-sided conflict, or one that seems so, both sides will suffer, if only later in the court of public opinion and historical documentation. The British may have outnumbered and outmatched the Zulus, but these days it's the latter we remember mostly with sympathy and an understanding of their cause. Xerxes suffered massive losses at Thermopylae, but it's the brave defenders we remember.

History is of course also written by the winners, and they are naturally going to paint themselves in the best light possible. It's always important, when reading about any particular war, to try to get an account or accounts written by a disinterested party, or even by the losers. A chronicle of World War I written by a German author is going to read far different to that related by a British or French one, and what, I wonder, would an account of the Iraq War look like from an insider there? I'm always reluctant to trust the writings of the winning side – although sometimes, they are the only ones available – and usually try to check my sources and ensure that, like a good Ken Burns documentary, both sides of the story are told, in so far as can be achieved. I haven't found many books about World War II by German authors, probably because it's not a subject Germans are particularly keen to revisit or remind people of, and with Wikipedia there's no way to know who wrote what, though in general I tend to trust most of what I read there.

But biographies are almost always written in two ways: gushing, congratulatory prose by people who knew or know the person, or are connected with him, or scathing, biting attacks on the person by someone who has an axe to grind. Hard to find unbiased sources there. However when talking about this man, you'll do well to find a biographer who will slander or even cast doubt on his legend, so we're left with the accounts which would have to be considered “friendly”. But through a combination of research outside these books and articles on Wiki, I hope to get somewhere close to the truth. I'm not looking to canonise the man, but neither am I looking to vilify him. I just want to write a reasonably accurate and unembellished account. After all, it would hardly be fair, would it, to rail at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Stalin, and present their adversaries as pure souls, untouched by scandal or even ill-advised plans?

So if anyone out there is a Churchill devotee, don't take offence at anything written here. I'm not trying to tear the man down: I realise what an icon he is, how important, even indispensable he was to the war effort, indeed to winning the war, and I agree he deserves the place he occupies in history. But sometimes idols can stand a little kicking, to see if those feet are made of the same tough substance as the rest, and what we find may surprise us. I already know there are skeletons lurking in the Prime Minister's closet – skeletons not exactly hidden, to be fair, but ones which cannot be ignored – and they'll get a good airing. It's only in looking at all sides of a man that you can get a proper picture of him, and we would in fact I believe be doing Churchill a great disservice by pretending he was untouchable, unimpeachable, without blemish. I'm sure even he wouldn't want that.

I: Born in a Palace – The Best Laid Plans

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30 1874 in his family's ancestral home, Blenheim Palace. If he can be compared to anyone, in terms of upbringing and lineage, it is probably Herman Goring, which is to say he was born into an aristocratic family, and was certainly no working class boy done good. Winston would never have to struggle for the basic necessities of life, and so in many ways would perhaps be seen as disingenuous when he assured the British people during the war that he understood how they felt. Of course he did not. He never went without food or drink, or hot water, or his famous cigars. But to some extent, you can't help what you're born into, and it's the measure of a man how he responds to that birthright. Does he coast on through life, living on stipends and allowances, exploiting his position in class society, or does he get down and dirty with the people his class traditionally look down upon? Churchill has certainly been called all but the archetypal man of the people, but does he deserve that title? We'll find out, but not here probably, as this account, like the others I've written and those yet to come, are only intended to cover the early years of each figure and their rise, if any, to power prior to the onset of World War II.
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It was a bitingly cold Tuesday in November, 1874, when only months earlier, half a world away, the Great Chicago Fire had levelled that proud city, and further south, the Texas-Indian Wars were drawing to a close, while closer to home Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh had married the only daughter of Tsar Nicholas III of Russia. Meanwhile, 160 miles to the north, Alfred Cellier's comic opera The Sultan of Mocha had premiered only days before in the Prince's Theatre in Manchester, while luckless emigrants fleeing poverty and discrimination in England and heading for a new life in far-off New Zealand were destined never to reach that promised land, as the ship carrying them foundered and sunk with all hands.

None of this concerned the young woman, newly-wed, as she walked in a party of shooters in the grounds of Blenheim Palace that morning, November 30, trying to keep warm and probably quite bored. Jennie Jerome was the daughter of an American financier, and had been born in Brooklyn, spending her youth in Paris. She was a socialite who had edited magazines and probably did not understand nor care for the class system in Britain, where everyone was expected to conform to certain behaviours deemed “proper” for their status. In the USA, things were much freer and more lax, but here in the heart of the British Empire, and in her new married position, she had to conform, and she more than likely resented it. She may also have resented carrying the soon-to-be-born child of her husband, Lord Randolph Churchill, though she probably did not realise how soon that event was to occur.

As a girl, Jennie had been quite a talented pianist, tutored by no less a personage that Stephen Heller, a close friend of Chopin, and believed by him to be capable of rising to concert level. She therefore, it can be assumed, would have been discontented in the role she now played, very much second to her husband, with no real life of her own, subservient to his wishes and trapped in the snares of his class. She had been, for the past hundred days or so, Lady Churchill, but may have considered herself as a bird in a gilded cage. And a heavily pregnant bird, at that. Married at twenty years of age she was already carrying her first child and due to deliver in a matter of months. She had met her future husband at a regatta on the Isle of Wight, introduced to Lord Randolph by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VI, and three days later they were engaged. Family bickering over arrangements delayed the marriage, which did not take place until April 15 1874.
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To nobody's surprise, the idea of his son marrying a liberated, opinionated American woman did not sit well with Randolph's father, who had then final say in the marriage of his son. He did not in fact have so much against Jennie as against her father, Leonard, who, though he had involvement in newspapers (he once part-owned the New York Times) had made his money in horses, in racing, and while horse racing was seen in England as “the sport of kings”, that was watching and betting on it, not financing it or owning any part of it, which was seen as common and vulgar. However, whatever else he might be, or said to be, Leonard Jerome was rich, and if there's one thing that will placate even the deepest disapproval it's hard cash, and so, after some new world ideas about women owning property met old world ones which said everything was the right of the husband, and some considerable money crossing hands, differences were settled and the marriage was allowed to proceed.

Whether Jennie could shoot, or had any interest in doing so, or was just bored and tagging along, I'm not aware, though in general I think women shooting was frowned upon in nineteenth-century England (though her being an American, it's quite possible she did shoot). Whatever the case, an accident occurred which was to have long-ranging implications for her. She had a fall and was then placed in a pony carriage, the resultant jostling and bumping in which resulted in her going into labour the following Saturday night. No doctor being available, it was left to the county physician to deliver the baby. This was not how it was supposed to have been.
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Lord Randolph had rented a fashionable house in Charles Street, Mayfair, from which his first progeny was intended to glimpse the world and in which his birthing cries would be heard, but the house was not ready, and so Lord Randolph and his pregnant wife moved into the family ancestral home at Blenheim for the autumn. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but when Jennie went into labour there it became the site of Winston's birth, and the friends and social butterflies and powerful magnates and nobles Lord Randolph had no doubt planned to be in attendance were conspicuous by their absence. The room, in fact, which saw the emergence of the future Prime Minister of Great Britain pop out his head was a small, dark, cheerless one, and I suppose in some ways you could say its austerity and bleakness might have been seen as a metaphor for what was to await the little baby in his long and illustrious life.

He would also be, like most children of the time, deprived of the love and attention of his mother. This was simply how it was done in England at that time. A nanny took care of the child and the father and mother seldom saw them until perhaps they were grown, and so it was with young Winston. Elizabeth Everest, a spinster nurse, was engaged to look after the baby a mere month after his birth, and would become in every sense but reality his mother. He looked up to her, loved her dearly, referring to her as “woomany”, and shared all his problems, thoughts and dreams with her. He would, when he grew old enough, write regularly to his mother, but would seldom receive a reply, much less a visit.

In 1876, when Winston was two years old, Lord Randolph's brother, John Spencer-Churchill, had an altercation with the Prince of Wales over a woman, and was as a result sent to Ireland to serve as Viceroy. This was clearly punishment, as no Englishman, never mind a nobleman, wished to serve in Ireland, which was mostly still seen as “that barbarous country”, as Queen Elizabeth had described it in the sixteenth century, and was bitterly opposed to English rule. During the Churchills' time there they would witness the unspeakable horrors of the Great Famine, brought about mostly by greedy and thoughtless English landowners who treated Irish farmers and peasants as little more than slaves, and allowed them to starve in the fields or die on coffin ships.

Although the quarrel had nothing to do with him, Randolph was John's secretary and so was constrained to accompany him to Dublin, along with his new family. Three months before their return to England Winston's brother Jack was born, another entrusted to the care of Mrs. Everest (although she had never married, spinsters were traditionally called Mrs), who was summarily and, many say, rudely and unfairly dismissed in 1893. Although no longer in her care, it must have been an emotional wrench to Winston to see the woman whom had more or less filled the role of his mother being so cruelly and thanklessly treated, but he of course had no say in the matter. Elizabeth would die two years later, and Winston paid for her tombstone and for her grave to be perpetually upkept by the cemetery.

Another thing parents did with their children back then was send them off to boarding school as soon as it was possible. You'd imagine they must have had very little feeling towards their offspring, and often this was correct: while the father wanted an heir (and so a male child) to take over from him, he would be generally – not always of course, but it seems in the majority of cases – uninterested in the boy's babyhood, childhood and adolescence, and perhaps only even meet him again once he had grown to be the man his father had impatiently awaited him to become. Girls were, I think, mostly kept at home – fathers had little to no interest in them, as a rule, as they could not inherit anything from them – and probably got more of the mother's love (if there was any to give) than her son would have. In Jennie's case certainly, evidence seems to indicate that though Winston loved his mother (“at a distance”, according to himself) she never quite returned the kind of affection he craved, possibly seeing him as an unnecessary distraction to her career as a socialite.

Seven years was the age at which Winston was packed off to boarding school, the first being St. George's in Ascot, Berkshire, where he hated every moment. The school – now a girls' one – had a reputation for brutal, uncompromising discipline, and for a boy of seven years who had, while not having the love and affection due to him from his parents, never received any such punishment at home, and had only had devotion and kindness from Mrs. Everest, his “woomanny”, this must have come as a terrible shock. Whether such treatment toughened him up for the life he was to follow or not is open to debate, but when many of the teachers in boarding schools were known at the time to be both sadists who relished their power over the young boys and men of at best limited education themselves, it seems doubtful that it served any useful purpose. Certainly, his lack of progress academically while there, and his transfer to Brunswick School in Hove, a mere two years later, does not point towards his having advanced in any way under the tutelage of the masters at St. George's.

