Jump to content
The Education Forum

Churchill and Hitler


Recommended Posts

Recently released documents reveal that Churchill wanted Hitler executed without trial. Churchill also insisted that Hess should not be allowed to talk freely to the media (Hess was almost certainly murdered while in prison). What was Churchill so frightened about what Hitler and Hess had to tell the world? I suspect it was his fear that they might disclose that Churchill was trying to negotiate a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940. If this got out it would completely change the way we see Churchill as an historical figure.

http://spartacus-educational.com/PRchurchill.htm

http://spartacus-educational.com/GERhitler.htm

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Recently released documents reveal that Churchill wanted Hitler executed without trial. Churchill also insisted that Hess should not be allowed to talk freely to the media (Hess was almost certainly murdered while in prison). What was Churchill so frightened about what Hitler and Hess had to tell the world? I suspect it was his fear that they might disclose that Churchill was trying to negotiate a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940. If this got out it would completely change the way we see Churchill as an historical figure.

Although not necesarily - Gallipoli... Return to the Gold Standard... General Strike... Dresden...

He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and thoroughly deserved the humiliating defeat of 1945.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was my grandad who formed my first impressions of Churchill. He'd been a union organiser and Labour Party agent in Sheffield, and always referred to him as "that bugger Churchill", who had a plane ready with its engines running in Hyde Park so that he could flee the country if the Germans had invaded (it turned out that there was an airstrip prepared at the Kensington Gardens end of Hyde Park, partly for the purpose of evacuating VIPs in an emergency).

It was Tonypandy which really got Churchill into my grandad's bad books, together with the use of troops in Glasgow in 1919.

My grandad was also, incidentally, peripherally involved in the mutiny in April 1918 (have you heard about that one?), when British soldiers mutinied in Folkestone to avoid being sent back into the German offensive which nearly won the war for them. He'd been lightly wounded and was on his way back to Britain to convalesce. The mutiny had already started as his troopship pulled in to Folkestone and the MPs just shoved all arriving soldiers straight on to whatever train was in the station at the time. He ended up in Sheffield … which is why I was eventually born there.

He was also one of the participants in the great Kinder Scout trespass in the 1930s, which paved the way for ordinary people to have access to the countryside.

He started his military career in 1900 when he lied about his age and managed to enlist in the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers (he came from a large family and they were starving - getting into the army was one of the few ways of getting a full belly and clothes on your back). At the age of 12 he was shipped off to China (helped suppress the Boxer rebellion), then was sent to India, and found himself in Egypt at the beginning of World War One. His regiment fought in Gallipoli (another source of hatred for Churchill) and then in every major battle of the Great War (well, it was an Irish regiment, so, quite by chance, happened to be picked for all the dangerous assignments by the English generals).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ed, have you ever considered producing some "alternative" materials on Winston Churchill? He is always treated too kindly in UK text books.

I've often thought this to be a necessary part of a very different education of the future. Not just him, of course... You're right about the way he is portrayed in the books - the saviour of the British Empire (as if this were a good thing?) I've seen something on him on the Heroes and Villains section of Learning Curve.

Would love to be part of some deeper analysis of him...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is interesting indeed. Here in the states, at least in the Mid-West, Churchill is portrayed as one of the great men in history, and he is. The problem arrises from the fact that we are not allowed to see his "bad side."

I would say that John's initial position that these documents could change the way we see Churchill, will be dulled by the fact that many will claim that anyone who writes about this aspect of Churchill is a revisionist. Much in the same way Howard Zinn is seen in this country. People won't, or don't want to find fault in someone they have been taught is infallable.

Interestingly, Franklin Roosevelt is seen in much that same way in the U.S. Most are taught that the man could do no wrong, and was loved by all, when in fact many people blame him for making them go hungry, during the depression due to his farming policies. While doing oral histories with members of my family that were alive during the depression, most of them adore FDR and credit him for saving them and America. But a few, blame him for their remaining literally hungry during the depression. Oddly enough Teddy Roosevelt is almost always shown in this "perfect light" as well, despite the fact that he was a proponent of eugenics.

