Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The government announced plans to construct a new building to house the Colonial Office, integrating on a single site activities spread around five separate ones. Extra space was needed to meet "new and important responsibilities as a result of the great developments in the colonial Empire."  These presumably referred to the new possessions awarded to Britain by the Versailles Treaty over twenty-five years before, which included Palestine which Britain was frantically trying to slough off. It was to be an immense building across the road from Westminster Abbey covering a comparable area; it would have dominated the area north of the Palace of Westminster. Providing a suitable venue to receive visiting foreigners (presumably colonials) was part of the brief. It was to take some years to clear the site and history rapidly overtook the project which was never begun. The opposition found a way of introducing the question of the closed shop into a debate on fair wages for employ...

At the apparently unilateral decision of Britain the conference on Palestine was suspended until December 16 at the earliest. The ostensible reason was that the upcoming  first meeting of the UN General Assembly made it impractical to continue the discussions. In fact prime minister Attlee was already concerned at the possibility that permitting the immigration of 100,000 Jews, which was under discussion at the conference and was supported by President Truman, would inflame Moslem sentiment worldwide and increase the difficulty of the Indian independence process which was deadlocked by the stand-off between the Moslem and Hindu communities. The conference had, anyway, been floundering with no agreed solution in sight; India was the far larger problem.  Truman responded with a public endorsement of the 100,000 immigration plan and a far more direct statement in favour of an independent Jewish state. Attlee appointed A. V. Alexander as the first minister in charge of a newly cre...

  The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg  delivered its verdicts on 22 men accused of major Nazi war crimes. Twelve were sentenced to hang and three were  acquitted. Goering was the most important figure to be sent to the gallows followed by foreign minister von Ribbentrop, the Nazi rulers of occupied Europe were fully deserving and the sentences on generals Keitel and Jodl gave the lie to the later myth of the Wehrmacht having fought a "clean" war. They were careerist lackeys but Hitler's successor Admiral Doenitz was a convinced Nazi and still escaped the noose. Two paid the ultimate price for propagandist support: Rosenberg, a theoretican, and Streicher, a loathsome anti Jewish newspaper editor, had no direct involvement in war crimes. Albert Speer was every bit as guilty of the Nazi's murderous slave labour programme as Fritz Sauckel, head of the relevant department, but his veneer of civilised education saved his life. The Soviet judge dissented strongl...

Churchill delivered a speech at the University of Zurich entitled the Tragedy of Europe. He contrasted the ravaged state of most of the continent with the prosperous state of Switzerland and expressed a wish to prevent a recurrence of the war. One avenue that he proposed was a United States of Europe with, as a first practical step, a Council of Europe to direct it. He hoped that the US, Great Britain and, with more good will than realistic expectation,  the Soviet Union could be its friends and sponsors. To many this marked the beginning of the EU although whether he ever contemplated that Britain might be part of it is hotly debated. Ho-Chi-Minh left France after the failure of the Fontainebleau conference on the future of Indochina conducted under the auspices of France as the colonial power. Some form of self-rule for the poorer provinces of Tonkin and Annam but the wealthy area of Cochin China, which had unilaterally been declared an autonomous republic, would remain a French ...

  President Truman suffered dissent from his foreign policy when Henry Wallace the Commerce Secretary delivered a speech  calling for a soft line towards the Soviet Union and a hard line towards Britain's imperialist policy. Wallace had been Roosevelt's vice president 1941-5 and lay on the left, a vocal New Dealer. Truman sacked him, in a move that set the seal on the US policy of containing the Soviet Union. Wallace went on to found the Progressive Party with a near socialist platform. Stalin's long standing foreign minister Molotov attacked one aspect of Byrne's speech of hope which prefigured the rebuilding of a democratic Germany as a counter weight to the Soviet Union. Byrne had stated that Poland's western frontier was open to negotiation. Molotov insisted that the Curzon Line boundary held good. Given the mass removal of Germans to the west which had already taken place, Byrne's claim had little more than symbolic value as a gesture towards Germany. The e...

      James Byrnes, the US Secretary of State, gave a speech in Stuttgart under the title "Restatement of Policy on Germany." It was delivered to a large  audience including the three ministers president of the states in the US zone, who had greeted Byrnes when he had arrived train in a highly symbolic photocall. In particular Byrnes declared that Germany should not become the satellite of any power or a dictatorship. He stated that the economic conditions ruling in the country divided into four zones of occupation made it impossible to maintain a peace-time economy and that free exchange between the zones was needed. He looked forward to a future when the government of Germany would be returned to the German people. In practice he was rejecting the Soviet policy of treating its zone of occupation merely as a resource to be exploited purely for Soviet benefit. Byrnes claimed the authority of the Potsdam Agreement for his vision, but in practice he was proposing the c...