Indeed, his health had begun to deteriorate (whether due to the beatings or not I don't know, but you can speculate; they certainly wouldn't have helped) by the time the decision was made to enrol him in Brunswick, and here he found a completely different world. Punishment and discipline were not used in this school, the teachers far more friendly and relaxed in comparison, yet this was attended by a general lack of incentive to learn. While I personally would never advocate the corporal punishment of children, especially to gratify personal tastes, and while it's clear that the application of same did nothing to help Winston (or, presumably, the other students) learn anything, the lack of discipline at Brunswick may have had the very same effect, leaving no impetus for improvement. It would not be until he was finally moved to the famous Harrow, in 1888, that any sort of real education would begin for the future Prime Minister.

Historians, particularly British ones, would love to say that Winston Churchill sailed through the entrance exam, excelled in his studies once he had “found” the right school, and that Harrow had only been waiting for him, to open and impart its centuries of knowledge to his eager young mind. Unfortunately, that was nowhere near the case. He barely scraped through the exam, narrowly missing being turned down, and was never a good student; which is to say, or clarify, that he did not easily take to the accepted important subjects of the time, Greek, Latin and mathematics, for which he had little or no time. He was, however, deeply interested in English and history, and expended all his learning energies on these subjects. Despite private tuition offered by one of his teachers in the Classics, he did not seem interested, though one of his other teachers, Robert Somervell, was impressed by his grasp and usage of English and sought to bring this latent talent to flower, for which Churchill later wrote he was very grateful: "Mr. Somervell - a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great - was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing - namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it As I remained in the Third Fourth [a very disregarded form] three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing.”

Winston's father, determined that his son should pursue a military career, had him enrolled in the army form in Harrow, and for the next three years he trained as a soldier, finally managing to gain admission to the prestigious military academy at Sandhurst as a cavalry officer. It should be noted though that this was no natural conclusion either; in order to make it, Winston had to secure the services of what was known as a “cram master”, someone who would tutor him and advise him on his subject, and this was on his second attempt, therefore it was on his third that he finally made it into Sandhurst.
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Once in, though, he finally started to show the promise and aptitude that some of his teachers had seen dormant in him, and by the time he left in 1894 he was already on his way to a commission as a second lieutenant in the Hussars. Unfortunately, a month after leaving Sandhurst his father died, an early age even for that time, passing away in January of 1895 at the age of forty-six. What should have been a traumatic and painful time for the young Winston (now 20) was probably lessened by the lack of contact he had had with Lord Randolph, his father almost a stranger to him. A few months later he took up his commission in the 4th Hussars.

While I don't wish to draw too close a comparison between him and his contemporaries on the other side, a military man is a military man, and like Hitler and Goring (more Goring really, as Hitler never went to any military academy but simply signed up for the army), Winston Churchill only really began to shine once he entered the army. Here, he could forget the hated Latin and Greek: a soldier had no need for such classical knowledge, and the only use he had for mathematics would be to establish whether the opposing force was bigger than his, or whether he had enough ammunition. However, no man ever entered Sandhurst or any other military college without at least a grounding in maths, and indeed Churchill had been forced to cram figures and equations into his mind in order to pass the entrance examination, though he later shrugged that the knowledge, once it had served its purpose (i.e., got him into the academy) “passed away like the phantasmagoria of a fevered dream”. Maybe it was as well he forgot it, considering the kind of almost insurmountable odds Britain, under his leadership, would face in the summer and autumn of 1940 as it strove to survive the Nazi onslaught. A man with a better grasp of figures (and thus, reality) might have been more amenable to a compromise than he.

A year after his promotion to second lieutenant, he and his regiment were shipped almost five thousand miles southeast, to begin a whole new chapter in the life of the man who would one day be voted as the greatest of Britons.
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II: Churchill in India – Empire and Empowerment

It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, and this had two meanings: one, a sort of metaphor for the supposed immortality of the empire, that it would never fall, but also a literal one. As Britain had colonies all over the globe, when it was night in England you could be assured that in some other corner of her far-flung empire it was day, so that at its height, Britain could indeed boast that the sun, in a very real way, never set on her dominions. And it was here, in the country deemed the jewel in Queen Victoria's crown, where she was known (to British if not Indian subjects) as the Empress of India, that life finally began to open up for Winston Churchill.

He arrived in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) in October 1896, four weeks before his twenty-second birthday, and at the height of British power in the colony. The Queen was about to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, having reigned for sixty-five years, making her by far the longest reigning monarch England had ever had (and only beaten today by the current Queen), and while there had been the “unfortunate unpleasantness” of the Indian Revolt of 1857, all of that had been sorted out now and the Indians were once again good and obedient subjects of the Crown. A posting to India was generally seen as a cushy job – the working day lasted three whole hours, and the rest of the day, from 10:30 onwards, was the soldiers' own to do as they pleased, to say nothing of having their every need pandered to by a flotilla of Indian servants – but Churchill didn't do cushy, and he wasn't about to relax here for the next few years.

In fact, he spent only nineteen months in India, while his regiment remained there for eight and a half years. In that time, he visited England twice, for three months at a time, Calcutta three times and even went as far as Hyderabad, over three hundred and fifty miles north, to take part in a polo contest, polo being the one sport he was ever interested in. Added to this, he undertook his own expedition to the northwest frontier, where he catalogued his travels. It was in Bangalore, where his regiment had moved three days after arriving in Bombay, and where they were to be stationed for the duration, that Churchill began to feel (again, and with apologies to any English readers, like Hitler) that he had a destiny to fulfill. He knew serving in India for eight years was not part of that, and he began to rue his failure to learn Latin and Greek, wishing to read more of the classics and improve his, up to then, quite basic education. He still couldn't face learning these dead languages, he just wished he already understood and could read them. He considered leaving the army and going to Oxford, but it was a little late in his life for that. He would have had an awful lot of catching up to do, and as we have already seen, he wasn't the kind of student who could expect to manage that.

A letter to his mother offered him no encouragement in return – again, Winston's love and regard for Jennie didn't quite, but almost did, vary inversely with that of his mother for him. She just was not interested, and left her son to sort out his own problems. With her husband dead, she was happy to take a string of lovers, and he was possibly an unwelcome reminder that she had once settled for a stuffy old English aristocrat who was not worthy of her. She was having fun, still young, still beautiful, and she didn't need her son from another marriage spoiling it for her. She would marry twice more before her death, the first to take place at the very turn of the century, only a few years away. But meanwhile she was becoming the darling of society, and in particular the Prince of Wales (who, you might recall, had originally introduced her to her late husband), freed from the bonds of matrimonial responsibility.

We could, I suppose, castigate Jennie for this seemingly unbecoming behaviour, with her husband only a year dead, but then we should remember two, or perhaps even three things: one, she was young and beautiful, two she was American, and three, her marriage to Lord Randolph had quickly soured, and she was said to have had lovers even during the time they were together, so perhaps it's not such a surprise to read that she took to her freedom like an imprisoned butterfly suddenly loosed from a jar, and spread her wings, courting all comers. None of this helped her son, of course, who decided his best course was to self-educate, and asked her to send him various books, which, to her credit at least she did. He then made himself familiar with the classics, history and most especially politics, which he had started to take a keen interest in. Perhaps this had to do with his father having been an MP (if not a very successful one) or perhaps it had no bearing on his interest at all. What it would do was prepare him for the life he was to lead, the position he was to occupy, and secure forever for him one of the highest and most exalted places in history.
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One point on which his mother did correspond with her son, and very angrily too, was the subject of his spending. She wrote in one letter that if he could not live within his means he would have to resign his commission and come home. She made it clear she was not going to continue to support him on her own if he would not rein in his reckless spending. Nevertheless, he used his mother's considerable political connections, not to avoid postings to the front, but to obtain them. A young man lounging in the heat of India looking for a fight, he sought conflict everywhere and wherever there was a battle, an engagement, a civil war or some sort of action, he wanted to be there. The spirit of adventure was hot in his blood, and he wanted to make a name for himself. He was also eager to do this through the means of politics, and to that end was aided by an American Representative and failed candidate for president, Bourke Cockran, who took him under his wing when he visited New York on his way to fight rebels in Cuba, and taught him much about politics.
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Time spent with Cockran imbued in the young Winston an abiding fascination with and love for America, which would carry over of course into his relationship with President Roosevelt, and perhaps lay the foundation for the close ties between both countries over the following centuries. He was thrilled with New York, where he stayed and was entertained at Cockran's Fifth Avenue apartment, and at how eager everyone was to make his stay as comfortable as possible. But comfort was never Churchill's game, and when, on leave home in England, word came to him of an uprising on the border between India and Afghanistan, he cut short his holiday to rush to be there, pressing his friend, Major-General Bindon Blood, to approve his Hussars being posted there. It took him over a month of travel, and even then Blood's reply to his request was non-committal at best: 'Very difficult; no vacancies; come up as a correspondent; will try to fit you in. B.B”. But he continued on in high spirits, sure he would see action and champing at the bit to be there, no doubt worried it would all be over by the time he arrived.

It was not an easy, not a short journey from Bangalore (he had to return to his headquarters first to ask permission of his commanding officer to go on the expedition) and most men would have written their account of it as a complaint, or a testament to their misery, but for Winston there was a sense of adventure and even joy when he wrote “I had the curiosity to ask how far it was. The polite Indian [booking clerk] consulted a railway time table and impassively answered, 2,028 miles. . . . This meant a five days' journey in the worst of the heat. I was alone; but with plenty of books, the time passed not unpleasantly. Those large leather-lined Indian railway carriages, deeply shuttered and blinded from the blistering sun and kept fairly cool by a circular wheel of wet straw which one turned from time to time, were well adapted to the local conditions. I spent five days in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.”