I would love to see more books, articles, etc. written discussing the "alternative" views about some of these great men.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is interesting indeed. Here in the states, at least in the Mid-West, Churchill is portrayed as one of the great men in history, and he is. The problem arrises from the fact that we are not allowed to see his "bad side."

I would say that John's initial position that these documents could change the way we see Churchill, will be dulled by the fact that many will claim that anyone who writes about this aspect of Churchill is a revisionist. Much in the same way Howard Zinn is seen in this country. People won't, or don't want to find fault in someone they have been taught is infallable.

Another one I would like to tackle is Ronald Reagan. In reality, one of the most corrupt presidents in American history. I would argue he was worse than Richard Nixon.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
Recently released documents reveal that Churchill wanted Hitler executed without trial. Churchill also insisted that Hess should not be allowed to talk freely to the media (Hess was almost certainly murdered while in prison). What was Churchill so frightened about what Hitler and Hess had to tell the world? I suspect it was his fear that they might disclose that Churchill was trying to negotiate a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940. If this got out it would completely change the way we see Churchill as an historical figure.

But history was kind to him, as he said, because he wrote it.

Although not necesarily - Gallipoli... Return to the Gold Standard... General Strike... Dresden...

He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and thoroughly deserved the humiliating defeat of 1945.

Agreed on his character flaws.

What do you all think of Prouty's claim that Stalin claimed that Churchill killed FDR?

http://www.prouty.org/coment11.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 months later...
Recently released documents reveal that Churchill wanted Hitler executed without trial. Churchill also insisted that Hess should not be allowed to talk freely to the media (Hess was almost certainly murdered while in prison). What was Churchill so frightened about what Hitler and Hess had to tell the world? I suspect it was his fear that they might disclose that Churchill was trying to negotiate a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940. If this got out it would completely change the way we see Churchill as an historical figure.

But history was kind to him, as he said, because he wrote it.

Although not necesarily - Gallipoli... Return to the Gold Standard... General Strike... Dresden...

He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and thoroughly deserved the humiliating defeat of 1945.

Agreed on his character flaws.

What do you all think of Prouty's claim that Stalin claimed that Churchill killed FDR?

http://www.prouty.org/coment11.html

Reagan was in many ways (IMO) the worst US president of modern times and will ultimately be recognised as such.

___________________

Stalin had good reason for hating Churchill when he refused to open a western front when the USSR was seriously endangered by OP Barbarossa in 1942. Not until the Russians after huge sacrifices of lives, far in excess of any other nation, and the tide of the war turned did D-Day finally arrive, and the race for Berlin started. Then Germany surrendered to the Soviet General, and to the allies.

Then the Russians were freed to attack Japan, who was already sending out feelers for surrender.

So what do the allies do?

Truman convinced the USSR (who had decicively defeated the Japanese in Mongolia before Op Barbarossa, but as a consequence had their army widely dispersed.) to delay their attack a couple of weeks. As a consequence the atom bomb was completed and needless civilian lives lost in what may otherwise have been a successful surrender in the east anyway.

_____________

There was an attempt to assassinate Churchill in june 1943. The breaking of the German code had revealed that there were observers in Lisbon looking out for Churchill and an attempt would be made to shoot down his plane when returning to England.

It appears that he ordered his bodyguard to disable an engine on his plane that was to take him from Lisbon to England. The result was that his return was delayed by a day.

Instead a civilian aircraft was shot down.

The circumstances outlined in the following article here suggests that Churchill sacrificed a number of Intelligence officers, including a leading anti-Nazi ampaigner the actor Leslie Howard.

Is it going too far to denounce Churchill for what appears to be an outcome he could have (see the changes in passenger list) avoided? Are there any of these largely intelligence connected people that died as a consequence of the apparent planting of lookalikes of Churchill and his body guard that Churchill had a reason to see dead?

http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/...er_1ashley.html

"Even if they had definitely known that Churchill was not aboard, the Germans might still have blasted the Ibis out of sky. The England-Portugal air route had a reputation as a spy-line for both Allied and Axis agents, and the passenger list for Tuesday, June 1, 1943 reveals the Ibis was a nest of Allied spies the Nazis would have been eager to eliminate en masse.

