Eighty Years Ago This Week

    The TUC congress voted to support government foreign policy but only by 3.6m member votes to 2.4m. The delegates voted on behalf of their members. There had been extensive criticism of the British policy in Greece to support the anti-communist side in the civil war. There was also hostility towards the prime minister's direct rejection of  communist tactics in Britain. The Electrical Trades Union was especially vocal on both counts. A motion calling on Britain to suspend all economic contact with the Franco regime in Spain was approved by 4.5m to 1.4m.  In co-ordinated overnight operations Soviet security forces and troops  seized some 2,500 German scientists and engineers together with 4,000 family members and deported them forcibly to the USSR. The largest number worked for the aviation ministry. Some were taken after a dinner to which they had been invited. The university town of Jena which was also home to a large optics industry was a major focus of the...

    The energy minister, extreme left-winger Manny Shinwell assured Parliament that the 5m ton gap (about one third of the amount required) in coal supplies needed for the winter was nothing to worry about. This would be the industry's first winter since  nationalisation and a key register of how well it performed in public ownership. The shortage could be dealt with by increased output from the mines and reduction in consumption. He skirted over how the former was to be achieved but did admit that 5,000 workers including "incorrigibles" had recently been "shaken out." He relied on assurances from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and did not address the question of absenteeism which was running at two and a half times the pre-war rate. Politically the government was unwilling to challenge the NUM on this problem. Bengal suffered another major surge in communal violence in the Noakhali district between Hindus and Moslem as tension mounted in the blocked se...

  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 ...