Of course, with this being, as mentioned, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, he was probably more anxious than ever to make a good impression and have something to boast of, and accounts of his valour to be read in the newspapers. One thing which would become very clear about Winston Churchill from the beginning of his career (and again, we have to acknowledge that this was the case with his two main Nazi counterparts, and is, in fairness, most likely true about most famous men) was that he was one of his own best promoters, never missing a chance to be in an action and then ensure it was written about, using his wit and his (later) reading to make comments, quips and indeed speeches that have lasted the test of time and are used to point to the man's incredible grasp of and manipulation of the English language, and to build up his own legend. This legend was reinforced – or, if you prefer, first began to show itself – in his amazing work ethic and endurance. Having spent six weeks at the front with Blood, he then returned to Bangalore to work on an account of the battle which ended up running for 85,000 words, while also writing his first and only novel. Although Lady Randolph had his account, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published without delay, it was riddled with punctuation errors and other things which should have been caught by any competent proof-reader, and Churchill was disappointed with the many mistakes which had been left in it.

Nevertheless his writing became widely admired, mostly due to the patronage of the Prince of Wales: when His Highness remarks on how splendid a book is, it's almost incumbent on anyone and everyone who wishes to get on to make sure they read it too, and have an opinion about it that supports the future king of England. Interestingly, a few months later the roles were reversed between Churchill and his mother, with she requesting (a cross, in her case, between a demand and an entreaty which surely stuck in her throat after having taken him to task about money) a loan, to be secured against his trust fund, which he grudgingly, but it has to be supposed with a certain sense of satisfaction and triumph, agreed to. Although they had never been as close as Winston would have wished – not close at all, in fact – the issue of money, and in particular the swift and somewhat brutal removal of the moral high ground from beneath her very feet, as she had to go, proudly and arrogantly but still symbolically cap in hand to her son for money, soured their relationship, on both sides.

Winston, though he had more or less precipitated the rift, was the first and the most eager to close it, asking her to resume the correspondence she had cut him off from, but she remained obdurate, most likely smarting from his rebuke in the way no parent can take a dressing-down from their own child. Despite this, she was still ready to do what she could to advance his political ambitions, and arranged many meetings, luncheons and teas with powerful and influential figures of her acquaintance, out of which came precisely nothing. Nevertheless, due to what to him were fortuitous circumstances, he was in Cairo by early August 1898 and almost immediately joining his regiment on a 1,400-mile trek north to Luxor, in order to take part in the engagement at Atbara. After the successful campaign, in which it is said he both distinguished himself and was miraculously untouched, he decided his future did not after all lie in the army, and resigned his commission, to go instead into politics.

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III: Churchill in Parliament – The Legend Begins

Returning to England that autumn, he began cultivating friends, supporters and alllies in the Tory Party to support his application for a seat in the House of Commons. In December he made his final visit to India, mostly for polo tournaments, and to visit with the then Viceroy of Calcutta, with whom he was most taken. Interestingly, or perhaps even ironically, given that money was so tight, he nevertheless spent a week in the famous Savoy Hotel in Cairo on his way home (“very comfortable though I fear rather expensive”) but once back in England it was pell-mell for the Commons as he wined and dined future Prime Ministers and spoke at Conservative meetings in Cardiff and Paddington, but it was not a good time to be a Tory and though he stood for the seat in Oldham, he and the party lost, and he transferred his energies temporarily back into journalism, as he headed for Cape Town to cover the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Bouncing back to his military days, while on the steam liner headed for South Africa, he secured from the Colonel of the Lancashire Hussars, travelling on the same ship, a commission in his regiment, so that in addition to covering the war he could also take part in it.

In the event though, it turned out to be Churchill's first and only term as a prisoner of war, he and his whole company taken when the huge artillery gun they were transporting by rail was stranded and they had no choice but to yield. He then spent a month in prison but his somewhat ambiguous, not to say duplicitous nature was coming to fruition, as he both tried to claim he had been a non-combatant at the capture of the train (not true; had he his pistol, which he had dropped, he would have been happy to have killed for the Empire), a mere journalist, a war correspondent, and therefore not subject to imprisonment – a civilian, basically; but when rumours came through of a prisoner exchange in the wind he changed his tune and demanded to be classified as a soldier, in order to avail of the opportunity to be considered as one of the prisoners to be swapped. He even went so far as to promise the Boers that, were he released, he would neither fight against them nor report on their situation.
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The Boer commander, though, was not fooled, and had had word from his officers of Churchill's crucial part in the derailed train incident, in which the young Winston had managed to persuade the nervous engine driver to bash at the tracks constantly until he managed to roll the locomotive back onto them and so escaped with some of the wounded. By the time the Boer general had begun to rethink his position in the light of Churchill's promise though, the future Prime Minister of England had had it away on his toes, escaping from the prison – which was only a repurposed school building – and legging it across an unfamiliar country with no knowledge of it or grasp of its languages. Nevertheless, with the help of an English miner whom he happened to run into, and some uncomfortable time spent hiding in his mine (along with some rats) he eventually managed to get out of South Africa and on board a ship back to Durban.

Not wishing to keep comparing him to the man who would become his implacable enemy, but while this story is mostly true it does have the kind of ring of embellishment and self-congratulation about it that attends Hitler's supposed taking of a French gun crew single-handedly. There were, let's just say, other aspects of Churchill's miraculous escape from captivity that he left out, obscured or perhaps even lied about, including leaving two of his colleagues back in the prison when they had been supposed to have broken out together, and bribes exchanged on his behalf along the way by a local merchant, but whatever the truth at its heart, Churchill was received back in Durban as a hero, and his fame began to grow and spread, which could do his later political ambitions no harm. Tales of bravery and derring-do always played well with the folks back home, and nobody better placed than himself to relate that tale to an avid, gasping and congratulatory English public who would hang on every word of his gripping story.
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All of this, and his later taking part in engagements in the Boer War, was of course in direct contravention of his promise to the Boer commander should he be released, but then, he had not been released; he had escaped, and so to his mind (and probably correctly) the bargain had never been struck. If one side of it had not been kept (his release) then why should be keep the other side of it? Whether he would have considered doing so had he secured his release through those channels is something we will never know. As the new century turned, Lady Randolph, aboard the hospital ship Maine, of which she was in all but name in command, arrived in Durban and mother and son were reunited, as were brother and brother, as Jack came too. Winston's relationship with her, the cracks papered over for now, would suffer further damage when a few months later she married a man almost as young as her son, George Cornwallis-Smith, a union on which society very firmly frowned.

While his mother's star was slowly descending, his was on the rise. He had made a name for himself in Africa and was a well-known personality by the time he got home at the end of July 1900. He stood again for the seat in Oldham and this time won it, though it must be said not comfortably or by anything like a landslide. Still, he was in, and once in, like a limpet on the hull of a ship, he would be difficult, even impossible to dislodge. Even so, he didn't hang around and booked passage to New York in December. The thing was, back then MPs did not draw a salary, so Churchill would have to support himself, as he was doing, through his journalism and his other writings, and famous as he was now, he saw celebrity lecture tours of the USA as his biggest earner, and, having made a tour of England and Ireland already, that was where he went. The coming victory in the Boer War was guaranteed to keep the Conservatives in power for a while, so he had no worries about losing the seat he had just won.
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His expectations were thoroughly dampened when he arrived in the Big Apple though. He was aghast not to find the same sense of empire and triumph and victory in America that pervaded Britain at the time like the celebrations following Waterloo. The Americans were cooler towards Britain's treatment of the Boers, remembering their own hard-fought War of Independence just over a century earlier, and Churchill was not the figure in demand he had hoped to be. Worse, though invited to the New York State Capital by then Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt, he seems to have made a poor impression on the future president, who later said of him “I have never liked Winston Churchill” and “I have refused to meet Winston Churchill.”

Neither men ever gave any clue as to where the hostility came from, whether it was anything to do with that dinner, whether Roosevelt never liked Churchill or whether he said or did something, or was told he said or did something that rankled with him, but the two men were cool to each other for all of their lives, the only attempted concession by the American president made in 1914 when he grudgingly passed on his congratulations to Churchill after his handling of the naval fleet. Perhaps, as Roosevelt's daughter once opined, it was because the two men were so alike.

Fed-up and disillusioned with the tour – though he was received better when he went across the border to Canada – Churchill returned home in February and prepared to take his seat in the House. He arrived in a changed England. The long, long reign of Queen Victoria was over. She had died while he had been out of the country, and been succeeded by her son, the Prince of Wales, now Edward VI, and so the long nineteenth century Victorian age came to an end, very appropriately, if obviously coincidentally, as the twentieth began, ushering in the Edwardian period. Whether he had had personal knowledge of or relation to Her Majesty I don't know, but he certainly was known to the new young king, who, as the Prince of Wales, had enthused over his account of the war. Four days after taking his seat, the newest MP made his first speech, which went down in a pretty average way. It was hardly the precursor to the stirring declamations he would give when he sat in the Prime Minister's seat and thundered about Hitler and an Axis of Evil. But it was a start.

It wouldn't have made the papers today – no speech ever does, unless the content is impossible to ignore, or some racist, sexist or other less desirable sentiment is expressed, intentionally or not (or unless something happens like the speaker's trousers fall down, or he suffers a heart attack) – but back then people were mad for news of the goings-on in Parliament, perhaps because the radio and television had yet to be invented, and the only real source of entertainment was the newspapers. And without perhaps enough to fill them happening in the world at the time, the editors filled them up with reports from the House of Commons. I suppose people were probably interested in seeing what the men they had put into power – or voted against – were doing with that power. At any rate, Churchill's speech seemed to go down well in the papers, with some careful caveats, as evidenced by H.W. Massingham's report in the Liberal Daily news the next day:

“Mr Winston Churchill's reply was in very striking contrast to the speech [Lloyd George's] to which it was indeed only nominally an answer. The personal contrast was as striking as that of treatment and method. Mr George has many natural advantages; Mr Churchill has many disadvantages. In his closing sentences he spoke gracefully of the splendid memory of his father. Mr Churchill does not inherit his father's voice - save for the slight lisp - or his father's manner. Address, accent, appearance do not help him. But he has one quality - intellect.

He has an eye - and he can judge and think for himself. Parts of the speech were faulty enough - there was claptrap with the wisdom and insight. But such remarks ['more squires than peasants', 'an honourable peace', etc.] showed that this young man has kept his critical faculty through the glamour of association with our arms. . . . then Mr [Joseph] Chamberlain rose. His speech was an able piece of debating - clear, rasping, coarse in tone, full of points aimed - and successfully aimed - at the average party spirit of his following. . . . But the speech was utterly without elevation - and in insight and breadth of treatment it was far inferior to Mr Churchill's.”