Every one of the eight men passengers had proven or likely connections with British or Allied intelligence. There was an industrial spy pretending to be a mining engineer specializing in locating tungsten, a vital war metal; a Jewish intelligence operative, working for the British, who heroically rescued Jews from the clutches of Nazi Germany; a continental director of an engineering firm, sponsored by the British Department of Overseas Trade; an inspector-general in the British consular corps on a "routine inspection tour;" a manager of Portugal Shell Co., sponsored by the British Ministry of Fuel and Power; and the Washington correspondent of Reuters news agency.

Leslie Howard himself is known to have had connections with British intelligence services, and his month-long lecture tour of Spain and Portugal, from which he was returning on the fatal airplane, may have been a cover for spying activities. His friend Chenhalls also probably had intelligence connections.

It was Chenhalls and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden who had induced Leslie Howard, against his better judgment, to undertake the tour of Spain and Portugal, a trip which the actor deemed arduous, dangerous, and of minuscule importance to the war effort.

One of the women passengers worked in a consulate, and may therefore have been in intelligence work, using diplomatic cover; and another of the women passengers, the wife of the Reuters correspondent, might also have been involved in spying. But not all the females on the Ibis could have been spies. Two were young sisters: Petra Hutcheon, 11 years old, and Carola Hutcheon, 2, traveling with their mother.

Had Leslie Howard, to the knowledge of the Germans, been the sole passenger on board, the plane might still have been attacked. Leslie Howard was a towering figure in the British government's anti-Nazi propaganda policy, and his anti-German movies and radio broadcasts had enraged Joseph Goebbels, the fiendish Nazi propaganda minister and Howard's bitterest enemy. Goebbels had surprising influence in Nazi wartime affairs, and it would not be surprising to discover that he had arranged for German military forces to kill Leslie Howard. There is no doubt that before they attacked the airliner the Germans knew Leslie Howard was on board.

When the Ultra secret was disclosed long after WW2 ended, the public learned that the Allies had broken the Nazi codes for most of the war. Subsequently it was also revealed that the British had known in advance of possible German plans to intercept the airliner. To avoid compromising the Ultra secret, the British did not pass on their knowledge to the airline.

Amazingly, three persons who had boarded and been seated on the Ibis in Lisbon that fateful Tuesday were taken off the plane before it took off, and thereby narrowly escaped certain death. One was a Catholic priest* who benefitted from a mysterious anonymous telephone call summoning him back to Lisbon. The other two were the young son of a British diplomatic official and the boy's nanny; the two were bumped to make room for Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenhalls""".

Leslie Howard was a great motion picture actor with a wistful face and a haunting, silvery voice; he was also a great stage actor, an author of belle-lettres, a radio broadcaster, and a movie director and producer. As an actor he specialized in playing idealists (such as Ashley Wilkes) and heroic men of action (such as the Scarlet Pimpernel). As a man he possessed ineffable sweetness of character and was filled with the noble spirit of those firmly attached to love and to just causes. Writing of Howard in 1934, the New York Herald Tribune observed: "There is a splendid air of rightness about everything he does."

Sensing the nearness of war, Leslie Howard left Hollywood and returned to his native England a few days before WW2 began. Once war commenced, he strove mightily to help his country. He made uplifting patriotic movies; in BBC radio broadcasts he castigated Nazism and defended democracy and human rights; and at the request of the British government, he even reluctantly undertook a hazardous journey which led to his premature and violent death."

I think a thorough correction of history could very well see Churchill as far less of a statesman than history currently portrays him as. He seems rather as a ruthless and arrogant anti communist with real interests in staying the hand of western forces that could have helped bring the war to an earlier end in order to permit Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union.

In fact I'd go so far as to suggest that WWII's sole purpose was to destroy the USSR. The attacks on Pearl Harbour (Japanese "Go South" Policy, expecting Hitler to take Mosow.) and on Britain were to draw in a motivated US-British soldiery to follow and if not complete the process, at least establish containment boundaries.

