Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The catastrophe at Stalingrad had overwhelmed any thought of commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Nazi  Machtergreifung (seizure of power), traditionally the most important date in the Nazi calendar, but Goebbels filled the gap with a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast in which he addressed the German people with "total frankness." They were offered the choice between domination by Bolshevism or resistance to the end in a total war. In practice Germany's leaders had chosen destruction as the national goal and destiny. Three students in Munich belonging to a loosely organised movement, the White Rose, were caught after scattering  tracts calling for the removal of Hitler in the central lobby of the university. The movement was religous and intellectual in tone, but male members had served on the Eastern Front and learned of the extermination of the Jews. This was the sixth pamphlet to be distributed and group had also put up grafitti. Sister and brother Sophie and Ha...

    Mahatma Gandhi stepped up the pressure on the British by beginning a fast (hunger strike to some) in protest at his arbitary imprisonment. Unlike the fast he had undertaken in 1939, this produced no change in the British attitude, but it did cement his moral authority. He never intended it to be a fast to death. Labour MPs as a body voted against the government (including its Labour ministers) on the question of financing the Beveridge proposals for social security measures. The Conservative Chancellor Sir Kingsley Wood insisted on "sound financing" for the proposals. The vote was a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the scale of planning for a post-war Britain that was now looking like a distinct possibility and not a distant dream. The Labour MPs were easily defeated and there was practically no risk that this marked a broader move towards opposition to the government, but a warning shot had been fired; wartime unity was a finite commodity. Moreover, Conservati...

  After two frustrating years in Nazi Germany, where he had been a privilieged but ineffectual resident, the Indian nationalist leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, set off by submarine on a long journey to Japan, which offered a more promising ally in his project to expel the British from India. Bose had to leave his Austrian partner and baby daughter behind. All he had achieved in Germany was to recruit a couple of thousand Indian prisoners of war for the "Free India Legion" trained by the German army. Japan, by contrast, was still fighting to invade India, although there is not the slightest indication that Indians would have been more than puppets in any area Japan succeeded in conquering. Mussolini rejigged his government, sacking a number of ministers including his own son-in-law Count Ciano, who had been foreign minister. Mussolini took over most of the vacant portfolios himself, but his new deputy on foreign affairs had been a well-regarded ambasssador to London, which sp...

  Hitler promoted Paulus, commander of the German troops in Stalingrad, to Field Marshal. It was tantamount to an instruction that he was to kill himself rather than surrender. He did not take the hint and surrendered with the 90,000 odd survivors of the Sixth Army. The Battle of Stalingrad had cost around two million casualties, rather more on the Soviet side where many civilians lost their lives. The city was practically destroyed. It was the turning point of the Second World War; it was now a matter of time until Germany was defeated. Stalingrad set the seal on the USSR's standing as the most commited and (so far) most effective opponent of Nazi Germany which served to mask from most in the West Stalin's history of mass-murder and oppression. Defeat at Stalingrad coincided with the tenth anniversary of Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship, spuriously labelled the Machtergreifung (seizure of power). This was one of the high days of the Nazi regime but Hitler's pr...