Less supportive was the Glasgow Herald, whose reporter shook his head and noted

“Occasionally there were tones and inflections of voice which forcibly recalled his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, but the hon. Gentleman did not show much trace of his parent's brilliancy in debate. . . . Readiness he had in abundance and he may develop well, but to those who remember the electrical effect of the father's maiden speech, the son's first plunge into debate was nowhere near so high a flight.”

It seemed people were determined to continue to compare him to his late father, but that would not last. However if he thought that he was about to burst like a comet and scream across the face of parliamentary politics, he was to be disappointed, and the three years of his Conservative tenure were marked by little other than questions which were dismissed out of hand. He went back on the lecture circuit, capitalising on his fame still, and had some successes in parliament, one fiery piece of rhetoric in support of the independence of the army earning him the comment from the then-Secretary of State for War that “you will never make a better speech than you made tonight.” Shortly afterwards he made clear his preference for the navy over the army, despite having fought in the latter.

“The only weapon with which we can expect to cope with great nations is the Navy. . . . And surely to adopt the double policy of equal effort both on Army and Navy, spending thirty millions on each, is to combine the disadvantages and dangers of all courses without the advantages or security of any, and to run the risk of crashing to the ground between two stools, with a Navy uselessly weak and an Army uselessly strong.”

His disenchantment with the Conservative Party grew, as the Prime Minister pushed the country towards a more isolationist, protectionist course, and he, Churchill, did not believe this was the way to go, snarling that it would surely lead to the “Americanisation of British politics.” In November 1904 he delivered one of his most damning speeches, and made no bones about his dissatisfaction with his party: "No one seems to care anything but about money today. Nothing is held of account except the bank accounts. Quality, education, civic distinction, public virtue seem each year to be valued less and less. Riches unadorned seem each year to be valued more and more. We have in London an important section of people who go about preaching the gospel of Mammon, advocating the 10% commandments, who raise each day the inspiring prayer 'Give cash in our time, O Lord'."
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Losing the support of his colleagues, ostracised by them and even mocked harshly when, in the middle of a speech, he lost his place and forgot what came next, you might say Churchill was forced out of the party but he took it upon himself to “cross the floor” in 1905 and joined the opposition, the Liberals. Here he believed his ideas would be more readily accepted and received, and though only a junior MP he was still a scalp for the opposition, and not an unknown one thanks to his exploits. Gaining Winston Churchill to their side was a pretty major coup for the Liberal Party,who came to power when Lord Balfour resigned and they were swept into government, winning a landslide victory in 1906. This was not, it should be stressed, due at all or in any way to Churchill's defection; people were just simply fed up with the Conservatives and wanted a change, and they looked to the Liberal Party for that change.

The voice of the people was loud and unequivocal, and in Churchill's new constituency, Manchester Northwest, the Conservatives lost all their seats while the Liberals gained seven to their previous single seat. The tide was definitely turning. But in other ways, too, and in a decade and a half Churchill – along with the rest of the world – would find himself with his biggest challenge ever, one that he would prove unequal to.

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Before that though, there was another challenge he would prove unequal to, and that was of his heart. In 1904 he had briefly met the daughter of Lady Blanche Hozier, then nineteen, and when he again ran into her four years later at a party given by one of her aunts, he was stricken with her to the extent that they were married six months later and the new Lady Clementine bore him his first child ten months later, a girl. They would have five in all, three more girls and one boy, whom they would name after Winston's father, Randolph. In the same year as he married Churchill was also elected as President of the Board of Trade, one of the youngest ever to hold that position. This year was not however without setbacks, including losing his seat in the Manchester constituency and having to opt for a “safe seat” across the border in Scotland, where he was successfully elected as representative for Dundee. Whether he knew or cared anything about Scotland is probably irrelevant; the seat merely provided safety for him to continue in the Commons, and it's possibly likely that if that could have been attained by sitting as member for Dublin, he would have hopped on the boat over to Ireland. Maybe. Anyway he did not have to go so far, but his seat was now well away from where he lived, though of course then as now MPs are not necessarily expected or required to live in their constituency, as long as they keep “visible” and drop in from time to time, so Churchill was able to leave the bleak Scottish town behind by May and return south, only venturing across the border a few times in the next three years.

Further tribulations came when he retired to the house of a friend in Rutland at the break-up of parliament for the summer, and which subsequently burned down (no account advises how this happened, but the house was gutted). Winston was relatively unharmed, but all his important papers were lost in the fire. Soon after this he proposed to Clementine, in August. Engagements were then not the long events they can be these days, when a woman could be proposed to and not married until years later. There was to be no hanging around (whether this was for the sake of propriety, for fear one or the other would change their mind, or whether Churchill was eager to begin, ahem, close relations with his new wife and feared the birth of an illegitimate child if he could not restrain his ardour I don't know; maybe it was just seen as the polite thing not to make the lady wait) and they were united in holy wedlock the next month.

Easily returned in the election of 1910, Churchill nevertheless hated Dundee, and spent as little time as politely possible there. When you read his account of his experiences in the notorious Queen's Head hotel, it's not too surprising that he would want to get away from the place at the earliest opportunity: “This hotel is a great trial to me. Yesterday morning I had half-eaten a kipper when a huge maggot crept out & flashed his teeth at me! Today I could find nothing nourishing for lunch but pancakes. Such are the trials which great & good men endure in the service of their country!'” Ugh! Turn you right off your haggis, that would! He proved himself no friend to the aristocracy when he made a speech calling for the total abolition of the House of Lords, but it was impossible to deny that he was a rising star, climbing into the firmament and exploding all over the place. When the Prime Minister offered him the Irish Office, he politely declined and instead suggested he should be given the Home Office or the Admiralty. He would hold the latter position soon enough, in political time, but for now Asquith agreed and he became the Home Secretary.
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During this time he repaired his somewhat frosty relationship with the King, and more importantly projected himself as a man of the people when he authored two important bills, the Mines Bill of 1911 which sought to both raise the minimum age for mining from thirteen to fourteen (I know!) and to standardise safety rules to protect this most precarious and dangerous, but vital of professions. The other bill was the Shops Bill, which sought to protect the rights and working wage of those involved in the retail industry. Though this was taken apart and never passed in its fullest form – losing the right to overtime restrictions and Sunday openings, for example – it still showed the public at large that he cared about them, or seemed to, and was trying to help them. Napoleon had once described Britain – disparagingly but in fact accurately – as “a nation of shopkeepers”, and being an island, Churchill of course knew how important this industry was to his country, and felt it unfair that its workers should be so shabbily treated.

He was also involved heavily in the National Insurance Act, which provided in part for unemployment insurance, a thing very much needed in a country where people were so frequently out of work. He told the House on May 15 : “There is no proposal in the field of politics that I care about more than this great insurance scheme.” There was, though, and he applied what remained of his boundless energy to it as he feared the government was soon to fall. Though he had been returned without difficulty in Dundee, his party had lost its majority in 1910 and Churchill knew the writing was being chalked on the wall. Before it was complete and spelled out electoral defeat, he wished to organise the reform of the prisons system. Though most ministers, and most Home Secretaries before him, preferred to ignore the problem (and it was a big one) Churchill remembered his time spent in the school house in Africa during the Boer War, and so he was more sympathetic towards the conditions prisoners endured, if not prisoners of war. He had been a prisoner, and so had a perhaps unique view of how that felt.

Apart from ensuring that from then on, those termed “political prisoners” (which included many suffragettes, who had been imprisoned for protest actions but otherwise had no criminal record) would be treated differently and more leniently than the run-of-the-mill thief, murderer or rapist, he obtained better conditions for all prisoners, and as a man who was very sceptical of the power of prison to reform and rehabilitate, directed his own efforts towards ensuring the prisons were less full than they usually were. As a result of his recategorising certain less serious crimes – drunknness, debt, public disorder etc – as non-custodial ones, the population of British prisons fell by a staggering ninety-eight percent over ten years. One aspect of criminal law he could not – and probably did not want to, on balance – interfere with or try to change was the death penalty, which held sway in Britain up until the mid-1960s, though by then used very sparingly and only in the very worst or most notorious cases. As Home Secretary, it was Churchill's unenviable duty to decide which cases presented to him should be afforded mercy, and commuted, and which should proceed with the man (or, very occasionally, woman) being hanged.

This power of life and death, which might have bolstered the feeling of superiority in some other men, weighed Churchill down with its responsibility, and of the forty-three cases presented to him during his tenure he recommended mercy in twenty-three, but that still meant he signed off on the deaths of nearly half of the cases. Of course, in due course he would be responsible for making the decisions to send thousands, even millions of young men to their deaths, and of taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians as he ordered German cities to be bombed, but that would be in a state of war, and while I'm sure they bothered him, as they would any rational human being, those actions would not have oppressed him as much as did sending convicted men to meet their maker. Despite this, I find it strange to read that he was not an abolitionist, and when the vote was to come up he would support the retention of the death penalty.

Never much of a lady's man – he had had a few affairs before his marriage, but little meaningful, and he was hardly what could be called handsome – he danced desperately on the head of a pin as he tried to both support and block women's suffrage, the former on the basis that women voting meant, of course, more votes in the populace, likely to favour the party who eventually enfranchised them, the latter in fear that supporting such a mostly unpopular position would weaken the party and lead to its downfall. But in suffrage, you were either with the girls or against them – there was no room for middle ground, and the pin he had been dancing on was dashed to the ground and stepped on as suffragettes attacked him, dogged his speeches and eventually came face-to-face with his authority in a major demonstration in which there were over two hundred arrests, though most of them were released without charge (mostly because he didn't want the idea of 200 women going to prison, and the bad publicity that would create, both for the government and for his own prison reforms).
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You would have to characterise Churchill's time as Home Secretary as one of ups and downs; with several high-profile strikes, including a rail and a dockers' one, handled by him with varying degrees of success, an incident in which violent criminals who had killed police officers were allowed to burn in their hideout, Churchill ordering the fire brigade to stand down; his opposition to the Peers and his disdain for the House of Lords, and his fractious relationship with the police, it was decided by 1911 that the post really didn't suit him, and he was of the same mind, wishing to move closer to his old military ways, and angling again for the Admiralty. Fortuitously for him, an incident in the Moroccan port of Agadoo, sorry Agadir provided the kind of climate that would smooth his transition in that direction. Utilising a version of the English tactic of “gunboat diplomacy”, a German frigate sailed into the port. It didn't do anything, just sat there in I guess what could be taken as a menacing or at the very least provocative manner, but it shook up the French, and indeed the British, and well it should have done, as we all know what happened a few years later.