_________________

*It would be interesting to know the name of this catholic priest

"""Churchill's and his bodyguard's look alikes.

Edited by John Dolva
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Churchill, for me, was a fairly typical conservative. For most of his life he was a reactionary, who fought to preserve things that shouldn't have been preserved, such as British domination of India, monarchies (hence his desire to overthrow the Bolshevik revolution and reinstate the Tsar, with the help of the British Expeditionary Force in Russia in 1919).

When World War Two started, he was still regarded as an irresponsible agitator, but, as Orwell said in 'The Lion and the Unicorn', he understood that the war could not be won without fighting. He was able, during the war, to take a lot of hard decisions, of the kind that many other leaders had to take, such as not alerting Coventry to the raid which destroyed much of the town centre, in order to preserve what was seen as a greater secret, the breaking of the German Enigma codes. I'm reluctant to condemn him for that - I don't know how you're supposed to react in a situation where every alternative has dire or disgusting consequences.

It was no surprise, however, that he lost the 1945 General Election massively. The British electorate were responding to Churchill, the politician, not Churchill, the war leader. What a shame that the incoming Labour government ultimately lost its nerve. On the way, though, it introduced much legislation which any government could feel proud of, such as the Town Planning Act, which gave local councils the power to start enforcing controls and standards on polluting industries and local landowners. I mention such an apparently 'trivial' law (rather than blockbusters, such as the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the railway system), because it's exactly the sort of 'minor' matter which conservatives in general look down on. In Beighton, outside Sheffield, though, one effect was to force the aristocratic Sitwell family to instal inside toilets in the tied cottages of their estate workers and pensioners. If you've ever had to go to the privy in the cold and dark, you'll understand what a boon it is to go to the loo indoors!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Recently released documents reveal that Churchill wanted Hitler executed without trial. Churchill also insisted that Hess should not be allowed to talk freely to the media (Hess was almost certainly murdered while in prison). What was Churchill so frightened about what Hitler and Hess had to tell the world? I suspect it was his fear that they might disclose that Churchill was trying to negotiate a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940. If this got out it would completely change the way we see Churchill as an historical figure.

John

I suspect the real reason why Churchill was so desperate to silence ALL the Nazi leadership was to ensure they could not testify, at the time, to the nature and content of the deals offered by Hitler to the British Government in an attempt to restore peace, after Britain declared war in late 1939.

These efforts to make peace with Britain continued after Churchill took power. But IMO, Churchill's reputation wouldn't have suffered had it been known he negotiated with the German Government. One expects national leaders to negotiate..

What one does not expect of leaders is complete refusal to negotiate - or willingness to negotiate only in bad faith. Not when millions of lives are at stake.

Churchill's reputation would indeed have suffered had it been known on what basis he refused genuine negotiations and/or negotiated only in bad faith. He seems to have had an inexhaustible lust for war and enjoyed the personal thrill of being in the driving seat at a time of war. It would be nice to know more about why he rejected Hitler’s offers of peace.

Unfortunately, British war propaganda from that era has since been elevated to Articles of Faith, and anyone who now doubts its veracity is branded as a fanatical supporter of Adolf himself. Hence it has become hard to see this clearly.

Unable to see outside the fetid web of 60+ year old lies, it is true that most folk wonder why anyone should ever try to negotiate with a man who was the epitome of Evil with a Capital E. The reality was rather different - and Churchill knew it. Given a choice between peace or the 'thrill' of crushing Germany (only to empower another, more durable Imperium in the eastern European theatre), I suspect most Britons in the late 30s and early 40s would have opted for peace.

In the event, they were never given the choice. Their elected government - like Roosevelt in America - spoke with a forked tongue, saying it wanted peace but instead helping to contrive war.

IMO, that was the real dirty secret that required the elimination of the Nazi leadership.

In our times, we've seen similar travesties of justice with Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Guys like that are useful when dead (as living myths), but dangerous while still alive and able to tell their side of the story.