Although the incident was nothing about nothing, a storm in a Moroccan teacup, it still provoked Churchill into prevailing upon Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, soon to be Prime Minister) to issue this stark if slightly ambiguous warning to the Germans, if not actually mentioning them: “But if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”

When the reply came back from the Germans, it was stiff enough that Churchill was told the fleet could be attacked at any moment. He began making what preparations he could, and with remarkable foresight laid out the entire coming conflict in a memorandum, and while he could of course not predict the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the spark that lit the powder-keg to kick off World War I, he got most of it right. England would side with France and Russia, while Austro-Hungry would ally itself with Germany, the Germans would attack through Belgium, push the French back to Paris. At any rate, he pushed for the Admiralty, as he had the previous year, and this time he got it.

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IV: Churchill Misrules the Waves – Storm on the Horizon

If nothing else, being given the post of the Lord of the Admiralty raised Churchill's profile by making him one of the four men in the government to be provided a residence at the nation's expense (the other three of course were the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Lord Chancellor), perhaps the finest of all the residences, the sumptuous Admiralty House. In addition to this, he got his own yacht. Oh yes. The Lord Admiral could not be seen being ferried from appointment to appointment on some Navy runabout, so he had Enchantress, a 320-foot behemoth weighing 4,000 tons and with a crew of nearly 200. The ship was not mothballed during Churchill's tenure, as he made good use of it, spending over eight months of his time in the Admiralty aboard her, basically showing her off and showing off his power and prestige no doubt. But he was not an indolent commander, lazing back on Enchantress and letting the world, and responsibility, pass by. On the contrary, as already noted, he was preparing for war.

It's easy to see Churchill as a war-mongerer, but according to most of the notes quoted in Roy Jenkins' (pretty boring mostly) biography of the great man, nothing could be further from the truth. Although he anticipated, or perhaps a better word would be foresaw, the coming of a great war in which England and France would take on Germany and her allies, he was by no means looking forward to it. He intended to prepare for it, the same way, perhaps, someone going to the dentist (not an occasion anyone would be looking forward to or wishing for – unless there were in great pain I expect) would ensure their teeth were brushed before leaving the house for the appointment. You wouldn't want to do it, you might wish to avoid it altogether, but if you had no choice you were damned sure you were going to be prepared. So it was with Churchill in his role as Lord of the Admiralty. He could see the dark clouds forming on the horizon, and intended Britain should be ready to weather the storm.
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This meant, of course, bolstering up and training the navy, having it equipped with the best vessels and ensuring the proper chains of command were in place, and a whole lot more besides. Obviously, strategy as to where the various fleets should be deployed in the case of war breaking out was of paramount importance too, including the deployment of seven army division to France at the first sign of hostilities, and to change the policy of ships blockading German ports, and instead send them to intercept the enemy, or any who tried to supply or assist him. In this he came up against some stiff opposition, making enemies of powerful people, removing them from their posts in various manners and replacing them with men not only loyal to him and who would support and implement his policies in the advent of war, but who were, in his view, better suited to get the job done. Out went First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson and Lord Fisher, in came Rear Admiral David Beatty and Sir John Jellicoe, two men who were to prove pivotal in the naval battles of World War I. Not all of his appointments would work out so well, particularly the ill-advised rethink on the deposed – and semi-retired, at seventy-two – Lord Fisher, whom Churchill invited back as First Sea Lord.

It was, of course, during the First World War that Churchill made his name and wrote it in the annals of history before he became Prime Minister and elevated himself almost to the state of legend, but the period was also the time that marked his greatest fall, one that could have toppled him so badly that he might never have risen again. As we all know, his predictions about German belligerence came to pass, and World War I – then known as the Great War, or indeed, perhaps naively, the War to End All Wars – fell upon the planet like a ravening beast. There had never been a world war before; it was something terrible and new. Up to now, in human history, armies had fought other armies, nations had fought other nations, empires had fought other empires, but from a strictly global point of view these conflicts could be regarded as parochial. In other words, only those with a vested interest in, or subservient to, the main powers took part. When the Roman Empire went to war, although its legions might number among them troops from Africa, Egypt, Greece, none of these countries supported their campaigns. Their soldiers fought because the countries or regions they belonged to were part of the empire, but those territories themselves did not rise up. When Britain struggled to curb the expansion of France under Napoleon, she mostly did so alone. When the French fought the Dutch, it was just those two countries. Generally speaking, even if allies, unless called upon (and unless it was expedient to do so, as treaties were forever being warped and changed and loyalties shifting in those times) most of the other kingdoms left them to it. It often worked out better for them if they stayed out, and could then capitalise on a weaker enemy, or even, a weaker previous ally.

But there was no such thing in World War I. All countries joined in, even America (though they came late) and Russia (who, for only the first time in history, fought on the same side, as they would in World War II, but never again) and it truly was, and deserved the title of, a world war. Churchill knew though that history would not remember or care about his prediction of such an event, but would judge him by his actions, read, his victories, during the conflict. Sadly for him, these victories were not only slow in coming, but preceded by embarrassments, such as the escape, despite hot pursuit, of the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau, leaving the vaunted Royal Navy basically chasing its own tail and looking stupid, and the later sinking of three British cruisers by German U-Boats a month later off the coast of Holland. Ironically, it was in home waters that an audacious attack saw the battle cruiser Audacious destroyed off the coast of Ireland, and this indignity was exacerbated when, weeks later the Battle of Coronel, which took place on the Chilean coast, was lost, with the sinking of two cruisers and the loss of 1,600 men. Things were not going well.
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Five weeks later the Royal Navy responded by winning the Battle of the Falklands, sending four German cruisers to the seabed, but as Christmas approached the Germans were able to shell the English coastal towns of Yarmouth, Whitby, Scarborough and Hartlepool, and the populace began to brace for an enemy invasion. That never came, of course, but confidence was rapidly diminishing in both the ability of the Navy to take out the enemy and its capacity to protect its own coastline. When the Belgian army seemed to have made up its mind to retreat from Antwerp, pulling back to Ostend, Churchill saw the danger of losing control of Dunkirk, and went to Antwerp immediately. There he seems to have derived so much pleasure and satisfaction from directing the defence of the city that he asked for permission to resign his commission as First Lord and taking command of the army instead. This request was however refused, and when his replacement arrived he returned to London, to attend the birth of his third child, and second daughter. He was late, something his wife was angry about, and missed the birth.

In 1915 he proposed an attack through the Dardanelles, or Strait of Gallipoli in northwestern Turkey, in the hope of taking Constantinople and bringing in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria on the side of the Allies. His main intent here was to prevent a prolonged war of attrition in Belgium, or, to put it in his own words, to prevent the soldiers “chewing barbed wire in Flanders” - which was unfortunately exactly what happened. His decision to try to take Gallipoli entirely by naval strength proved impossible, and troops had to be moved in in support, but too few and too late. Gallipoli was a massacre, a failure and a huge blot on the already-shaky career of the First Lord. With resignation of Fisher, added to the knives being drawn of many of his political and naval opponents, Churchill was finished at the Admiralty. His plans had not worked, the ambitious but flawed Dardanelles campaign had floundered (sorry) and his services to the navy were no longer required.

He continued on for some months, not in any major role, offering advice, suggestions, strategies, and watching the whole thing crumble down about him. Eventually, near the end of November of 1915 he tendered his resignation from the government and, carrying his rank of Colonel, embarked for France, returning to his first love, the life of a soldier – and a commander.

La Belle France: Churchill Resurgent

It wasn't long before he was literally back in the trenches, assigned to the 2nd Grenadier Guards, and seemingly loving it. I've not been able to discover (though I did skim Jenkins' tedious accounts more than perhaps I should have) why Churchill was so enamoured of the Navy. He wasn't a nautical man, was not from a naval background, and, so far as I can see, had no experience at sea, never mind sea warfare. At a quick glance, he seems most unsuited to the post he occupied. However, I guess that could be said of many officers and commanders, and a good number got their posts through the reliable “good old boy/old school tie” system rather than by any merit or competence displayed. Might explain in part when the First World War was both such a charnel house and a running farce in terms of strategy and tactics. But for whatever reason, if only because he saw naval power as being the only force that could hold back the expected German onslaught, he had pushed for the Admiralty twice, got it on the second time of asking, and, it must be said, made something of a hash of it. Thousands of lives were lost due to his lack of understanding, bullishness and perhaps, in terms of naval warfare, inexperience.

Now he was back doing what he loved, what he was eminently qualified to do, and determined to erase the stain his time at the Admiralty had marked his war record with. Unfortunately (using this word in the strictest sense of Churchill's wish to advance his career) although he soon dispelled the men's reservations against, even distrust of him and became one of the boys, he never faced any serious assaults, though he did emulate his later foe by also narrowly avoiding death when a large chunk of shrapnel landed near him. When he went back on leave in May, he addressed all his energies towards politics, doing all he could to help the troops and try to place Britain on the right footing to win, or at least survive, the war, but he was no longer in the government, his enemies crowded around him like vultures to tear him apart, and few listened to his ideas, recommendations or suggestions. It felt like he would never shake off the shadow of the Dardanelles fiasco, and he was already being treated as yesterday's man.

Whether his grasp of the situation was loose or whether he just wished to force through his opinion, he threw his weight on the side of the debate as to whether or not conscription to the British Army should be forced across the sea, in Ireland. Given the time, with the Easter Rising having been just put down, its leaders martyred (in Irish eyes) and hatred and resentment for the English bubbling to fever pitch, and though undoubtedly some Irishmen put their differences with the English aside in favour of the bigger picture of world peace, the idea of any Irishman being forced to fight for the King seems ludicrous, and surely Churchill must have known this. Yet he continued to push the issue. Indeed, he had flip-flopped on the question of Irish Home Rule, one of the biggest dilemmas gripping the British government up to the outbreak of war. At first, as a staunch Unionist, he had railed against it, then later he had seemed to support it (with the proviso that Ulster should be exempted) and now he suggested that men who were not allowed their own parliament should fight on the side of the people who were their oppressor! It sounds incredible, and of course the motion was completely defeated, most British surely more worried about internal attacks from Irish conscripts than open ones from Germans!
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Perhaps more realistically, he put a lot of energy into arguments for the setting up of an Air Ministry (presumably commanded by him) but it seemed he was being passed over, his mistake in Gallipoli ever to dog him. Even when Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, was killed, and Lloyd George took over, Churchill saw himself being appointed Minister for Munitions, but it did not happen. Nobody wanted to trust him with any post of importance or influence, nobody believed he had the skill for such a position, and so he floated on in limbo, delivering speech after speech in the House, always being shouted down by the inevitable “What about the Dardanelles?” to which he had no acceptable response. The Comer Report, published in 1917, partially absolved him of direct personal blame for the failure, but he could never quite shake off the impression that the responsibility for the debacle lay with him.

Then in July, after Asquith had resigned and Lloyd George had become Prime Minister, and after considerable wrangling and discussion, Churchill had a new post. He was the Minister of Munitions, which suited him fine, as it gave him overall responsibility for all the armed forces – after all, what use is an army, navy or air force without ammunition? Albert Speer realised this in the next war, when Hitler placed him in the same position: in one way, yes, it was a vote of confidence, but in another it was a warning: if the war effort fails from now on, it fails on your watch. Churchill, of course, had no intention of allowing that to happen. However he soon realised his appointment held nothing of the power wielded by Speer, and mockingly called himself a “shopman at the orders of the War Cabinet.” He was not consulted on decisions made about the war, only tasked to provide what had been decided, however this left him free to make numerous visits to France, where he did his best to influence the authorities there to adopt his suggestions, particularly regarding the Americans, who had just recently joined the war effort, and to deal with labour disputes.

His time in the Home Office stood him in good stead here, as he lobbied for fairer working conditions and better wages for the workers in munitions factories, and dealt with two strikes. One of the ways, perhaps controversial, in which he did this was, losing patience with strikers and inwardly condemning them for not being in service, to threaten them with just that: conscription into the armed forces. This was enough to shake even the deepest-held beliefs of workers, who were not prepared to die for their principles, certainly not in a foreign land. By November 1918 that threat had evaporated, as Germany was on the run and soon to surrender in the Armistice, but of course by then the need for munitions was decreasing, and life began slowly to return to normal for workers, so the conditions under which and against which they had gone on strike improved, taking with them the need for such action, and leading to a form of industrial detente.

Looking back over the contribution of Winston Churchill to the First World War, the amount of powerful people he pissed off, the policies he advocated and those he opposed, and his overall performance, both as Home Secretary and later First Lord of the Admiralty, he would not seem to be the obvious choice as the man to lead Britain through her second major conflict in twenty-five years, much less to achieve victory for them. But history can be fickle and capricious, and the world was not yet finished with Winston Churchill.

It had, in fact, barely begun.

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If Hitler was the most powerful man in the Third Reich, the second most feared was the man in black, a small, unassuming, bespectacled ex-chicken farmer who would go on to become one of the greatest mass murderers in history, who would set up one terror organisation and work his way into controlling the other, and who would, in the end, meet the fate of most if not all of Hitler’s inner circle. But who was Heinrich Himmler, and how did he rise so quickly within the Nazi echelons of power to become the living symbol of the oppression of the Third Reich, synonymous with torture, anti-semitism and murder?

(For much of this entry I will be referring to Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel)

I: Born to Darkness: Heil to the Prince

The turn of the century brought forth a monster whom history would curse, and who would in three short decades write his name large in blood and darkness across the pages of the Second World War. Heinrich Himmler was born on October 7 1900, the second of three boys, and given the name of the Bavarian Prince for whom his father, Gebrardt, a Munich schoolteacher, had been appointed as private tutor. Himmler did not come from a wealthy or noble family, unlike his contemporary Goring, though his father, conscious of his great fortune and status as His Highness’s tutor, did what he could to act like a noble, buying expensive art and furniture for the flat in which he lived with his wife, Anna. His own father had been a penniless soldier, and Gebrardt was determined his sons would have a better start in life than he himself had. His sons of course when they were old enough attended his own school, but there is no evidence that he treated them any differently. He may, in fact, have been harder on them, as discipline and manliness were important to him, no more so in his own sons.

As the First World War began, Himmler was of course too young to enlist, being only fourteen when war broke out, so unlike his later beloved leader he could only read about it and occasionally witness things like prisoners being transferred through his hometown of Landshut. Even at this early age his contempt for what he would no doubt have termed “lower races”, and his burgeoning anti-semitism, as well as his nationalist fervour, were evident. He wrote of Russian prisoners that "They multiply like vermin. As for the Landshuters, they are as stupid and chickenhearted as ever. Whenever there is talk about our troops retreating, they wet themselves.”
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He was eventually drafted in 1917, and does seem to have seen some action, though like Hitler he would embellish his actions, claiming he led men into battle when it is clear he was not an officer and could do no such thing, and the idea comes across that he joined up, or was able to join up, too late: the war ended less than a year later, and by the time he enlisted in December 1917 the tide was beginning to turn against Germany, leading to their ultimate defeat and surrender in November of the next year. I suppose to be fair to him (much as I don’t wish to be) the appellation that has followed him down through history - and which I’ve used myself here in the introduction - of being a failed chicken farmer isn’t quite accurate. In fact, he did work on a farm for about a month, but he got very sick - he was never a well child - and the cause was traced to the farm, from which he was told to abstain for a year at least. There’s no mention either in the book or in the Wiki article as to specifically what he farmed, so while it may have been chickens, it may just as well have been sheep or pigs, or crops. At any rate, his farming career was short and ill-starred, and he entered the University of Munich in 1919, where he studied agriculture.

Though he claims to have fallen in love with the daughter of the woman who ran the eatery where he took his meals, the relationship between Maja Loritz and him seems to have been platonic, more, as he says himself, as if she were his sister. Nothing came of it, and he began to think about another war which he believed was on the horizon. ‘I think we are heading for serious times. I look forward to wearing uniform again.’ His best friend - perhaps his only friend - Ludwig Zahler, he seems to have dropped quite quickly, though in contrast to Hitler he seemed prepared to spend time in Russia if necessary, and even learned the language. Hard to imagine Der Fuhrer polluting his pure German (!) tongue with the bastardised language of the hated Bosheviks!

Throughout his early adulthood, Himmler gives the impression almost of a man masquerading as a human, some sort of cold alien being who does what he has to in order to fit in, not to stand out. He dated girls but made no bones of the fact that he was not interested in sex with them, he had friends but was close to none of them, and he did all he could to be socially acceptable, while still remaining aloof and detached from his fellow humans. He comes across as a man who realises he is missing something in his life, who is not satisfied with himself, as this self-effacing comment demonstrates: ‘I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess.’ He had also given up his ideas of heading east to farm in Russia, and was now considering Turkey instead.

His views on women are not too surprising, considering the kind of man we know he grew up into, but still disturbing when he admits to his friend that he does indeed despise them. He goes further: ‘A real man will love a woman in three ways: first, as a dear child who must be admonished, perhaps even punished, when she is foolish, though she must also be protected and looked after because she is so weak; secondly, he will love her as his wife and loyal comrade, who helps him fight in the struggle of life, always at his side but never dampening his spirit. Thirdly, he will love her as the wife whose feet he longs to kiss and who gives him the strength never to falter even in the worst strife, the strength she gives him thanks to her childlike purity.’

One concept that resonates very strongly here, and in most of his writings, is the idea of purity, and he seemed to prize that almost above all else. This would, of course, make him a perfect fit for the Nazi Party when they took power. Similar to Hitler, but not Goring, he subsisted on a very small allowance; his father was not rich, and not given to supporting his sons more than he had to. Perhaps he believed they should carve their own way in the world. His budgeting and his attention to detail marked him as a careful, meticulous man, perhaps what we might call today a bean counter, and this of course would serve him well when he took over perhaps the most frighteningly administrative organisation of the twentieth century, where people were reduced to numbers and filed away.
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His intention was to remain celibate until he married, if he ever did, and this refusal to join in and let himself go made it hard, even impossible, for him to make friends, and also marked him out as a little weird. He would never really fit in, and it’s hard, even at this early stage, not to see this almost rejection of him by the world as fuelling the inhuman and despicable acts he would oversee during his tenure as Germany’s most feared man. Around about now he also began to have doubts about religion. A staunch Catholic, he vowed to remain faithful even if he was excommunicated - why he feared such a fate should befall him is unknown - but went to mass less and less from about 1924 onwards.

II: Darkness Calling: The Circle of Evil is Forged
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His first real brush with anything approaching the Nazi Party came on January 26 1922, when he met Captain Ernst Rohm at a rifle club meeting. Rohm would go on to become head of the SA, and be perceived as enough of a threat by Hitler to be one of those murdered during the “Night of the Long Knives”, but Himmler was star-struck by the older man, who held the same views he did about Bolshevism. By the middle of the year the phrase “the Jewish question” had begun appearing in his well-kept but seemingly ultimately boring and pedantic diaries. It should be, in fairness, understood that Himmler’s views - and those of Rohm - were not unique in Germany at that time, nor even unusual. Hatred of Jews had, as we have already established, been well entrenched even before the myth of the “stab-in-the-back theory”, as everyone needs someone or something to blame their woes on, and the People of Abraham have been convenient scapegoats all through history. In fact, around this period it would probably be seen as odd if you didn’t hate the Jews. Not that that in any way makes it right, no more than being racist about blacks, Irish, Chinese, West Indian or any other race during the 1970s or 1980s was right. But it was, at the time, the way of the world. Look, even Churchill had his problems with the Jewish race, as we’ve seen.