Apparently Hess, each evening, was subjected to a process whereby anything he'd written that day by way of a diary entry was destroyed. That continued until his death - four decades after his 'capture' in Scotland.

It tells of a very strong motive to silence the truth - a motive that goes well beyond defending the reputation of Winston Churchill - a motive that continues to this day.

The Second World War was very hard to arrange, IMO. The forces that wanted it and made it happen had a serious problem. Only one generation earlier, Europeans had slaughtered each other in unprecedented numbers in a senseless, protracted orgy of violence.

Few wanted to go there again.

It was like trying to persuade Americans to butcher each other - all over again - in the 1890s.

Most sane people didn't want a bar of war.

Getting Europeans to willingly fight each other in the late 30s required trickery and deceit. Churchill was a player in that - but not a key player until 1940. He didn't have enough power, for one thing. Many of his contemporaries, with good reason, believed he was barking mad. They remembered Gallipoli and other Churchillian disasters.

Churchill ultimately became PM when the pro-war faction gained ascendancy in Britain in 1940.

Thenceforth, keeping Enigma secret from even close colleagues in Cabinet, he ran a war in which he seemed like a magician able to take huge risks... but the risks he took were much lower than they appeared to be, because Churchill could read, better than almost anyone else knew, Hitler's real intentions.

He could terrify his colleagues by sending troops to North Africa (weren't they needed back at home for the defense of Britain?), secure in the knowledge that Hitler never actually intended to invade Britain.

Until the Americans joined the war, Churchill's real military successes in WW2 were few indeed - and mostly attributable to Enigma, as far as I can see.

His concern at war's end, I suspect, was to ensure that he was seen by history as a reluctant but necessary war leader - not the power-hungry pro-war fanatic who refused all reasonable offers of peace and helped ensure that Europe would needlessly suffer another horrific bloodbath, this one squarely on his watch.

Under normal circumstances, with the passage of a couple of generations, propaganda heat dissipates and historians can pick over the entrails of history and piece together a balanced appraisal of what really happened.

However, the myth that Hitler was the most Evil man who ever lived and a psychopath who actively worked to bring about World War - useful British War-Time propaganda – is now kept alive to sustain a grafted legend that has taken over its rootstock narrative, and is increasingly the determinant of the fruit it bears.

This is The Legend of the 'Final Solution' aka The Origin Myth of the Israeli State.

That's the real reason, IMO, why all these years later, key WW2 archives are still kept under lock and key - and what I have just written remains unprintable in the mainstream western press.

No-one really gives a hoot anymore about Winston Churchill and his reputation. The Man himself is long dead. In general, if ever asked whether they’d like to know the real truth about their history, most people answer yes. Would they like historians to debate history freely? Of course they would! Why wouldn’t they?

After World War One, apologies were proffered to the Germans over the worst lies promulgated by 'British Intelligence' during the war.

That kind of after-the-event national honesty has been stymied, to date, in relation to World War Two, because the British intelligentsia has come close to losing control of its own historical narrative.

People may legitimately disagree with what I have to say. I welcome intelligent responses. I may well have misread this time in history. If so, I’d like to know why and correct the record – for my own sake if no-one else’s.

Sadly, unless history is not about to repeat itself, shrill, content-free ad hominem attacks are the most likely retort from those who treat World War Two like theological dogma. Lots of hot air and no illumination.

Edited by Sid Walker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In fact I'd go so far as to suggest that WWII's sole purpose was to destroy the USSR. The attacks on Pearl Harbour (Japanese "Go South" Policy, expecting Hitler to take Mosow.) and on Britain were to draw in a motivated US-British soldiery to follow and if not complete the process, at least establish containment boundaries.

Really?

Then why didn't the British and US Governments ally with Hitler and give the USSR a good thrashing?

I imagine the Japanese and Italian Governments would have been keen for a piece of the action as well.

France might have stayed neutral... but who cares about them? Recalcitrant Gauls!

Edited by Sid Walker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

For all some of us know, there may well be substantive reasons to be very critical of the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill, particularly if you have the benefit of seventy years' hindsight and your critique carries the innate moral superiority bestowed by a Left radical perspective.