Then again, of course, hating or professing to hate Jews is a far different thing to actively attacking them, and our man Himmler was naturally about to gravitate towards the latter. In the company of the man he saw as a war hero, and indeed a mentor (until Hitler came along) Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi Party, four months before Hitler’s famous failure at the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, a failed coup that landed the future leader of the Reich in jail. But first Himmler joined Rohm’s brigade, the Reichskriegsflagge, the deceptively-innocent-sounding national war flag society, and indeed this is what he did: waved a flag. When Rohm and his brigade were detailed by Ludendorff and Hitler to take the war ministry, which they did, fulfilling their part of the putsch, Himmler stood outside waving the Imperial German flag. Perhaps due to this minimal participation in the event, he escaped prison while Rohm, along with Ludendorff and Hitler, were held awaiting trial the following February. In the end, only the two latter would be imprisoned.
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Well, as everyone knows, imprisoned isn’t really the word in terms of Hitler. One thinks of the more recent so-called incarceration of Pablo Escobar; a cushy, comfortable, all-mod-cons “prison” which allowed visitors, alcohol, parties (though I doubt Der Fuhrer threw many of those) and access to writing materials, with which he penned the worldwide best-seller (!) Mein Kampf. But Rohm was released without charge, and so free to pursue his goal of setting up his own paramilitary force, which he expected to become the armed wing of the new Nazi Party, the SA. Hitler, of course, would have other ideas once he got out. For now though, Himmler joined the same right-wing, anti-Semitic party that Rohm did, the Völkische, and set about campaigning for them. To the chagrin of his family, having lost his job due to his participation in the putsch, Heinrich refused to seek another job, but instead devoted himself to politics in the name of the Völkische.

Meanwhile Rohm had resigned in disgust at the now-released Hitler’s determination to pursue more legal paths to power, and had taken a job in Bolivia. He would return to lead the SA at Hitler’s request in 1930, but his dictatorial style of leadership was not approved by Hitler, who feared Rohm would become too powerful and with the SA behind him as an autonomous body answerable to him (and, ostensibly, Hitler) might mount his own bid for power and topple Hitler. Four years later he would be dead, as Hitler “cleaned house” in a purge which became known as Nacht der langen messer, or Night of the Long Knives.

For now, Himmler was a student without a tutor, and with the previously-all-but-dead Nazi Party beginning a resurgence in power and popularity in 1925, he rejoined the organisation almost exactly two years after he had originally signed up. Now he would have a darker, more savage, more powerful mentor, and I don’t mean Hitler. Although he ended up working as a secretary and general dogsbody for the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, who were instrumental in the rebirth of the Nazi Party, Himmler soon realised these two moderates did not share his virulent anti-Semitic views. When their secretary (and occasional spy, as he kept an eye on the cache of arms the Nazis were secretly amassing as they prepared for war) wrote to a Nazi party member, a supporter of Hitler who was leaving for America, of his plan to name-and-shame local Jews, they laughed at him.
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‘For some time I have entertained the project of publishing the names of all Jews, as well as of all Christian friends of the Jews, residing in Lower Bavaria. However, before I take such a step I should like to have your opinion, and find out whether you consider such an undertaking rich in prospects and practicable. I would be very indebted to you if as soon as possible you would give me your view, which for me is authoritative, thanks to your great experience in the Jewish question and your knowledge of the anti-Semitic fight in the whole world.”

While his bosses may have twirled their index fingers at their temples and grinned at the nationalist and racist fervour of this young upstart, the letter does show how Himmler already intended to operate, if he got a chance. There would be no compromise, no finding common ground with Jews (including any in positions of power), no attempt to come to terms or understand each other’s position, and no backing down. To him, all Jews were scum (and indeed, as the letter shows plainly, he viewed their supporters - “Christian friends of the Jews”) - in the same dark light of hatred, and all were to be dealt with in the same manner. It was this kind of attitude that would endear him (if that’s not the wrong word to use) to another up and coming star of the Nazi party, a man who would in fact control its destiny through the manipulation and dissemination of propaganda designed to support it.

Himmler met Josef Goebbels in 1925, when the young doctor came to work for the Strassers. Goebbels was already known to Hitler, and would soon gratefully accept the position of organiser for the Nazi party, but Hitler knew nothing about his contemporary. While Goebbels showed a flair for writing, rhetoric, public speaking and an ability to twist the truth into whatever shape he wished his listeners to perceive, Himmler was little more than an office boy who dreamed of one day being a soldier. He had no real aptitude beyond that of clerical organisation, administration and bureaucracy, abilities which would stand him in good stead when he became the leader of the SS, and later, the Gestapo. Himmler looked as he was: a filing clerk with a heart full of hatred and the organisational brain to apply that to reducing human beings to numbers; manilla files containing names, races, birth dates, colour of eyes, colour of hair; people turned into statistics. His cold, calculated manner would also allow him to sign death or torture warrants of men, women and children with no more emotion than he would evince signing for a pair of new boots.

Both of these men would in time turn out to be indispensable to Hitler’s new Reich, as one told the people what Hitler wanted them to hear, and the other closely monitored what they said, and how they said it. Between them they would become two of the most powerful men in Germany, if not the world. But one would, if you will, have the courage of his convictions and remain true to his leader to the end and follow him to Hell, the other would make a cowardly attempt to escape and save his own life. But that was in the future, and for now both men only knew each other in passing, nodding acquaintances, soon to be united in their worship of the man who would burn the world.

Himmler’s big chance came when he was appointed second in command of a small group called the schutzstaffel, or SS. Numbering at the time only two hundred, it would come to encompass the entire Nazi organisation, its secret police, the most feared and powerful arm of the party. Originally detailed to act as a bodyguard corps for Hitler, it would in time (as we will see when we go into its formation and deployment in much greater detail later on in this journal) hold sway over the German wehrmacht, the army, and staff and run the horrific concentration camps, the labour and death factories which the Nazis would set up to eliminate the Jews.

He had joined the SS in 1925, soon after rejoining the Nazi Party, and proudly bore the blood flag they carried, a replica of the one that had fallen during the putsch, and which Hitler would mythologise as having been steeped in the blood of martyrs, though in reality all the SS had done on November 9 was wreck the printing presses of a socialist newspaper. His position in the group, though given the grandiose title of Deputy Reich Propaganda Chief, was mostly to attract new members, enlist willing men and swell the ranks of the SS. Around this time he seems to have begun to impress Goebbels, and the two spent more time together than they had previously when he had worked on and off in the offices of the Strassers.

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III: The Bride Wore Black: Till Death Do We Part

Despite his initial aversion to, one could almost say revulsion at, women, Himmler was not immune to the arrows of Cupid, and he duly fell in love. In one of those not-so-funny twists Fate likes to play on us, her name, though Margarete Concerzowo, was Marga, so close to Goebbels’ Magda that there’s only one letter in the difference. The owner of a nursing home in Berlin, she was into homoeopathic cures and herbal remedies, and interestingly, was a Pole, which surely gave her a good chance of having some Jewish ancestry? Seven years his elder, she was as calculating and dedicated to order as he was, and they were accordingly married in 1928, moving out into the suburbs of Berlin. In this smallholding they kept hens, and I would posit that it may have been from this that the idea of Himmler having been a chicken farmer was later born.

Marriage seemed to improve Himmler’s prospects. Their first, and only, child was born a year later, a daughter they called Gudrun (which I think, but I’d have to check, is the name of a heroine or at least figure out of German mythology, maybe something to do with Sigrid or Siegfried?) and soon after Hitler himself appointed him to the top job in the Munich branch of the SS, making him Reichsfuhrer. Despite, again, the grand title, Himmler still had little power, the real power residing of course in Berlin. But it wouldn’t be long before his reach extended to the German capital, and he became the overlord of the SS. Under his leadership, it would become a check on, and quickly the destruction of the rowdier, less disciplined and hated SA, and lead to the execution of the man who had once been his mentor and friend.

But for now, he had managed a promotion, which must have filled him with pride. Despite its not being the biggest step up - and surely he had ambitions to go further - it was still an improvement, and at worst it brought in more money for him and his small family. Marga had sold her nursing home in order to buy their little house in Waldtrudering, and so had no income, leaving the family dependent on what her husband earned, with the slightly added revenue from the small farm. Himmler would never be rich, though despite his father’s ambitions to the contrary, it doesn’t look as if he ever wanted to be. He did crave power though, and recognition, and respect, and these he would obtain, even if the respect was born out of sheer, naked fear.

Himmler had met, or been made aware of such dark influential figures in Germany as Rudolph Höss, later commandant of Auschwitz, Dr. Viktor Brack, who would go on to run his euthanasia programme, and Alfred Rosenberg and Walther Darré, two men most responsible for the idea of Aryan superiority and the master race. It would be their theories which would lead to Himmler’s philosophy guiding the development of the SS and feed into the general idea of the ubermensch robbed and twisted, as we have already seen, from the writings of Nietzsche. Darré joined Himmler’s staff in 1931 to set up the Race and Settlement Office, which was basically research into how many Germans and Europeans were “racially pure", setting down rules as to the treatment of those seen as ethnically questionable.
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Hitler quickly began to see that his instinct had been right, and that Himmler was the man to shake up the SS, which under its previous leader had in fact decreased in membership. Under the guidance of Heinrich Himmler, it would swell from a few hundred to thousands in only three years, and by 1931 its original purpose as Der Fuhrer’s bodyguard would be sidelined - though the SS would always fanatically protect Hitler - to allow them to become a more elite fighting force, a sort of, as Himmler (and probably Hitler too) saw it, battle knights. Himmler set about making membership of the SS a privilege, something to be worked for, and something only the very best of the best (read, most fanatical and dedicated Nazis) could achieve. Their code of conduct was stricter than almost that of a Puritan, with total loyalty demanded to Hitler, an almost suicidal mentality (few if any SS were ever captured alive or surrendered) and an ingrained sense of superiority even to other Germans.

As the Nazi party would soon do, Himmler ensured he had control over every aspect of his soldiers’ lives, including how and who they could marry. The eternal misogynist, the last thing Himmler wanted was for his perfect soldier to breed with impure women, so the intended wives of SS men had to pass a test, as did they, and could only be joined on the very strictest and exacting grounds. He called this his Marriage Law. In part, it stated that

‘Every S.S. man who aims to get married must procure for this purpose the marriage certificate of the Reichsführer S.S.

S.S. members who though denied marriage certificates marry in spite of it, will be stricken from the S.S.; they will be given the choice of withdrawing.

The working-out of the details of marriage petitions is the task of the Race Office of the S.S.

The Race Office of the S.S. directs the Clan Book of the S.S., in which the families of S.S. members will be entered after the marriage certificate is issued.

The Reichsführer S.S., the manager of the Race Office, and the specialists of this office are duty bound on their word of honour to secrecy.’

In other words, if you were in the SS and wanted to marry a girl whom either Himmler or his Race and Settlement Office did not approve of, you had two choices: marry her anyway and quit (or be dismissed from) the SS, or find another bride the Reichsfuhrer agreed was suitable. Needless to say, this meant no SS man could even dream of marrying a girl who had even a drop of Jewish blood in her veins (though as I note, Himmler may have broken that edict himself), nor any other deemed “unacceptable” to the SS chief. I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t be all that surprised if they didn’t have to sign something promising to enroll any sons they had in the SS when they came of age too. Wouldn’t put it past them.

What is unquestionably clear is that Himmler - and Hitler, who of course supported, encouraged and endorsed Himmler’s methods and rules for the SS - was intent on creating a master race which would grow out of the sterile root of his organisation, spread and engulf all of Germany, and then all of Europe, eventually covering the world, assuming Hitler won the war. As I often remark caustically, it seems hilariously hypocritical to me (not meaning to make light of such horrible racism and eugenics of course) that men who were in no way the apex of humanity would deign to try to drive, even force and shape the evolution of man. Hitler was short and suffered later in life from Parkinson’s Disease, and was not even German. Himmler was short-sighted, with little capacity for emotion and a poor sex drive, Goring was fat and overweight, indulgent and had a bad leg, in addition to being a morphine addict, and Goebbels was hardly a prime example of “Aryan purity” either. In fact, much as I hate to give him any credit, if anyone exemplified the kind of ideal man that Himmler and Hitler wished to propagate, it was Reinhardt Heydrich. At least he looked the part, and following Darré’s blueprint for the perfect Nordic man, he had little interest in culture, was unquestioningly obedient to his masters, cruel and cold, and thankfully killed before he could rise any further in the ranks.
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He met Himmler at the beginning of June 1931, having been recommended by one of his staff. The Reichsfuhrer of the SS had an important role for Heydrich to play, one that his ice-cold dedication to duty and his almost casual brutality suited perfectly. He wanted the young leutnant to set up a secret department within the SS, a sort of internal affairs deal which would spy on even Party members, and would especially concentrate on the SA, to which, at this time, his SS was still subservient, despite its power and standing. Heydrich would become, perhaps unbeknownst to Himmler, a silent threat to his own position, a force to be reckoned with, a man whose ambitions were so massive and daring that it is believed he was even mounting an attempt at a coup to remove Hitler from power and replace him, before he was assassinated in 1942, putting an end to his plans, and perhaps saving Himmler from a similar fate.

Insidiously, Heydrich made himself so indispensable to Himmler that he all but became his right hand man, running the SS with him, and helping him to transform it from a small force of about 400 men under the overall banner of the SA into a fighting force of 30,000 which, by 1932, was still only less than a third of the strength of the SA. In 1931 Hitler had requested Ernst Rohm return from self-imposed exile in Bolivia to lead the SA, fearful of the trouble they were causing him as he attempted to get right-wing industrialists and politicians on-side as he laid his plans to take power. With Rohm’s return Himmler was reminded uncomfortably of his subordinate status in the overall structure of the SA. His old friend did not necessarily interfere in Himmler’s running of the SS, but he made sure that the Reichsfuhrer was under no illusion that he was autonomous in any way.

After Rohm’s murder, Himmler undertook a study from 1934 to 1935 in which he checked and evaluated the calibre of the membership of the SS. He was aware that originally a lot of mostly wealthy or aristocratic young men had joined up in the belief that the organisation was more like a men’s club, a social recreation deal that allowed them to mix with the sort of people they wanted to mix with, and gave them the added prestige of being in the elite force. Put simply, many had joined up just because they liked the idea of wearing the uniform. They enjoyed being in the SS, but were not committed to it. Himmler wanted only the most fanatical, loyal and dedicated men in his corps, and so those who were seen as being there for other reasons, those who were playing at being soldiers, using their membership to impress the girls, or could otherwise be shown not to be “true” SS men, were kicked out. This in the end amount to about sixty thousand men, a large figure, though as the Nazis gained power it would become a tiny percentage of the overall membership in time.

As he would do throughout his career in the Reich, Himmler was winnowing the chaff, separating the men from the boys, and ensuring that only the best of the best of the best were accepted into the SS. This would radically change its image to those outside of the organisation, as well as create an almost mythical aura about it, comparable to, as Himmler had intended, a brotherhood of knights, to which everyone wanted to belong, but of which only the most select were allowed to be part.

With the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933, and the subsequent fire at the Reichstag building, following which the new Chancellor passed the Enabling Act, basically suspending all rights and turning Germany into a police state with himself as its head, things began to move fast, but around, not with, Himmler. Everyone seemed to ignore him, despite his perceived power as head of the SS. Rohm in particular detailed the SA to remove the Catholic Conservative government in Munich on March 8, completely bypassing Himmler, while Goring set up the concentration camps which would soon become synonymous with Himmler, in Prussia, without any consultation with the SS Reichsfuhrer. As Minister of the Interior for Prussia, Herman Goring had taken charge of the local police force, dismissing all those he deemed disloyal and installing his own men, and creating within the force a special, secret corps which went under the mundane-sounding Berlin Police Bureau 1A. It would later change its name to Geheime Staatspolizei, and Germany, and the world, would come to know and fear and hate it by its English translation.

Gestapo.

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IV: Blueprint for Murder: Building Hell on Earth

Not to be outdone, Himmler established his own death camps, one of the first being also one of the most infamous, Dachau, in Bavaria. Chillingly, this was situated about ten miles from Munich, and so may (depending on what direction it was located) have ended up being close to the farmhouse in Waldtrudering. This, to me, suggests a sort of Vlad Dracul mentality, where the proximity of death and suffering to one’s one location does not cause any consternation or upset. I mean, yes, Himmler may have moved by now - probably had - and even if not, then ten miles to the north is not ten miles to the south, but it would be interesting to see how close Dachau was to his home, even if he no longer lived there. At any rate, given Goring’s involvement in the concentration camp business, if you will, Himmler knew he needed men he could trust to staff his camp, and so he ordered a special volunteer section of the SS to guard it, men who would be fanatically loyal to him, and brutally uncompromising to the inmates. This new unit was called the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head battalion, and they would take charge, in due course, of all the concentration camps which would spring up like diseased crops all over Germany and later its occupied territories.

Imagine the kind of man who would willingly put himself forward to oversee the forced labour, torture, brutal treatment and extermination of people! Someone who would not be ordered to undertake this onerous task, but who would actually agree to it of their own free will. Men who would volunteer to work in the death factories, patrolling the grounds, the fences, the gates, pushing the inmates around, no doubt availing themselves of the women inmates who would have less rights than a black woman in the Deep South before the Civil War. Two of the guards in Dachau would themselves rise in the ranks (or I guess you could say, sink to levels seldom plumbed even by the worst of humanity) and go on to become infamous. One would, as already mentioned, be the lord of Auschwitz, presiding over one of the worst charnel houses in the dark, terrible history of the Nazi concentration camps, Rudolf Hoesse, while the other would be known after the war as one of the very few Nazis caught and executed as a war criminal, a man perhaps responsible for more Jewish deaths than anyone other than Himmler and Hitler, and a key architect of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. He would hang in 1962, seventeen years after the war ended, but before his death Adolf Eichmann would proclaim that he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”
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Once the SS were established as the country’s official secret police, along with the Gestapo, Himmler would have those who were even suspected of being “disloyal” arrested. The description could cover everything for outspoken criticism of the Party, or refusal to join, to a chance remark or even a completely unsupported accusation, for which proof was seldom required or requested, and which may have been nothing more than someone settling a score. Men and women lived in fear of the knock at the door, none too gently of course, and the thrusting into their shaking hand of a piece of paper, perhaps the most important piece of paper they would ever hold - perhaps even the last piece of paper they would ever hold - with the following written on it: ‘Based on Article I of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State of February 28 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interest of public security and order. Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the State.’ Now there's a catchall phrase!

Once such a “protective custody order” was received, there was little chance its recipient was coming back alive. At best, they might hope to live out what remained of their life in prison or in a concentration camp, no charges ever brought, no court ever involved, no rights allowed. At worst it could mean death, and often not a quick one. It’s quite likely that someone hearing a thump on the door in the night and realising it was not their door, breathed a sigh of relief and thought no more about it. Till they were knocking at their door, or course. Even selling out your neighbours and friends would not save you if you yourself were accused, and the chances were that if you were a known informant, then you were probably going to end up being a victim of the same system of reporting.

Particularly telling is this short extract from the rules for the camps, laid by by Himmler and Theodor Eicke, commander of the Totenkopf: ‘The following offenders, considered as agitators will be hanged: anyone who . . . makes inciting speeches and holds meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others; who for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false information about the concentration camp …”

The emphasis is mine, showing that Himmler didn’t really care whether what these people reported, or tried to report, was in fact true. He knew it was. He just didn’t want anyone else finding out about it, which is completely different to someone spreading unfounded lies and mistruths about Dachau and other camps. What essentially Himmler’s decree is saying here is, if you tell the truth, a truth we don’t want getting out, you’re going to be hanged.

One thing that could be guaranteed about any high-ranking Nazi, or any hoping for advancement, was that he would be laying his plans to either make or break alliances, betray those above or below him, and smooth his way towards the Nazi Holy Grail, a place at Hitler’s side. Himmler was no different, in fact he was a master of weaving webs of suspicion and machinations, but suffice to say here, for now, that Goring was so shocked by Rohm’s appointment to Hitler’s cabinet at the end of 1933 that he began to re-evaluate his relationship towards Himmler. The two men had never been friends, and never would be, but it was clear to both that they might need to set aside their differences if they were to thwart a perceived coup by Rohm and the SA.

As a result, and with the uncovering by Heydrich of a plot (real or not I don’t know, and did it matter?) to have him assassinated, Goring was left looking somewhat ineffective. How had his Gestapo been unaware of a scheme to kill their own leader? Pushing his advantage, Himmler requested that Hitler transfer the command of the Gestapo to him, and der Fuhrer agreed, making Himmler at a stroke one of the most powerful men in Germany. They say knowledge is power, and the Gestapo, under Goring’s leadership, had been for years collecting dirt and information on Party members, agitators, anyone deemed disloyal or whose weaknesses could be used against them when or if the time came. All of this potentially explosive information was now in the hands of Heinrich Himmler.

A small, petty, vindictive man, Himmler was certainly short in many ways. Short on human compassion, short on tolerance, short on mercy, short on talent, other than an almost inhuman capacity for administration. Short sighted too, and of course short in stature. And yet, this small man would cast a long and dreadful shadow across Germany and later occupied Europe, and become almost as hated and vilified a figure as his glorious leader in the years to come.