But what happens if, hypothetically, your potentially valid critique is transposed and put to use in other arguments, arguments you might find at best ridiculous --- viz., that Churchill was the true warmonger in the Second World War and Hitler was really seeking peace? What then? Silence? Embarrassed silence?

Well, so much for the moral superiority of your perspective --- not even self-regarding enough to object to being used....

Not sure if your remarks were in response to my post or not, Daniel.

Anyhow, to be clear, I think a strong case can be made that Churchill was a war monger and Hitler did really want peace - at least in relations between their two respective countries.

Hitler had more warlike tendencies towards the USSR, which he loathed with a passion (the feeling, I think it's clear, was entirely mutual). However, I think it likely the other 'great powers' could have restrained Hitler and discouraged him from attacking eastwards... had that been their real intention.

In other words, I think it is true that the impulse for war in 1939 came primarily from the west.

However, I think it would be mistaken to see Churchill as the key player in triggering war. In late 1939, he was still a rather marginal character, although his star was once again on the ascendancy.

Hitler was not, of course, exempt from blame. His desire to resolve the Danzig issue was understandable and probably justified. The citizens of Danzig did, it seems, overwhelmingly want union with Germany, Hitler's proposal for a land corridor was not unreasonable. Poland, it seems, did not negotiate in good faith.

Nevertheless, invading Poland was a high risk strategy. One might also take the position it was immoral. Similar debates surround the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi army in 1990. Saddam had a point - and was probably encouraged to go ahead by winks and nods from the American Government - but it was still rash to invade.

However, both Saddam and Hitler were fooled into thinking that they could take a gamble and gain their territorial aspirations - then negotiate with with the rest of the world from a position of strength. A fatal mistake in both cases.

In Hitler's case, he might also have thought that if the western powers objected to his invasion of western Poland, they might do so in an even-handed way and condemn both Germany and the USSR (which invaded the Baltci States and eastern Poland shortly afterwards). How wrong he was.

___________________

As to the use of history, I think it this a complex issue.

The 'official' version of WW2, in which Hitler WAS the ultimate evil dictator and sole perpetrator of the war, certainly has its contemporary ideological uses. I object to many if not all of them.

Might violent anti-Jewish sentiments might be unleashed if there if full and open debate about WW2?

I doubt it very much There is nothing inherently vengeful in a revisionist analysis of WW2. By making it possible to regard WW2 as yet another war that need never have been fought, it provides the basis for a consistent anti-war position.

None of the bloody wars of the 20th century were necessary, IMO. True, they prompted acts of great courage and spurred on technological advances in war-related fields. Yet all of them, on balance, were a bloody stupid waste of human life and effort.

The USA was better off by far in its pre-war, pre-CIA condition... a regional hegemon yes, but not an aggressive super-power with a secret state apparatus borrowed from the British but expanded and bloated to the point of global malignancy.

Europe - from Ireland to the Urals - would have been better off to avoid the devastation of WW2 war. Peace was also possible - and much preferable to war - in the far east as well.

If one believes - as you do - that many millions of Jews died in WW2, it is hard to argue that the Jewish people would not have been much better off without WW2 as well. Whatever the figure, WW2 clearly plunged millions of European Jews into a dangerous and terrifying maelstrom in which many perished in quite horrific circumstances. They would have been better off without it, wouldn't they?

Most fundamentally, one cannot build a secure future on shaky ground. We need the firm rock of historical truth - or at least an honest attempt to ascertain the truth. Even white lies are dangerous if they are on a grand scale and require legal sanction for their maintenance.

The ultimate villains of WW2, IMO, are the powerful people who orchestrated it. They almost certainly did not suffer from the war. They profited. After the war, they were more powerful than ever.

It is in the common interest of humanity as a whole to expose and restrain those whom Bob Dylan called the Masters of War.

Edited by Sid Walker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

dbl post

Edited by John Dolva
Link to comment
Share on other sites

triple post

Edited by John Dolva
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...